Almost Plausible

Ep. 12

Lunch Box

19 April 2022

Runtime: 00:40:16

An aging child star tries to recapture his fame when props from the TV show that made him famous go up for auction. We meet a colorful cast of characters, all vying for a famous lunch box and screen time in this mockumentary-style story.

References

Corrections

Shep mentions reading the Darkman book before it was a movie, but it was an original screenplay. There is a 1990 novelization of the film, which must be what he read.

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
Is there a play that the brother and sister can both be in as rivals for some reason?

[Thomas]
Sure, probably.

[Shep]
I mean, that, you know, of that people would recognize if they’re watching it. And like, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because they’re on the surface trying to support each other’s acting, but they play the characters that hate each other.

[Emily]
I can only think of ones where it would be weird that they would be playing off of each other because Shakespeare and incest, so, that would be weird.

[Shep]
Othello.

[Emily]
Yeah. Othello, even Much Ado About Nothing. Taming of the Shrew- Taming of the Shrew would be a really good one.

[Shep]
Okay, it has to be Taming of the Shrew now.

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary ideas and turn them into stories. Joining me, as always, are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey guys.

[Thomas]
And F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
Lunch boxes have been around in some form or another for quite a long time, but for those of us who grew up in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, what most often comes to mind is a metal or plastic box with a handle and some kind of character art on the side. This week, we’re exploring the idea of a movie about a lunch box. Bringing an extra challenge is the fact that a lunch box is a type of container. So hopefully we don’t run into the same issues we did in the Paper Bag episode. We’ll just have to make a point to think outside the box on this one. Shep, I know you don’t love the puns, but try not to get too bento out of shape.

[Shep]
You have that one ready!

[Thomas]
I did. All right, with that in mind, let’s do lunch. Emily, what have you come up with for lunch box?

[Emily]
All right, so I have three for us. I have a lunch box that houses a small thermonuclear device that only one man can stop. It’s Speed. But with a lunch box that has no special requirements. So never mind, it’s not actually Speed.

[Shep]
So what if it’s like an eating contest? They got to keep eating the food out of lunch box, and if they stop eating, the bomb explodes.

[Thomas]
There’s, like a scale.

[Emily]
Oh, a scale. Yeah.

[Shep]
And then you just dump everything out very slowly.

[Emily]
Does it have lasers that catch every movement from food coming in and out of- hands coming in and out of the box?

[Shep]
Well, if it’s a laser, you just get one of those bobbing bird thingies.

[Thomas]
Oh, so it’s Dark Man all over again.

[Emily]
Oh my God, that movie I haven’t seen in so long.

[Shep]
Wow.

[Thomas]
I remember, like, two things about that movie, and that is one of them.

[Shep]
I read that book before it was a movie. That’s how old I am.

[Emily]
I didn’t even realize it was a book.

[Shep]
It’s not great.

[Thomas]
Neither was the movie.

[Shep]
So it’s a great adaptation.

[Emily]
All right, second pitch is blah blah blah, magic lunch box. Blah blah blah.

[Shep]
We always have to have a magic pitch, that’s required.

[Emily]
Yes. So that was my magic pitch for it. All right. And then the one I’m actually excited about, the one I really like is: child is very attached to his lunch box. It’s really old and beat up and just kind of almost looks like it’s falling apart. Maybe even the handle is slightly broken. But he carries it with him everywhere. He never actually has his lunch in it. He actually carries his lunch like in a paper sack or buys lunch at school. Whatever. He’s really secretive about it. He won’t let anybody see him open it. He, like, hides away whenever he does so no one knows what’s in it. And one day his bully takes it and loses it on a class field trip. And he’s devastated, distraught, cannot function. Is just like sobbing uncontrollably. So when his mom comes to pick him up from the field trip, it’s revealed that the lunch box was in fact his father’s. He found it going through his dad’s old stuff after his dad passed away and he leeched onto it. His mom’s not exactly sure what’s in the box either she thinks it’s some mementos from his childhood or his time with his dad. Whatever. And his teacher is just so moved by the story that she decides to go and retrieve it and then finds out what’s in the box.

[Shep]
What’s in the box?

[Thomas]
So is Gwen Paltrow’s head in the box?

[Emily]
Yes, that’s in fact what it is.

[Thomas]
Yes. Okay. All right. Just making sure. Yeah.

[Shep]
What a twist.

[Emily]
He is a serial killer and he has killed Gwyneth Paltrow.

[Thomas]
Not her character from the movie Seven. Literally just Gwenith Paltrow.

[Shep]
The actress.

[Emily]
Literally just Gwyneth Paltrow. He went to Goop headquarters.

[Thomas]
They’re like little breadcrumbs throughout the film of, like, fitness actress Gwenith Paltrow still missing. Authorities unsure…

[Emily and Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Just stuff in the background.

[Emily]
Exactly.

[Thomas]
All right, I’ll go next. So along the same lines of magic lunch box, I have lunch box as either a mimic or a bag of holding. That’s the whole idea.

[Shep]
I like a lunch box as a mimic because mimics eat people and people-

[Thomas]
Right. In Soviet Russia, lunch box eats you.

[Shep]
Yeah. And it’s kind of like a treasure chest. It lines up really well.

[Thomas]
My next idea, a scientist steals a MacGuffin from their lab by hiding it in their lunch box or perhaps disguising it as a lunch box. The lunch box gets shuffled around throughout the movie with various people chasing after it.

[Shep]
It’s a device that can take the form of other things. So he turned it into his lunch box to sneak it out. And then they find his lunch box in the lab, and then they’ve realized what he did. But because it can shape shift, it keeps changing into other things, making it- Oh now it’s no longer a lunch box. Never mind. I broke it.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
So we won’t do that. Another magic lunch box idea here. When you open it, it has your favorite food from when you were a kid inside, but it only works one time for each person.

[Emily]
It could be your last meal.

[Shep]
Your last meal as in you open it up and you eat whatever’s inside, and it’s like “Whenever I have that again, it might be my last meal.” Why would you ever have that again?

[Thomas]
It’s just poisoned food. You’re like, “Oh, boy, my favorite food from when I was a kid.” And you eat it, it’s literally your last meal.

[Emily]
Maybe it predicts your death. And when you open it, it’s your favorite meal from childhood. And when you get that, it’s your last meal cause you’re going to die any minute now.

[Shep]
So I’m sorry, is this one idea or two separate ideas? It’s your favorite dish from when you were a child. And also it kills you.

[Thomas]
Well, I think what she’s saying is that there’s some exterior force that’s about to kill you. And the lunch box is like, “Look, buddy, this sucks. So here, have this pizza that you can’t find anymore because it was a Mom and Pop pizza shop and they closed down 20 years ago, when Pop died, like you’re about to.”

[Shep]
Too soon.

[Thomas]
And my next idea, a lunch box goes up for auction that was either owned by someone famous or was used in a popular cult film. We see a colorful cast of characters come together and vie for ownership of the lunch box. Obviously a more character driven one.

[Emily]
I kind of like that one. I like the idea of the wackadoos you can invent to come to this auction.

[Shep]
Is this another mockumentary style…?

[Thomas]
I was just going to say it has a real Christopher Guest feeling to it in my head.

[Thomas]
What is this idea? I don’t remember writing this idea.

[Emily]
The lunch box did it for you.

[Thomas]
Oh, right. The protagonist’s estranged father is dying and wants them to come and spend a weekend at their mansion to reconcile. The main character reluctantly goes and the half siblings clearly view them as a threat and don’t want them there. Despite the unwelcoming conditions and initially hostile interactions with their father, the weekend ends up being cathartic. As the main character is waiting at the airport to fly home, they get a call that the father has died, so they stay and attend the funeral. At the reading of the will, the father leaves the main character a lunch box which was established earlier in the film to have significant meaning. The main character is surprised that he kept it all those years and the gesture proves a meaningful one,

[Emily]
And it also contains a million dollars’ worth of rubies.

[Thomas]
Right. Something like that. They open it up in their favorite pizza from this pizza place that’s no longer- Oh, my God! My final idea: a lunch box whose picture on the outside changes to tell the future. So a kid is in a vintage or antique shop. Maybe he’s there with a parent because otherwise, why would there be a kid in an antique shop? And they see a lunch box with their face on it, so they buy it. Later, the image on the lunch box has changed to something else, which eventually comes to pass. This continues to happen and helps to drive the story.

[Shep]
How does the person working in the vintage antique store not realize that the lunch box has changed its picture? How do they even recognize that’s the thing that they have for sale? Also, don’t they recognize that it’s the picture of the child who’s purchasing it? And isn’t that weird?

[Thomas]
Maybe it’s the antique shop owners’ teenage kid who just couldn’t care less.

[Emily]
I could see that.

[Shep]
Or it’s an antique store in a Stephen King novel, the seller is the devil.

[Thomas]
Right. Or it could be the sort of thing where the kid goes to their parent and says, “Hey, can we buy this lunch box?” And parent is like, “Yeah, all right, sure, whatever.” And so the shop owner doesn’t actually see the image on there or something like that. I don’t know. I don’t know. Those are all my ideas, though. Shep, what do you have?

[Shep]
I had a similar one, which is a lunch box discovered in an archaeological dig where the surrounding rock is millions of years old. But the embossed metal lunch box appears to depict characters from a show or movie, which has its title on it in English. But that show or movie does not yet exist. It has to be a metal lunch box. Otherwise, how would it last for millions of years? The paint would have worn off. So it has to be embossed.

[Thomas]
If the show doesn’t exist, how does anybody know…? I mean, obviously, it would be like, “What is this modern invention doing in million-year-old strata.” But apart from that, what would the significance of this show be if it doesn’t exist yet?

[Shep]
Well, if it already existed. I mean, what are the odds that it’s existed for millions of years and is found after whatever show has aired? The next one. My magical pitch is a lunch box that always seems to be with you or nearby. That’s it. That’s the entire pitch. Just a lunch box that always seems to be around.

[Thomas]
That would be interesting because you could take the lunch box into a place, put something in it that shouldn’t be taken out of that place-

[Shep]
And then just leave.

[Thomas]
And then leave without the lunch box. And it’ll magic its way back to wherever you are.

[Emily]
Are we doing a heist with a lunch box?

[Shep]
So it seems to me that there are two types of lunch box stories, stories that are about something in the lunch box or some stories that are about the lunch box itself. Like the briefcase from Pulp Fiction has something in it that we never discover. It’s just a MacGuffin. It’s something inside the briefcase. But it’s not really about the briefcase.

[Thomas]
Right. I mean, it’s the same problem that we were running into with paper bag. Right? It’s the item as a container. And so the stories were all focused on what was in the container and not the container itself.

[Shep]
Yeah. So here are my pitches for things inside lunch boxes.

[Thomas]
Okay?

[Shep]
Lunch box is used as an emergency container for something like an organ transplant or a radioactive material or something like that where it’s another wacky chase the lunch box because it has to get to where it’s going in a finite amount of time. The clock is ticking. The heart is ticking.

[Thomas]
Is this like that movie Twenty Bucks, where we just follow a lunch box around LA as all these different people have it in their possession?

[Shep]
I don’t know. Is that about a $20 bill?

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
That sounds like a different pitch. That sounds like another Sisterhood of the Traveling Lunch Box. My last one was: lunch box, used as a time capsule by kids. They put stuff in it and then they bury it under a tree. Wait, that’s Penny. Go listen to our Penny episode.

[Emily]
It is really good.

[Shep]
It’s really good.

[Thomas]
It is.

[Shep]
I might be biased in my opinion.

[Thomas]
It’s because you love time travel.

[Shep]
I do!

[Emily]
So what do we like?

[Thomas]
Yeah. What do we like?

[Shep]
There’s a lot here. This is a lot of pitches.

[Thomas]
I’m surprised how many we have for lunch box.

[Shep]
How many different ones.

[Emily]
We were very creative this week.

[Thomas]
I do like the prospect of a magical heist film.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s always fun. I like the lunch box auction.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that could be a lot of fun. It might be fun doing something like that. Coming up with all the characters not sure what the story is, what the arc is, but that’s what we’re here for, right? Figure that out.

[Emily]
I also really like the archaeological big one of discovering a lunch box for a show that doesn’t exist. And what are the implications of that? Is it as old as the rock that’s around it? Has it been there this whole time? Did aliens leave it?

[Shep]
It’s an Alf lunch box.

[Thomas]
I mean, it could be interesting if the show is currently in production or if it’s a screenplay, a teleplay somebody has written, they find this lunch box and the person’s like, “Wait, that’s my show.”

[Emily]
Yeah, I kind of like that.

[Shep]
I see as a skeptic, I would look at that and go, “Oh, clearly they’ve rigged this somehow. They’re trying to get their script read.”

[Thomas]
It’s viral marketing.

[Shep]
Yeah, if it works, it only works once. So let’s save that for when we write a script. I like the auction one because I want to come up with the colorful cast of characters.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I think the closest we’ve gotten to that is the Toilet Brush episode where we had a bunch of characters, but it really wasn’t about them so much. Whereas that’s kind of the point of this one is having the wacky characters. Is that what we’re liking the best? Before we go too far down that path, we should come up with what is the story arc?

[Shep]
Okay, so there’s a collectible lunch box, right? It’s, some rich guy has died and one of his heirs is auctioning off his belongings, one of which is this rare collectible lunch box. But one of the other siblings thinks that it should have gone to them. It shouldn’t have been auctioned. It shouldn’t have gone to the one who’s selling off their father’s belongings. It should stay in the family. It’s a lunch box for maybe the dad was an actor and it’s a lunch box for a movie that he was in or something like that. Or the son is an actor and it’s a lunch box that he was in, but his dad bought the lunch box because he was part of his son. But then when he died, the eldest sibling decided to sell off the belongings, including the lunch box that is of the movie that the other son was in. And then you could have fans of that movie who want to buy this lunch box. Oh, it was specially made. The dad had it made. So it’s one of a kind. So something wanted by the son and also fans of whatever movie that it was.

[Thomas]
It could also be just sort of a Rosebud situation where here’s this famous prop from this beloved TV show or movie. There was only ever the one. And so at the end of the production, they took it with them and now it’s up for auction.

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. They took it with them. They basically stole it from the set. So now that it’s famous and it’s worth all this money, it’s going up for auction. The studio is coming and they’re like, “Hey, that doesn’t belong to you at all. That’s ours.” They’re getting the police involved. They’re getting insurance investigators involved.

[Thomas]
So Studio Lawyer would be a character?

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s a good one. I was thinking if it was like the kid was a star, it would be one of his super fans who stalks him. Who has been stalking him his whole life. Would be one of the characters, too. Just wants a little piece of him.

[Thomas]
So is the heir who’s running the auction or the sibling, the star, the Child Star?

[Emily]
I think the sibling is the Child Star. I think the one running the auction has no stake in it. That’s why he’s like other than “This will bring in a good amount of money,” because maybe dad died broke or something.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s a good idea.

[Shep]
Make one of the siblings a girl. So it’s not just two boys. I don’t care which.

[Emily]
The Older Sister is selling the stuff because dad died broke. She wants to pay off some debts.

[Thomas]
Right. She’s very practical.

[Emily]
And the kid was a Hollywood kid and the golden boy.

[Thomas]
Yeah. And she’s sort of lowkey jealous. And so she’s trying to get rid of this fucking thing that she’s had to look at her whole life. It’s been like in a little display case in the dad’s entryway or something. And every time she comes over, she’s like, “This fucking thing.”

[Shep]
Oh, yeah.

[Thomas]
Everybody loved him. Nobody cared about her. She was ignored.

[Emily]
And she’s the responsible, career driven woman.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
She’s the responsible one because the mom was out of the picture. She basically had to raise the siblings herself. She also had wanted to be an actor. Maybe she did some stage work when she was younger, but when she was older and the mom was out of the picture, instead of working on that, she had to stay home, take care of the family, and she didn’t get her opportunity. And basically her younger sibling stole her thunder, stole her limelight as younger siblings do.

[Thomas]
This isn’t more trauma for you, is it, Shep? So is the end of her character arc that she has joined a local community theater?

[Shep]
No, I think that she’s actually a terrible actress. In her mind she had this opportunity, but she just couldn’t act.

[Emily]
She just wasn’t actually as good as she thought she was.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Does she realize that by the end of the film?

[Shep]
Maybe.

[Thomas]
Well, I guess we can cross that bridge later. I’ve been taking notes on our characters, so I have: there’s the heir who’s running the auction, which is The Sister (I’ll put older as well, so we know), the sibling who is a Child Star (a younger brother), the Studio Lawyer. I was thinking we should have a couple that’s like a Cosplay Couple that’s way too into this show. Their whole life is this show, and they’re, like, in their late 30s or something, don’t have kids. They have, like, cats or something.

[Shep]
Cats that are all named after characters on the show.

[Thomas]
Yeah, totally. The Child Star Superfan who is, like, kind of stalking them.

[Emily]
Yeah. He’s not like a dangerous stalker. Still creepy, though.

[Thomas]
Right, right. Does the auction actually happen, or does the studio shut it down?

[Shep]
I think it’s got to actually happen because then you get who gets the lunch box, and then what happens there? If the Superfan gets it, she’ll give it to the guy. If he goes on a date with her.

[Thomas]
What’s everybody’s reason for wanting the lunch box? Obviously, the Child Star wants it because it represents… What’s his deal? I mean, does he want it because he’s washed up now and this represents the pinnacle of his career? Or is it just because it’s been in the family and he thinks it should stay in the family, at least through his lifetime?

[Shep]
I think that he says it’s one, but it’s actually the other.

[Thomas]
Does he or somebody else want to donate it to a film history museum?

[Emily]
Yeah. Maybe there’s like a Film Archives character there to pick it up.

[Shep]
Or maybe there’s a third sibling that wants to-

[Emily]
Yeah. There could be a third sibling that wants to donate it.

[Thomas]
Obviously the Lawyer wants to have it go back to the studio because they want, I don’t know.

[Emily]
Well, because they can use it in their-

[Thomas]
It’s like a prestige piece for them. Yeah.

[Emily]
Right. They get to recover it. It’s another stop on the studio tour.

[Thomas]
Right. Exactly. The Cosplay Couple wants it because it’s their whole life. Like, this is the Holy Grail of their collection.

[Emily]
It’s going to complete their costume. And they’re so going to win at the next convention.

[Thomas]
They literally couldn’t lose. It would be absurd to think that they would lose at the convention if they have the actual real lunch box. Nobody could vote against that.

[Shep]
I think that’s great because the characters that they’re playing are much younger. And so you have much younger people cosplaying as those characters at the conventions with dummied up lunch boxes or whatever. Maybe the character always carries it in the show.

[Thomas]
So the Child Star Superfan wants it-

[Emily]
To have a piece of him.

[Thomas]
Yeah, initially, because it’s one of the most recognized representations of that character that she’s obsessed with or he or whatever, and then maybe realizes at some point that if they win, they could use it as a bargaining chip.

[Emily]
Yeah. Maybe they overhear the Star arguing with the Older Sibling about “I should keep it. It’s my legacy. It stays with me. It’s who I am. You have nothing to do with this.” And she overhears it and is like-

[Shep]
I think that would not be a secret conversation. I think that would have been a very public… You don’t need to overhear it if they’re shouting at each other during the auction.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And of course, the Former Child Star can’t afford to win it because he hasn’t worked in years.

[Thomas]
Right. Usually, I think with these bigger auctions of, like a preview day where you come and you view all the different lots. So maybe that’s where that argument happens, and maybe that’s even where the quote unquote documentary picks up is, it’s the day before the auction or maybe it’s it like it starts a few days before the auction and we’re sort of starting to meet the characters, obviously. Starting with the heirs.

[Emily]
Yeah. You can start out with the heirs, getting everything kind of set together, getting all the lots out. Maybe the lunch box isn’t originally the focus of the documentary. It’s just this auction of this guy’s stuff. And then the lunch box just slowly becomes as they realize that’s the hot piece.

[Thomas]
Sure. The dad is some old timey hotshot producer, and so the documentary is about him initially, and maybe it’s supposed to be a retrospective of his life. And so they’re starting out with talking to the family members. And so that’s how we get an explanation to the audience of what the show was and how popular it was. Sort of the family members talking about “What sort of a role did this show play in our lives?” And “No one expected it to be as big as it ended up being.”

[Shep]
Throwing some cameos of famous people talking about having watched that show as a child. And “That’s what got me excited to be an actor.”

[Emily]
How it inspired them.

[Shep]
Yeah, exactly.

[Thomas]
Some older actors talking about guesting on the show and how it really boosted their career once they were the neighbor who was in like three episodes ever, but they built the whole career on that. And then. Yeah, so the auction is an early element as far as the documentarians know. So it just sort of naturally pivots as the fracas around the lunch box comes to light.

[Emily]
Yeah. Because there’s all sorts of cool things there. There’s pictures, scripts, whatever. There’s all sorts of really cool memorabilia that anybody would be excited about. But everyone is like, “It’s the lunch box.”

[Thomas]
Is there a Russian oligarch?

[Shep]
Too soon.

[Thomas]
I do like the idea of foreign investors or something.

[Emily]
What if they don’t know that it was actually stolen yet? It’s just that was always the rumor. Nobody knew what happened to it. And then they find it in the lot of stuff.

[Thomas]
Oh, it’s like in a trunk. They didn’t even know the dad had it?

[Shep]
Oh, it wasn’t stolen because he was a kid when they were filming it. Someone gave it to him, one of the producers or something. So he didn’t steal it. But that Studio Lawyer is claiming he did. But he needs evidence. He needs proof that someone gifted it to him. Not that it would matter because his father was in possession of it. Even if he claimed “It wasn’t really Dad’s, it was still mine. He was just holding on to it because I left it at home when I grew up and moved to wherever.”

[Emily]
Yeah. But I think the actor is still trying to make it. He’s still trying to be that.

[Thomas]
Or is he just coasting on his fame and the royalty checks?

[Shep]
Oh, no. The Child Star, the Former Child Star and the Studio Lawyer are in it together. They’re trying to revitalize his career. They want to make a reboot of this show with him as the parent-

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
With a new cast of children. And they’re like, “Well, how can we drum up some viral marketing for this? We’ll have a big fracas over the missing lunch box.”

[Emily]
All right.

[Shep]
That’s the twist reveal later, though.

[Thomas]
So is this like a viral campaign that FuckJerry came up with for Netflix or something?

[Shep]
That who?

[Thomas]
FuckJerry. They’re a marketing firm or something like that.

[Emily]
Do we need them to do our marketing?

[Thomas]
I don’t know if they’re even still relevant. I have no idea. I heard about them once a few years back. And were they part of the Fyre Festival? I don’t remember.

[Emily]
Yeah. Let’s get those people to market us. I mean, it was good marketing.

[Shep]
The marketing was the best part.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Thomas]
Right. The marketing was the most successful part. All right, well, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, so we’re going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we’ll figure out the rest of our story for lunch box.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back from break. We have a pretty good cast of characters so far, and I’m sure we’re going to come up with some other ones. Do we have any others in mind right now before we move on?

[Shep]
I have one. Because you were talking about foreign investors earlier and you had previously talked about Russian oligarch, and I thought, “Oh, but they’d have their funds frozen at the last minute, so they couldn’t actually win the auction.” And I was like, well, let’s not do that. Let’s do a rich cryptocurrency investor who has tons of money and then tries to buy this just because they’re buying all kinds of stuff, showing off their money. But then their crypto, whatever it is, crashes during the auction after they’ve bid.

[Thomas]
Right, they’ve got the high bid, and they’re like, “Uh uh, uh uh, no no no.”

[Emily]
I like that idea.

[Thomas]
Are we going to get Eugene Levy to be the auctioneer?

[Shep]
Oh, well, yes.

[Emily]
Yes.

[Shep]
I didn’t know that was an option, but-

[Thomas]
I wonder if we know anyone who knows Eugene Levy to get this idea in front of him. So we still haven’t quite figured out, what- So it gets auctioned. I think we decided. Right. It does sell.

[Shep]
Yes,

[Thomas]
Who gets it?

[Shep]
The Superfan.

[Emily]
I think the Superfan should get it.

[Thomas]
Okay. How is it that the Superfan is able to afford it over everybody else? Does everybody, for some reason, have to retract their bid?

[Shep]
Oh, yeah. So we already have the one.

[Thomas]
It’s up at, like, $100 million. And the Couple and the Superfan are just like, “Forget it.” But then that crypto crashes mid auction, so he has to take it back. So now it’s down to, like, a million dollars or whatever. And it keeps going back, and more and more people keep not getting it for whatever reason.

[Shep]
Sorry, I’m just picturing the look on the Superfan’s face when they realize they have the winning bid because everyone else is out. Then the camera pans over to the guy, the Former Child Actor. So why does the Cosplay Couple have to-

[Thomas]
Maybe one of their cats needs emergency surgery or something.

[Shep]
Have cat leukemia. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah. They get a call from the cat sitter.

[Emily]
I was going to say they get a call from the cat sitter there that couple in Best in Show.

[Thomas]
So the Studio Lawyer retracts his bid because he never actually wanted it in the first place.

[Shep]
The Studio Lawyer didn’t want it sold. They didn’t want it to be auctioned. They wanted to take it back by claiming that it never belonged-

[Thomas]
So he’s just at the auction, but he’s not bidding.

[Shep]
Yeah, he’s there before the auction, trying to get it before the auction, before that even happens.

[Thomas]
I think the auction itself is the climax. Right. So we need everybody there. So he’s just there watching the proceedings.

[Shep]
Well, I think if you have it so that he and the Former Child Actor were in cahoots to drum up a revival of the show, then he’s still there because he’s there with the Former Child Actor because they’re partners.

[Thomas]
Has that been revealed yet, or is that something that gets revealed as part of the denouement?

[Shep]
No, that’s got to be revealed first so they can have the auction where he is no longer interfering. Like, maybe he gets a judge to have an injunction. Like, “This can’t be auctioned.” That’s why it’s the only item left. Everything else has been auctioned off. And now it’s just an auction for this one thing.

[Thomas]
It could be that, or it could just be this is the pride of the auction. And so we sort of skip the first hour of the auction and we just see this part. Maybe there’s somebody who’s there who they just spend all their money on other stuff. Maybe that’s what the Cosplay Couple does. Oh, no, they have to actually have a bid, though. It’s like the person who you thought was going to be after the Crypto Guy. The next most obvious person is like, “Actually, I don’t have any more money I spent at all.”

[Shep]
Maybe the third sibling has someone from the museum that is bidding on stuff with them. But because everything belongs in a museum, by the time it gets to the lunch box, they’re out of money.

[Emily]
That would work.

[Thomas]
Everybody looks over and they’re just like, “Sorry.”

[Emily]
Yeah. Because they’ve been winning consistently all of the other ones. And I was thinking the Studio Lawyer would reveal that the producers backed out and there’s not going to be a revival after all.

[Thomas]
The whole thing backfired. There was all this negative press as a result of the studio suing and getting the injunction.

[Shep]
Oh, no.

[Thomas]
And so the investors pulled out because of the bad press.

[Shep]
That’s perfect.

[Thomas]
And so now is it the Child Actor who is in the community theater and talking about really getting back to their roots and trying to spin it like, “No, this is a good thing.”

[Shep]
Is there a play that the brother and sister can both be in as rivals for some reason?

[Thomas]
Sure, probably.

[Shep]
I mean, that, you know, of that people would recognize if they’re watching it. And like, “Oh, that makes sense.” Because they’re on the surface trying to support each other’s acting, but they play the characters that hate each other.

[Emily]
I can only think of ones where it would be weird that they would be playing off of each other because Shakespeare and incest, so, that would be weird.

[Shep]
Othello.

[Emily]
Yeah. Othello, even Much Ado About Nothing. Taming of the Shrew- Taming of the Shrew would be a really good one.

[Shep]
Okay, it has to be Taming of the Shrew now. I just keep picturing it.

[Thomas]
Oh, man.

[Shep]
Because they’re trying to explain why it’s not weird because they’re acting.

[Thomas]
That’s fantastic.

[Shep]
That’s great. So at the beginning, you have the third sibling talk about “They were real close when we were younger, so it’s hard to see them at odds as an adult.” And then at the end, they’re real close.

[Emily]
Yeah. You see them almost kissing the rehearsal but it gets cut because the director is uncomfortable and he’s like “I can’t, stop. No.”

[Thomas]
Is the director, the third sibling who’s just like, “Oh, my God.” So I feel like we’ve got a pretty solid start, and I feel like we know how the whole thing ends. What happens in the middle? We have the injunction.

[Shep]
We have the injunction. You could throw in a court case where the Former Child Actor is trying to prove that he’d received it as a gift, but the person he claims gave it to him has since died or whatever, and the Studio Lawyer is arguing against it. Maybe there’s a photograph of the prop guy handing it to them. Last day, on set, there’s a signed photo of the two of them.

[Thomas]
Maybe he’s just holding it in the photo and he’s like, “Here, this is the moment where the prop guy gave me the thing. See, I’m holding it there.” And they’re like, “Well, you could also just be posing with it for this photo. That’s not evidence that he gave it to you to keep.”

[Shep]
Oh, I love it if the prop guy is still alive. They just thought he died because he was a chain smoker and it’s been 40 years.

[Thomas]
Everyone just assumed he was dead. No one even bothered to look. He’s just like super old.

[Shep]
Yeah. Yep. That’s great.

[Thomas]
We need to learn, too. We need to see basically everybody doing stuff. So what about the Cosplay Couple? What do they do in the middle of the movie? What is their job? Do they run like a fan site? They have a podcast, of course.

[Emily]
Of course they have a podcast. They do run a fan site.

[Thomas]
Do they organize a convention or volunteer at a convention or something like that?

[Emily]
They don’t organize it because they’re competitive assholes. So they have to be able to participate in any kind of competition.

[Thomas]
What happens to them at the end? Are they still together? Do they win second place in some costume contest? And they’re really bitter because it’s like a four year old that wins or something.

[Emily]
Yeah, they have to lose to a child.

[Thomas and Shep]
Yeah.

[Shep]
An age-appropriate person.

[Emily and Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Yeah. And they think it’s because they didn’t get the lunch box. That’s the only reason that they could have lost.

[Emily]
Do they just switch fandoms after? Do they get a bad taste of their mouth from this and they’re like, “You know what? Screw this. We’re going to-“

[Shep]
No, next year they’re going to win it.

[Emily]
How?

[Shep]
This is their year.

[Emily]
Every year is their year.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
They’re just completely deluded.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
“I heard that one of the wigs is going to go up for auction in Pasadena.”

[Thomas]
This is like a year later, and they’re like a couple of the items from the original auction are going up again already.

[Shep]
The museum burned down, so a lot of things were lost.

[Thomas]
What happened to their cat? Did their cat die?

[Shep]
Oh yeah, the cat died. They have a new cat.

[Emily]
Are they special cats? Are they just any kind of cat? Are we talking like hairless?

[Shep]
No, it’s a cat that looks like the cat that was on the show.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
And the new cat is even better because he has the mark on his paw and their old cat didn’t.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Shep]
So this is their year.

[Emily]
They started training this one earlier so he’s responding to the commands much better. And you just see the cat flop over.

[Thomas]
Oh, man. I can see this whole thing in my head. I really want to see this movie. What about the third sibling? What are they up to at the end? Are they the most normal person of the three? And so they’re just back at their job?

[Shep]
Yeah. They’re out of this entirely. They have no comment.

[Thomas]
Yeah. So it’s like a walking shot. They’re leaving their work, heading to their car, and they’re like, “Please, guys, I don’t want to be in this anymore. Why are you still filming?”

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Because they were originally in it to promote the museum, which has since burned down, so they have no more reason to be in it.

[Emily]
Why did the museum burn down?

[Shep]
Well, obviously the Superfan burned it down.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
So what happened was Superfan wins the auction and gets the lunch box. And the Former Child Actor still wants the lunch box because it started as a scam to drum up whatever, and then that didn’t pan out. And now all they have is their nostalgia. So they want that lunch box for real now. And so they agree to go out with the Superfan, and it doesn’t go well. The Superfan doesn’t like them in real life because they haven’t done anything really, because they keep talking to them as if they were the kid, they played a child genius or whatever. And he’s not a genius in real life. “Well, you do all that stuff as a kid.” He’s like, “No, we had writers and I just memorized the script. It’s not realistic to expect someone to actually know all this stuff.” And so she gets over her fandom. She gives him the lunch box because she doesn’t care. But then she’s so angry at the show for ruining her life, basically, with a fantasy. She burns down the museum. We don’t know for sure, but we know the museum burned down and she disappeared.

[Emily]
She just disappears so we don’t see her again. They were unable to locate.

[Shep]
Or she’s in prison for arson. So the last interview with her is behind the glass window.

[Thomas]
Maybe she insisted on their date being at the museum, at the exhibit.

[Shep]
Oh because they had other props.

[Thomas]
Right. And so she’s like, “Let’s go see those other props.” And then she freaks out and pushes some displays over and light something on fire. And you see, like, security camera footage of it at like twelve frame per second. Jerky.

[Shep]
It burned real fast.

[Thomas]
Those old props and stuff, they’re all made out of really flammable materials or asbestos. And unfortunately, these ones were not made out of asbestos.

[Shep]
That’s why the prop guy is still alive this time. All the other prop guys died.

[Thomas]
Yeah, this was the first show that didn’t use asbestos. What is the Superfan doing during the middle of the movie? Are they just always lurking around in the background of shots and stuff?

[Emily]
You want to see her do a lot of weird things like sniff objects in the house that aren’t normal.

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah. Did she break into his house at some point?

[Shep]
Oh, she has a restraining order against her. She has to stay 50ft away from him, so she’s always in shot where he is, 50ft away. She’s got like a laser distance measure. When she first sees him, and he’s like, “Oh, it’s (whatever her name is).” And she’s like, “You remember me?” He’s like, “I have a restraining order against you.”

[Thomas]
“You must have lots of restraining orders, though.” “No, just you.” Is there anybody else we need to figure out the middle of the movie for?

[Shep]
I think we got it. They’re just going over the list here. We have the interview with the Older Sister about being the mother to the family and missing her shot. And bills are rough. The dad had a lot of debt. We have the Child Star throughout the whole thing. We have the Cosplay Couple.

[Thomas]
I’m trying to think of other roadblocks to put in the way of all of these characters. So the injunction works initially. They stopped the lunch box from being sold. So the rest of the auction happens. Everything else sells. This is like six months or a year later. And I think it could be funny if you have that jump in time twice in the movie. So we sort of see what’s changed in people’s lives.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
We could start with foreshadowing a couple of cats being sick in that first one, and they jump forward and it’s like, “Oh, well, Mr. Biggles isn’t doing as well. He’s still really sick and his leukemia is more advanced now.”

[Shep]
“But he’s at the nurse right now. He’s at a special spa for cats.”

[Thomas]
And then he has to be rushed to an emergency vet now that their bills are going to be stacking up. So that’s why they have to pull out.

[Shep]
Yeah. They were paying a lot for the cat to go to the special spa, the healing spa, because the next convention is coming up and he needs to be better in time for the convention.

[Emily]
Because he’s a key piece of that costume.

[Shep]
Part of the costume.

[Emily]
He and the lunch box are what’s going to make it.

[Shep]
Yeah. He holds the lunch box. She holds the cat. She plays the neighbor that had the cat.

[Thomas]
There’s a little girl character from the TV show who played opposite our Child Star. And so she shows up at some point and maybe she’s really successful. She hasn’t gone off the deep end as an actor. She just kept plodding ahead in her career, and-

[Emily]
Yeah, she could be the success story that was launched from the show and there’s a big hubbub of her coming along.

[Shep]
You get some famous person to cameo as that part because she only has time for one quick interview.

[Thomas]
That’s good.

[Shep]
“The show only went for six episodes. You guys are taking it way too seriously.”

[Thomas]
No, it had to be like Friends. It’s got to be like an iconic maybe not running as long as Friends, but it has to be like a big iconic thing.

[Shep]
Family Ties.

[Emily]
Yeah, I was thinking Family Ties meet Family Matters. You got an Urkel-esque character.

[Shep]
I think we got it.

[Emily]
I think we do.

[Thomas]
Well, that’s pretty good. I’m happy with this. I love this idea. I think it’s hilarious.

[Shep]
I want to watch it.

[Thomas]
I really want to watch it.

[Shep]
And for me, that’s a sign that we did a good job.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Well, we’re at the end of our story, so I guess that means the lunch break is over. Hold on.

[Shep]
I got to brace myself.

[Emily]
Deep breath, Shep.

[Thomas]
Yeah. We’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s episode. Was this a power lunch or did our ideas make you lose your lunch? You can let us know via email or social media. Links to those can be found on our website AlmostPlausible.com Thank you for listening, Emily, Shep, and I will return next week for another episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]

[Shep]
So when I was in elementary school, I had a zip up insulated lunch box that I loved. And after Halloween, I had all my Halloween candy in it, but I would ration myself, so I didn’t eat it all. So I’d have part of one sucker and then put the rest of the sucker back in the lunch box and put it away.

[Thomas]
That’s some hardcore rationing.

[Emily]
That is.

[Shep]
Yeah. Well, this is when I was poor living in the woods. So this Halloween candy had to last me until next Halloween. So I was at school during lunch and I went to put my lunch box away back in the classroom but I didn’t want to go down the hill, there was a big hill. My school was uphill both ways…

[Thomas]
Ha ha ha.

[Shep]
So I didn’t want to go down the big hill and put it by the classroom and then have to come back up the hill for the rest of the recess. So I threw it, because it’s soft, it’s insulated. I threw it toward the classroom door and it went on the roof because like I said, this is down a big hill, so we were above the building when I threw it and I threw it a little too hard and the teacher wouldn’t go on top of the roof to get it so that was just gone forever.

[Emily]
What a mean teacher.

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