In this dream, I came up with, basically, the most socially irresponsible Saturday morning cartoon ever. The animated hijinks of Joe Camel couldn't have topped this. Were I to somehow, against all odds and sanity, succeed in ensuring its production it would be my greatest and final achievement all at a stroke. Greatest because it would encapsulate every iconoclastic urge I've ever held or pretended, and final because I would in all likelihood be beaten to a stain on the sidewalk by a horde of enraged (and quite likely bereaved) parents.
In my dream the show was animated in a pseudo-realistic style, similar to Megas XLR (still the finest children's cartoon of the past decade). The main characters were two young adult (young enough for children to identify with, yet old enough to live free of adult supervision) males of the stock "lovable slacker" character type; the sort who somehow manage to live in relative comfort despite the lack of any obvious employment or support. These two young men (whose names I never learned) shared one joy, one specialty, one driving passion in life:
Blowing shit up.
A quick clarification: these two fellows were not petty terrorists, destroying random buildings in their neighborhood. Rather, their specialty was homemade fireworks, the sort unlikely (at least initially) to cause property damage beyond scorch-marks on the driveway. Though the duo frequently possessed pre-made fireworks
, they rarely fired them off as-is; they preferred to take them apart, salvaging their combustible elements for use in their own creations. These custom explosives were invariably large, very noisy and even more colorful, though the two's tendency to set them off in broad daylight dampened the effect somewhat.Though the fireworks always had exceptionally long, match-lit fuses, this was the summation of the protagonists' safety precautions. At no point did they ensure the ready availability of fire extinguishers
(or even a common garden hose
), wet down the ground before detonation, put on eye protection or employ any other risk-reduction tactics one might associate with such a dangerous hobby. Yet they displayed no physical signs of any mishap--no missing fingers, no cauterized optic nerves, no burn scars. The two remained as whole and handsome as my totally-not-gay subconscious first birthed them. Every week some shadowy antagonist (the dream provided no details on this point, beyond his apparent existence) would threaten the duo's beloved neighborhood and they'd use their bomb-crafting expertise to save the day.By itself, this all might not sound so bad. It's nothing you don't see every drunken white-trash idiot do every 4th of July. With the addition of about ten thousand disclaimers and parental-advisory warnings it might even reach the air. Hell, just look at all the crap Japan pumps out with the seeming purpose of providing pedophiles with masturbation material
.And then came the moon voyage.
It's exactly what it sounds like--the heroes decide to take a trip to the moon and set about building a conveyance. From what I recall it consisted entirely of a plywood board, with four plastic buckets attached one to a corner and stuffed with bottle rockets to serve as thrusters. There was no way to steer (this will be important later), no oxygen supply and no life-support system of any kind, so I have no idea how the duo planned to survive the rigors of hard vacuum should the plan succeed--which they fully expected it to. They lit the fuses and...
Now at this point logic should dictate that the contraption would explode (or simply catch fire) on the ground, held snugly by the Earth's gravity well. Even if it were to attain liftoff, the would-be spaceship should reach only a few feet of height before plummeting back to terra firma. Either should produce the same result--a fiery death for our heroes, becoming just another scorch-mark on the abused driveway.
This is not what happened in my dream.
For some reason I feel the need to point out that the two men did NOT, in fact, reach the moon. This may or may not be an important distinction, given the result they did achieve. Though outer space remained beyond the protagonists' reach, they did succeed in building a rather handy (and unlikely) flying machine. Upon a bed of multicolored sparks they rode, zipping back and forth across their hometown with speed and ease--this despite, as previously mentioned, the machine lacking any steering mechanism. The phrase "toyetic" floated through my unconscious--I recall a moment of pure shame at knowing what that even meant.
There's not much else to tell--the dream ended just as the heroes managed to relieve one of the antagonist's henchmen of his pistol and started taking apart the bullets, to use the gunpowder within for--well, you know.
So you can probably see how people would have a problem with this cartoon, were it to exist. The sheer amount of "imitatable behavior" is nothing short of flabbergasting (is that a word?). I've never been the sort to blame the stupidity of children on the media--kids are a little smarter than that, and even the ones who aren't tend to have a limited shelf life no matter what (if he hadn't put on a cape and jumped out the window, it would have been something else--say, eating spinach until his stomach exploded trying to gain super-strength). But every fireworks-related injury would end up getting blamed on this show, rightly or wrongly. And it'd only be a matter of time before some aspie tried to build his own bottle-rocket flying-machine and wound up cremating himself (and rest assured, it WOULD be a boy).
So no, this show would never get made. It's kind of a double standard, really. So many people in this country--Michael Bay, Arnold Schwarzenegger
, the US military--built careers and reputations on the premise that explosions are cool. Isn't there room for one lousy cartoon saying it's cool to violate local fire codes?Apparently not.
