The Annoyed Man wrote:Skiprr wrote:Whaddya think?
I think you and I have more in common that I realized.
Okay. Wait. Forgot the last idea. Now I think it should be a collaboration, you and me, with plenty of room for sequels:
Cannibalistic Creatures of the Western Canon. Or maybe just,
Canonical Cannibalistic Creatures (I can't seem to get past the alliteration).
Picture this:
Think time travel, a good-guy Rambo from 2040 who can rack up body counts faster than Stallone circa 1985, and an evil, mutant, zombie-virus-carrying vampire who is hell-bent on destroying the most important works of Western Literature by infecting all the people around the author in order to make sure the works are never created.
We'd be able to do period-piece, costume vignettes at will, dropping Rambo in with suitable revisionist one-man-army weaponry (think
The Iliad with sword-and-sandle zombies and Rambo mowin' 'em down with a future variant of the M60 as he tries to get to the vampire virus-carrier; think of a real Grendel and our Rambo brushing aside Beowulf to take care of business with a .50 cal. and a katana; think of things out on the moors of
Wuthering Heights that Bronte never imagined). The possibilities are endless: we can even throw Jane Austen under the bus again, but in person--so to speak--not just her novels.
Rambo never quite gets the ghoul, but he does win most battles. One set-piece could be about the greatest Italian poet no one ever heard of: Pietro Benedictus. Born as Petrarch was aging, the Sicilian Pietro would come to have a greater impact on the arts than virtually any other pre-Renaissance writer...had he lived.
Our zombie-virus vampire pops up in 1345 and infects convoys of merchants travelling the Mongol trade routes. The horrible infection slowly spreads, and in 1347 whole ship-loads of the infected wash up on the Sicilian coast, "aaarghing," ambling, and chewing their way across the island and onto the Italian mainland.
Poor Pietro and his entire family end up as zombie munchies...as do significant numbers in the European population. The zombie virus mutates by 1348; it remains a contagious killer, but ceases turning people into flesh eaters. History loses Pietro Benedictus to the great plague called...the Black Death.
It was the early, slow infection that caused Rambo to miss it, and it is his greatest defeat. Cinching his headband even tighter, Rambo focuses his steely resolve onto a single-minded objective...that no one--and no
thing--can stop.
Next episode: all hell breaks loose at the first Pembroke production of
The Comedy of Errors, and William Shakespeare learns to love a Glock.
I can do the voiceovers for the trailer: "In a world teaming with undead things that want to make you their own, only one man stands in their way..."
See what you started? I got a million of 'em, I tell ya; a million of 'em.
Oh man... You owe me a new monitor.... and a new pair of pants.
