fanboy & friends

Finally, last but also least is the Fanboy and Scapegoat proposal. This was an afterthought straggler proposal that got squeezed in. This is a reworking of a proposal that was entered a Heritage Cablevision contest for new TV series ideas back in 1991. That original proposal was written on an aging Mac Plus. I have no idea if anybody actually won that contest. At least this proposal has new art, including some that was done during coffee breaks.

Otherwise, I'm a little annoyed that I drove all the way over to the mid-town Best Buy in dinner time traffic on slushy sloppy roads to get a 250Gb hard drive that was on sale, only to come home and discover that it's a IDE instead of a SATA. Good thing I never opened the box and have the receipt and bag.

Fanboy & Scapegoat
A series proposal by Doug Holverson

Fanboy and Scapegoat is similar to a black humored Bullwinkle, with two buddies sharing a mobile home, who really don't like each other. Fan-boy and Friends is about the adventures of that funny appliance, Fanboy, his roommate, Scape-goat, and the people that they bump into. Whereas Moose & Squirrel can jet set to adventure, Fanboy and Scapegoat are stuck in the post-industrial and post- prosperity town of Dieselburg, Iowa. Fanboy and Scapegoat split the rent of a trailer house, get on each other nerves, and get into often sur-real slap-stick. Fanboy and Scape-goat live in the Twister Valley Trailer Park on the edge of Dieselburg, a cartoonishly de-picted run-down in-dustrial park, which in-cludes the Dieselburg Community College, Mom & Pop’s T.V. Sales and Ser-vice, Harry X. Hippie’s Comic Book Shop, the Messinghouse Nuclear Mop-up Division, Klosed Klique Komics Publishing, and the Polyphemus Point Nuclear Plant. Dieselburg’s ethnic mix includes cartoon humans, funny animals, Fanboys, and Cyclopes. Dieselburg is also a stopping point for Martian space pirates looking for moth-balls, dusty old New Wave cutouts, and other stuff that’s over-priced contraband on other planets.

Here are some of the colorful characters of this community.

Fanboy is the main character and often compulsively dumb funny appliance. He’s out-going and a bit self-centered for somebody with no par-ticular talent, and he lives for comic books. Fanboy is a poor to middling amateur cartoonist, and is cliquish and hangs around with a clique of fanboys just like himself. Fanboy has a job with the Messinghouse Nuclear Mop-up Division, doing stuff for minimum wage that you can’t pay most people enough to do. The ‘Boy sometimes takes classes at the Dieselburg Community College.

Scapegoat is Fanboy’s full-time housemate and funny animal. He is a social leper with a heart of gold, although it’s starting to get a bit tarnished through too much of others’ mistreatment. He has a high IQ, but low self-esteem. He is a mostly-unemployed electronic repairman and can repair anything and is a journeyman car-toonist, but mainly gets treated as having no talent. The ‘Goat takes classes at the Diesel-burg Com-munity College and would die to be a professional cartoonist. He will let himself be used and abused by others in the vain hope that he’ll be liked.

The Fanboys are the clique of fanboys that Fanboy hangs out with. They are funny appli-ances just like himself, but distin-guished from each other by being different heights. Their big collec-tive shtick is comic books, patting themselves on their collective back for being rugged individuals for being comic and Skiffy fans and then deciding by consensus to like or hate ex-actly all the same things.

Ray Gamma Is Fanboy’s overbearing boss at the Messinghouse Nuclear Mop-up Divi-sion. His favorite quote is, “Remember, kid, I’m forever sending you in there to do things that I wouldn’t do myself.”

Joan Miro is a pretty brunette co-worker of Fanboy’s and one of the few people who looks good even in a rad suit (if Fanboy would ever notice). She is semi-friendly and is about the only good worker on the Mop-up team. Joan lives in the same trailer court as Fan-boy and Scapegoat.

Prof. E. Lou Sid Dayson Ph. D. Is a Professor at the Dieselburg Community College and teaches some of Fanboy’s and Scapegoat's classes. He’s somewhat pompous and stuffy but is the only one that no-tices that the ‘Goat is intelligent and talented.

Alice Chalmers is an exotic tomboy student at Dieselburg Community College. The local males' secret crush, she’s too perfect to be touched. She can whip any other character on the show if she has to.

Fran Chelf is another co-ed at the Community College and resident at the trailer court. Has big poodle cut, receding chin, and prominent curves. Scapegoat has a crush on her, though she’s ranges from indiffer-ent to hostile towards him, unless she wants something fixed then she makes false promises of friendliness. Fran would rather go steady with the abusive Gunter and complain that there are no good men around.

Gunter is a big jock with letter on-campus and big dumb bully off-campus and Fran Chelf’s steady date.

The Muse is a matron goddess of cartoonists with an overbearing personality and is more than a bit bat guano bonkers. She usually in-tim-idates Scape-goat into drawing highly inspired cartoons that get met with hos-tility from ev-erybody except somewhat pompous and stuffy college professors with Ph. Ds.

B.B. Boomer is he ex-hippie-cum-greedy-businessman head of the local Klosed Klique Komics. He often wears a tailored suit over a tie-die T-shirt and his hairline has receded halfway back to his ponytail. B.B. openly believes that his generation is god’s gift to the universe and the rest of the world should bow down into worshipful, grateful servitude.

Harry X. Hippie (a.k.a.: ‘‘Mean Ol’ Fascist Hippie’’) is the mean old sixties hold-out that runs the comic book shop next to Mom & Pop’s TV. Panders his store’s selection to the Fanboys, although he can barely hide his contempt for them. He will kick Fanboy or Scapegoat out of his store on any provo-cation, real or imagined. Actually, Harry is not derivative of a certain Simpsons character, but is loosely based on a real shop owner in Iowa, who is too dense to be cuttingly sarcastic.

Maxi Nekeaux is the ‘Boy & ‘Goats next-door neighbor. She is kind of easy. She as no real ambitions in life, although she has slid into the unofficial one of seeing how much TV she can which and eat as much food stamp bought junk food as possible.

Note on the nuclear work angle: I use to be a Bowl Jumper for Westinghouse doing nuclear work in what seemed like a previous life. I always would have liked to have bagged the early Simpsons on doing nuclear humor that is based on real life instead of made up by politically correct ex-hippies. Even to the point of going to the power plants and getting all the juicy horror stories from the HP's ("Health Physics" people).