So there is this thing going on at this year’s SPX where Nickelodeon is actively soliciting show pitches. And on a whim, I started thinking about what the heck I could throw together for a laugh that would be appropriate for somewhere in the age range of 6-11. I ended up remembering this silly thing I drew for the event of my friend Gabe’s comic “Big Pants Mouse” ending:
And the idea of “cute cartoon animals stuck in a self-important Japanese cartoon about mech combat” stuck. Obviously I couldn’t just take Gabe’s characters as is; I’d have to make up my own.
Or would I? After all, I have this old funny-animal pulp sci-fi cartoon idea called “Ensign K” floating around. I could just pluck the existing characters out of that and recast them a little.
Obviously “Buttstania” is a placeholder here. Also that shoulder patch needs work. Looks way too much like the logo from “Dresden Codak” right now.
I decided to keep the “mechs that look like giant pants” because that makes me laugh. Ideally, the whole thing will be cartoony and funny-looking, but the script will never acknowledge how absurd the world is; the characters take their lives perfectly seriously. At least one named character will probably die every season. Not a gory on-camera death, mind you. Spaceships exploding kinds of deaths. Clearly I am aiming for the upper end of their 6-11 age range, here, but why not? Working on this would make me laugh a lot, and would give me an excuse to get really stoned and have that Star Blazers marathon my nine-year-old self dreamed of. I also kind of want to use this an excuse to finish watching Revolutionary Girl Utena while I’m at it.
Outline a season’s worth of episodes, draw a silly spaceship and a few more of the characters that need to exist in this (captain, bridge crew, a few members of the Tryskari Empire, etc), and it’ll be done. Then the question becomes whether or not this is actually a thing I’d want to spend any serious chunk of my life working on…