Steamrollin' whatever I see.
I'm hardly ever tempted to write fan-fiction. This hasn't always been the case. The second or third story I ever completed, age 11, was a sequel-cum-parody of Jurassic Park, and I still have notebook after notebook filled with notes, synopses, maps, sketches, and early chapters of ambitious epics set in the universes of Star Wars, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, and yes, Jurassic Park. But the last gasp of that stuff expired when I was 17 or 18. In more recent years, taken as I am with an enthusiasm for worldbuilding (usually at the expense of ever getting any story committed to paper), I rarely remember the appeal of setting a story in someone else's universe.
But once in a great while, someone else will squander all the promise of their story universe, and I find myself twitching to take it over and do it right. I speak, of course, of Despicable Me 2.
The first Despicable Me was a cute and surprisingly entertaining lark, and last summer it was Jonny's favorite movie. I'd heard the sequel was a letdown but last week I checked it out from the library anyway. The charm of the original is absent, the antics of the Minions are tacked on to generate LAFFS instead of growing organically from a well-constructed script, and it does everything it can to make Despicable Me more conventional and bland. I'm trying to imagine how the pitch must have went. "You know what this story about a sympathetic supervillain creating an unconventional family really needs? For Gru to become a Good Guy and for his girls to get a mommy!"
One of my favorite things about the first movie was how Gru adopted the girls as a single father, with almost no comment from the other characters. The kids fantasize about having a beautiful mom and a successful dad, but their conventional wish is forgotten once they discover the charms of growing up in a supervillain's secret lair. Likewise, Gru's evil plans don't discomfit the girls so much as a work-over-family scheduling conflict discomfits his henchman. After the movie ended, I liked to imagine that Gru raised the girls to be supervillains, sharing a delight in freeze rays and gleaming metal rocketships while setting aside time for dance recitals and perhaps a humorous sleepover sequence. That's a movie I would pay to see.
Instead, we get this half-baked mush of "a family needs a mommy" moralizing, a love interest who looks pretty while the script pretends that "eager and winsome personality" is a humorous character flaw, an evil plan unmasked when Gru (in classic sitcom-dad fashion) develops an irrational hatred for Margo's first little boyfriend, and really just an aggressive campaign of making Gru and his family blander and more conventional.
What I imagined is so much more interesting than that. I won't actually write it, but I now can better understand the temptation to "fix" where someone else's story universe went wrong.
But once in a great while, someone else will squander all the promise of their story universe, and I find myself twitching to take it over and do it right. I speak, of course, of Despicable Me 2.
The first Despicable Me was a cute and surprisingly entertaining lark, and last summer it was Jonny's favorite movie. I'd heard the sequel was a letdown but last week I checked it out from the library anyway. The charm of the original is absent, the antics of the Minions are tacked on to generate LAFFS instead of growing organically from a well-constructed script, and it does everything it can to make Despicable Me more conventional and bland. I'm trying to imagine how the pitch must have went. "You know what this story about a sympathetic supervillain creating an unconventional family really needs? For Gru to become a Good Guy and for his girls to get a mommy!"
One of my favorite things about the first movie was how Gru adopted the girls as a single father, with almost no comment from the other characters. The kids fantasize about having a beautiful mom and a successful dad, but their conventional wish is forgotten once they discover the charms of growing up in a supervillain's secret lair. Likewise, Gru's evil plans don't discomfit the girls so much as a work-over-family scheduling conflict discomfits his henchman. After the movie ended, I liked to imagine that Gru raised the girls to be supervillains, sharing a delight in freeze rays and gleaming metal rocketships while setting aside time for dance recitals and perhaps a humorous sleepover sequence. That's a movie I would pay to see.
Instead, we get this half-baked mush of "a family needs a mommy" moralizing, a love interest who looks pretty while the script pretends that "eager and winsome personality" is a humorous character flaw, an evil plan unmasked when Gru (in classic sitcom-dad fashion) develops an irrational hatred for Margo's first little boyfriend, and really just an aggressive campaign of making Gru and his family blander and more conventional.
What I imagined is so much more interesting than that. I won't actually write it, but I now can better understand the temptation to "fix" where someone else's story universe went wrong.