Story Ideas I Can't Use

1) "Pit Boys". A high school football team (from a school in a poor neighborhood where few graduates ever get to higher education) loses their try at the playoffs. On the way back home, their bus comes upon an RV broken down on the side of the road, so the boys decide to help the RV out. When they get the RV back running, they find out that the RV is owned by a friend of an up-and-coming race car driver. The driver shows up at the school and tells the Senior boys "keep your grades up, graduate--and then spend a season as my pit crew. Do that and I'll pay for college or tech school!" And so the rest is them learning their jobs on the box, dealing with life on the circuit and the hassles from rival teams, and the heartbreak of mistakes and changes in fortune. But the Pit Boys eventually become hometown heroes--and the driver rewards their faith and effort more ways than one.

2) "Regularly Scheduled Programming". It's a small TV station in a small market. So small that the station doesn't have a news department and 99% of the programming is syndicated or infomercials. The central characters are the techies who keep the station operating 24/7.

Story Idea I Can't Use

"A Very Special Episode"--A writer for a sitcom meets an elderly writer who had been blacklisted in the 1950s. The sitcom writer reads one of the older man's scripts from fifty years back, and plagiarizes it into a script for his show. The episode gets great ratings and loads of attention, but the writer's guilt holds him back from enjoying the success. When the show is nominated for an award, he goes back to the old man to tell him the truth. The old man tells him it was part of his plan to get his script "ripped off", as he'd been trying to get that script produced for years and nobody cared. The writer, now morally conflicted, takes his feelings to the pages of the next episode--and this causes a good measure of controversy/havoc.

My Mastery of Japanese Pays Off--I Hope!

Just entered the drawing for the colossal Gundam model.



Cute Japan-ess not included.

For the record, Bandai Channel wanted to know who my favorite character from Bandai's anime works is (Mellowlink) and what my 10 favorite Bandai shows are.

What I told them:
1) Armor Hunter Mellowlink
2) SPT Layzner
3) Stratos4
4) Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam
5) Metal Armor Dragonar
6) Sento Yousei Yukikaze
7) Argentosoma
8) The Last Exile
9) Armored Trooper Votoms TV
10) Gasaraki

I guess I could have thrown in a Dirty Pair or a Crusher Joe there too. These were just the first ones that came to mind that I recognized.

Golly, what would I do with that big honkin' robot if I won? Boggles the mind.

FP