I wanted to announce a DS-related project, and get some opinions and suggestions, either negative or positive about it
Years back on scifi.com there was a feature called Caption This. I see that you have a version of it on this board, so probably everyone is familiar with the concept. Take a photo from the show and write funny captions about it. You guys have threads where someone puts up a single photo and write captions around it. Sci-fi did it a little differently. They used to show screengrabs from whatever they had on the air at the moment (show, commercial, or whatever), update it every 10 seconds or so, and let users submit captions, with the most recent dozen or so being visible to whoever dropped in. It was a lot of fun, but they dumped it about 6 years ago.
As fun as it was, all those captions, and all the ones here, are a series of one-off jokes. That's good, but I became interested in doing it one better by actually trying to tell a story this way. Some of you may remember the Woody Allen movie "What's Up, Tiger Lily?", or the 80's show "Mad Movies", in which they took an old show, and redubbed it with all new dialogue, to turn it into a comedy. That's exactly what I've done with Dark Shadows, in photographic novel form. I've actually taken entire episodes, storyboarded them out, and written comedy dialogue for them, while retaining the same basic characters and storyline.
I tried pitching it to Dan Curtis Productions as a possible book, website feature, or something. The bad news is that they rejected it. The good news is that they rejected it sight unseen, which means that they didn't really reject "it", they just didn't want to be bothered (which is probably understandable, considering how many half-baked ideas come down the pike).
Of which this may be one. It's perfectly possible, of course, that what I've put together is of no value at all. Or maybe it is. That's what I hope to get opinions about. I also hope to get suggestions about what to do with it. (From the people who like it, I mean. I KNOW what the people who don't like it will tell me to do with it.) Does anyboy like this? Would anyone like to see more? If anyone wants to see more, how should I go about trying to disseminate it? Bug DCP again? Hire an artist and turn it into a parody? Something else?
To offer an opinion about that, people will have to see a little of what it is I'm talking about, so here are a couple of samples. Here's "Chapter" (i.e. episode 92). Those of you familiar with the show already know what's going on here. Vicki goes to Bangor to learn about her past from the Garners, but finds them to be the propaganda wing of the Collins family. One of the many running jokes in the caption books is that the Garners, although they're a hundred miles away, run a newsletter that tells people who actually live at Collinwood the "official" version of what's going on there (because obviously a lot of the things that happen at Collinwood aren't fit for public consumption, and even in the original show, the fear of scandal and what the townfolk might think was a major motivator).
http://graeme.50webs.com/burkedevlin/ch92/index.htmHere's another that should be very popular. Episodes 410-411, in which Barnabas, in 1796, rises as a vampire for the first time, and acquires his obligatory dimwitted sidekick:
http://graeme.50webs.com/burkedevlin/ch410/index.htmI should stress that these are not just three random episodes done in isolation. ALL the episodes have been done this way (this project has been in the works for 10 years, but has only been available for the amusement of me and a few friends up to this point).
A couple of other things that people might enjoy. I've put together a (unpublished, of course) book called "Dark Shadows Cast Lists." Essentially it's broken down into 15 chapters (one for each of the 13 major storylines of the show, plus the two movies). It's basically an encylopedic work with a photo and entry for each character that appeared in that storyline, but if you read the entire chapter, you also get a feel for what that storyline as a whole was about. Here's the first chapter (the others aren't online):
http://graeme.50webs.com/burkedevlin/01burke/index.htmSometimes the caption books have special sidebar items called "Specials". Here's one of these, devoted to the DS Viewmaster Reel that was put out in the 60's:
http://graeme.50webs.com/burkedevlin/viewmasterds/index.htmOne other thing that people might enjoy: a captioned episode, with it's ORIGINAL dialogue. In other words, except for the introduction, I didn't write this one. It exists because every time Sci-Fi showed DS, they showed Episode 59 twice, and didn't show Episode 54 at all. Most dedicated viewers never got to see it. So, for those who did want to see it without having to buy a DVD, I put this together:
http://graeme.50webs.com/burkedevlin/ep54/index.htmSo, opinions? Is it good? Does it suck? Do people want to see more? There are hundreds of episodes just like these that I'd like to have people enjoy, but don't really know the best way to go about it. One idea has been to print up just the 15 chapters of the Cast Lists as a book, try to sell it at a Fest, and hope that DCP doesn't mind too much. Another idea has been to take the caption versions of the two movies (House and Night of Dark Shadows), have an artist make drawings of the photos, and rewrite it as an unauthorized parody. There are probably other ideas I haven't thought of.
Of course all these ideas are predicated on the idea that this is something good that people would want to see more of. Is it?