Post by paulpogue on Jan 1, 2010 12:37:20 GMT -8
A bit of a spinoff of nerdglee. Sometimes we get caught off guard. Quite often even the creators get caught off guard. Completely out of nowhere, something cool happens that couldn't have possibly been anticipated by any sane person. It wasn't part of the plan, and if it HAD been part of the plan, everyone would have laughed it out of the room.
This is less well-defined than "ideas that should not have worked"; really, it just comes down to things that you totally didn't expect to rock but did, and bonus points if even the creators wouldn't have expected it.
Wesley Wyndham-Price IS Batman, "Angel": Go ahead, jump back to April 1999, after Wesley Wyndham-Pryce first shows up and becomes the tweediest, nerdiest, most annoying does-it-by-the-rules doofus ever. We all know that character. He's in just about every sci-fi or fantasy story ever done, and his primary role is to be absolutely wrong about everything and then slink away at the end, maybe after apologizing to everyone for being a yutz, or maybe not.
So after five or six episodes of the guy whose main role in the series, besides being a jerkass of epic proportions, is to directly drive Faith to the dark side, go ahead and tell any fan, "You know what? This guy is gonna rock. He is going to be AWESOME. People are going to call him a British vampire-hunting Batman and they are going to do so WITHOUT IRONY. This guy will take on the devil using a shotgun and John Woo dual pistols and it will NOT SUCK. He will torture the hell out of Faith and you will think he is SCARY AS HELL. He will be better, faster, smarter and sharper than anyone else despite having no powers save for magic he's not very good at. When all goddamn hell has broken loose and the apocalypse is seconds away, whenever he storms into the scene you'll be all like 'Thank god, Wesley is here, everything's gonna be okay.' When all the forces of hell are storming them at the end, you will assume that the heroes have the edge because WESLEY IS THERE. Also, he will fuck Amy Acker like mad in her good form and even get her to love him in her evil form, and even though you don't know what that means yet, trust me when I say it is good. In real life he will be banging Alyson Hannigan. You're welcome."
Go ahead. Try and convince your 1999 nerd self that all this is true. I DARE YOU.
Larry the Cable Guy displays real talent, "Cars": I groaned at the casting. Mr. Git-R-Done himself? Taking a major role in a Pixar film? Playing opposite PAUL NEWMAN? It was the nadir of vocal stunt casting, especially from as reliable a crew as Pixar. I could see it coming: Every bad Larry tic at once, boiled down into one rusty, bucktoothed character that would obviously be so horrifically bad it might actually retroactively make all prior Pixar films suck. And yet, Mater turned out to be a surprisingly well-done character. It's as if Larry, stripped of his normal comedic tics and forced to be a child-friendly character playing a well-defined plot role, had to dig in and play it much closer to what the lovably, slightly developmentally disabled local handyman would actually be like. It worked out so well that I didn't particularly mind that they still worked his catchphrases in there, and I genuinely enjoy the Mater shorts that my son watches religiously on the Disney Channel. Who knew?
"52" didn't suck, DC comics: This is really more of an Idea That Should Not Have Worked, but I'm putting it here anyway. 52 wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but it was extremely good storytelling, and did an excellent job juggling the various plot points and numerous characters running around. Hell, it did such a good job with the second-stringers that one of the few glaring flaws of the series was the hamhanded way they used "World War III" to finish the actual point of the book, which was to explain a lot of the One Year Later changes. Plus, it was a nice capper to Grant Morrison's Animal Man.
It really shouldn't have worked. Weekly series, rotating artists, second-stringer characters, spun out of a series that wasn't particularly good? Not to mention a plot structure that was planned out roughly as well as "Battlestar Galactica" -- it's pretty clear in retrospect that they didn't know what the 52 actually were when it all started, and Waid has been pretty up-front that he didn't really know where he was taking the Ralph Dibney business until four months in. Even with the level of writers in play, I wouldn't have expected Waid, Rucka, Johns and Morrison to be able to bring it together. And yet they did, creating a wildly entertaining ride.
The surprise of 52's creative success was underscored even more strongly the very next year, when "Countdown" was created to capitalize off the same concept but promptly managed to suck in all the ways we were afraid "52" would.
But my vote for the winner of Best Nerd Surprise of the Zeroes:
Michael Hogan steals the show, "Battlestar Galactica": Actually, "BSG" has a wide array of big surprises that weren't at all intentional. I doubt anybody thought Baltar would end up as a cult leader, let alone a reasonably good one, and the creators didn't even intend to have Helo come back after the mini, let alone supplant Apollo as the fleet's designated conscience.
But the craziest, and the best? Colonel Tigh didn't have much going for him at first. A drunken loser who's lost his wife and only gets worse when she actually shows back up again, Saul Tigh was pretty much there to be the designated asshole and play the role of military dickhead. Thematically, he was just there to be a foil to Adama, to advocate the easy wrong thing whenever Adama wanted to do the hard right thing. He was gruff but lovable, minus the lovable. But most importantly, he was just plain not very important or interesting.
And yet by the end, he was the heart and soul of the show, maybe even moreso than Adama. The plot forced him front and center with the Final Five business, but he was developing into someone completely different as early as New Caprica. He was certainly a fully developed and utterly engrossing character by the point of "My gods, what about Ellen?" And by the end, with perfect delivery of lines like "Yeah, yeah, you're forgiven for all your darrkk secrets" or his reaction to Kara playing Watchtower, he had completely dominated the show, and done so in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural and not at all forced. He was the most interesting guy on the show by a wide margin.
And now, whenever Michael Hogan shows up on a sci-fi show, he practically earns Special Guest Star status, whether or not that's the title actually in the credits.
Your thoughts?
This is less well-defined than "ideas that should not have worked"; really, it just comes down to things that you totally didn't expect to rock but did, and bonus points if even the creators wouldn't have expected it.
Wesley Wyndham-Price IS Batman, "Angel": Go ahead, jump back to April 1999, after Wesley Wyndham-Pryce first shows up and becomes the tweediest, nerdiest, most annoying does-it-by-the-rules doofus ever. We all know that character. He's in just about every sci-fi or fantasy story ever done, and his primary role is to be absolutely wrong about everything and then slink away at the end, maybe after apologizing to everyone for being a yutz, or maybe not.
So after five or six episodes of the guy whose main role in the series, besides being a jerkass of epic proportions, is to directly drive Faith to the dark side, go ahead and tell any fan, "You know what? This guy is gonna rock. He is going to be AWESOME. People are going to call him a British vampire-hunting Batman and they are going to do so WITHOUT IRONY. This guy will take on the devil using a shotgun and John Woo dual pistols and it will NOT SUCK. He will torture the hell out of Faith and you will think he is SCARY AS HELL. He will be better, faster, smarter and sharper than anyone else despite having no powers save for magic he's not very good at. When all goddamn hell has broken loose and the apocalypse is seconds away, whenever he storms into the scene you'll be all like 'Thank god, Wesley is here, everything's gonna be okay.' When all the forces of hell are storming them at the end, you will assume that the heroes have the edge because WESLEY IS THERE. Also, he will fuck Amy Acker like mad in her good form and even get her to love him in her evil form, and even though you don't know what that means yet, trust me when I say it is good. In real life he will be banging Alyson Hannigan. You're welcome."
Go ahead. Try and convince your 1999 nerd self that all this is true. I DARE YOU.
Larry the Cable Guy displays real talent, "Cars": I groaned at the casting. Mr. Git-R-Done himself? Taking a major role in a Pixar film? Playing opposite PAUL NEWMAN? It was the nadir of vocal stunt casting, especially from as reliable a crew as Pixar. I could see it coming: Every bad Larry tic at once, boiled down into one rusty, bucktoothed character that would obviously be so horrifically bad it might actually retroactively make all prior Pixar films suck. And yet, Mater turned out to be a surprisingly well-done character. It's as if Larry, stripped of his normal comedic tics and forced to be a child-friendly character playing a well-defined plot role, had to dig in and play it much closer to what the lovably, slightly developmentally disabled local handyman would actually be like. It worked out so well that I didn't particularly mind that they still worked his catchphrases in there, and I genuinely enjoy the Mater shorts that my son watches religiously on the Disney Channel. Who knew?
"52" didn't suck, DC comics: This is really more of an Idea That Should Not Have Worked, but I'm putting it here anyway. 52 wasn't a masterpiece by any means, but it was extremely good storytelling, and did an excellent job juggling the various plot points and numerous characters running around. Hell, it did such a good job with the second-stringers that one of the few glaring flaws of the series was the hamhanded way they used "World War III" to finish the actual point of the book, which was to explain a lot of the One Year Later changes. Plus, it was a nice capper to Grant Morrison's Animal Man.
It really shouldn't have worked. Weekly series, rotating artists, second-stringer characters, spun out of a series that wasn't particularly good? Not to mention a plot structure that was planned out roughly as well as "Battlestar Galactica" -- it's pretty clear in retrospect that they didn't know what the 52 actually were when it all started, and Waid has been pretty up-front that he didn't really know where he was taking the Ralph Dibney business until four months in. Even with the level of writers in play, I wouldn't have expected Waid, Rucka, Johns and Morrison to be able to bring it together. And yet they did, creating a wildly entertaining ride.
The surprise of 52's creative success was underscored even more strongly the very next year, when "Countdown" was created to capitalize off the same concept but promptly managed to suck in all the ways we were afraid "52" would.
But my vote for the winner of Best Nerd Surprise of the Zeroes:
Michael Hogan steals the show, "Battlestar Galactica": Actually, "BSG" has a wide array of big surprises that weren't at all intentional. I doubt anybody thought Baltar would end up as a cult leader, let alone a reasonably good one, and the creators didn't even intend to have Helo come back after the mini, let alone supplant Apollo as the fleet's designated conscience.
But the craziest, and the best? Colonel Tigh didn't have much going for him at first. A drunken loser who's lost his wife and only gets worse when she actually shows back up again, Saul Tigh was pretty much there to be the designated asshole and play the role of military dickhead. Thematically, he was just there to be a foil to Adama, to advocate the easy wrong thing whenever Adama wanted to do the hard right thing. He was gruff but lovable, minus the lovable. But most importantly, he was just plain not very important or interesting.
And yet by the end, he was the heart and soul of the show, maybe even moreso than Adama. The plot forced him front and center with the Final Five business, but he was developing into someone completely different as early as New Caprica. He was certainly a fully developed and utterly engrossing character by the point of "My gods, what about Ellen?" And by the end, with perfect delivery of lines like "Yeah, yeah, you're forgiven for all your darrkk secrets" or his reaction to Kara playing Watchtower, he had completely dominated the show, and done so in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural and not at all forced. He was the most interesting guy on the show by a wide margin.
And now, whenever Michael Hogan shows up on a sci-fi show, he practically earns Special Guest Star status, whether or not that's the title actually in the credits.
Your thoughts?
