Almost Plausible

Ep. 4

Ceiling Fan

22 February 2022

Runtime: 00:46:32

The pattern on a child's ceiling fan transports him to a fantasy world, where an evil wizard is taking over the kingdom. The child teams up with a band of misfits to help stop the wizard and rebuild the ceiling fan so he can be transported home.

References

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
How does he defeat the wizard?

[Emily]
How does he defeat the wizard?

[Shep]
Rock, paper, scissors.

[Emily]
No, it’s a ladle and the magic goes backwards to him.

[Shep]
Because he’s not just a hero, he’s also a chef. And also a rat. Did we not mention that earlier?

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary ideas and turn them into stories. I am joined this week by the same people who join me every week, Emily-

[Emily]
Hey.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Hi, everybody.

[Thomas]
This week’s theme is the ceiling fan, which I thought would be easy, but then I struggled to come up with ideas. So I’m looking forward to hearing what my compatriots thought of, and we start each episode with a pitch session where we share those ideas, choose the one we like the best, and then come up with a story based on that idea. So, Emily, I’m going to put you on the spot this time. What story ideas did you come up with for ceiling fan?

[Emily]
I surprisingly came up with three after sitting and staring at the computer for a very long time.

[Shep]
I thought you’re going to say sitting and staring at the ceiling fan.

[Emily]
I have one in my living room. I should have used it for inspiration.

[Thomas]
I think I’m the only one of us who doesn’t have a ceiling fan.

[Emily]
You might be.

[Shep]
That’s why you struggled this week. It all makes sense.

[Thomas]
It must be. Yeah. I lacked that inspiration.

[Emily]
Yeah. All comes together. So my first pitch I have, when you reverse the ceiling fan, it turns back time three hours.

[Shep]
How long does it stay turned back time for three hours? Forever? As long as it’s reversed?

[Emily]
Yeah. You go back three hours.

[Shep]
Every time you reverse it, it goes back three hours.

[Emily]
It goes back three hours.

[Shep]
So you just sit there switching it back and forth and go back an arbitrary amount of time.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
If you have the patience-

[Thomas]
“Three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four…”

[Emily]
You can go back all day.

[Thomas]
And then you eventually get good at it. You’re just like “One two three four five six seven eight, OK, let’s do this day over again.”

[Shep]
How long until you break the switch?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
The motor burns out. The fan is just like, “No no no.”

[Shep]
I like time travel stories. And there have been weirder things that people use as time travel devices.

[Thomas]
Cough, cough. Hot tub.

[Shep]
Or phone booth.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s true. Both of those had multiple movies.

[Emily]
They did. Yeah, that’s number one…

[Thomas]
I like it.

[Shep]
Why wouldn’t you just go back immediately and buy a winning lottery ticket?

[Emily]
That’s a good question.

[Shep]
Why is that not the first thing people do when they have a time machine? Nobody won the billion dollar lottery…

[Emily]
Usually there’s some kind of stipulation that you find out that you can’t do that.

[Thomas]
If it’s not that it, every time you flip the switch, you jump back another three hours. It’s basically there’s now and there’s three hours in the past, and those are your options. So if you flip the switch, you’re three hours in the past and you’re just operating on three hours ago time until you flip the switch again, and then you jump back forward to the regular timeline. So you can’t go back three, six, nine. You just go back three or current time. Right. In that case, usually lotteries have a cut off point where you can’t buy a ticket after a certain amount of time prior to the drawing.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Yeah, it’s less than three hours, though.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I think it’s usually about an hour. But in our fictitious world, this fake lottery that doesn’t exist, maybe they have different rules.

[Emily]
Well, honestly, you have to have watched the Lotto drawing in order for you to do it with the fan that only goes back three hours. You’d have to watch the Lotto drawing and go back the three hours, get to a store, get the ticket…

[Shep]
This is all doable. You sound like you don’t want to be a millionaire!

[Thomas]
Who wants to be a millionaire?

[Emily]
Biff did it! I guess there was the one where Biff does it in Back to the Future part two. He goes back and bets and-

[Shep]
Yeah, it worked really successfully.

[Emily]
It did. And he had a great life, didn’t he? Till that meddling kids. All right, so pitch number two, because that was literally my only sentence for pitch number one.

[Shep]
I have so many more questions though. Could it just go backwards? Time goes in reverse when it’s going backwards and it goes forward when it’s going forward. And if you turn the ceiling fan off, time stops…

[Emily]
Oh, I didn’t even think about that.

[Shep]
Then you have control over it.

[Thomas]
That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s really interesting.

[Shep]
But I guess that’s like Primer where if you want to go back three days in time, you have to go- you have to live three days to go back three days. And you’re stuck back. There’s no skipping back to the present. You’re just in the past.

[Emily]
You just stuck back in the past.

[Thomas]
Yeah, well, you’d have to plan things out carefully. Like if you wanted to do the lottery thing, you’d have to plan. “Okay. I’m going to be in my apartment for three hours, sitting, doing nothing, and then after the drawing, I’ll flip the switch, sit in my apartment for however long and then go out, flip the switch again to restart the flow of time forward. Go out, buy the ticket.” So do you move? You move independently of time. Everything moves backward?

[Shep]
So does just the room move? The room goes through time. What if someone else enters that room while you’re going backwards in time?

[Thomas]
Well, I think the idea is that you reverse time, so it’s just like everything from that- the moment you flip the switch, it all just starts going back.

[Emily]
Right? It just goes back three hours.

[Thomas]
So if a glass falls and breaks, it comes together and flies up. Like time is literally moving backward.

[Shep]
Right. But if you are moving backward with it, then-

[Thomas]
But you move independently of time.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because you flipped the switch. Because you touched the switch.

[Thomas]
Right. You’re the genie’s master, essentially.

[Emily]
Yeah. You’ve now gone outside of the realm. So if somebody comes into the room while time is moving back, they go back out of the room because they’re part of that environment.

[Shep]
But they will see you.

[Thomas]
What if you were having a conversation with someone? See, that’s why I think you have to plan things very carefully.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Time travel’s hard.

[Emily]
Time travel is hard.

[Thomas]
So I think there’s definitely a scene there where they rewind through a moment that they were in where there was another person, and it causes a problem.

[Emily]
Like they’re in an argument and they get up and get a ladder out and go up and flip the switch and the person is like, “What the fuck are you doing?”

[Shep]
I think there’s a short film about a guy who has a way to move back in time and loses arguments and goes back in time to win the argument.

[Thomas]
I want to say it’s a Kids in the Hall sketch, but I could be wrong.

[Shep]
Oh, there’s a Saturday Night Live sketch where a date goes really badly and then he goes back in time. It’s a toilet stall.

[Emily]
Yeah, I know which one you’re talking about.

[Shep]
That’s different, though.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I think there’s a Kids in the Hall sketch where he has, like, a button and it jumps him back a certain amount of time, and so he tells off his boss and then hits the button, and then he has not told off his boss, but he gets the satisfaction of doing it without the repercussions. And then at some point, it goes wrong and the button doesn’t work anymore. And he’s “Uh oh!”

[Shep]
There’s also the short film where he hits the button, he goes back one minute in time. He’s trying to hit on a girl, and then it’s like, “You realize that it’s multi-worlds, right? What do you think happens to the you in that other world?” And it’s a bunch of him dying. So from her perspective, he just shows up and hits the button and then dies. Anyway. Okay, never mind. What was your next pitch? Sorry. Just like time travel stuff. You can’t start with that and not expect me to go off on a tangent.

[Emily]
During a heat wave, the ceiling fan breaks and a young woman spends an entire day trying to fix it to get some relief from the heat. It’s a day in the life kind of a story. She has to go to different stores to get the parts she needs. Maybe she blows the circuit and has to figure out how that all works. But I was thinking she lives in a big old house with a creepy basement that she had lived in with a partner before, and the partner kind of always took care of all this stuff. And she never had to go to the basement because she’s afraid of the basement. So now she has to get over that fear. And it’s just a day in the life of her trying to fix this fan and be a self-sufficient independent woman. And the final one is the ceiling fan in an office opens a magic portal and the protagonist must do something to save the new realm. They end up using pieces of the fan in some kind of steampunk device, and that will save the portal’s world but prevent the protagonist from returning to their world.

[Shep]
If you have gained entry to a magical realm, why would you want to go back to this boring realm of politics and taxes and pandemics?

[Emily]
This has always been my question for those movies, like A Kid in King Arthur’s Court or even Army of Darkness.

[Shep]
Look, I like you guys. You’re my friends, but you’re not magic.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
Yeah. No hard feelings there.

[Shep]
Right? I’ll miss you.

[Emily]
I wish you’d have come with me, but I can make new friends in my new world.

[Thomas]
Maybe you could magic us there.

[Emily]
Yeah, maybe.

[Shep]
If either you ever go to a magical realm, magic me there.

[Thomas]
Noted.

[Emily]
And those are my pitches.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
Those are my pitches, bitches.

[Thomas]
Shep, did you want to go?

[Shep]
Well, my only one was a time loop story like Groundhog Day, except you’re waking up, or the protagonist is waking up on the floor staring up at a ceiling fan. That’s the repeating moment that they keep coming back to. And you could change that. Like, maybe it resets later and they’re staring at, like, an industrial fan. And then when they go back, they’re now staring at the industrial fan and not the ceiling fan. That’s a surprise.

[Thomas]
So I think that segues pretty nicely into one of my ideas, which is a person is catatonic or in a coma or whatever, and they’re unresponsive, but they have their eyes open and above their bed is a ceiling fan. So they’re stuck staring up at the ceiling fan. I had that idea, the sort of similar idea of lying there looking up and seeing that. That was really all I came up with for that idea. As I said, I struggled. The other idea I had was a horror story where a possessed fan decapitates horny teenagers, or more likely, fans all over the world become possessed and start killing people.

[Shep]
I mean, probably would do well in Korea, but they believe fans will kill you in your sleep.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, right. Fan death.

[Shep]
Fan Death would be a good title.

[Emily]
This is like the tire that comes to life and causes mayhem.

[Thomas]
Like Rubber?

[Emily]
Rubber, yeah.

[Thomas]
The thing that I couldn’t figure out is, can the fans just, like, move around? At least with Rubber, it’s a tire; tires roll. No problems there.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
I don’t know how a ceiling fan-

[Emily]
It can lower, it can go up and down, it can swing.

[Thomas]
It could come down and cut your head off and go back up. But moving?

[Emily]
But you could just choose not to be in that room.

[Thomas]
Exactly. But if it’s like a campy horror film, why would they leave? I mean, clearly they should leave, but that never happens.

[Emily]
Right. But they can’t because-

[Thomas]
Because they’re horny. And-

[Emily]
It’s a blizzard out, there’s a hurricane outside.

[Thomas]
That would be funny, actually, if it was like a tornado or some wind.

[Emily]
Yeah. There’s some kind of thing that keeps- Blizzard, or tornado.

[Thomas]
“Well, the wind out there is going to kill us, or the wind in here is going to kill us.” I don’t particularly love my ideas. I like the time travel one the best. Or the magic portal. That’s pretty cool, too. I was trying to sort of think of something- My first thought, and I was never able to really work this into an idea, was like trying to use the ceiling fan in a way that’s not immediately obvious. And Emily, you kind of touch on that with your steampunk device idea. I had something similar. Like can we use the fan as, like, a propeller that drives a craft or something like that? Or can we attach things to the end and because it spins around, it does something like that? I had an idea about, like, little Lilliputian-type people who have a little society on the blades of the top of the ceiling fan or whatever. Maybe there’s a colony of dust bunnies that lives on top of the blades of the ceiling fan.

[Shep]
I like that.

[Thomas]
I don’t know what the story is.

[Shep]
That’s the premise: a society that lives on top of the fan.

[Thomas]
Because you never look up there.

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
You never look up there. And so, the different blades are different countries. They don’t like each other.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Maybe they don’t understand why the fan rotates sometimes and why it doesn’t. So they like, maybe in some of the countries it’s beneficial when it does. In other countries it’s beneficial when it’s not. And they all blame each other.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. When they throw their garbage off, it either goes to the right country or the left country, the clockwise country or the counterclockwise country, depending on the direction of the fan. So when it’s blowing one way, they’re mad at the upwind (or the downwind?) the country that’s dumping their garbage on them-

[Thomas]
Upwind. Yeah.

[Shep]
And doesn’t care about the country that’s downwind from them, that they’re dumping their garbage on. But the countries are disappearing one by one because someone’s cleaning the fan. It’s the end of the world.

[Thomas]
One fan blade at a time over the course of like a month.

[Shep]
Well, no, because they’re small. So to them, time is going really quickly. Oh, I just realized this is just the plot of Carpet People by Terry Pratchett. Never mind.

[Thomas]
No wonder you like the idea.

[Shep]
Yeah, I realized that it’s like, oh, wait, I read this book. It’s, someone’s vacuuming the carpet, and from their perspective, it’s getting closer and closer, very slowly.

[Thomas]
I think you could still have the idea of a tiny society living on the fan blades and-

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Some sort of a battle between them.

[Shep]
I like that as a premise.

[Thomas]
A pitch session where I just came up with something on the spot. All right, which of these ideas do we like the best?

[Shep]
How about a sentient ceiling fan that comes alive, and-

[Thomas]
Controls time?

[Emily]
And can transport you to a magical realm.

[Thomas]
Another thought that I sort of had, and again, I never really fleshed this out was like… This one was very visual for me. I had lots of images in my head, but never really like a full on idea. So one of the other images I had was as the fan spins, there’s sort of like a column of magic air. It’s almost like a vortex type of thing, but you can see it. And that is a way to teleport or a way to transport yourself to another land or something like that. It’s like a doorway to something, a passageway to something. Again, I never really could figure out what I liked about that, because the other thing, too, is if you go to a magical world, man, I hope they have ceiling fans in the magical world, because otherwise, how are you getting back? Or-

[Shep]
So I imagine. I’m picturing a ceiling fan in a kid’s bedroom. It’s like above their bed, maybe. And so when they’re going to bed or when they want to take a nap or whatever, they’ll turn on the fan and get on the bed and stare up at the fan and pretend in their mind that it’s a vortex and it pulls them into a magical world with the equivalent ceiling fan on the other side. So when they’re done, when it’s time to wake up or whatever, they turn on the magical ceiling fan in the kingdom and then come back to their world. But maybe they go and there’s a big war and there’s a battle and then they lose the castle and, “well, now we’re stuck in this magical world. How do we get back to the castle to get to that ceiling fan, to get home? And actually, we got to get there… There’s a time pressure because if the evil wizard figures out that he could travel to the real world, to my world from the ceiling fan…”

[Thomas]
This reminds me of the second season of Dirk Gently. Like a lot.

[Emily]
I was going to say it reminds me of a show my kids used to watch, but it involved a bucket of dinosaurs.

[Shep]
This could have a bucket of dinosaurs.

[Thomas]
We’ll save that one for when we do Bucket.

[Shep]
Yeah, the Bucket episode has everything.

[Emily]
Bucket’s gonna be a masterpiece.

[Thomas]
That’ll be the finale, we’re calling it. Now, if we do Bucket, you know the shows over.

[Shep]
It’s over.

[Emily]
It’s over.

[Shep]
That’s the peak. It’s all downhill.

[Emily]
We’ve reached our pinnacle.

[Thomas]
“So next week on Almost Plausible, we’re doing Bucket- Oh, shit!” Okay. There are sort of two that I feel like we’ve gotten the most traction or the most excited about. And that’s time travel and alternate world.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah, both of these are good.

[Thomas]
So I think it’s between those two.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
I’m always up for time travel. It doesn’t have to be this. I liked Emily’s pitch about time travel because ceiling fans are reversible, and I thought, “Well, that’s perfect. That fits right in with a time travel device.”

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
Go forward in time, go backward in time.

[Emily]
I’m down with some time travel. I’m not as well versed in the science of time travel as you, so I will make-

[Shep]
Well, the science is that time travel doesn’t exist.

[Emily]
Well, yeah, I know that.

[Shep]
Spoilers.

[Emily]
I know. In reality, there’s no time travel. It’s not a thing, but-

[Thomas]
Yeah, there is. We’re traveling through time right now.

[Shep]
1 second/second.

[Emily]
Forward motion only.

[Thomas]
No, I agree, though. Like, the way the fan works lends itself incredibly well to the premise. And I also love time travel movies.

[Emily]
Right. I’m always down for time travel.

[Shep]
All I can think of is Primer, though, because they could duplicate items, you know what I mean? So if you can travel back in time, so you take something out of the room with the ceiling fan and travel back in time in the room where you can get it again. So you’re carrying it with you and you could get a second one, the past version of that same object you could duplicate-

[Thomas]
So maybe there’s a repercussion for that.

[Shep]
Maybe. There wasn’t in Primer.

[Thomas]
Well, we’re not making that movie, aren’t we?

[Shep]
I’m just saying Primer had the most logical time travel device that I had seen in any movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And I don’t know why they didn’t just duplicate. They’re like trying to do stock trading and stuff. And it’s like you have a Replicator, you can make more of, put in a bar of gold, and now you have two bars of gold. And also it’s not traceable, unlike stocks. I’m saying the geniuses in Primer we’re dumb.

[Thomas]
It’s one of those things like you’re too smart, so you don’t think of the simple thing, you overcomplicate it. So are we going to do time travel then?

[Shep]
I think that I would actually say not to do time travel just because it’s so complex.

[Thomas]
That’s true.

[Shep]
It’s so hard to do right and well. I like the mechanic. I’m just saying I like the mechanic of the idea because ceiling fans are reversible and it’s a time machine that goes backward and forward. But I think the portal to another world might lend itself to a better pitch session or a better-

[Thomas]
Listening experience for our listeners? Yeah.

[Emily]
Right. I think time travel is going to end up with a lot of “No, you’re wrong, Emily.”

[Shep]
Well, time travel- so in a podcast, it’s hard to show the spreadsheet of all the timelines.

[Emily]
This is also true.

[Thomas]
Right. All right, well, let’s pursue then magical portal.

[Emily]
I like Shep’s idea of it being a kid because I know I put it like in an office, but-

[Thomas]
Yeah, I agree. But it could certainly be bedroom or- I think that’s the most natural.

[Emily]
Yeah, I make a kid’s bedroom fan. Sounds-

[Shep]
Plausible?

[Emily]
Sounds plausible.

[Thomas]
Almost.

[Shep]
Roll credits. So did they go through the… how does it work? What do they see? What does the audience member sitting in this movie see?

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
The transition from one world to another…

[Emily]
So the kids laying on the bed looking up the ceiling fan as it spins faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. Faster. And a bright light pops out and sucks them up.

[Shep]
But it’s not like a blender.

[Emily]
No.

[Shep]
Okay.

[Emily]
Doesn’t chop them into little bits and pieces. That’s Thomas’s movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s my horror movie.

[Shep]
So what do they see on the other side? Is there a fan on the other side? Does it transport the whole room or just them or just their mind and they leave their body behind?

[Thomas]
I like the idea that it transports their house or something. Or almost like in Zathura, where they’re playing the game in the whole house is like the spaceship.

[Shep]
The house is full of other people. So if you’re picturing this as like occurring in a child’s imagination.

[Thomas]
But not in but not in Jumanji, not in Zathura, there’s always an excuse to get rid of the parents for whatever reason.

[Emily]
What is the age of this child?

[Shep]
Yeah. What’s the target audience?

[Thomas]
This feels like a movie where the kid is ten to twelve years old, somewhere in that range. Feasibly, they could be home alone for a couple hours.

[Emily]
You’re thinking 90s. They can be home for a while. In today’s world, you gotta be 35 to be home alone.

[Thomas]
If you stay home, you can be a good deal younger. But yeah, if you’re going to walk down the sidewalk, forget it. The cops will be there.

[Shep]
Or it’s just their bedroom so they can open their door and they’re in this other world and all they have with them is whatever is in their bedroom.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I like that. Is the outside just bare like you see the studs and everything?

[Shep]
Yeah. Would a kid know that that’s what the inside of a wall looks like?

[Thomas]
Is this really happening or is it just their imagination?

[Shep]
I mean, obviously open to interpretation.

[Thomas]
That was kind of why I wanted to transport the whole house.

[Emily]
When it transports the room, does the room transport into another building so that when they open the door, it’s just another wall on the other side.

[Shep]
So it’s just a room in a new building.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
So it swaps that room? They trade places in reality? So if the parents come to the kids room, there’s like-

[Emily]
A dragon inside of it.

[Thomas]
A dungeon or whatever. Yeah.

[Shep]
Someone in the other world has made a device and they’re testing it. And because the fans are on at the same time, they could swap.

[Emily]
Yeah. That works.

[Thomas]
So is it something where like, the kid is able to control this and they go back and forth or is this, like you said, it’s a coincidence that happened one time and now all the magic supplies the guy needs are back in the realm and the kid has to figure out how to-

[Shep]
Well, again, what’s the target audience? If you’re aiming for ten to twelve, it’s Harry Potter rules where they’re the chosen one type of- They’re the ones controlling the swap and they’re not swapping with anyone else. They’re just moving the whole room. Nothing’s going to their house. No one ever notices that they’re not home because they don’t open the door.

[Thomas]
This is how we get our time travel. No time passes.

[Emily]
Because it’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. They’re in the realm for hours and hours and hours, days and days and days, and they come back and it’s been like two seconds.

[Shep]
Or a couple of hours long enough to take a nap and have dreamt about this.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right. Or it’d be like an overnight thing. Like it’s the next morning and their parents, they get back just in time and the parents come to wake them up for school. Or it’s Saturday morning. “You didn’t get up and watch cartoons this morning.”

[Shep]
That’s not a thing anymore.

[Thomas]
That’s not a thing kids do anymore? Never mind.

[Shep]
Kids today will never know.

[Emily]
Again, you’re thinking of the nineties. The world is different now.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
It’s sad.

[Shep]
Part of the reason I was thinking that just the room transfers is that if it’s a kid playing in their room, they’ll have access to all of their stuff.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Are they stuck in this other world or can they travel back and forth whenever they want?

[Thomas]
I liked your idea about… that they can travel back and forth whenever they want, but that on this particular trip, they get ousted. There’s like a wizard who knows, an evil wizard who knows about it.

[Emily]
And blockades it.

[Thomas]
Or like he knows there’s something. There’s something hinky going on in this castle or whatever.

[Shep]
It’s Last Action Hero where it’s the magic ticket and they can come out of the movie.

[Thomas]
Oh yeah.

[Shep]
So if it’s a child’s adventure…

[Shep]
Like Never Ending Story or fill in the blank here.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Then it’s just, they go into another… They flip the switch; they look at the ceiling fan. Is the ceiling fan an important enough element that this counts as being a ceiling fan movie?

[Thomas]
I mean, if it’s the MacGuffin, is that good enough?

[Shep]
I liked Emily’s suggestion that the ceiling fan breaks or something, and they are using the parts of it in the other world.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Okay. So the kid gets to the other world, and maybe where he ends up is not safe or somehow, like, his room gets invaded or something like that. And they’re, like, taking all this stuff out of his room and they take apart the ceiling fan, pieces get scattered across the land. And so it’s a story about him having to recollect all the parts.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Got to put the blades back, got to get this and that.

[Shep]
Standard children’s adventure movie. Go to each place, go to the five places, pick up the five pieces.

[Thomas]
And so doing somehow help liberate the fantasy realm from-

[Emily]
Well, yeah, because now it’s scattered to the five regions and they’re all warring factions because that’s how everything works. And they reunite each other and find the common goal and work together and become one country.

[Thomas]
So I don’t know how the fan gets enchanted in the first place, but somehow I think we can kind of combine everything here, all of the good ideas that we each had into this one thing. So it’s fantasy land. It’s time travel in that The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe rules, right. And there’s a visual whirlwind type of element. So the kid flips on the fan and it causes, like, a tornado, and the tornado is what takes him to the other world. It kind of takes his room and everything, and so everything’s, like, jumbled up in the tornado, and that’s how the fan breaks apart and the pieces all go flying off in different directions, and that’s how they end up in the five different realms or whatever. He ends up somewhere else. And then his Hoggle comes along and helps him or whatever.

[Shep]
His what?

[Thomas]
Hoggle from Labyrinth?

[Shep]
I haven’t seen Labyrinth in 45 years, so. So, this other world. Tell me about it.

[Thomas]
Is it typical medieval type of-

[Emily]
Yeah. It’s agrarian society with feudal-esque qualities-

[Thomas]
Generic Tolkien? Sort of. There’s elves and wizards and crap.

[Emily]
That might be too played out. Maybe-

[Thomas]
I mean, it is definitely very tired.

[Emily]
It is definitely very tired. Maybe it’s just another city. And at first he thinks he’s still in his world because it seems like a normal, ordinary city. But then there are wizards, so it’s still the modern era. But there’s magic now. And now he can see it and he realizes it’s not his homeworld. It’s a whole new place.

[Shep]
Why would you ever want to go home? If there’s magic?

[Emily]
Because he’s a child. That’s why he wants to go home. He misses his parents. He doesn’t have the-

[Shep]
You get new parents.

[Thomas]
I think maybe it’s Little Monsters rules. This is great, but staying here will kill me. Or there’ll be some repercussion for staying here.

[Shep]
Yeah, if he’s out of his world for too long, maybe, like, the fan pieces are getting brittle and falling apart because it’s not from this world. So all, like, his toys or whatever are breaking apart. He brought his baseball bat out of his room with him, and it just turns to sawdust, and that’s going to happen to him. If he doesn’t hurry home.

[Emily]
I think that works. Yeah. Have a consequence for staying.

[Shep]
He can’t stay no matter how fun it is.

[Emily]
Right?

[Thomas]
Right? It’s initially very attractive, but. So then he has to go around and collect the pieces?

[Emily]
Yup.

[Thomas]
How does the fan get enchanted in the first place?

[Emily]
Do we really need to know?

[Shep]
His mom could have painted something on the fan as just, you know how parents are.

[Emily]
Oh, she got a stencil from an Etsy shop and she thinks it’s just this pretty text, but it’s a spell.

[Shep]
From the kid’s perspective. They see it as a spell, for sure.

[Thomas]
Or maybe it’s the paint. There’s something special about the paint.

[Shep]
I think you guys are both overexplaining already. The mom just says it’s magical. So the kid perceives it as magical. The whole thing is taking place in their imagination while they’re taking a nap. And then you could do whatever you want. You don’t need to explain how it can travel to another world. Just that the mom said it can.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. She’s like, this is a special thing. It’ll help you sleep.

[Thomas]
You don’t feel like it was all a dream as a cop out?

[Shep]
No, especially if you establish it’s a dream from the very beginning. It’s not a cop out at the end.

[Thomas]
Okay. If you establish it. Sure.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Okay. So we see him entering the dream state.

[Shep]
Well, you see him lying in his bed.

[Thomas]
But if it’s not real, then the consequences of staying there are not real.

[Shep]
But the kid thinks that it’s real.

[Emily]
Then why not just make it real? Why have it be the “It was a dream all along.”

[Shep]
Because you don’t say it was a dream all day long. We all know that it was a dream because we’re adults watching this. The kids would see it as, oh, he went to a magical world. If he can go back and forth, this is getting back to it doesn’t just split apart when he goes into the other world. If he can go back and forth and he’s trying to tell his parents about it, and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Because to them, the kid has an imagination, but maybe they learned something from the other world. “Oh, they need help with some something. I made a friend over there, and they’re hungry. I’m going to get a tuna fish sandwich out of the fridge and take it back with me.”

[Thomas]
That is funny. I like the idea that he’s coming back for supplies and then taking them. But why wouldn’t he just bring something back if he’s trying to demonstrate to his parents?

[Shep]
Oh, no, he’s not trying to demonstrate it. He just tells them about it, like, “Oh, what are you doing?” “Oh, I made friends in the other world. I’m going to get a sandwich out of the fridge.”

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And then goes back to his room. And the parents are like, whatever. He’s not trying to prove- He’s got nothing to prove. He doesn’t care if they believe him or not. He just assumes that they do.

[Emily]
Okay. I can buy that one.

[Thomas]
I think now would be a good time for us to take a quick break. When we come back, we’ll figure out the rest of the story, I guess.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back. This is definitely proving to be as difficult as I thought it would be.

[Shep]
Yeah. What is the story? What do we have so far? Does it break when he goes into the other world or not? Does he go back and forth or not? Is it real or not? We haven’t decided on anything yet other than there’s a fan.

[Emily]
It’s a very choose your own adventure right now.

[Shep]
So, yeah, we’ll just make four of these movies and intercut them together on the DVD.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
So I like that he’s going back and forth. I like that it’s real.

[Shep]
I like that going back and forth, it’s Calvin and Hobbes. Hobbes is real to Calvin.

[Thomas]
I guess we don’t have to decide in that case. Whether it’s real or not.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
It’s every Christmas movie. Well, no, that’s not true, because every Christmas movie is real. It’s real to the kid and it’s imaginary to the parents and it’s ambiguous to the audience.

[Shep]
Yeah. So this is real to the kid and imaginary to the parents.

[Thomas]
That’s fine, I think. Right.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Although you could do Never Ending Story at the end, and he brought his friend back with him. Who’s a Goblin or whatever.

[Thomas]
Yeah. One of the thoughts that I had was when the fan all broke apart is that there’re five blades, typically on, like, your standard ceiling fan. Maybe not yours. Oh, okay, thumbs up. It does. Maybe one of the fan blades gets destroyed and so he thinks like, “Oh, no, I’m not going to be able to get back,” but it still works all right with four. Then he comes back and he’s telling his parents about the adventure and they’re like, “Okay.” And then you tilt up to the fan and there are only four blades on the fan. So it’s like it was real. But if we’re not doing it that way, then.

[Shep]
Yeah, or he uses something else to replace the fifth blade, like a blade, a wide sword that his friend uses. It’s like, “I’ll give up my blade so that you can go home to your family.”

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah. That’s cute. I like that. Because then the friend is sacrificing for his friend.

[Shep]
Right. It’s similar to what you had suggested at the beginning, where you could use the fan to save the realm or whatever, but then you’re stuck there. This is the opposite of that. The inverse of that, where their friend is giving up their sword so that the kid, the main character, can get back to the real world.

[Emily]
Can return home.

[Thomas]
I don’t know if having a sword spinning around is a great idea. Maybe it could be something other than a sword.

[Shep]
All right.

[Thomas]
A special shield or something that’s decorated similarly. Or maybe the mom just, like, paints this pattern on the fan blades, and when he gets to the other world, there’s some totem that is a fan blade vaguely shaped thing that has that same pattern painted on it. And that’s how the connection happened.

[Shep]
I like that because they could also be perceived as the kid is imagining that because of the pattern on the ceiling fan.

[Thomas]
Right. So there are five blades, but one of them is different. It’s a slightly different shape or it’s a different material or something like that.

[Emily]
I’m sold.

[Shep]
Yeah, that works. So what happens in the other world? How long are we into this? And we don’t have… Other than the basic framework, what does he do in the other world?

[Emily]
He makes a friend.

[Thomas]
He definitely needs to make a friend.

[Shep]
He makes a friend right away and, some magical creature or some something and, who is hungry, and he wants to help him so that’s when he goes back real quick.

[Thomas]
He’s running away, the friend is running away from some-

[Emily]
From the-

[Thomas]
There’s a big bad.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And these are like, the henchmen are chasing the friend for whatever reason. And that’s how he meets him. And the henchmen don’t take the guy. They ransack the kid’s room or something like that. And that’s how the fan-

[Shep]
They show up momentarily later. So you see just a friend at first. Where’s the room? Is it on its own? Is it a cabin in the woods now?

[Thomas]
I sort of imagined as just like in the middle of a field or something like that. But I guess it does… It should be in the woods, shouldn’t it? That would make more sense.

[Emily]
I think it should be hidden maybe like, Hobbit style in a rock in a mound or something.

[Shep]
So is it a room or is it a house?

[Emily]
In the other realm, it would be, let’s make it like a one room cabin-esque thing.

[Shep]
Okay, so his first trip there, he meets that person who’s fleeing, who’s looking for a place to hide and thinks this is an unoccupied, just a cabin in the woods because who lives out here in the woods? Nobody. And so tries to hide in the room, and that’s their meeting. And his stomach rumbles or whatever. And the kids like, “Oh, I’ll go and get you food” and goes back into to the other world and goes out of the room and comes back with a sandwich.

[Thomas]
And maybe the friend is there. He’s like, “You need to stay here. You stay in the room. I’ll go get the sandwich.”

[Shep]
Or goes with them. And the parents don’t look up from their newspaper and don’t even see whatever. Anyway, they go back to the room. They go back to the other world. And while they’re talking, that’s when the henchmen who’ve been following the tracks of this guy catch up to him. That’s when they break in and ransack the place and take the parts of the ceiling fan because they’re taking everything.

[Thomas]
Maybe they’re on horseback or whatever. And the friend hears them coming, and he’s like, “We got to go. We got to get out of here.” And they hide somewhere.

[Shep]
I want them to be shocked when the door bursts open and people run in, so they could be captured at that moment and escape. But they’re escaping without the fan, without their stuff. So escaping is not enough. So the friend in the other world is like, “Okay, we’re free.” And he’s like, “No no, we still need to get the other parts of this fan, because if they take it to the evil wizard and he reconstructs it, my parents are going to be so mad at me.”

[Thomas]
Going to be grounded forever.

[Shep]
Your Mr. Tumnus says, “Oh, I know who we can call,” or “I know who we can go see. We have this problem with evil wizard. We’re gonna go find the hero who’s at the castle.” And the hero will put his team together, and then they pursue the henchmen and maybe recover parts of the fan over time.

[Emily]
What’s he like?

[Shep]
I don’t know. Let’s find out.

[Emily]
Is he an integral part to the plot or is he just the shiny hero that helps them?

[Thomas]
Yeah. I sort of initially imagined him as being essentially useless. He’s all sizzle no steak type of guy. Or maybe this is below him. This is like, the friend, the Hoggle character is annoying. He’s like a well-known miscreant or whatever. And he’s like, “Man, get out of here.” He doesn’t take him seriously.

[Shep]
Like the parents earlier when the kid was in the other room. It’s a reflection of that.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
I was thinking the hero could be all sizzle no steak in the sense that he puts together the hero’s party and all of them are really helpful and the hero is just there to kind of get the team together and take all the credit.

[Thomas]
He’s basically the mascot.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
Yeah. I’m picturing the hero just being awful at fighting or whatever, but is, he’s the Scrappy-Doo of “I’m going to go out and chop these orcs that are three times my size” and they just got to stop him all the time and go-

[Emily]
Yeah. He’s going head long into the fray and they’re like, “No, no!”

[Thomas]
How does the one fan blade get destroyed.

[Shep]
At the end. It can’t be destroyed until the very end because that’s where you get the lowest low of “We did all of this to get all the pieces together, but in fighting the evil wizard at the end, they used it as a shield and it got destroyed. So all of that was for nothing.”

[Thomas]
The hero used it as a shield?

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
He grabbed the first thing not thinking about it.

[Thomas]
And it would be ineffective as a shield. It is ineffective as a shield. It’s immediately destroyed. He gets knocked over anyway.

[Shep]
That’s great because it’s awful.

[Thomas]
Where does this totem come from? Why is it a sacrifice? Who’s the one that sacrifices there? I mean, is this the friend?

[Emily]
Yeah, I think it’s got to be the friend.

[Shep]
Okay, the friend gives up something.

[Emily]
Yeah. The friend has to give up something that’s important to him, that’s essential to him.

[Shep]
Right. Like his shield that he’s been wearing on his back the whole time.

[Emily]
That he got from his father.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Something that’s important to him for sentimental reasons or like it’s a family heirloom.

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s a family heirloom.

[Thomas]
Is that something that we could establish at the beginning that he was told when he was given to him, like… Or maybe it wasn’t given to him by a family member. Maybe it was given to him by a mentor type of character who told him like, “Oh, someday you’ll give this on to someone important to you” or something like that. And FOMO is not the right word for it. But he’s got this like, “Well, I can’t give it to anybody until I’m sure.” He’s never sure. And it’s like sort of preoccupies him.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And so the kid is like, well, I can help you with that. Let’s go around and we can try to find the person that’s worthy. And then in the end, it’s the kid.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because the friend is always on his own. He’s an outcast. He’s a miscreant.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
So he’s never known a person, another individual that’s shown any interest in him. So they’re never worthy.

[Shep]
So imagine the friend as like a squire type. Right? He’s an aspiring hero. So this item that was given to him was given to him by some prior hero. Not the current hero that’s awful. But like the previous hero that was heroic.

[Thomas]
That everybody in the world knows.

[Shep]
Yes, everybody loved him. So the henchmen are after this relic. That’s why they’re chasing the squire and they trash the room and get everything.

[Thomas]
Yeah. They take the fan because it has the pattern

[Shep]
It has the pattern on it.

[Thomas]
And they’re the henchmen, they’re kind of idiots. They’re like, “Oh, look, there’s five of them. Even better. Forget the one.”

[Shep]
Right. “This is five. Five is more than one.”

[Thomas]
Yes. So they break off the fan blades and take them with them.

[Shep]
Yeah, that’s a good setup.

[Thomas]
And the wizard doesn’t do anything with them because they are literally useless to him.

[Shep]
Right?

[Emily]
They just have the pretty pattern on it.

[Thomas]
“That’s not at all what I was looking for, you idiots.”

[Shep]
This is classic wizard henchman banter.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So the movie is also the character arc for the squire becoming a hero or realizing that he has that heroism in him. More so than possibly who people are holding up as the hero.

[Thomas]
In his mind and maybe in everybody’s mind, it’s the Dumbo feather, right? This is the sacred object that will make him great. Everyone will know he’s a great hero because he has this thing and it’s just the thing that he needs to realize, that helps him realize his true potential.

[Shep]
So he’s giving it up because he doesn’t need it. So it’s not really a sacrifice.

[Emily]
But it will Mark him to the rest of that society that he’s the next great hero. And the kid says, “Don’t you need this in your new role?”

[Shep]
If he gives it up, he’s not seen as the squire going to be a hero. He’s just seen as some person.

[Emily]
Yeah, he’s just some dude.

[Shep]
But he still doesn’t need it because the heroism was inside him the whole time.

[Emily]
Right? And through this journey of gathering all these things and interacting with all these people, people are talking about him and they recognize him for him. Not because he has that object. He thinks it’s because he has the object that they recognize him. But he’s getting foretold about from one town to the next. Like, “Oh, this kid, this guy came in and he was with the hero, but that guy was a loser and this was really the brains of the operation.”

[Shep]
They’re talking about the hero and they mean the squire and the hero thinks they’re talking about him.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s good. I assume the friend who becomes the hero defeats the wizard.

[Shep]
Sure.

[Thomas]
So does he give the kid the shield before defeating the wizard or after?

[Shep]
Before. So he’s like, “I’m giving you this because you need that fifth blade and you can start the fan and go home. And I’m giving that to you because I’m going to go face off the wizard and I might not come back. So here, you take this first and get out of here. And I’m gonna go fight the bad guy.” Because it turns out he didn’t need it to defeat the wizard. How does he defeat the wizard?

[Emily]
How does he defeat the wizard?

[Shep]
Rock, paper, scissors.

[Emily]
No, it’s a ladle and the magic goes backwards to him.

[Shep]
Because he’s not just a hero, he’s also a chef. And also a rat. Did we not mention that earlier?

[Thomas]
He could be a rat. I mean…

[Shep]
He could be.

[Emily]
He could be anything.

[Thomas]
Entirely feasible.

[Shep]
That’s why he went to get cheese out of the refrigerator at the beginning.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Well, I like it.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It was a long path to a short story.

[Shep]
Yeah, I think we got there at the end, at the very end.

[Thomas]
But I think we got all the details, at least the basics. There may be a little lighter on details than we would normally-

[Emily]
We cobbled something together, though.

[Thomas]
This is an entertaining story to me. I think.

[Shep]
I wanted more scenes with the wizard and the henchmen.

[Emily]
Oh, Yeah.

[Thomas]
Oh, definitely. I mean, we have to get a sense of how bad the big bad is and what his, I mean, I guess certain details we left out, such as what’s his goal? Well, let us know what you think about this story. Do you think we were successful or do you think we missed the mark? You can get in touch with us via email or social media. Links to those can be found on our website: AlmostPlausible.com If you aren’t already subscribed to the show, then how are you listening to us right now? Anyway, go subscribe. You won’t regret it. Look for Almost Plausible wherever you regularly listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed it. Thank you to Emily and Shep for joining me. The three of us will be back next week with another episode of Almost Plausible.

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