I meant for the Storypalooza 2.0 to end in November, but I just can't seem to turn it off! Case in point on my birthday I was watching my favorite indie comedy, Free Enterprise. It's a fun low budget movie filmed in 1997 but not released until 1999 about two geeks who are about to turn 30 and their struggles to find happiness in relationships.
The thing I always liked about this movie since I first saw it late at night on the Sci-Fi Channel about 2004 is that Rob and Mark aren't the stereotypical fat, awkward nerds who live in their mom's basement. They're fairly normal except for their love of sci-fi and Rob is even a bit of a pick-up artist. It really is rare for a movie to treat sci-fi geeks as normal people with the same wants and desires as most everyone.
Since much of the movie concerns birthdays--and it ends with a big surprise birthday party that features William Shatner rapping a speech from Julius Caesar--I usually watch it on or around my birthday whenever possible. I've watched it about 100 times and yet when I was watching it this year I got an idea for a sequel.
The idea of a sequel isn't new. On IMDB I read a few times that there was supposed to be a sequel called something like My Big Fat Geek Wedding about Rob and Mark marrying the girls they ended up with at the end of the first movie. Since the first movie featured Bill Shatner as himself there was hope of getting Leonard Nimoy to play himself in the second one.
Obviously those plans fell through and now Nimoy is dead, so that certainly wouldn't work. And really it's been 20 years so a movie about them getting married wouldn't work either.
But you know what would work? Married...with children! Instead of focusing on them getting married, why not focus on Rob and Mark trying to bring up kids? Sort of like Parenthood only with sci-fi geeks.
I haven't roughed out an entire script but the gist of it would be there would be issues with the kids. Like maybe purist Rob's kid is really into the reboot movies or Discovery or Next Generation or whatever. Maybe Mark's kid isn't into it at all. Or maybe the kids are being picked on by bullies and what do they do about that? And somehow Bill Shatner (and maybe someone else like Patrick Stewart or Chris Pine or someone from one of the other properties) would help to guide them to sorting things out.
As far as marriages I suppose that would depend on whether you can get the whole cast back. Otherwise you can just say that Clare or Laura divorced Rob or Mark or they died or whatever. I'm not a big fan of that but it's been 20 years so it might be hard to get all the same people.
Since no one else I know has ever watched the first movie they have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, despite that I've mentioned this movie before several times. And you can watch it on Amazon Prime. I don't know about Netflix, but maybe look into that. Or you can buy it on DVD. Obviously it's a little dated, but part of the fun for me is seeing the old toys and comics and stuff; sometimes I wish I could just step through the screen like when they're in Toys R Us or the comic book store and look at all that classic, vintage stuff.
An advantage of trying to make a sequel now vs about 15 years ago is you have Kickstarter and all that to help raise money. And as long as Shatner and Eric McCormack and whoever else don't want too much it probably wouldn't cost more than a million or two--about .01% of a Marvel or Star Wars movie. I'm just saying.
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