I'm trying to put an end to my history of writing a piece of fiction and never finishing it

I'm too busy working on a manuscript for a prose novel right now to post any new material for the AFOS blog. I've discovered that it takes me an entire week to finish writing each chapter in this manuscript. The novel is currently intended to consist of 31 chapters, so if I continue at this one-chapter-a-week pace without ever stopping, I'll be done with the manuscript by the end of February 2017.

That means I have no time to write any new blog posts for the AFOS blog for the rest of the year. I'm so committed to finishing this thing (and then shopping it around) that I don't allow myself to watch a new episode of Mr. Robot until I'm done writing an entire chapter.

"The Pet" was an unfinished Filipino monster story I've mentioned in great detail on this blog. Filipino monster folklore definitely needs more shine, and I was hoping "The Pet" would help out in bringing some more exposure to Filipino monster stories. It's not the first story I've tried to write and ended up failing to finish due to writer's block.

In high school, I wrote an unfinished novel called Jasper, about a Filipino teen who kills a racist bully and runs away. I never was able to reach the killing-the-bully-and-running-away part of the story, which was disappointing because the greatest thing about fiction writing is that you can murder people who are assholes without getting thrown in jail. Despite the novel being unfinished (and also being rather aimless and not very good by my standards today), I allowed its completed chapters to be used as part of the syllabus in a Filipino American lit course one of my older brother's friends presided over at UC Santa Cruz in 1993. It was interesting to later see the Robert Duvall movie The Apostle echo the plot of Jasper with its story of a preacher who kills his wife's lover and escapes to another town to start over and continue with his preaching.

Then I tried to write a screenplay for a time-travel comedy called Timegroove back when I reluctantly worked in the tech industry, but I was never satisfied with the dialogue. Also, the original Life on Mars was doing wonderful things with the "modern-day cop trapped in the '70s" premise, so why fucking bother? Life on Mars was immensely better than much of what I had in mind for Timegroove.

The Timegroove plot had an Asian American cop chasing an escaped criminal who hijacked an Indian inventor's record player-inspired time machine and hid out in the '70s, and the protagonist had to put up with worse forms of racism than the forms of racism he encountered in the present day. His '70s female love interest was an Asian American undercover cop named Lotus Blossom, whose name was a reference to a really cheesy slow jam of the same name by the band War, and his '70s partner was a black cop named Stroke Johnson.

In the '70s, the protagonist also encountered a younger version of the time machine's inventor and turned to him for help to get back to the present, and the inventor dressed exactly the same as his older self. The Timegroove script never went past the first couple of scenes.

Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong crime flick that was remade as The Departed, or rather, The De-pah-ted (Photo source: DVD Beaver)

Finally, there was a 2010 webcomic script called The Palace: Continuous Hell. It was about a movie theater worker who, after work, is forced to wait in a never-ending line outside a nightclub, while her theater co-workers go insane as they sit through a staff-only advance screening of a new and totally unnecessary Infernal Affairs sequel from Hong Kong because the movie never actually begins. A lot of modern-day Hong Kong movies kick off with 800 different movie studio logos, but this fictional Infernal Affairs sequel opens with 800,000 of them.

I wrote Continuous Hell before Family Guy, a show I greatly dislike, riffed in 2011 on movies that open with too many production company logos. Continuous Hell had a great webcomic title too: it referenced a line from the original Infernal Affairs ("The worst of the eight hells is called Continuous Hell. It has the meaning of Continuous Suffering"), and I especially like how the words "Continuous Hell" can easily be sung to the tune of "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland ("Continuous Hell, whatever you are...").



Unlike the other unfinished stories, I actually completed writing the Continuous Hell script, but I never took the script to the drawing stage because I retired from trying to draw webcomics by then. They're fucking hard to draw.

The likelihood of me finishing my current manuscript is higher than the likelihood of me ever drawing a webcomic again. It's time to finally break the cycle.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Roxy Music, "Same Old Scene"

Song: "Same Old Scene" by Roxy Music
Released: 1980
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's mainly due to its appearance at the end of the first episode of the impressively soundtracked British cop show Ashes to Ashes, a sequel to the original version of Life on Mars that ran on BBC One from 2008 to 2010 and like the original, left a present-day British cop stranded in the past (this time, it was Keeley Hawes' Alex Drake, trapped in both 1981 and huge Dynasty shoulder pads).

From an Ashes to Ashes first-season soundtrack album customer review at the British version of Amazon.com, which notes that "Same Old Scene" isn't on the album:

But most mystifyingly, the one track which for me was as much the theme of the series as Bowie's 'Ashes To Ashes' itself - Roxy Music's 'Same Old Scene' - is also not included. This track was used in the ultra-cool sequence at the end of episode one which contained virtually no dialogue. The piece of music that the show's producers were originally going to use for this was 'Imagine' by John Lennon; considering how much the mood of the sequence would have been altered if they had gone ahead, it becomes clear how essential this Roxy Music song actually was in setting up the dark, brooding, sexually charged atmosphere so successfully evoked.

BBC America has yet to air Ashes to Ashes' third and final season, which I haven't seen yet, so unless I click to Wikipedia to read the spoilers, I have no way of knowing if Ashes to Ashes ended in a brilliant, David Bowie-scored way like the original Life on Mars did or in a batshit-crazy, completely random, "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet"-style way like the American Life on Mars did. Apparently, decades-old reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation are a bigger priority to BBC America (last time I checked, that show's not British).



All the other "Rock Box" Tracks of the Day from this week:
The Dubliners, "The Rocky Road to Dublin"
Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"
The Skyflakes, "Talk About Today"
The Jackson 5, "Never Can Say Goodbye"

Funky Cops: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 5

"Lacuna Matata" concludes--for now--with another recollection of a show barely anybody remembers.

This time, the subject of this "Lacuna Matata" installment isn't exactly a classic or a buried treasure worth digging for. Remember this curio from a few years ago?

Funky Cops was a bawdy, Austin Powers-style French cartoon show about a pair of disco-dancing '70s San Francisco cops with scary-looking Jay Leno chins that I caught a few times on Fox's Saturday morning schedule in 2003. It was apparently big in France, and it spawned two volumes of not-so-bad original music from the show. The Brand New Heavies-esque tunes are easily the best part of Funky Cops.

I can't say I liked Funky Cops. For the disco sequences--I think each Funky Cops episode was 80 percent disco sequences, 20 percent cop show stuff--the animators took CGI animations of the cops' dance moves and rotoscoped them, and the cels and robotic character movements in those sequences looked rather creepy and ugly (most rotoscoped cartoons look terrible, and Funky Cops was no exception). Also, the show was very French, like how The Fifth Element is a very French sci-fi movie.

One of the reasons why I checked out Funky Cops was because I wanted to see what San Francisco looks like to French animators. The show's constant shots of cars leaping over hills indicated that the Frenchmen did their homework by watching the Bullitt car chase--and that's about it. Aside from the hills and the glimpses of Chinatown, the Transamerica Pyramid and the Golden Gate Bridge, Sucka Free looked more like the nondescript city where Penny took care of her mentally challenged Uncle Gadget than the Sucka Free I know.

Another thing that made Funky Cops an interesting curio was its bawdiness, which showed how much Saturday morning network TV standards had loosened since the days when Rev. Donald Wildmon's theory about Mighty Mouse being a cokehead forced Ralph Bakshi to trim some footage from Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. The standards changed probably because animated Saturday morning TV was slowly dying and nobody gave a shit anymore.

Funky Cops' sexualized character designs were clearly inspired by Austin Powers. The show's creators, Christophe and Benoit Di Sabatino, even ripped off the white Funky Cop's thatch of chest hair from Austin. The bawdiness was one of several elements FPS Magazine contributor Terrence Briggs criticized on the rec.arts.animation newsgroup:

The character designs are grotesque, featuring overly sculpted arms, huge chins, and triangular female breasts (of which you'll see plenty on this show). The Elvis lookalike has a grin that takes up most of his face. The black dude, on the other hand, has no lips and rarely shows his teeth, while his chin and Afro duke it out for ownership of his head. Their black supervisor has HUGE lips...

The musical score pays homage to far better R&B from the era. Unfortunately, the lyrics and vocal performances are embarassing, and they're always used over the silent scenes. The theme song, however, is catchy and well-produced...

And the writing doesn't save the day. Scripts often feature lame comedy (bad singing, ironic sentiments about how awesome and timeless disco is, slacking on the job) and tired plot devices (Could the episodic female dancer who has stolen Ace's heart be the episodic jewel thief?).

Funky Cops made me think I could create a funnier '70s cop show spoof than the Di Sabatino brothers' animated series, so in 2003, I tried to write a comedic screenplay called Timegroove, about a present-day Filipino American cop who gets sent back in time to 1977. I typed up a complete treatment, a full list of '70s tracks I wanted to use (like "Skin Tight" by Ohio Players and "In the City" by the Jam) and a screenplay that only went as far as 11 pages. Except for a cameo I wrote for legendary, now-retired KTVU anchorman Dennis Richmond and a gag involving an argument about who sang "Back Stabbers" that escalates into a fistfight, my unfinished Timegroove screenplay isn't very good. Three years later, BBC's Life on Mars premiered and was such a clever '70s cop show homage that I decided the world didn't need another one.