When I recently saw the movie Hancock it struck a chord with something I had been thinking about when I watched the movie, The Dark Knight. That is the cost of the property damage many of these superhero characters cause in their quest to rid the world of evil scum.
Hancock creates a massive amount of unnecessary property damage that becomes a major cause of concern for the city he lives in. The cost of cleaning up after the heroes misadventures is a real issue.
If you look at the opening scenes of The Dark Knight where Batman sends in the Batmobile to 'terrorize' the criminals, the car crashes through a wall and fires missiles into what looks to be a toll booth office of the multi story car park they are in. What is that costing the rate payers of Gotham?
Enter my new superhero character Bat Storm. See the first preview below.
Bat Storm Preview by etourist on GoAnimate
When GoAnimate introduced superhero outfits into their character creator, because I'm a huge Batman fan, I set out to see if I could create a character that was as close to a Batman look-a-like as I could get. Seems easy enough but none of their superhero cowls have bat ears so I had to improvise (I'm not telling how I achieved the ears).
You also can't change the logo insignia of two lightening bolts on the superhero suits so when I was thinking up a name I related it back to that insignia so it would make sense - hence 'Bat Storm'.
My concept for Bat Storm the series is looking at the idea that being a superhero is actually pretty expensive. Especially if you're not a heir to an old money billionaire fortune like Bruce Wayne is. Bat Storm is low rent and working class. In fact he's a single Dad struggling to make ends meet and can't afford to run a car.
His daughter, Bat Flash is seventeen and works in the family business of crime fighting and children's party appearances (crime fighting doesn't actually pay a lot when you're a vigilante).
Bat Storm is just like Batman and has no real superpowers. In fact he's not even that great at solving crimes with his public school education and B minus grade point average. However he's determined to make crime fighting pay... at least a little more than being a criminal seems to pay!
Unlike the current Batman on film, played by Christian Bale, real superheroes do exist in Bat Storm's world. In particular, Super Charge and Charge Girl (Superman and Super Girl look-a-likes respectively). Bat Storm and Bat Flash see them as 'the competition' and don't tolerate it when they muscle in on Bat's turf.
As can be seen in this preview animation below with Bat Flash and Charge Girl:
Bat Storm Preview 2 by etourist on GoAnimate
By now you should have realised Bat Storm is a comedy series. My intention is to do a run of six episodes each 24 minutes long (each episode will be broken up further into 8 minute parts for GoAnimate). The challenge for me is to transition from short, 3-5 minute scripts to TV length sitcom scripts.
I'm hoping to have the first episode out by June/July of 2010 but it's a lot of work for one person so we'll have to see how it goes. If you're looking forward to it, let me know in the comments. It might just spur me on to get the series done sooner.
In the meantime here's a sequence featuring Super Charge from an unreleased, third preview animation (you may need to click on it to see a larger version):
Cool stuff!
ReplyDeleteCool, Great Blog! Thanks for sharing this.
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