Dark Shadows Caption Novels

[BurkeDevlin]

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.htm


Here'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.htm


I 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.htm

Sometimes 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.htm


One 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.htm

So, 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?

[Annie]

Hi Burke  thank-you so much for sharing these with us and taking the  time out of your busy schedule.  I really ejnoyed them.
               Love  Anne

[BurkeDevlin]

I'm glad you liked it, but it doesn't seem to have generated much interest overall.  Which just means that I have to build interest.  I'm going to look into various options, but if worse comes to worse, I might just try putting the first storyline on the web two episodes a week.  If I do, I'll be sure to announce it here.

[patrickm]

I remember the SciFi captions very well - I spent quite a few mornings being a smart alack there and had a ton of laughs reading the other clever responses. I think a book version would be a hoot - but copyrights might be a problem. Anyways, I do enjoy the games dept here on this board.

[BurkeDevlin]

Yeah, I remember you.  I think I even saw you at the 2000 Fest.  Caption This folded around 2004.  The stuff we wrote on Caption This (all of which I still have, incidentally) was funny, but it was impossible to understand unless you'd just seen the episode.  And it was a dozen people talking at once, some of whom had never seen the show.

If you looked at the links above, you can see it's come a long way since then.  Now it's written in such a way that it's not just a series of one-off jokes, it's designed so that you can (ideally) be able to follow the story from beginning to end without ever having seen the actual show.

There have actually been three phases to it all.  Phase I was the stuff we wrote on Caption This (which covered episodes 300 to about 1040.  Phase II was when I couldn't write on Caption This any more.  I just capped the rest of the series to Episode 1245 by storyboarding an episode with photos, watching the episode, and then writing caps around it from beginning to end.

This was good, and got me to the end of the series (with a different ending for both the 1840 and 1841 stories!), but eventually I wanted to do the Black and White shows.  Before that, I capped House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows in 2003.  To try to make those as good as possible, I didn't just watch and then cap later, I worked off a screenplay, to try to get every little nuance possible in there.  When I started doing the Black and Whites in late 2003, I did it Phase 2 style for the first 40 episodes, but then started doing it HODS/NODS style, using transcripts (which meant making transcripts, since none are out there).  When I got to Episode 300, and made a full circle of the series, it was obvious that the most recent stuff was much better than the original stuff, so I started re-capping episodes that had been done in 1999.  It's up to Episode 683 now, with the added benefit that I have a full transcript of every episode from Episode 40-ish to Episode 583 (I might have to see about releasing those sometime too).