There exists in every children's show I remember fondly, one episode that stretched the limits and presented the viewer with fantastic ideas. Since I usually give a new cartoon only one chance to impress me, the ones I like are the ones that showed that episode on the first day I see it. Such was the case with Aaahh!!! Real Monsters!, the series Klasky-Csupo put out for Nickelodeon after Rugrats.
Real Monsters makes a strong contrast to Rugrats. Rugrats was about idealistic babies in a strange world. The only dark element, the cruel actions of unthinking parents, was somehow minimized whenever it came up, the enemy changing from Mom to fear of the unknown. Real Monsters, on the other hand, had as a backdrop a thoroughly-corrupt city, with no real hope that it would ever reform itself.
My story, like much of fan fiction, attempts to solve all the questions unanswered by the series (some of those questions were answered in a way I didn't like, in the third season). I make no attempt to introduce the characters and even delight in throwing in obscure trivia. I assume that my audience has seen the episode I am expanding at least once.
There were three things that led me to think that I could write this story: good background, good characters, and lots of inconsistency. The background I have already mentioned. The characters I liked because they were original-something surprising since the concept had been done so badly so many times (usually by the British, who from about 1960 to 1980 had to be about the worst providers of children's entertainment since the days of the written Pinocchio and The Water Babies). The element that let me think I could succeed, though, was the massive inconsistency of the series. Nobody seemed to care that one episode stated that a monster could not survive in clean air for more than a few hours and the next episode has the monsters spending days searching for Bigfoot. In the same way, The Gromble was teacher for Horvak during the American Revolution yet was doing his first scares during the 1920's. I had the opportunity to pick and choose, even fabricate, whatever I wanted to say about monster society without being totally wrong on any count.
"The Monster That Came Out of the Cold" was one of only a small handful of episodes in the first two seasons featuring Oblina, my favorite character. The episode worked on her obsession with scaring and, employing Freudian psychology, causes her to form a reaction complex that leaves her thinking she's human. I was willing to buy that, given the extreme form of Freudianism usually employed in cartoons ("My name is Elmer Fudd, millionaire. I own a mansion and a yacht."). What I did not accept was that this condition could be completely resolved by a triggered memory and a few voice-overs (the same doubt led me to pen an embarrassingly-bad sequel to Beauty and the Beast a few years ago). Twelve minutes was simply not enough to work through this issue.
Besides, this would give me an opportunity to air my speculations about monster society and Oblina's parents. We were given no information about either of these subjects on the date I started this. I imagined that Oblina's parents were upper-crust types (with a silent suggestion of inbreeding) that were disgusted with her for some reason. Once I decided it was because she enjoyed scaring too much, I was led to postulate a monster society. I had already decided that monsters were so much more independent-minded than humans that they were capable of that impossible human task of maintaining a perfect anarchy. Monster society was about everyone doing their own thing. Since I could not think of that many things a monster could do that would require scaring, I decided that scaring was seen as a survival skill and nothing more to most monsters. Scaring was the most ignored of school subjects, the way a nerdy father would see his son's PE class.
With that, I could start writing. Bradley was introduced, but I turned him into an odd sort of self-insertion: not how I actually was as a seventh-grader, but the overly-dramatic way I viewed myself and the world when I was that age. To anybody who really likes Bradley, I'm sorry, but my egotism got the better of me. All of the other characters from the series I tried to keep as true-to-themselves as possible. I constructed this story as a TV movie, about two hours long with commercials (although I never planned for where to put the commercial breaks).
Just to prove that I based Bradley on myself, here is the soundtrack I had in mind for the film:
Now one of the things I can't deny is that monsters hate classical music (whether or not they like Rock and Roll is a subject that is up to debate). The only excuse I can offer for the soundtrack is that it must be obvious that Bradley directed this movie, and he can use any music he pleases.
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