Hypothetical Productions presents “The ChubbChubbs Movie!”

Seems like some of my favorite unrealized projects are animated.

The 2003 best animated short was a clever space odyssey called “The ChubbChubbs!”

I got the chance to pitch a feature that would expand on the concept of the short, which allowed for a lot of fun riffs on classic sci-fi in an intergalactic movie-musical.

A somewhat long time ago, at a studio far, far away…

================

The ChubbChubbs Movie! 

Proposal by Eric Williams

Open on a ROCKETSHIP blasting through OUTER SPACE.  From behind, it looks like an impressive battle cruiser, but as we pull along its side, we discover that it’s the galactic equivalent of a station wagon:  painted green, with fake wooden paneling along its sides and bumper stickers of the tourist destinations it has been.  As we look through the front windshield, we see an alien HUSBAND and WIFE arguing over whether they’re heading the right way, while their SON and DAUGHTER torment each other in the passenger area behind them.  Some things truly are universal.

The husband reluctantly agrees to pull in at the next planet to ask for directions.  As he does, he goes against the flow of a flurry of spaceships careening madly toward him, their pilots seemingly desperate to get away from the planet.  But he continues downward, and all looks peaceful once they land at the Gas Giant service station.

The family disembark and walk into the station.  Mom picks up some supplies (opportunities for jokes as we see the various products for sale).  The kids rush to the rest rooms (we see the universal pictogram symbols on the multiple rest-room doors – it’s not just limited to “Men” and “Women” here).  Dad tries to find an attendant who can give him directions, but he and his family seem to be the only ones here.  Evidence suggests that everyone who had been here panicked and fled at a moment’s notice.

The family huddle together and walk cautiously behind the fueling station, where they discover a wrecked spaceship with a gigantic hole seemingly chewed out of its fuselage.  Mangled, twisted metal is everywhere.  Suddenly, they hear a rocket engine start – only to realize that someone has just stolen the station wagon and is escaping the planet in it.

As all around them gets quiet, they hear someone whimpering.  Cautiously, they move closer to the sound — and discover a fierce-looking creature in a service-station attendant’s smock hiding in the shadows.  He leaps away from them in fear until he realizes it’s just a family.  The attendant peeks out from his hiding place and asks “Are they gone?”  The father asks “Who?” and the attendant says, with terror in his voice, “The ChubbChubbs!”

Just at that moment, a tall menacing armored creature steps around the corner of the building.  As its shadow falls over the screaming family, we CUT TO:

Hypothetical Productions presents “Hodg-Man”

Another collaboration with my brother Greg from the Might’ve Bin:  ”The Inexpensively Animated Adventures Of Hodg-Man”.

Greg’s caricatures are also posted at his blog, the Williams Projects Archive. As you might guess, a complete collection of unrealized Williams Brothers projects could become quite voluminous.

=========

PRESENTING

Starring JOHN HODGMAN,

a professional writer.

 

Thirty weekly minutes of

animated sketches, songs,

recreations of true-life anecdotes,

and a great deal of totally-made-up crap.

 

Anchored by the noted raconteur

JOHN HODGMAN

with all the dry wit and deadpan absurdity

for which he has become

surprisingly famous.

 

Each week, Mr. Hodgman –

or, to be more precise, his cartoon doppelganger –

will embark on a George Plimpton-esque journey into the unknown,

with the advantage that, by making these quests in animated form,

Mr. Hodgman will at no point endanger his own health or safety.

 

At worst, we are talking a head cold

from the air conditioning at the recording studio.

Hypothetical Productions presents “Roger Rabbit Returns”

Another entry from the “projects that might have been” file:  a pitch which my brother Greg and I cooked up for a potential sequel to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”.  I still think this would be a blast.

Roger Rabbit Returns

A Treatment

by Eric Williams and Greg Williams

Based on Characters Created By Jeffrey Price & Peter Seaman

and Gary K. Wolf

Concept:  When Roger and his toon friends head for New York in the 1950s to do a live TV variety show (yes, that’s right:  a live cartoon show), Roger uncovers a sinister plot in which toons are mysteriously vanishing and being subjected to experiments which turn them into oversized mutants.  When he accidentally releases the giant out-of-control toons into the city, it’s up to Roger to round them up and save the day.

==================

The film opens with a black-and-white government educational film of the “duck-and-cover” variety in which Roger Rabbit demonstrates, in his usual frenzied fashion, how NOT to react in the event of an atomic bombing.  When he flubs a take, we reveal a set painted in various shades of grey.  As Roger heads to his dressing room, he removes his makeup and grey wardrobe, revealing his colorful self beneath.

This is Hollywood in the early Fifties.  With the arrival of television, film work has begun to dry up for all but the biggest toons.  Many toons have been forced to get jobs in the “real world” outside Toontown, while some just seem to have disappeared altogether.  Even though times are tough, most toons have an elitist disdain for television, although they do have begrudging admiration for the stoic work of one of the few toons to have gotten a break in TV:  that Indian chief on the test pattern.

What Have You Won For Me Lately?

If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” — Orson Welles

This Sunday, millions of people will witness exactly the same event. Approximately half will find this event exhilarating and life-affirming. The other half will find this event horribly depressing and unfair, leading many to question their faith in a Creator.

Fortunately, I know that God is a Green Bay fan, and He’s giving them nine points over Chicago.

I’ve long thought it would be interesting to structure a movie in the same way that most of us consume sporting events, where the audience would find the story uplifting or tragic, a thrill or a downer, not because the of the characters’ moral superiority or likeability or funnier way with a phrase, but because of the city in which the characters live. Just as you cheer for your local team, you’d want Victor Laszlo to triumph over Rick Blaine solely because you went to Czechoslovakian Underground Prep. (I did co-write a screenplay about a sibling basketball rivalry in which the audience never learns which side won the climactic game. The fact that the movie remains unmade probably tells me something.)

Having grown up in Wisconsin, the Packers have always been my default football team, and it was easy to remain a remote Packer fan in Los Angeles because the city can’t find a team of its own that will stay put. But my formative years fell between the Bart Starr and Brett Favre eras, which meant that “my” team pretty consistently sucked. It was delightful when Favre arrived, so I could finally root for a team worth rooting for. At his peak, Favre was so absurdly great, so capable of pulling off unlikely plays, that it seemed like he was performing magic. I’d have enjoyed watching his performance on any team, but sports fandom tends not to work that way. Most of us support whoever shows up to play in our local team’s jerseys. As Jerry Seinfeld has observed, we’re basically “rooting for laundry.”

Spinning Donuts In The Parking Lot Of Life

More years ago than I care to admit, I spent a frigid Christmas Eve packing nearly everything I owned into a used brown Chevette hatchback in preparation for a move to Los Angeles. I had just graduated from the University of Wisconsin on the coldest day that my skin has ever experienced, so even to a dedicated indoorsman like myself, California seemed particularly inviting, beyond its obvious allure as the only place you could really live if you really wanted to do what I was sure I really wanted to do, which was make movies.

On the bitterly cold morning of December 25, I left home, my brother Greg along to share the driving and cut the loneliness. We headed south immediately, in hopes of escaping winter as quickly as we could, but winter, like most things, could move faster than a used brown Chevette hatchback.

Choosing Sides: the lost art of the album side

I recently sent out a call for thoughts and reminiscences about the album side, for an essay I am considering writing for the Huffington Post.  Not sure when I’ll get the chance to write my HuffPost piece, so I wanted to share the comments of those who have generously submitted so far.

If you have your own “side A/side B” memories or musings, please submit them at the bottom of the page.

==================

Eugene Edwards

Singer/songwriter, www.eugeneedwards.com

The first sides that come to mind are side one of Springsteen’s Born To Run album and side two of Led Zeppelin IV.

I’m not sure that “Thunder Road” has ever been topped as an album opener, “Tenth Ave. Freeze-Out” and “Night” describe an urban landscape for the too-desperate-to-last relationship of “Backstreets” and we’re out.

Zeppelin manages to touch upon all the stuff that made them great in four songs.  The humor of “Misty Mountain Hop, the pastoral acoustics of “Goin’ to California,” the menacing to symphonic crunch of “Four Sticks,” and then the Mississippi Delta zen of “When the Levee Breaks.”

I realize that both of these sides contain four songs each and it seems as though that would decrease the odds of there being a clunker.  But it’s not so easy to have a song over five minutes in length that remains compelling.  Springsteen manages it with sheer drama while Zeppelin does it because John Bonham was such a great drummer that you just stay tuned for the next fill.

As far as the worst sides…I think side 4 of the Who’s Tommy drags and shows Townsend’s  eventual disinterest in the story.  This side breaks the concentration of the listener and that’s not a good thing when you think of the overall pretense of the album.  Big, big let down.  Also, side 4 of Cream’s Wheels of Fire album has the quarter-of-an-hour long “Toad,” a painful Ginger Baker drum solo.  Oy!  Clapton proves for three sides of an album that a soloist can go long in rock and then Ginger tries to argue, apparently.  What do 7 Eleven coffee and Ginger Baker have in common?  They both suck without cream.

Are album sides over?  Well, of course.  Album sequencing in general is becoming less and less important with every download.  Is this bad?  Only in a nostalgic way.  The long play album had a 50-year life span, that’s all.  Some of us tend to react to these changes as if we’re no longer allowed to have birthdays.  Baby boomers particularly go off the rails when something relevant to their childhood/adolescence becomes obsolete.  Though many artists still release albums on LP, they’re nearly all double-LPs and the sequencing seems to reflect the uninterrupted form of the CD.

This is not say that sides couldn’t hurt.  I recall an album by Semisonic released in 2001 that had 14 tracks.  Tracks 1 through 7 were all politely bland pop rock.  Then track 8, “I Wish,” grabs you by the heart and for the rest of the album you can’t believe that it’s the same band at all.  These guys really put together a magnificent string of tracks that would have been an excellent side 2 if there were such a thing by 2001.

==================

Michael Martin

Graphic designer

Of course, Abbey Road was the Beatles lp that had the biggest switch in feeling from side to side. Side one was a loose arrangement of songs, some of them classic, but incredibly different tom one another, while Side two had the feel of a symphony with different movements. It was a great, schizophrenic album.

Another thing to explore would be the idea that we put on a vinyl lp for 20 minutes of listening, or if we were motivated to flip it, 40 minutes at best.  For us short attention span listeners, we were rarely bored by the now average or expected length of 70 minutes (featuring extra tracks and remixes and every godforsaken thing they can dredge out of the studio trash can. I mean, do we REALLY need twenty remixes of Madonna’s latest?)

There were the occasional attempts at pushing the vinyl format, like Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, which was 40 minutes long…a single song over two lp sides with an incredibly clumsy fade out/fade in.

The worst lp multiple sets:

The Concert For Bangla Desh
(sorry, Ravi Shankar fans, but that side was torturous)

All Thing Must Pass
(what should have been “passed” on was the third album…an atrocity called Apple Jam)

Inconsistent or Schizophrenic splits between Side A and Side B:

Cat Stevens – Foreigner
John and Yoko – Live Peace In Toronto
Beatles – Yellow Submarine soundtrack

The Bizarro Decade

“May you live in interesting times.” – Anonymous

“On second thought…” – Me

Growing up, I sometimes regretted that I had missed out on the “Swingin’ Sixties”, with all of that decade’s societal upheavals and explosions of creative freedom.  Sure, you had a divisive and costly war, and I could have done without all those assassinations, but at least big stuff was happening!

As I look back on the past ten years of the “Still-Unnicknamed Zeroes”, I’d like to formally request a little less turbulence in the next decade.  Please?

No era is devoid of history, but certain periods do seem to exceed their allotment of tumult, and we are mired in a doozy.  I find myself reaching for “Superman”, “Seinfeld” and “Saturday Night Live” for the appropriate label.

I believe we’ve been living in the Bizarro Decade.

The Bizarros, for short.

Or, if you prefer, Bizarr-Os, although that makes it seem less like a momentous period in history and more like a sugary breakfast cereal.