Working Toward Failure

Working Toward Failure

So I just read that Arnold Schwarzenegger's first post-gubernatorial project is an animated series/comic book called The Governator. Created by Stan Lee, no less. I read about it with fascination because I know enough about such projects to know that:

A. It's going to be a huge flop. It's a pre-made laughing-stock of an idea.

B. Everyone involved who has any idea what they're talking about knows it's going to be a flop.

The best they can hope for with this thing is to be as successful as the Mr. T cartoon back in the 80s. But really, it has no chance even of that. Back then, kids had some idea of who Mr. T was, and they might have cared about him a little bit. But kids don't know and don't care who some old guy from 30 year old movies is, and the fact that he was a governor doesn't exactly put him in the same league as Spider-Man, Harry Potter, or Spongebob.  It's got about as much chance as launching the Mr. T cartoon today would have.

Stan Lee is a genius. A giant. But he hasn't done anything that appeals to kids--or really anyone--in decades. Other than winking cameos in Marvel movies, anyway. He's a writer with a 50-year out of date style doing a comic and cartoon based on an actor with a 30-year out of date style. Stan's got to know that it will never work. But hey, he could probably use a new wing on the guest house of his mansion--couldn't we all--so why not let whomever is funding this send a guy over to his house and hook up a new faucet for hot and cold running money?

More power to him, really.

I remember when I was working at Wizards of the Coast. A directive came down from some brainiac at Hasbro that the next hot property was going to be Centipede. Yeah, you know--if you're at least 40 years old, anyway--the old Atari arcade game. I kid you not. Centipede. Those of you with kids now how much 8-year olds are craving this. But remember, I didn't say this was a prediction from Hasbro. It was a directive. Not the kind of thing you argue with. So a bunch of people on staff got put on making some Centipede games. There were even Centipede novels written. No, seriously. Stop laughing. This is all true.

Obviously, it never came about. The people who worked on it, bless their hearts, will tell you that they had some good ideas for making it cool. And I don't doubt them, because they're smart. But you know that deep down in their creative little hearts, they knew that Centipede was never going to be the next big thing. Even when it was a game people had heard of, it was always a second rate video game. The game you played when the kids who got to the arcade earlier than you stacked up a bunch of quarters on the Donkey  Kong and Asteroids machines. (All kids in the 80s knew that a stack of quarters--or sometimes a line of them, depending on what part of the country you were in--meant "back off, man, I'm going to be using this machine for a while." It was understood, and it was kid law.)

Or going back even further, I remember when TSR was stuck with 8 quintillion extra Dragon Dice. Remember Dragon Dice? It was one of those games that would have been hugely successful if it hadn't been laughably overproduced. If you print 100,000 units and sell 100,000 units, the game is wildly successful and everyone that worked on it is a genius. If you print a MILLION units and sell 100,000, the game is a flop and everyone that worked on it is an idiot. (That of course isn't true. It's the foolish perception I'm pointing out. Dragon Dice was actually a really cool game.) Anyway, with a warehouse full of funny shaped fantasy dice, TSR management had the entire creative staff take a day and come up with concepts for new games that could use them in different ways. I don't think any of us ever thought those ideas would be used. I know I didn't. But still we had to do it because it was our job.

Sometimes as a creative person, you're commissioned to produce work that you know is terrible. Or will never be used. It's a part of modern creative work, sadly. I mean, when all those Lucasfilm CGI artists were making Episode I creatures fart, some of them had to know that they were churning out crap (no pun intended). I mean, I hope so. Because as strange as it sounds, it's better to know that you're working on garbage with your eyes wide open, collecting a paycheck so that you can later work on something good, than to actually think you're producing high art only to discover later that it's garbage. Well, I say that without actually having experienced the latter, and thankfully experiencing very little of the former. Both are things I've observed more than lived through myself. I still suspect it's true, however.

I mean, in a perfect world, we'd all be working on our own personal creations of pure genius and it would all be wildly successful. But barring that, I'd rather work on my own (hopefully) good material and have moderate success than on someone else's wildly successful garbage. And while working on someone else's garbage that fails is awful, working on someone else's garbage while thinking it's brilliant has got to be the worst of all possible scenarios.

But back to Arnold. I know there's a bunch of people in the offices of some animation studio or at Archie Comics (they're putting out the comic through Archie for Pete's sake--NO ONE THINKS THIS WILL WORK) working on this whole Governator thing who know it's going to flop. Even the guy writing the "exclusive" article for Entertainment Weekly has to know it will flop. I think everyone knows but Arnold. And a couple of suits involved in the production company that sold him this idea. And the financial backers they convinced to pony up the dough.

I actually kind of feel sorry for Arnold. You can see him in some wood-paneled office where one chair costs more than my house, a bunch of slick guys in business suits telling him how the kids were going to love this and they would get Spider-Man creator Stan Lee himself to do all the concept work, and they'd give him Iron Man-like suits to wear, solar powered because the show was going to have a green message because that's trending well right now, and he'd have a little dog and a robot butler, and they'd fight crime and... blah blah blah. And he bought it, because he didn't know any better and I imagine people have been telling him for years how much people love him whether they do or not. OK, I guess I don't feel that sorry for him.

So, anyway. The Governator. Coming to comic book quarter boxes and DVD discount bins near you. Maybe late night comedians will get some fodder out of it for an evening. And yes, even all those things--comics quarter boxes, DVD bins, late night comedy shows--are ten to twenty years past their prime. That's the point.

He said he'd back. I'm just pretty sure that after all these years, no one's going to care.