One Man's Silly Idea Becomes The Same Man's Marketable Story

 On Monday I mentioned I might do a soft reboot movie idea for the Oblivion movies I first saw on Rifftrax a couple of years ago.  I started thinking of the idea while doing boring shit at work, which besides using the bathroom and driving in the car is where I get most ideas from.

Not the Final Cover

I started thinking up an idea where the marshal from the first movie's daughter would be out on some other planet.  Her mother would be killed and clues would lead to the desolate planet of Oblivion.  There she'd have to work with the few remaining people willing to stand for justice to stop an evil gang and avenge her parents.  In the end she'd probably wind up taking up the mantle of the marshal from her father the way he took it up from his father in the first movie.

Then I got thinking about things and thought:  the core of this idea would make a decent gender swap book!  Like an Old West version of Chance of a Lifetime.  Or The Lone Ranger.

The gist is there's a Texas Ranger in the 1880s who's tracking down some evil gang.  But whilst trying to apprehend them, he's killed instead.  A Native American shaman then brings him back to life--only he's a woman now!  Then like Chance of a Lifetime he has to find the members of the gang who killed him and kill them.  A Native American would come along with him as a sidekick and maybe they'd fall in love along the way.  There'd be some final confrontation with the power behind the evil gang, some big-shot businessman or something, and then our hero would ride off into the sunset to continue avenging evil with her Native American pal.

Something similar happened a few days later.  I had been watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot on Peacock and wondered how I could do a gender swap story with that.  And then I was thinking since you have Cylon robots who can look like humans, you could have a male Cylon become a female for whatever reason.

But then I got thinking that this could actually work for a sequel to Reunion: Gender Swap Warriors #1, aka my Voltron/Power Rangers-type story.  I had been thinking since there were two Voltrons in the second one they could make a second Voltron thing and for that they'd need pilots.  But the gender swap angle wasn't really working.

Then I got thinking that the evil witch (like Hagar in Voltron or whatever) could turn an enemy pilot into a human-like female using a piece of hair or something from one of the good guys.  The pilot would infiltrate the second Voltron project in the hopes of learning its secrets and delivering them to the enemy. But then she'd bond with the good guys and decide to join them instead.

Like most ideas there's stuff that needs filled in before these really go from an idea to actual stories.  But as you can see, sometimes an idea that seems like a total throwaway can actually be useful.