You’ve probably heard the news by now that hedge fund Pacificor, LLC has purchased the rights to the Terminator franchise from Halcyon’s bankruptcy auction. This transaction has sparked massive speculation on the franchise’s future. Will McG make more sequels? Will T1 and T2 screenwriter Will Wisher’s treatments turn into the next two sequels? Will Pacificor go for a total reboot?
The future not set: there is no fate but what this shady hedge fund makes, right? Well, I wasn’t content with that. As a rabid Terminator fanboy, I needed to know how this turns out, so I took the liberty of using the Overthinking It Time Displacement Field (OTITDF) to travel ten years into the future to see what will become of our beloved franchise.
My report is as follows. Be warned; it ain’t pretty.
2012-2014: The Sequels
Pacificor’s first move was to get a sequel to Terminator: Salvation out the door as quickly as possible. McG, not having anything else better to do, agreed to helm the sequel. Christian Bale, upon hearing that McG had brought on the same Director of Photography from the last movie, refused to participate.
McG, in a bind, recalled Freddie Prinze, Jr’s fine work in Wing Commander and tapped him for the role of John Connor. Nicolas Cage just showed up on set, and nobody had the heart to tell him he wasn’t actually in the movie.
Pacificor, for its part, contributed the title:
Waaaay back in the day, Fenzel and I decided that it would be a good idea to write an elaborate Broadway musical. About zombies. There have actually been zombie musicals before, mind you, but what sets ours apart is that it would be played completely straight. Or rather, as I think one of us said at the time, “No parody element that we can dream up is going to be more fundamentally ridiculous than the fact that there are singing zombies on the stage.”
Anyway, that was a long time ago. We put in a lot of work. But we did not put in enough. And for a long time, it looked like no part of Brains! The Musical of The Living Dead would ever see the light of day.
But since we mentioned the project on the podcast a while back, it seemed only appropriate to toss something up this week. This isn’t necessarily the best song we wrote for the show, but it’s definitely the most stand-alone-y. All that you need to know to enjoy this is that the heroes are about to make a stand against the zombie hordes, and they’re reviewing strategy. The guy who is singing is named Hank. (That might not have made the final draft.)
Here’s the sheet music:
The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (PDF)
Here’s a terrible MIDI realization (think of it as lo-fi, if that helps).
The Only Way To Kill A Zombie (MP3)
And here are the lyrics…
Check out the names above the title. Christian who?
I feel like the words “cult classic” sometimes get used to defend pretty much any film that was a complete commercial failure. Saying a movie is a cult classic can be the equivalent of saying a girl has a nice personality. But to me, Newsies is a real, actual cult classic. I know this because if you casually name-drop the movie in public, four out of five people will stare at you blankly, and the fifth will jump up and down and say “OH MY GOD I LOVE NEWSIES!!”
For the four out of five of you, the movie is based on the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899. Christian Bale plays Jack “Cowboy” Kelly, a vaguely Dickensian street urchin with an accent as majestic as the Brooklyn Bridge. Back in those days, the newsboys had to buy the papers themselves (and eat the cost for any they couldn’t unload). So when Joseph Pulitzer decides to start charging them an extra 1/10th cent for each pape (the cool kids call them papes) it’s a big deal. (I believe 1/10th cent is about $84 in today’s money.)
But before this goes down, Jack gets to sing a song about his fondest dream: leaving New York behind to move out west. It’s called “Santa Fe.” Please take a moment to enjoy Batman singing and dancing.
