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Let's Get Animated!

I'm supposed to working on a new commission, and I am working on it. Here and there, a bit at a time. But I've had a strong itch recently to work on non-BoM stuff, so that's where I've been concentrating. Using writing prompts, I've been adding short stories to my WdC portfolio.

And yesterday I wrote an action-cartoon script.

No, it's not a "Spider-Man" script, though I am still working on that project. But it is going slowly, as I have to first outline a 13-episode arc; then outline the particular episodes; then write the scripts. In the meantime, though, I decided to have some fun with a similar but smaller project.

I'm putting the SPOILER WARNING up here, in case you want to read the script before hitting the spoiler-heavy commentary track. Yes, it is in script format, though I've tried to keep it as readable as possible. I have also interrupted it in spots with embedded images taken from the original animated cartoon, with some captions.

Anyway, the script takes the form of another entry in that weird fiction collection that Will finds in Blackwell's bedroom, and it starts here: "The Puppet Master Strikes!-1" 

So how did I come to write it?

A few days ago I stumbled on an episode of the 1982 Incredible Hulk animated series: "Bruce Banner Unmasked." The Puppet Master was the villain, so, as with "Superior Spider-Man," this was a story that is right in my wheelhouse. For fun, I decided to reimagine it in a case of Let's Pretend: "Let's pretend the series' story editor handed me Michael Reaves's script and told me to revise it however I thought fit." So that's what I did. No, the Puppet Master doesn't win in the end -- there's a conventional ending -- but I had a little malign fun with it in places. Also, because it is meant to be an adaptation of a 1982 cartoon, it is intentionally much cheezier than anything I'd normally try to write.

If you want to watch the original, before or after my version, you can find it on Daily Motion: "Bruce Banner Unmasked"  

Okay, another spoiler warning before hitting the commentary track, which follows ...

Now:

So, the original episode is an intersection of two plots. In the first, the Puppet Master is trying to use puppets to control both Mesa City and The Hulk; in the second, General Ross and his men are trying to discover The Hulk's identity, and they succeed!

I had a real problem with the story. The first problem is that the two stories are not intrinsically related. Yes, it's the Puppet Master who causes Banner to accidentally reveal that he's the Hulk, but that's the only way they connect. Worse, neither story really develops itself. As soon as the Hulk is revealed, the Puppet Master takes control of the Army, which freezes the Hulk-identity story: Betty and the others aren't themselves, so there's no development of what happens when they learn of Banner's secret identity. And after the Puppet Master takes control of the city and army (which happens in quick order) there's his story devolves into a lot of running around and technobabble.

Also, having revealed Banner's identity, the story then has to go to work finding a way to give Betty and everyone else amnesia.

So I decided to start by cutting out the "revealed identity" story, and made Banner's plot a simple one: He has to sneak physical evidence linking himself to the Hulk out of the base, with the ironic disaster that, as soon as he succeeds, that evidence is seized by the Puppet Master and used in the attempt to enslave the Hulk.

This required another change, one to the lore. In the Marvel universe, it is enough for the Puppet Master to make a clay likeness of his victim in order to control him. I find this too absurd even for comic book hoodoo. (Not even the excuse that the clay is "radioactive" works.) The Puppet Master is plainly using a variety of sympathetic magic, and sympathetic magic typically requires something of the victim's own in order to work. So I rewrote the lore so that the Puppet Master also requires the victim's hair be mixed with the clay. This had the added advantage of pointing to an easy "trick solution" to save the day at the end.

Otherwise, most of my changes were attempts to simplify the story and give it a little more forward momentum. I made the story move toward the Puppet Master's plot to control the Hulk, instead of giving him the ability at the start, and I made it move toward his getting control of the army base instead of giving him that control in the middle. I eliminated the character of Alicia and gave her (expository) part to the character of Rio, who in the original just disappeared after being used to menace the heroes. And although Alicia has a theoretically interesting relationship to her step-father, it's a relation that isn't used to real dramatic effect in the original, and eliminating her snips off an unsatisfactory dangly bit.

As a result of these simplifications, there are fewer action scenes, many of which didn't lead anywhere in the original. But I think an episode about mind-control can be forgiven for leaning a little more strongly on atmosphere than on Hulk-smashing.

With fewer action scenes, I'm not certain the script would actually be long enough for a twenty-two minute action cartoon. I'm just going to pretend that with less frenetic action, there would be more time for mood and atmosphere in the chase scenes.

I also added a few bits to better explain the Puppet Master's quick and far-reaching success, and some personality switching, because people seem to like that kind of perverse mind-screw.