My Filmography, Part 2

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The Pokémon Adventure (2000)
By the dawn of the new millennium, I’d found a new obsession – Pokémon. And when I saw Pokémon The First Movie
in theaters in November 1999, I was so hyped up to be seeing these characters on the big screen, I didn’t even notice how shit-tastic the movie itself was. Once again, I had to make a movie of my own. And this one is actually worse than what we saw in theaters, believe it or not.

It’s based on a short story I wrote for my eighth grade English class. Yes, I wrote Pokémon fanfiction for a school assignment. I was that kid. Anyway, it deals with these three people named Laura, Evan, and Chris (loosely based on three kids in my class who teased me for liking Pokémon – and when I say “loosely based”, I mean it was just them, no changes at all) who want to destroy all the Pokémon in the world. No motivation for it, they’re just evil for the sake of evil. They capture all the world’s Pokémon in a giant net and take them to a castle somewhere, and Ash, Misty, Brock, and Tracey go to rescue them, with Jessie and James tagging along, of course. They succeed in the end, obviously, and I think Laura, Evan, and Chris fell off a cliff and died. The whole thing was just one big “fuck you” to the bullies who made my life hell, and it was just really, really immature and stupid. But then again, I was really immature and stupid, especially for a 13 year old, so it fit pretty well.

 

FoxTrot 2 (2000)
It was just a year later, but already I was looking at FoxTrot: The Movie
and thinking I could have done better. So I toiled away on this sequel, which I decided to set at Christmas so I could work around two interesting storylines from the comic itself. The main plot dealt with Andy stressing out over her mother coming to visit for the holidays, since the two of them have a ton of unresolved issues from their past, while the subplot deals with Peter being unable to take his girlfriend Denise to the Christmas dance and being stuck with the dilemma of whether or not to invite a lonely freshman girl who has an obvious crush on him. Both of these are “borrowed” straight out of the strip, down to the letter, but since animated adaptations of comic strips always seem to lift dialogue right out of their source material, I guess this isn’t too egregious.

But I also came up with three original subplots, none of which made any sense. Jason finds himself hounded by Eileen Jacobson, who wants to dote on his every whim and desire, and vows to stop only if he returns the Charizard card she gave him (yeah, I was cramming Pokémon references into everything I did around this time). Roger devotes his free time to working on his golf game, despite the fact that the golf course is under a foot of snow (this “plot” goes absolutely nowhere). And Paige agrees to go to the Christmas dance with a kid named Tommy…mysteriously “forgetting” that she already has a boyfriend, Pierre. Yeah, I kept the “Pierre is real” plot thread from my first movie, for some stupid reason. None of these plots had any bearing on each other, and each one just sort of staggered around until it stopped. What a waste of paper.

 

A Lost Cause (2000)
This was my last JTV movie, and yet another one of my films where a character gets lost in the middle of nowhere and has to wander around looking for help. I seemed to really love that. In this one, the JTV tour bus breaks down in the desert, and Jesse and Elyse each go out to search for help, while Rob, Shirley, and Cras stay behind and try to get the bus working again. There was one especially weird scene where Jesse comes across a shotgun shack in a canyon, where he meets a grizzled old prospector with a Yosemite Sam mustache and an ethereal otherworldly spirit who appears amid smoke and thunder and demands to know why they’re there. Meanwhile, back on the bus, the bathroom starts flooding after Rob breaks a pipe, and Shirley ends up trapped inside while the water level rises (this was one of my earliest underwater scenes). The whole thing climaxed with the kids driving the repaired bus along a string of suspended power lines, trying to outrun the spirit monster. Actually, I still think that’s kinda cool.

 

The Simpsons Movie (2001)
No, I’m not kidding. I tried to write a Simpsons movie on my own, six years before the real thing existed. And at a time when I’d only seen about twenty episodes. It was about Bart getting expelled from school, and Marge getting a job at the plant alongside Homer. And then I discovered that both these plots had already been done on the show. So I gave up pretty early on.

 

Love Hina: The American Way (2004)
It was several years before I attempted a longer movie-style story again, mostly because I just didn’t have as much time to draw them as I used to. After a while, though, I decided to switch over to writing the scripts for these films instead. In high school, I knew a girl who was a huge anime and manga geek, and she set me up with Ken Akamatsu’s Love Hina series, which, if you haven’t seen it, is sort of halfway between parodying the “geeky guy lives with a harem of beautiful girls” anime genre and playing it disturbingly straight. I liked the manga, so I decided it needed a movie. And the story I came up with was…shall we say, slightly
different from the source material.

With all this awesome Japanese culture at my fingertips, I was teetering dangerously close to weeaboo status, and I think this almost pushed me over the edge. Set after the end of the series, dorky Keitaro and his short-tempered sweetheart Naru come home to the Hinata House in Tokyo to find that it’s losing money fast. So to gain some extra scratch, they decide to sell it to a big-name hotel chain, and they get an offer from Murdoch Hotels and Suites in New York City. Of course, Murdoch is your typical Corrupt Corporate Executive™ who only cares about money and has no qualms with committing illegal acts to get full ownership of the house, evicting all the girls in the process. Why? Because he’s American! They’re all eeeeevil! Everybody bands together with a massive arsenal of weapons to take back their house and show those fat filthy American pigs how much better everything is in Japan. Yeah, three years since my last attempt at making a movie, and my writing skills still sucked eggs.

 

Pokémon: The Revenge of the Scorned (2005)
This was basically just a remake of The Pokémon Adventure
, updated for the Hoenn region and condensing the bad guys down to one villain. I had gotten back into Pokémon in a big way around this time, after leaving the fandom for several years, and I wanted to flex my writing chops again by reworking the first original story I’d ever done for these characters. It still kinda sucked. I did give the villain a motivation this time (typical revenge tale, she failed so badly as a trainer that she felt compelled to take it out on the entire Pokémon world) but I gave no explanation as to how she was able to capture every single Pokémon in the world and fit them into one location. I think I just handwaved it with a line like “Long story, you wouldn’t be interested.” That’s not comedy, that’s just lazy writing. And I remember Ash and Misty kissed at the end, which delighted PokéShippers but just felt contrived to me when I read it later. I decided this premise is beyond any sort of redemption. It’s just a really bad idea.

 

Excel Saga: The Final Insult (2005)
Another anime I really got into in high school and college was Rikdo Koshi’s Excel Saga. It’s an insane story of a rinky-dink underground fascist organization called ACROSS that tries to overthrow society and create a perfect order, even though they only have two agents – Excel, a demented genki girl who can’t do anything right but does it with such enthusiasm anyway, and Hyatt, a demure shrinking violet who’s so anemic that she coughs up literal rivers of blood. I saw the potential for a really good comedy road movie in this, sort of like The Blues Brothers
, where the characters are on a mission and won’t let anything stop them, no matter how big.

In this one, Excel and Hyatt travel across Japan to put a stop to a rival underground group called SIDEWAYS that’s sprung up overnight and is making much better progress in taking over the world. Along the way, they get sidetracked and distracted by everything from biker bars to Matrix-style freeway chases, and the climax (involving transformation rays, interdimensional portals, and nuclear weapons) becomes so hopelessly overwritten that Excel ends up shooting herself in the head to get away from it – and the Great Will of the Macrocosm brings her back to life, starting the movie over from the beginning. Excel insists that she’s not going through all that shit again and sets the film itself on fire, escaping into the white nothingness of a blank screen. Given what the anime itself was known for, I actually think this could still work – for once, I finally wrote a movie that captured the tone of the source material.

 

Twice in a Lifetime (2006)
Okay, this is a really interesting one. I took a film analysis class in college, and I had an assignment where I had to write an outline for my own movie, using the storytelling techniques I’d studied. Borne from my own insecurities about my childhood mistakes, I came up with this – an unpopular high school student receives a pocketwatch that used to belong to his late grandfather. He discovers that this watch actually lets him travel through time, and he uses it to go back ten years to his own childhood and try to reform his younger self into a more popular and less socially awkward person. Despite his best efforts, though, nothing works. Worse, his younger self accidentally sends both of them back another ten years, to before he was even born. While he’s here, he meets the girl who lived in his house before him, and they hit it off pretty well. They start to fall for each other, but the boy realizes he can’t stay in this time forever – he has his family back in the present to think about. Thus, he tells the girl to meet up with him in 20 years. Sure enough, she does, although she’s now in her mid-30s and he’s still a teenager. So he gives her the pocketwatch, and she uses it to travel forward in time another 20 years, to when he’s in his mid-30s, and their relationship flourishes again. It’s got a few holes in it, I admit, but my teacher really seemed to dig it.

 

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Animated Movie (2006)

I got into MST3K in college, and when I saw :iconandrewdickman:’s awesome fan art for the show, my mind started whirring away with ideas for what an animated version might look like. My idea was to have a cartoon that book-ended the original run of the show perfectly – ten seasons, same amount of episodes, starting with Mike and the bots being tormented by Pearl, Bobo, and Observer, then running backwards through all the various cast and character changes until Season 10 wrapped up with Dr. Forrester and Dr. Erhardt experimenting on Joel, Crow, and a J. Elvis Weinstein-voiced Servo. It’ll never ever happen in a million years, but boy, is it fun to think about.


The movie would have happened between Seasons 4 and 5, and featured Mike, Crow, and Servo riffing on World Without End
(which they did at a live show back in the ‘90s but never on the show proper). The host segments were all about Dr. Forrester trying to make a movie that people would actually go see this time, referencing the fact that the real Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie bombed in theaters in 1996 thanks to a total lack of advertising. So he torments Mike and the bots by remotely steering the Satellite of Love all over the galaxy, throwing it into more and more perilous situations that would make for gripping cinema, most of which are parodies of classic sci-fi movies. In the end, as a loving kick in the ass to Star Trek V, the SOL warps to the deepest unexplored recesses of the universe and encounters a God-like energy being…voiced by Joel Hodgson doing his Joey the Lemur voice. Again, it’d never happen in real life, but I wish like hell it would.

Part 3 coming soon!

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bmann0413's avatar
Ooh, that Twice Upon a Lifetime one sounds a bit interesting.