Where Apes are Taken For Granite

I was going to post about storyboarding, about how to a storyboard artist must look between the lines of a script to do the best job.  But all my examples haven’t aired yet so I can’t post them on the web.  I showed the post to a director who said I should write a book.  Hmmm.  So that’s the explanation of why this post will feel a lot like the first.  So let’s start with another spectacular presentation piece by Ben Caldwell.  If you didn’t click on the link to his site last time, do it now.  He really gave the monsters a fresh look, especially Igoo, the rock ape.

As a kid, I loved THE HERCULOIDS.  I guess the idea of having a bunch of monsters on an exotic planet appealed to me.  But once again, a visit to YouTube provides the harsh reality that Saturday Morning breakfasts of Fruit Loops and Sugar Frosted Flakes have near hallucinatory effects on the developing brain. 

There was really nothing to these shows other than the high concept.  The human family seemed educated and completely comfortable when confronted with high technology but they dressed like cave men.  For some reason, all sorts of aliens wanted their planet but came up with the most ridiculous plans to conquer it.   For instance, one episode had an antagonist shrink the Herculoids to microscopic size so they had to battle his bateria-sized monsters.  Once you shrink your adversary to microscopic size, isn’t the battle over?  Whatever.  It’s all part of the glorious entertainment of early TV animation.  The action was fast and exciting enough that we never asked the hard questions.

Unlike my development of Hellboy Animated where my goal was to stay as close as possible to Mike Mignola’s creation  (check its blog for a chronology of that struggle) I wanted to develop the basic concepts as if the original show did not exist.

The obvious element that leapt out was that the show should probably center on the kid.  In the original show, Dorno just got into trouble with Gleep… or was it Gloop?  But the stories were so short that the family often just operated as a team. 

 My idea was that the human family came from a hi-tech planet and was searching for the space equivalent of Atlantis.  They not only find it, they crash land on it and then find the Herculoids.  Their clothes are hi-tech remnants mixed with clothes of the local tribes.  Dorno accidentally exposes the ancient power hidden on the planet, which instantly makes it a target for any number of hostile races and entrepreneurs. 

Backstory stuff and world building is a ton of fun but you’ll see little of it in the pitch.  By definition, backstory is what happens before the series.  It may get presented in the front credit sequence or explained in bits of dialogue but is unimportant in the pitch.  Why?  Because network executives want to hear what the show is, not how it got there.  They want a sense of a typical episode. That’s what the kids will be watching.

 So here’s the pitch.  Enjoy and feel free to ask questions.  Next time I’ll be showing what you try when your show doesn’t sell. Download The Herculoids

                                                                                                                                                 --Tad

Comments

[James Madison]

Hi Tad -

A smart executive will green-light this. It has a history of past success and it will be different from everything else out there now. In short, it will have a unique voice amongst a lot of homogenized material.

I look forward to seeing this on the screen soon.