What stories/intellectual properties (other than Star Wars) would you like to retell/rewrite? — Page 2

So I’ve come up with a loose five act structure for my take on Batman. I’m thinking five seasons of hour long episodes (full hours, not 44 minutes). This gives each villain room to breathe in their own solos episodes. I tried to stick to the use of strong themes like in the Nolan films. The acts are as follows:

Batman Begins: A lot of beats taken from the movie of the same name, namely the focus on Batman’s origins and the theme of fear. Throughout the season, Arkham Asylum superintendent Dr. Jonathan Crane appears to be up to no good, with inmates disappearing left and right. Okay, so yeah it pretty much is Batman Begins, which is appropriate given the title. The Joker is hinted at throughout and one episode has the Red Hood falling in a vat of acid at Ace Chemicals, though we never see who was under the mask. The arc villain is scarecrow. Batman starts of dealing with normal crime bosses, culminating in the Penguin.

Batman Strikes (tentative title): The same way the first act took from Batman Begins, the second act draws from The Dark Knight. We now a fully formed Batman. District Attorney Harvey Dent is waging war on the criminals of Gotham but new villain the Joker throws a wrench everything. We get Two-Face as the arc villain, but in this version he survives and becomes a part of the rogues gallery. Like TDK, we have a theme of chaos.

Batman Rises: Okay, here’s the part where the Nolan films go out the window (on a script level, since right off the bat (ha!) they were aesthetically the total opposite of my take). This one’s all about teamwork. We start off with the Sewer King, an amalgam character based on the Sewer King from TAS, Killer Croc, and Burton’s Penguin. Essentially, he’s an outcast whose parents threw him away as a baby due to his deformed reptilian skin. He came to live in the sewers, where he keeps pet crocodiles and an army of orphans who serve him. Among these orphans is a young boy named Tim Drake. When Batman frees the orphans from the Sewer King’s oppression, Tim begins an investigation into Batman’s identity, eventually locating the Batcave and deducing that Batman is Bruce Wayne. This impresses the Bat so much he adopts him and takes him on as an apprentice named Batboy.

Meanwhile, Joker is in Arkham following his capture at the end of the last season. There he manipulates a young Arkham cook (because there’s no way he’d manipulate someone whose entire job is understanding the human mind) named Hayley Fitzpatrick. She falls in love with him and helps him escape. Afterwards, to prove her love for him, she plunges into the vat of acid at Ace Chemicals and Joker dubs her Harlequin. The two wreak chaos throughout Gotham and clash with Batman and Batboy.

Batman Falls: Batboy becomes disillusioned with Batman’s ways and leaves him. Poison Ivy points out to Harlequin how abusive her relationship with Joker is so she ditches him. While on the run, Tim and Hayley meet and briefly work together, bonding over their similar situations. They eventually part ways when their goals no longer align. Tim also meets fellow vigilante Spoiler, with whom he falls in love. Meanwhile, Batman’s dealing with Catwoman and Dr. Freeze. The latter meets Harley leading her to realize that just because her love for Joker wasn’t true love doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (taking that one straight from that one episode of Harley Quinn). So yeah, in case you couldn’t tell, the theme of this season is love. Oh and Batman tries to hire a new Batboy but he ends up being too violent so he fires him. Mad Hatter is there, and we see his failed romance with Alice.

Batman Returns: The theme here is identity. Batman reunites with the original Batboy, or as he now calls himself, Robin. Spoiler is also along for the ride (sorry, Barbara, you’re sitting this one out). Actor Basil Karlo has a tragic accident and resorts to a special cream to heal his facial injuries, becoming Clayface, a man with no real face of his own. Batman decides he wants to know who the Joker really is. DNA tests turn up nothing, his DNA having been corrupted by his acid bath. Batman puts two and two together and deduces that Joker is the Red Hood, which leads him down a long investigation. And yet there are so many conflicting possibilities. Jack Napier, head of the Red Hood gang, went missing that fateful night. Jeremy Valeska was there too. Struggling comedian Arthur Fleck was last seen that night. They all were ginger. The Riddler, the only one smart enough to know the secret identity of just about everyone, taunts him about this. Batman confronts Joker, demanding to know the truth, but Joker simply toys with him, finding the whole situation very amusing. That’s when Harlequin, now named…something, I haven’t really decided yet, shows up and kills Joker as vengeance for his mistreatement of her. We never do find out who he was. Haley dies from her injuries, but not before revealing she had a daughter with the Joker. An epilogue features an older Bruce Wayne, crippled from years of crime fighting, sitting outside his manor with an older Selina Kyle, looking after two children, a black haired boy who looks a lot like Bruce, and a hyperactive young girl with distinct ginger hair.

A project I’ve long wanted to tackle is a reimagining of Friday the 13th. As a teen, I was a big fan of the series, particularly of the first five entries. As I grew older, I came to realize the series … wasn’t good. The original is very likely the best, and it’s still only a cynical cash-grab designed to capitalize off the success of Halloween. Still, I believe the bones of a good horror story are present beneath the putrid fat.

My reimagining of F13 would be a pentalogy, a period piece spanning the '80s. Right from the start, Jason Voorhees would be established as a supernatural being, having drowned as a child in 1957 then returned to life a year later, corrupted into a psychopathic killing machine with enhanced strength and regenerative capabilities by a dark force which lives within Crystal Lake. Jason would be the primary antagonist for the first half of the series, then he would be killed and replaced by Tommy Jarvis, who’d become possessed by the evil which inhabited Jason.

Friday the 13th: Chapter I

Set in 11-14 June, 1980. A mashup of Parts I & II, greater emphasis would be placed on characterization, particularly Alice’s, who would be revealed as a single mother who abandoned her 3-year-old daughter to the care of her parents to start her life over. The primary antagonist would be Jason, who’d wear a series of different masks to manifest different facets of his personality; his main mask would be this one:

Under this mask, he would be swift and stealthy, capable of overtaking his prey quickly and covertly. The secondary antagonist would be his mother, Pamela, who had kept him in isolation since his resurrection, trying her hardest to protect him and others from him, to diminishing returns. The film would finish with Alice setting fire to Jason and the Voorhees home, Pamela’s decapitation, and a depressing twist ending.

Friday the 13th: Chapter II

Set in/around 13 January, 1984. A loose remake of Part III, the final girl would be a fusion of Chris and Vera; Shelly would be the final boy. Jason would find/adopt his iconic goalie mask in this entry, manifesting a new personality — the brutal, lumbering Jason we’re most familiar with.

Friday the 13th: Chapter III

Set in/around 13 April, 1984. A more-or-less faithful remake of The Final Chapter. Rob would be reimagined as Alice’s brother.

Friday the 13th: Chapter IV

Set in/around 13 September, 1985. A more-or-less faithful remake of A New Beginning. Most of the patients at Pinehearst would be deaged, including Tommy, who would only be a year older than he was in the preceeding chapter. There’d be more scenes focused on Tommy, his mental deterioration, and his growing rapport with Pam. Roy wouldn’t be the killer, but rather the director of Pinehearst, Matthew, who’d be revealed at the end as a sadistic psychopath who had abused a number of kids in his care and had decided to advance to serial murder, using Tommy’s past with Jason as a cover for his crimes.

Friday the 13th: Chapter V

Set in/around 13 October, 1989. Tommy, now fully possessed by the evil he inherited from Jason, would return to Crystal Lake, renamed Forest Green in the years after the murders. Pursuing him would be his sister, Trish, who would be desperate to find him, stop him, and free him of Jason’s curse. She would meet Elias Voorhees, Jason’s very father. Elias would reveal the truth of Crystal Lake, of the evil beneath its surface which corrupted Jason and moved into Tommy following Jason’s final death. He would claim to have the key to freeing Tommy, but this would only be a half-truth. For Elias would have an ulterior motive; he would believe Jason’s spirit lives on in Tommy, ready to return to his original body, which Elias secretly saved from cremation and had buried in a secret plot…

DuracellEnergizer said:

Stargate

Stargate '94 has amazing costumes, sets, music, and lore, but weak writing and characterization. Stargate SG-1 has good characterization and writing, but it feels like a Trek knockoff, complete with generic English-speaking extraterrestrial civilizations and technobabble. I’d essentially like to craft a Stargate reboot which contains all the best elements of SG '94, SG-1, SGU, and the Bill McCay novels, and none of their worst.

I’d probably limit the humans seeded across the galaxy to north African stock rather than go gung-ho with Greeks, Chinese, Native Americans. etc. Also, no frickin’ Ancients/Ori/Ascension. That stuff wrecked Stargate for me.

Felt it was time to expand on this.

I did start work on this project. In 2016, I completed a rewrite of SG '94.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n5KJoU_ItjkYTH5V58ouJp8oar41F0fy/view

Written at the height of my postmodern phase, it’s a pretty thorough deconstruction of the original film (American imperialism doesn’t save the day; it gets an entire world killed). It was meant to be the first part of a trilogy, but shortly after starting on the sequel, development stalled; a casualty of the burnout I suffered while working on my PT rewrite at the time.

I never completely abandoned the project. I’ve continued to brainstorm, to write notes, to lay the bricks/work out the kinks of my personal Stargate universe. Now I’ve got a pretty solid vision in mind.

• Ra is Atum. I made this change because Atum is an older god than Ra, was worshipped earlier than Ra, and also because the pharaonic Ra of Stargate more closely resembles Atum than the hawk-headed Ra of myth.
• Atum isn’t a Goa’uld. He is one of the Ancients, who in this universe were amoral gray-skinned reptilian humanoids who reigned in the Andromeda/Triangulum galaxies prior to their extinction. The Goa’uld are a separate, unrelated species native to the Milky Way which Atum’s underlords conquered some 5000 years after the Rebellion on Earth.
• Atum has fourteen underlords under him: Anpu (Anubis); Apis; Aset (Isis); Ausir (Osiris); Djehuti (Thoth); Hapi; Heru (Horus); Khnum; Ptah; Sebek; Sekhmet; Sokar; Ubaste (Bastet); and Wadjet. Each underlord serves a different function in orchestrating the Imperium. When an underlord dies/abdicates/is ousted, their first prime takes their place, assuming their name and position.
• Atum was originally a benevolent ruler. After 2000 years of rule, ennui drove him to relegate command of the Imperium to his underlords and go into seclusion. His underlords then turned the Imperium to a totalitarian state, inciting the failed rebellions on Nubt & Abdju and the successful Rebellion on Earth. With the passage of 10,000 years and the coming-and-going of countless underlords, the Imperium has ossilated between despotic and liberal governments.
• The Goa’uld were genetically modified by the Imperium to curtail their ability to reproduce and take hosts. Only a limited number of fertile queens exist, and their offspring are incapable of growing to maturity without the administration of growth hormones. Infant Goa’uld are placed within first primes, boosting their immune systems and lifespans; adult Goa’uld are implanted within underlords to preserve their intellects, granting them a form of immortality.
• The Imperium consists of several hundred worlds concentrated within the Milky Way. Most are inhabited by humans and genetically engineered human offshoots, all descendants of peoples taken from North Africa in 10,000-8000 BCE.
• A small number of non-human species joined the Imperium. The most notable of these was the Setim. A caninoid race native to Tuat, they agreed to provide Atum the technological infrastructure to build his empire in exchange for help repairing their planet’s damaged ecosystem. This arrangement was mutually beneficial at first, but following the underlords’ rise to power, the Setim were displaced from positions of influence and forcibly relocated to the ice planet Nubt. With the Rebellion on Nubt, the Setim were exterminated by Sekhmet. Disgusted by this and other atrocities commited by the Imperium, one of the first primes, Sutekh, went renegade. Wearing a helm fashioned after the Setim likeness, he established a revolutionary movement on Earth, culminating in the Rebellion on Earth.
• The Apep are a species of giant, tentacled serpents — former enemy of the Ancients, present enemy of the Imperium. They aren’t nice guys.
• Heru Guards wear retractable, full-body power armour; this armour is impervious to any terrestrial ordnance short of .50 caliber machine guns. Heru Guards are armed with over/under pulse rifles; the primary barrel discharges a plasma blast which can kill, the secondary barrel discharges an electrolaser which only stuns.
• The staff weapon is a ceremonial weapon wielded by Ubaste Guards alone.
• The Imperium has developed lingual nanites. Injected within the language areas of the brain, they link the individual to a vast language database, enabling them to understand/speak/read/write any language stored within the database while also uploading any languages they know to the database. Daniel Jackson was injected with these nanites after being captured by Sekhmet’s forces during the first stargate mission. Following Daniel’s return to Earth, some of these nanites were extracted and replicated, giving the SGC access to this technology.
• FTL propulsion/communicators don’t exist. Conventional interstellar travel/communication is only possible through the stargate/supergate networks. Atum’s intergalactic voyage from his homeworld to Earth took 2.5 million years.
• Stargate addresses consist of nine symbols each. Each address corresponds to an individual gate.
• All stargates are iridescent black, with chevrons/engravings which light up white when active.

Wow, just now rereading my Batman synopsis at the top of this page and boy have things changed in the past 2 and a half years. It’s morphed into something completely different, though still retaining certain elements. It’s now the story of Tim Drake seen from his perspective and the actual plot is barely recognizable.