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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