Anyone remember laughter...?

I got a new laptop a few weeks ago, and I'm slowly transferring everything across from the old one, including all my old development stuff - you know, ideas for series that almost sold, didn't sell, weren't pitched at all, or in most cases didn't even make it beyond a one paragraph idea. It's fun to go through that stuff sometimes though, makes you realise how far you've come from those idealistic million ideas a minute days.

This one was different though, an idea that was either ahead of its time, outside time, or maybe even in a time all of its own, an adult 'euro-anime' series called 21st Century Fast Food Blues, about a post-apocalyptic society run by the Burger Barons, and the vegetarian resistance fighters, or Veggilantes, trying to stop them. "It's not a good time to be thin." 'FRiES' stood for Fast Food Retailing, Intelligence and Economic Policy Centre. The Burger Barons were never any good at acronyms.

It was created by me and my long-time friend and sometime collaborator Nick Martinelli, now a high-up games art director, and poked fun at pretty much everything, especially the politically correct good guys. We got quite a way down the line to be fair, pilot script, pitch bible with 'finished' artwork, and a 90 second or so trailer that was paid for by my former employer, Andy Craven, then the boss of computer games company Vektor Grafix, and made at Moving Images out in the Philippines. And you know what, it's still good - trouble was, once we'd made the thing, we just didn't know what to do with it. Andy took a stand at Mip, which none of us had even heard of before at that point, and got a lot of interest, but I guess no-one wanted to put their money into a show by completely untried creators, especially not one so out there as this. As Michael Carrington once said to me years later, all people really want to know is whether they can trust you with five million quid of their own money. Of course, Nick and I went on to create The Baskervilles, which did get made, and did pretty good.

So just for a laugh I thought I'd post it here - who doesn't need a little post-apocalyptic comedy right now? And you never know, with an A List Director, Producer, Star and Distributor, it could still get made. Yeah, I know, but I'm a writer, I get paid to live in a fantasy world. 

Anyhow, enjoy, hope it gives you a laugh in these dark days.