I think I just found an idea for an ongoing kid SF show I think I could get behind.

So: Imagine Star Trek from the perspective of an away team. A starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the United Federation of Planets.

But every other episode is another show. About an away team on a Klingon starship on a several-year mission of discovery and propaganda into unclaimed territory, spreading the good word about the Glorious Klingon Empire.

They’re not actually the Klingons and the Federation, of course. I’ll come up with good names eventually. For now it’s enough to know that one of them will be quietly “leftist” while the other will be quietly “rightist”. Neither will ever make a big deal of this.

Sometimes they have their own separate adventures. Find a planet with a problem, help them out with their problem, another win for Their Side, whichever one that is.

Sometimes they run into each other. At first always as adversaries. Who see each other as nasty caricatures. But as the show goes on, they occasionally find each other thrown together in a situation where they have to put their mutual hatred aside to survive in the face of some kind of Outside Context Problem, ranging from the small (on from each side stuck on an inhospitable planet with each other) to the large (oh shit we accidentally woke up the Creepy Ancient Anti-Life Robots and now we have to stop them from destroying both homeworlds).

So on a basic level we have “woo, spaceships, explosions, aliens, friendship, whee!”. But underneath that there is a serious attempt to get people to sympathize with the other side of the cultural conflict that’s going on in America nowadays. Not to necessarily agree with each other on everything. But to spend some time maybe rooting for the other side, and see a caricature of themselves through their eyes. Ideally I would get some right-wing people on the show’s staff to help make that side more believable, and to make the caricature of the lefties a bit sharper.

I feel like if I’m going to attempt to put together something aimed at kids, it behooves me to think about what I want to say to them. Now that I have this worked out, I think I can bullshit enough details to make a worthwhile pitch in the time between now and SPX, while also making a serious dent in the end of Rita.

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…