I’ve mentioned this before, but… I think there’s a FASCINATING show to be made about a realistic, skeptical, cynical person in our non-magical world who finds a magic item. What do they do with it? Who do they tell?
Bele of Ziggurville
Like Joan of Arcadia, only with Marduk, son of Ea, instead of God.
Viewer discretion is advised, due to scenes of animal sacrifice and partial nudity.
I have some ideas for movies and TV shows but I’ll keep them to myself for the time being, but a quick and true anecdote: I once, on another message board, pitched this “idea” for a TV show:
*Sister Belinda (Allison ‘Nellie Oleson’ Arngrim) is a heroin addicted nun who finds out that when she shoots up with a glowing heroin she bought from an invisible homeless guy that she can travel through time. She goes through history solving crimes from Mesopotamia to Jack the Ripper, always hindered by the fact she has to get back to her own time before she starts going through withdrawal and can never get to the same place in time again, so she has to solve the crime before she can travel. The only person who knows her secret is her ex-pimp, Fleejax (Don Knotts), and a young novice nun named Julie (Candace Cameron) who can call her on a cell phone when she’s in the past. The Mother Superior of her order is a humorless closet lesbian (Roseanne Barr) who is also an interdimensional crime lord using the convent as a cover. I call it ‘Holy Time Tracks’. *
It didn’t get much of a response one way or the other. I assumed the sarcasm or whatever was lost on the folks.
A few days later I got an e-mail:
“I absolutely love it! Throw in Melissa Gilbert as my methodone counsellor (who’s also a rabbi), a catchy techno themesong and maybe a CGI talking plant, and I think that HBO would eat it up and we’ll make millions!”
It was actually from Allison Arngrim, who it turns out is a really cool and has a great sense of humor and the absurd. Somebody who evidently knew her or knew somebody who knew her had forwarded it to her. We exchanged e-mails a few times after that but, sadly, we lost contact.
Zeldar, I think the endless blank loop has been done already. Guy Debord did something like this in the 1950’s with his Hurlements en Faveur de Sade. Supposedly the most interesting part of the movie was the wrath of the audience when they realized they’d been cheated.
I’ve long thought that a movie where we contact alien life forms and go to their planet to discover that they occur in the forms of beams of light or musical notes would be interesting. But that’s probably been done too.
Yeh, except an Encyclopedia Brown who figures out who raped and murdered the models, not who stole an autographed baseball.
I want to see the opposite of a supernatural TV show cliche: heroine gets knocked up by something evil with a demonic baby, and by the end the evil baby is gone, poof, in a magical abortion. (see: Angel season 1, Charmed season 4 or 5 etc)
So in this show a woman gets knocked up with a demonic baby and simply makes the best of it, attempting to nurture her little imp out of his or her demonic nature, with mixed results. If it’s a comedy, hilarity will ensue when she tries to pass the kid off as normal.
I’d remake Speed 2 only I’d set it on a bus…
mm
The US Supreme Court does not allow camera or tape recorders, but they publish transcripts of their hearings. Some of them are sad, some illustrative, some historic, some darn funny.
Get a team of actors to recreate wonderful exchanges like:
Justice: “So Missouri wants to require strippers to wear pasties in order to reduce prostitution and drug dealing?”
State Attorney General: “Yes, sir.”
Justice: “If the strippers wore one pasty, would prostitution and drug use by half?”
Justice Two: “If the strippers wore no pasties and no panties, would prostitution double?”
Justice Three: “Is this the least restrictive way to reduce prostitution and drug use?”
State Attorney General: "Ah, ah, ah, I mean, you know … "
Isn’t this the premise of My Name is Earl, more or less? (The lead even looks a bit like Nick.)
Five gay clown accountants, down on their luck, get a job as consultants for an art gallery/money laundry run by outlaw bikers. Steven Seagal works for the IRS, and he’s in trouble with his captain.
I know this one’s totally fresh – there’s never been anything like it on the screen, big or little: I’d like to see a hard-SF series set in the near future, say, the year 2050, in a hotel/bar/restaurant (“Giant’s Castle”) at the top of a surface-to-orbit space elevator or “beanstalk.” And I mean hard SF: No magic or mysticism or supernatural elements; no extraterrestrial life forms, sentient or nonsentient; no travel outside the Solar System; and no “black box” technologies of any kind – no FTL drives, no transporters, no force fields, nothing that is not considered at least theoretically possible in light of our current scientific knowledge. (Which still leaves open the door for a lot of exotic technologies, including some that have been explored in written SF but not much, as yet, in TV SF – e.g., nanotechnology, neural-electronic interfaces, and some stuff you can read about in Robert L. Forward’s Indistinguishable from Magic.)
The show would be like an SF version of LAX. The stories and the conflict would come from the lives and relationships of the permanent staff of the Giant’s Castle, plus all the people who pass through the station on their way to or from business in the space colonies at the Trojan points, on the Moon and Mars, etc. – and from the various governments, business corporations, and religious and political movements with which some of those people might be affiliated. There might or might not be a preconceived conflict-based “story arc” for the series, like there was for Babylon 5. I think the setting is enough to support endless plots and story developments.
I started a CS thread about this idea last February: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=301413
I’d also like to see a romantic comedy (or, rather, a film in the romantic-comedy mold) about a reckless womanizer who, after meeting the girl of his dreams, dumps her and goes back to reckless womanizing, and is happy in it, without the slightest regret, and without having acquired any sense that such a way of life is empty or meaningless.
Reality show: President for A Day. Random Ordinary Guy gets made President (either the CEO of a large corporation, or of the US of A) for a day. Hilarity ensues. 
prepare the rotten fruit…
i haven’t seen it.
dodges flying objects
Wolfenstein: The Animated Series.
You could even probably pull it off as Machinima.
How about Encyclopedia Brownshirt, about a bright Hitler Youth member solving crime for the fatherland?
First graders come home from school to find a strange man awaiting them. When they ask what he’s doing in their house he explains…
“ I have some bad news. Your mommy’s dead. You’ll never see her again”
Just as the kid starts to cry uncontrollably, Mommy jumps out of the closet and yells “GOTCHA!” – comic GOLD!
Oh yeah, I’m gonna have to call good old Mom one of these days so we can re-live all the wonderful memories :rolleyes: