Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Leaping & Dancing
I think a good idea for a movie would be about an astronaut who crashlands on a planet where sentient apes rule over listless humans and have outlawed dancing – but there’s a rising tide of rebellion among the ape & human teenagers, who’ve been secretly dancing together in honky-tonk bars across the county line. The astronaut leads the ape & human teens in a crusade to get the anti-dancing law repealed (“Get your stinking paws off my boombox, you damn dirty ape!”), which makes him unpopular with the more conservative elements of simian society (one of the apes’d challenge him to a game of Chicken – on tractors!). It’d end with the ape & human teens staging a makeshift prom in a mannequin factory, and then the astronaut walking along the beach the next morning, where he’d find a Lady Gaga CD in the sand and so realize he’s been on Earth all along (“God…damn you…all to hell!”). A good title for this story’d be APELOOSE: “I’m totally loose…apeloose! Put on your Sunday shoose!” etc.
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Another ape/dancing teenagers movie? Hasn't this been done to death?
ReplyDeleteSeriously though, I think it would be an interesting added wrinkle if the ape teens are just passionate about dancing but for the human teens the rebellion and makeshift prom is also secretly somehow part of their plan to escape into the jungle (or forbidden zone) beyond ape law. Then you'd have to deal with the class issue and teen infighting as the ape teen dancing leaders find out that their human compadres have more in mind than dancing...
So you're saying the ape teen faction of the dance revolution is like Snowball, in Animal Farm, and the human teen faction is like Napoleon, right? 'Cause the ape teens are doing it solely for the dancing, but the human teens have a secret agenda.
ReplyDeleteOr...you could say the ape teen faction of the dance revolution are vapid morons, 'cause they're in it for the dancing, while the human teens are admirable 'cause they're in it for their FREEDOM.
Speaking of class struggles & what-not, you could also snag a major plot element out of A Passage to India, thus: have one of the teen ape females falsely accuse a teen human male of rape! Kinky, eh? Oh, and what a device! You'd be using bestiality to comment on rape to comment on dancing to comment on the whole notion/structure of social classes & the class system and what said system hath wrought.
My hat's off to you, Charles, for your insight, and my thanks for your intellectual generosity.