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Wednesday, September 6, 2017

My fan fiction regarding the Catillac Cats

STORYLINES FROM MY SOAP OPERA INVOLVING THE “CATILLAC CATS” FROM THE HEITHCLIFF CARTOON SHOW.
I had a soap opera going there for a long time when I’d make these drawings at home growing up. The first storyline was about the heroine Cleo. It is a variation on the movie Near Dark. She’s revisited by a vampire form her past. Not a lot of character development in this. I recapped the “past” which was indeed one of the first storylines I ever put down and it was a near mirror of the movie Near Dark with a few slight changes. Anyway, with this storyline, the vampire is in love with her and wants her back. (Most of the other vampires from the previous gang survived the attempt to destroy them in the past.) He threatens her family which is now Hector and her twin daughters by Riff Raff. She agrees to rejoin them so he won’t hurt them. Of course, she goes into it with a plot with Hector to get her out and destroy them again. This time she has to kill or be killed while she’s in the gang. The vampire, Rick, is genuinely in love with Cleo and realizes that she is only with him to protect her family and will never really love him so he wants to help free her and she in turn wants to free him in gratitude. She has to rework the escape plan with Hector. The only character development I made was that Hector needed Riff Raff’s help for Cleo’s transfusion with the conflict being that Cleo and Riff Raff are now divorced and even on opposite sides of the law. I also had Cleo run into her prostitute sister, Jessie, one night while on the hunt and caught up in the blood lust. This would later be a starting block for her sister’s good-turn. In the end Cleo and Rick escape and the rest of the vampires are destroyed for good this time.
There was very little transition into the second storyline since I wasn’t developing my other characters at this point. So, quite suddenly, Cleo’s daughter Rosie is photographing the stars with her best friend Crystal one night on some rich person’s estate. Hector is on a case (and for some reason Wordsworth is with him) on the very same estate trying to track the suspect down. The men meet the girls along the way Crystal slips back into a very small, very shallow pond behind where she’s set up the camera and Rosie reaches a hand out to her. Crystal is sucked under dragging Rosie with her and the men naturally follow. They find themselves in the past; somewhere around the times of King Arthur. They are found by an old woman who shows them how to get back to their own time because she has that gift. So they quest. Along the way Rosie falls for their guide, Lars and Crystal falls for Prince Frances of the neighboring kingdom. They have to get past a witch or something to get to where they’re going; I’m a little fuzzy on the details. This whole story was badly thought out. I didn’t revisit the present much at all except to do the twin thing… when one twin is in pain the other feels it, etc. By the time they get where they’re going Rosie has decided to stay and Crystal has decided to leave, but they both change their minds at the last minute. I liked this story, but it needs a lot of work.
Now I make a transition period. Rosie turns up pregnant from her affair with Lars. Jessie comes back to Cleo begging her to help her straighten out her life. And Maria, Riff Raff’s long time girlfriend and mother to his son Rick, decides to leave Riff Raff after he beats her. Everyone is surprised at Rosie’s pregnancy and the consensus is that they all expected to happen to Roxie (the other twin) which of course annoys Cleo. I’d always written Roxie as the “bad twin” without much meat to it. I insinuated that she was always kind of a slut, but never managed to get a reputation. So, Cleo can be believably clueless when it comes to Roxie’s behavior. Wordsworth has especial contempt for Roxie, but I don’t reveal why at this time.
So, the next storyline officially begins with a dark and stormy night. Wordsworth is on a date with his high school sweetheart, Candi, who’d contacted him after many years out of the blue earlier that morning. She drugs him. Next we see Maria hitching a ride out of town and is picked up by a white van. Next we see them in the van together, each in cages like animals. They get to know each other. Then they’re suddenly back and everyone’s been worried, but they remember nothing after the van ride. So, Hector and Cleo do some detective work and trace the kidnappers back to another planet. It’s a planet of people from Earth that colonized the planet and became an isolationist society. Nobody realized that they’d become completely segregated. Not only races but genders. Procreation was taken care of in a lab and each sex was raised by their own gender. They took drugs to repress their sex drives. But, the drugs that repressed their sex drives also made them sterile, so they had to send people to Earth to steal reproductive cells from the fertile Earthlings. This is what happened to Wordsworth and Maria. Along the way to the planet Wordsworth and Maria fall in love and his disgust with Roxie is revealed. Roxie had gotten him drunk or drugged once and seduced him, became pregnant and had an abortion (the back of a van type abortion) and when it was all screwed up and she was sick from it she called Wordsworth to help finish it off to save her life. He never told Cleo for obvious reasons. I had to make it really bad, cuz I was intending for Roxie to take Jessie’s place as the bad girl and I wanted her to be a lot worse than Jessie ever was. They arrive too late on the planet and are forced to leave, but not before they find out that Wordsworth and Maria’s cells were used together to make a child and that child would belong to Candi. This opened doors for later on.
I was in a transition period when I stopped. Rosie had her baby and I intended to make it a seer like the old woman was in the past. This was the base plot for my short story Time Guides. Roxie accidently bumped into Mungo which would spur on her downfall. This would’ve been the main focus of the next storyline, but I never thought one through.
STORYLINES pt. 2
I have thought it through now. Actually, I began to retrace all of the storylines and thought of improvements, primarily in the area of character development. In the first storyline I just jumped into the action bringing in no other characters than the ones I needed. I would now begin with some idea of what everyone does. Cleo and Hector would not only be portrayed as living happily together but also at work when nothing major is happening. She’s always suspected Rif Raf of organized crime but could never prove it. Riff Raff and Mungo would be portrayed in mob activities. I’ve never known enough about the mafia to follow up these characters and I still don’t, but no soap opera rendition of mafia crime I’ve seen has ever come close either anyway. Mungo must be abusive to Jessie who is a prostitute and exotic dancer. Roxie would be portrayed with her best friend, Angel, always causing trouble; also with boyfriend Jake and they would be having problems because Jake is a good guy and Roxie is bad. Rosie is portrayed with Crystal as the model child. Perhaps I would have them do fencing together to set up their being able to defend themselves in the past. I would have them working at a local theater together with the man that runs the place, Dave, being a potential love interest for Rosie after she returns from the past. His story is that he was a juvenile delinquent that Cleo collared as a cop and took a personal interest in rehabilitating him by getting him into the theater work to begin with. Rosie would have hung around the theater from the time she was a child and he would have known her all this time. Riff Raff and Maria’s relationship would be rocky and Riff Raff’s relationship with their son, Rick, is less than ideal. Rick has no interest in the family business.
Then I would go heavy into the first storyline with little change apart from continuing character development. However, there would be a transition period between the “vampire” storyline and the “past” storyline. I would begin Jessie’s story here, instead of between the “past” story and the “space” story. She would decide to get out of her bad life and continue in this thread as a secondary story while Hector, Wordsworth, Rosie and Crystal are in the past. I would also create some animosity between Roxie and Rick as well as Roxie and Cleo… all setting Roxie up as the bad twin in earnest. The rest of the second storyline would play out now. The transition period between the 2nd and 3rd would remain unchanged except for Jessie, who is recovering nicely.
Then, onto the space storyline. Since I’ve had time to really examine Roxie’s bad turn, I don’t think I’d put the abortion in the mix. I’d leave it to be that she got him drunk and slept with him, but then that she’s always blackmailing him with this to get favors or money. I want her to be bad, but I want there to be an innocence about her when it comes to actually taking a life so that it’ll be harder on her later when I make her a killer (doing hits for the mob, and such.) A secondary storyline for the space storyline could be Roxie becoming anxious to make money and being suspicious of her rich friend, Angel. She knows her dad is not entirely on the level but she doesn’t know Cleo’s suspicions. Nor does she care; she just wants easy money. By the time Cleo, Hector, Wordsworth and Maria return from space, Roxie will have learned that Rif Raf is in such an illegal way that it turns out that Angel is an adult that’s been posing as a student for years in order to protect her from his enemies but Roxie only half believes it. It entices her interest more. The following main storyline would be Roxie’s story and her involvement with the mafia via Mungo. This will open up several avenues. A contract placed on Roxie’s life could have the hit man mistaking Rosie for Roxie. There could be a rivalry between Roxie and Rick because he’s jealous of her now being favored by their dad. Mungo will be eager to help start Roxie on her new career which will drive a wedge between he and Riff Raff ultimately for corrupting his little girl.
I also had thoughts of someone one day wanting to exploit Rosie’s daughter’s ability to see time pockets. A kind of love triangle between Wordsworth, Jessie, and Mungo as Jessie keeps trying to be good and keeps failing… Or Maria, Wordsworth and Jessie who Wordsworth was helping to recover before the space storyline. I’d toyed with the idea of making Angel Rick’s secret lover. And to keep fantasy themes present, I would have Rick trying to dabble in alchemy to overthrow his dad’s crime empire with one of his own. New characters would need to be introduced in order to do more. Can't rule out parallel dimension and universes and other space/time projects. I could always bring Rick, the ex-vampire back into it. Perhaps, he used to be a lawyer when he wasn't a vampire. When I used to do the drawings, I’d always used to infer that Cleo had another sister named Billie who was the middle child of the three and was just perfect in every way with a long lasting marriage and five kids, whereas Cleo had been in relationships with all of the males in the Cadillac Cats group at some point in her life. (First married to Riff Raff, then dated Mungo til he turns bad with Riff Raff, then Wordsworth, and finally Hector.) I’m thinking of changing Lars’ name to Rowan cuz I like it better. Other names I like are Ian and Burke and Colin.
Storylines part 3
The official back story I made for the Catillac cats runs thus: Rif Raf and Cleo married young and had the twins. Cleo divorces Rif Raf for being involved in illegal activity and rebounds with Mungo. It’s a brief affair because Mungo chooses to ally with Rif Raf and become his main thug. She then tries to date Wordsworth for a while but they break up because he wants to pursue medical school. So Cleo joins the police academy and later starts dating Hector and opens a detective agency with him. In the meantime, Cleo’s sister Jessie, the youngest sister, moves to town and she’s completely innocent but is corrupted by Mungo and becomes a prostitute. Cleo’s third sister, the middle child, is referred to as being the perfect mom type with five kids (two sets of twins) but I never brought her into it.
I’ve thought of taking up drawing again, but it would probably be considered creepy at age 42 unless I was a professional cartoonist and reverted it to more of a kid’s level of action cartoon with a small and over-simplified portions of story and character development, like anime. But, I’m not, so I considered putting it in screenplay form, cuz I see it as action from one frame to the next in my mind. But, I don’t know much about screenplays either. So, I think I may just jot it all down in story form for my own amusement. Is it weird that I still hold onto it after more than 20 years? I don’t know. All I know is that it’s sort of like fan fiction that I created and nurtured over my childhood year that kept me from being bored and reckless, and I’m in the mood to write fiction again without much to draw on in the last few years. It could’ve been Star Trek. It could’ve been Dark Shadows. But, it’s this. So, maybe I will just amuse myself here… the writing will be of poor quality, but that’s because it doesn’t seem like real writing to me since I see the scenes in my head in storyboard fashion. Looking back over the storylines, I realize that so many of them were either plagiarized knowingly, or were similar to other ideas that were created by other authors or shows, but I was unaware of it, so I would never consider getting serious with this or publishing any of it. That’s okay, it’s just for me…

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