The Movie-Cop Franchises

Yes, we're talking about both the lone cops-- Dirty Harry, Axel Foley (The "Beverly Hills Cop") and John "Die Hard" McClane (although with Bruce Willis sadly retiring, we're enlisting John McClane Jr.)-- and also the buddy cop-teams from Lethal Weapon, Rush Hour, and Bad Boys.

[Note: We need to hurry up and do this. Eastwood is 92.]

And yes, I got the idea from The Expendables. But this time it is the characters (not just the actors) who are all being thrown into one insane movie.

The plot: There is a crime wave in the US, but only a few cops are beginning to notice a pattern. The crimes all seem to fall just short of the level of felonies, so they are calculated not to draw the attention of the Feds.

One of the cops putting the pieces together from stories reported in different cities is Detroit's Axel Foley. Another is John McClane, Jr., in New York. Yet another is Martin Riggs, in LA. Since each of these cops is known to be wild and unreliable, their insistence that there is a pattern is dismissed by their superior officers. 

When yet another crime that fits the pattern takes place in Miami, they all converge there to investigate. But Mike Lowrey is already there and he and his partner Marcus Burnett find their arrests foiled by the interference of all these other cops.

They end up in a 4-way stand off. As if on cue, they all pull their guns at each other and say, as one, "Freeze! Police!"

Once they finally all prove to each other that they are, all, in fact, police-- and that they have all noticed the same pattern of crimes,  and all believe there is one force behind all of them-- news of another crime back in Los Angeles sends the team all over there.

This time, the Rush Hour team of Lee and Carter are already responding, but this time, our squad calls ahead. Meanwhile, the long plane flight from Miami to San Francisco allows the team the chance to corroborate their facts, and also form some new friendships-- and frictions.

In Los Angeles, the trail leads to a terrifying place-- an FBI office! And not just any office, that of one "Dirty" Harry Callahan in San Fransisco! His lifetime of fast-and-loose policing, but also public acclaim protecting him from being fired, has lead the FBI to hire him on, so they can keep him-- but on a short leash and a desk job.

The squad has to forge a plan and sneak into his office to find proof one way or the other. Of course, they get caught-- not even all these supercops are a match for the original-- and of course he's innocent. He's being set up to be framed for the whole thing if it goes sour. After all, who has more method or opportunity that a fast-and-loose man on the FBI's inside, or more motive than someone being kept like a dog with a muzzle? 

Harry agrees that none of the crimes reach the level of federal interest on their own, but together, they do. He pitches the theory up the chain of command and is shot down.

Eager to clear his name, Harry takes charge of the case. They can use the FBI's resources, but they have to be sneaky about it. 

To this end, they enlist Penelope Garcia ("Criminal Minds"), who works for the FBI's serial-killer-catching unit but who also happens to be a computer genius. She collects all their data and crunches it. She says the reason only the few of them have caught on is that the cities that are targeted for each crime are randomized to as to avoid creating a pattern: "The pattern is that there IS no pattern; but it's too random to be unplanned. You have to plan for something to be this random."

She says that together, the clues all point to one of the few major US cities they have not been to: Chicago.

There, they enlist the help of Federal Marshall Samuel Gerard ("The Fugitive"). The crime hub turns out to be hidden in the bowels of the complex of O'Hare Airport, one of the busiest airports in the country. This allows the criminals to quickly dispatch to any city in the country, and circumvent all the TSA and security protocols.  At the airport, there is a shootout. 

The bad guys take a plane and almost hijack it, but it is stormed by our squad and the bad guys are apprehended by force. It takes off but they force an emergency water landing on Lake Michigan, with the amazing Chicago skyline in the background.

The final scene has all of our hero cops posing for a picture for the press, each holding up the badge of his city. 

One of the nice things about this idea is that it creates a Mt. Rushmore of sorts of some of the most popular Black actors in Hollywood, all in one place: Eddie Murphy, Will Smith, Chris Tucker, Martin Lawrence, and Danny Glover. Since Chris Rock has been in one of the Lethal Weapon movies, he can come along too, but we understand if he does not want to be in scenes with Will Smith (given their, um, incident at the Oscars). 

If we want to keep that going even further, we can include Denzel Washington as the Big Bad at the end. And we can also work in Morgan Freeman's Detective Alex Cross character in a cameo, or even his detective character from Se7en... but I would like to keep this to only those characters that haven been in at least 3 movies. Once you let in just any movie cop, where does it end? You have to draw a line somewhere.

Anyway, some of these series have ended, and some have sputtered. The solution, I think, is to throw them all in a blender and hit "frappe."   

 

The Muppets

Short Answer: Either Alice in Wonderland or Robin Hood

A recent article in Cracked.com suggested sticking a fork in the Muppets. But it forgets something. The Muppets don't only make movies about themselves.

The Muppets, while characters, have also been actors. So maybe, yeah, no more original content-- shows or movies-- for a bit... and instead, a pivot back toward familiar favorites.

As actors, they have performed famous stories including Christmas Carol. The Wizard of Oz, and Treasure Island-- stories that have been made into movies many (many) times already. There is even a video of Muppets telling several traditional fairytales.  

Well, there are two other stories that fill the bill (and are kid-friendly) that they have not performed yet, at least as feature-length movies. And so... they should make those.

One is Alice in Wonderland. They could use Miss Piggy as Alice, but I think she'd make an excellent Red Queen. And then we could have someone like Margot Robbie as Alice. There has been a Muppet Babies version, and some illustrated books, but not a full-length, theatrically released feature.

I see Sam the Eagle as the unimpressed Caterpillar, Kermit as the flustered White Rabbit... and Gonzo has already played the Mad Hatter twice. 

The other option solves two problems at once. One is what to do with the Muppets next, yes, but another is how to fit Disney's Robin Hood into a live-action format, to fit in with their insistence of re-releasing all their movies as live productions. 

In their remakes of Jungle Book and Lion King, stories with talking animals, they CGI'd realistic animals and had actors do the voices. But in Disney's version of Robin Hood, the animals don't just talk... they wear clothes and walk on their hind legs. They are all animals (no humans appear), but basically people.

So how to live-n a movie like that up, without just making another Robin Hood movie (and they already made a live-action Robin Hood movie back in 1952). 

Well, puppets are live-action. So make the Robin Hood live remake a Muppet production. They have already cast it, in an illustrated book. Kermit is Robin Hood, Piggy is Maid Marian. And Fozzie is a ready-made Little John, Rowlf could be Friar Tuck, Scooter should be Will Scarlet, and the book already has Floyd the guitar player as Alan-a-Dale. Gonzo could be either the Sheriff of Nottingham or Prince John, with a human being the other part. And then Sam could come in at the end as the stately King Richard. 

Two problems solved! 

Star Trek

Short Answer: The Eugenics Wars; Deep Space 9 movie

Star Trek is one of the original franchises. It encompasses many series and films, as well as mountains of work in other media. The main focus now seems to be creating new shows.

In a very brief period of time (since 2017), we have been given:
-Picard, which tells us what happened to the former Next Generation captain, um, next...
-Discovery, which first fills in the gap between Enterprise (the series, not the ship) and The Original Series, then (spoilers) leapfrogs past all the other series, chronologically, to show us (finally) the beyond year 3000...
-Strange New Worlds, which connects Discovery and The Original Series, with the adventures of Capt. Pike (whom we met in the Original Series' FIRST pilot episode and rencountered in Discovery)...

Plus, two new animated shows: Lower Decks, a comedy about what happens there, i.e. not on the Bridge; and Prodigy, meant to engage kids raised on anime-style animations. It introduces a whole new crew... but also (spoilers) Janeway from Voyager (from the series and the ship), shows up... sorta.

So, yes, the new series are doing a great job of looking both forward and backward (if one can say that about a show set in the future).

But there are still more gaps to be filled in.

Namely. two: The Eugenics Wars and the rest of the Deep Space Nine story.

The Original Series got movies. The Next Generation series got movies.

But Deep Space Nine never got movies. 

All of the actors, save one, are still with us. And the one who passed on-- Rene "Odo" Auberjonois-- was a shapeshifter. He could be "played" by CGI, or by an entirely new actor as long as the resemblance is passing. After all, it is canon that he had a hard time assuming human form. Now that he has been with his "people" a while, it is possible his powers of mimicry have sharpened, which could easily explain his new face.

If ever there was a series that makes the viewer beg to know what came after the series finale, this is one.

Further, the end of the series involves a battle that surely would have drawn the involvement of Starfleet's flagship-- Picard's Enterprise. Yet, what that ship was doing during the battle was never shown... or even discussed! Weird, right? 

We see Picard meet Sisko in the pilot of DS9, to pass the torch narratively. So we know these two leaders are contemporaries. We also know that Sisko blames Picard for his wife's death. 

What about a movie showing what Picard and his ship were doing during the battle for the planet Bajor and its wormhole-- and have it end with Picard making such a huge sacrifice-- for, say, Sisko's son Jake-- that Sisko has to forgive Picard for his wife's death? Forgiveness and redemption are huge parts of Trek's ideology.

The other plotline that has been referred to endless times, but has never been shown, are the Eugenics Wars. The "augments" that were the result of genetic engineering gave us the enhanced ubermensch named Khan, Trek's best baddie. We see him being exiled in The Original Series. We see him escaping exile and wreaking havoc in the Wrath of Khan movie. 

But we never see the origin of the augments, which is a shame because it also involves three characters we know and love. One is Dr. Soong, who eventually gives up on perfecting humans like another, Khan... and turns to AI, resulting in the building of Data. (Khan's full name is Khan Noonien Singh. Data's creator is named Dr. Noonian Soong. These names are, in real life, a tribute to a friend of Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator... but could easily be used to link the two characters.)

The other is a character-- who was inspired by James Bond and The Man From UNCLE and such fare: Gary Seven. The character was created for one episode of The Original Series and was intended to spawn a a spin-off. This show never materialized, but the idea of humans protecting Earth from alien threats (and with the help of a memory-wiping pen, at that!) perhaps gave us Men In Black.

The difference is that the MIB agents were from Earth. Gary Seven's bloodline originated on Earth, but his genetic ancestor was abducted ages ago; he was the result of millennia of genetic perfecting on a distant planet, then beamed back to Earth (in The Original Series) to protect it from threats foreign and domestic... er, alien and human. 

Anyway, Gary Seven (whom we need to refer to by his full name because "Seven" to Trekkies means Seven of Nine) had tried to get the augments (this is explained in some Trek novels) to be defenders of Earth, only to have them decide to conquer Earth instead.

Which resulted in, you guessed it, The Eugenics Wars. Which... should have happened by now, IRL. They happen 1992-96. The other major gaps in the timeline, in terms of years not chronicled, lie (still!) between Enterprise and Discovery... and between The Original Series and The Next Generation, even though the movie Generations has characters from both.  

It would be great to see more of Gary Seven (name-checked in Picard) and his assistants, a brilliant if awkward Roberta Lincoln (played by Terri Garr, still alive as of this writing) and a shape-shifting black cat Gary Seven can communicate with telepathically. Oh, and Gary Seven knows what Vulcans are-- and is immune to their neck pinch, so Vulcans can show up, too, as long as no one else sees or identifies them.

So, showing us the Eugenics Wars gives us, potentially a story with Dr. Soong (or someone in his ancestry), Khan (whose enhancements evidently allow him to live for centuries; Wrath of Khan is set in 2285), and Gary Seven (who could easily still be alive in the 1990s if he was in he 1960s, especially since he is a "perfected" person)... plus a war that takes place in the Trek timeline in the 1990s...

...before the year Picard's (the show) characters go back to (2024), well before warp-drive tech was developed and "first contact" was made (in 2063), let alone the establishment of Starfleet (2161). 

I guess what I don't get is, if Dr. Soong was still perfecting augments in 20204, how could the Eugenics Wars have taken place back in the 1990s? I think I have more research to do...

 

Pirates of the Caribbean

 Short Answer: Take to the Skies

The Golden Age of Piracy is said to end around 1720, but piracy as a "thing" lasted at least until the 1830s. 

And you know what else was going on around then? The early days of air travel, in some of its most fanciful forms. Gliders and even hot-air balloons were around in the late 1700s. (The earliest airships-- anything like a blimp-- did not show up until the 1850s. But if you don't care about historical accuracy, pirates in blimps is a pretty cinematic visual.)

After five movies that take place predominately in boats, why not have the pirates start to exploit some of this other sea-going technology in their swashbuckling and derring-do? 

The series is still a cash cow (cash sea cow?) so they probably aren't done with it yet. Adding sky-high stunts to the seafaring and land-lubbering could be the helium it needs to buoy it up again.

Or it could be a hydrogen situation, and the whole thing could blow up in everyone's faces-- which would not necessarily be the worst thing. Only the first movie got good ratings, and the most recent two had Rotten Tomato scores in the 30s. It's also OK for a series to end once it runs out of... gas.