Hello, my apocalypse surviving friends. This is Chris your producer.
We’ve gotten up to episode 10 and you should be starting to feel the story tone and the story arc coming together. Like I said last week, Bill the dog is my favorite character, but I’m a dog guy.
There are a lot of apocalypse movies with dogs in them. I think it’s so the main character has someone to talk to. Having a dog gives an opportunity to work some dialog into a ‘sole survivor’ situation.
There is actually a post-apocalyptic novella called “A boy and his dog” from 1969, made into a movie in 1975. I have not read it, but I am familiar with the author Harlan Ellison, who was an accomplished SciFi writer. I have recently listened to one of his famous pieces “I have no mouth, and I must scream” .
Both of those stories were about a post apocalyptic world.
The post apocalypticgenre relies on a number of different ways for the world to end. Most of the postapocalyptic world
s of our lifetime were based on nuclear war endgames, because those writers’ lives were filled with the cold war.
Of course there is some killing pandemic, like in our universe, but there are other subtler things.
There are aliens, either big scary monsters, like the war of the worlds, or alien microbes that take over human brains. I just listened to one where the alien microbes took over all the wild animals and the wild animals killed off all the humans.
There are extraterrestrial events, like the sun going supernova, or a meteor shower, or the moon breaking up, like in the recent “Seven Eves” by Neil Stephenson.
A more common end of the world these days is the environmental disaster because that’s what’s in the zeitgeist right now.
I did watch a movie that is not from a previous century last week. And, of course, it was a post apocalyptic movie. Called Love and monsters, starring Dylan O'Brien. I won’t give any spoilers but the pitch for this movie was a post-apocalyptic road movie in the vein of Mad Max and Zombieland with a John Hughes-esque love story.
That’s the pitch. We all love a good pitch.
I’ll now quote a review by Jessica Kiang of Variety that is pretty accurate. “…a silly but satisfying hero's journey entirely unencumbered by importance.”
That got me thinking just now, what would be the pitch for our little story here? How would we sell this in the big boardroom of a Hollywood producer?
Send me you
r answers.
Back to business… I am settling in on a once-every-two-week schedule. The show will drop every other Sunday.
We’ve got over a thousand listeners now. Shout out to our apocalypse surviving friends in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Sweden, Spain, New Zealand, Belgium, Bahamas, India, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Malaysia, and Viet Nam. Welcome! You know who you are!
Reach out to me and say ‘hi’ at cyktrussell at gmail dot com. Would love to hear from you and will take any suggestions you have that could make the show better.
If you like the show I can use your support. Like it on iTunes, write a review, and forward it to a friend – that’s how we build our tribe of global survivors.
I have a Patreon page
at patreon.com/aftertheapocalypse – I post the full episode scripts there and you can talk to me directly. I would appreciate any financial support you could lend so I can keep paying Robert for his excellent audio reads.
That’s all I got for you this week. Stay safe. Reach out and say ‘hi’, and, as always, keep surviving.
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