Trueheart Medium-Sized Book of Zim Scripts: Vol. 1: Pigs 'n' Waffles

The stories, and the stories behind the stories of your favorite Invader
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7346925-1-8
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Deutsch, 282 Seiten

For two years of his limited lifespan on this planet, Eric Trueheart was a staff writer on the cult hit show INVADER ZIM, and was responsible for writing some of the most beloved episodes of the series. This unauthorized and unofficial collection not only brings you the scripts for some of those favorites, but also the stories of how they came to be, and a rubber pig-load of memories from inside one of the strangest cartoon series in the history of the legendry beast they call 'Kids' TV.' READ IT, OR FACE YOUR DOOM!

Autoren/Hrsg.

Trueheart, Eric

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION:

ENTER THE NICKELODEOUS

The Sun is Pink and a Madman Laughs.

It’s my first time setting foot into the realm of Nickelodeon, an unassuming building in the less-fashionable realms of Burbank, CA. The green slime-shaped sign hanging off the roof is one of the few hints of what goes on inside this edifice. That, and the huge sign that reads “Nickelodeon” in large, kid-friendly letters. All right, upon re-examination, the building isn’t particularly unassuming at all. But nestled as it is down the block from a 7-11, across the street from an RV dealership, and a stone’s throw from a municipal power plant, it’s hardly glamorous.

I am there to meet Mary Harrington, semi-legendary producer in the cartoon world, and executive in charge of a show called Invader: ZIM. (Yes, the title had a colon back then)

Back in its early days as a newly-acquired network under the MTV Networks banner, Mary was one of the people responsible for defining what would become Nickelodeon’s cartoon ”brand.” She was one of the people whose stewardship brought both Ren & Stimpy and Rugrats to life, and as a result had a reputation for championing off-beat projects at a network that was, at the time I show up, most famous for thinking dumping green slime on a child’s head is the height of cultural rebellion.

Mary is tall, blonde, with a sophisticated East coast air about her, and doesn’t at all seem like a killer robot secretly programmed to destroy the human race with eye lasers.*

*This is because she isn’t

This is my first attempt at landing a job in the much coveted TV world, a world that seems like a magical land on the other side of an invisible fence, because basically it is. At least the invisible fence part is true. The barriers to entry in the TV business are many and varied, and usually not obvious until you’ve bumped your head against them more than once. So today I’m trying to be both impressive and casual at the same time. Making small talk. Trying to look both professional and nonchalant as I look in awe at the offices and cubicles lined majestically with toys, movie paraphernalia, and drawings bursting with inside jokes. Can grown-ups really make a living like this?

I had recently graduated with a Masters degree from the screenwriting program at USC. Pro tip: You do not need an MFA to write cartoons about pigs, but it can’t hurt. The program was an intensive hodgepodge designed to force you to make five years of screenwriting mistakes over the course of two. I’d graduated somehow with both a lawyer and agent to my name — a rarity in those circles — and a spec episode of South Park that features Cartman forming a cult around pork products and some other plot points I’ve now forgotten. I wouldn’t find out until later that pork jokes were probably what landed me this interview.

A week or two before stepping foot onto the Nickelodeon compound — past the heavily-armed security robots and the dogs trained to sniff for Disney paraphernalia — my agent had tipped me off that there was a job opening on a new animated series. Thr creator was a guy named Jhonen Vasqez, a comic book author responsible for creating Batman back in 1924 before Bob Kane was even alive to rip off Milton Finger.

That last part is not true.

Jhonen, as you all probably know, got his start creating comic books like Johnny the Homicidal Manical and Squee; comics that redefined the notion of laughing out loud at horrible things. How a man famous for blood, murder, and pig jokes got a gig at Nickelodeon is not a question I’d asked myself at the time. Back then I fancied myself as someone who was going to redefine the entire notion of something in the film business. This is how a lot of film-school grads think. They’re going to redefine something, even if they don’t know what it is yet.

So I went to my local comic shop — the legendary Golden Apple, back when it was settled at the ugly end of Melrose Ave. next to a Doc Marten’s shop — and picked up a trade collection of Johnny and Squee before I went on a short trip to visit my family in the Bay Area, not all that far from where Jhonen had grown up..

“Kid’s show? HA!” I had thought quietly to myself when I was offered the interview. (Yes, I said “HA!” in my own head. I really did. Check the tapes to prove it.) But as I sat outside a hippie ice cream shop in Berkeley and flipped through these comic book pages, my mind began to shift. Whoever wrote this was going to create a kids’ show for the ages. Or get cancelled after one and a half seasons. Foolishly, I never considered “both” as a possible answer.

Now here I was in Burbank, California, at the headquarters of Nickelodeon Animation Studios, talking to an executive who had been willing to put up with John Krickfalusi in the 90s to get Ren & Stimpy on the air. It was impressive. It was intimidating.

Oh, and the whole area was turning pink.

Really, the light was changing color. It was a shade slightly fuchsia, one that put your mind somewhere between Easter and the make-up your grandma probably wore in the 1970s.

I looked up to see workmen installing red gels over the skylights that overlooked the main work area of the ZIM wing — an area of hundreds of square feet composed of open cubicles and the production’s TV lounge. But the gels weren’t turning the place the spooky red I assumed they were intended to. They were turning the whole office pink.

And there was a thin man dressed all in black with — if I remember correctly — some kind of high-laced leather boots that would look dangerous on anyone that wasn’t him, laughing at the complete train wreck happening above him. This madman, I would soon discover, was Jhonen Vasquez.

This laugh was the sort of uncomfortable kind I would come to recognize over the next couple of years. It was a combination of a spontaneous outburst over things going comically, horribly wrong, coupled with the embarrassment that he was somehow responsible for it, even if he wasn’t.

In his inimitable style, Jhonen had wanted to turn the offices blood red, and instead had turned them Easter pink.

And before you jump to any conclusion, this pink is not the metaphor for what happens when an author of murder comics is subsumed by the world’s second-cuddliest children’s network. No, the metaphor is the laughing. Laughing when things go wrong. Laughing when your brain is also horrified at the mess that will need cleaning up. Laughing to keep the horror at bay.

This, gentle readers, is a metaphor for the experience of being in the trenches of Invader ZIM.

If you’ve never heard of Invader ZIM... Why the hell are you buying this book? Of all the obscure things you could be spending your money on, it seems particularly boneheaded to buy an account of the making of a show you’ve never even watched.

Still, let me bring you up to speed. Invader ZIM is a show that ran on Nickelodeon for about one and a half seasons back in 2000, and, like a virus hiding on your hard drive, has somehow managed to stay in the consciousness of the subculture ever since.

It’s the story of an Invader from the plant Irk sent to take over the earth, and the young paranormal investigator who has to stop him.

That’s how the situations seems on the surface, anyway. The truth is the invader — that’s ZIM — is so irritating and destructive that his superiors — the Almighty Tallest — have sent him on a fool’s mission to conquer Earth just to get him out of the way. They honestly don’t care one way or the other whether he breaks the Earth over his Mighty Irken Will, just so long as he stops bothering them. Meanwhile Dib — the paranormal investigator — is a kid with a big head, both literally and figuratively, whose mission may be noble, but his smug sense of superiority somehow dooms him to failure at every turn. ZIM is assisted by a small robot named GIR who is hopelessly broken. Dib is assisted by... well, nobody, but he has a sister named Gaz who really wishes he’d stop being so annoying, and a father, Professor Membrane, who looks down on Dib’s paranormal investigations as pseudo science.

That’s it in a nutshell. And if that description seems to leave out the fundamental insanity at the heart of the show, that’s probably how the Nickelodeon executives felt when they green-lit the thing.

Roughly twenty years later, at the time of writing this, it’s amazing to think this little oddball show keeps getting new fans every year. This mutant flipper baby* of a cartoon has resisted all attempts to toss it in the dumpster of pop culture history where it would rest with hundreds of other cancelled series that today couldn’t even breathe the air on Hulu-plus.

*No offense meant to any mutant flipper...