Twisted ToyFare Theatre: Behind the Scenes Week 8

September 26, 2008 on 8:04 pm | In TTT, Twisted ToyFare | No Comments

Hey folks, TJ here. The ‘Rambo Connection’ strip will always hold a special place in my heart because it’s the first one I had a real hand in creating. The Spidey/Nova strip was pretty much in the can by the time I came on board and I’m a huge fan of these crazy, ultra-manly movies that we reference and mock. Originally, the strip was going to be about how the current crop of action movie stars are wussy, which I don’t necessarily agree with, but in the middle of a very long meeting with former Editor Zach Oat and former Price Guide Editor Jon G. the idea to make the classic 80s stars a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen kind of team. It went on from there and kept growing as you can see by the fact that this is the third part (wouldn’t it be great to see the whole strip as a comic book?).

And one heck of a finale it is as the Manly Men of Action face off against the evil Segal with the help of surviving old school MMA. I can’t help but hope that somehow this gets made into a real movie. My personal favorite joke in the strip came from Justin and it’s how the MMA call on their predecessors (originally it was going to be just Chuck Norris and they would summon him like Captain Planet). Good stuff. Okay, here are Jon’s storyboards:

Justin here now. I just wanted to post a little additional comment on the joke that TJ mentioned about the original Manly Men, because it was one of the few times I’ve been able to use something I learned in college in my professional life (aside from grammar and punctuation rules, of course).

In my screenwriting class they taught us about Chekhov’s gun. “Wait a minute,” you’re saying, “Didn’t Chekhov have a phaser, not a gun?” Wrong Chekhov. Anton Chekhov was a Russian playwright who famously said that if there’s a gun hanging on the wall in Act 1, it had better go off by the end of Act 3.

So when we were sitting around trying to figure out the end of Act 3 of our own “play” here, I thought back to our Act 1, which I wasn’t as involved in planning. If you recall the first chapter of “The Rambo Connection,” we spend about four panels introducing previous incarnations of the Manly Men of Action, but there was never any intention to do anything with them. But then I started thinking, that’s a lot of guns hanging on the wall…literally! If we spent that much time setting them up earlier in the story, it had better pay off at the end.

So there you go…I’ve now explained TJ’s favorite joke to death so it’s no longer funny. You’re welcome, TJ!