Putty

References

• Silly Putty
• Almost Plausible: Zipper
• Stephen King
• The Blob
• Colossal
• Encyclopedia Brown
• Flubber
• Darkman
• Clayface
• Friends
  • The One with Ross and Monica’s Cousin
• Undercover Blues
• Pygmalion
• Equalibrium
• Peter Falk
• Columbo
• My Fair Lady
• Lionel Richie
  • Hello (Official Music Video)
• Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
• Big Hero 6
• Djinn
• Gray Goo
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• The Twilight Zone
  • It’s a Good Life
• Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit
• Pandora’s Box
• WarGames
• The Mitchells vs. the Machines
• Ghostbusters
• The Iron Giant

Transcript

[Intro music begins]

[Shep]
Maybe the face that the putty takes the shape of is actually based on someone that she saw. Like, that’s not a made up face.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Shep]
That’s a real face of a real person that she could meet.

[Emily]
Oh, like the Lionel Richie music video.

[Shep]
Yes. Oh, no. There are no new ideas. Damn it!

[Intro music]

[Thomas]
Hey there, story fans. Welcome to Almost Plausible, the podcast where we take ordinary objects and turn them into movies. That process begins when we start with some random everyday thing and mold it into a movie plot where the object is central to the story. We are Emily-

[Emily]
Hey, guys.

[Thomas]
F. Paul Shepard.

[Shep]
Happy to be here.

[Thomas]
And I’m Thomas J. Brown. Today, the object we have chosen is Putty. I’m excited to see what strange and interesting interpretations of the word putty we have in store. So let’s jump right into the pitches. And Emily, you’re up first.

[Emily]
I bounced around with putty a lot because, you know, I was thinking of, what are the different types of putty?

[Shep]
Haha! Because Silly Putty is bouncy.

[Emily]
Yeah, Silly Putty. What are the different types of putty? Silly Putty, wall putty. You know, there’s millions types of putty, so I’m going with a weird one that I invented. Not really. I’m sure this exists somewhere. So a young scientist develops a putty that will heal wounds and become part of the patient’s skin when it’s grafted on. It’s still in its beginning stages of development when their partner is nearly burned alive. Our young scientist uses the putty on their partner with incredibly successful results. Everything is going well until the partner begins to act strange. They are no longer as fun or carefree as they once were. The scientist begins to suspect the putty has done something. Their partner slowly becomes an automaton and no longer has a personality because the putty has slowly seeped into their brain and is erasing everything that makes them human.

[Thomas]
And you say you think this putty exists somewhere?

[Emily]
No, no. Like the skin.

[Thomas]
I know what you’re saying. Yeah.

[Emily]
This fake skin putty.

[Thomas]
There is fake skin putty in the funeral industry, isn’t there?

[Emily]
Yeah, I think there is. Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I think that’s a thing.

[Emily]
So this is just, like, a biological component to it.

[Thomas]
Well, that’s very much like one of my pitches, so I’ll go next.

[Emily]
Oh, I figured we all have this one.

[Thomas]
Probably. Probably. My similar pitch is: Allison, a once renowned sculptor has been living in seclusion after a mysterious illness caused her skin to flake and decay, leaving open sores all over her body. Alone and desperate, she discovers that a special type of putty she used for her sculptures can adhere to her skin, masking her condition. As Allison continues to use the putty, she starts to notice strange side effects. The putty doesn’t just cover her skin, it seems to fuse with it, taking on a lifelike quality. She discovers that she is able to sculpt her face and body, becoming a living piece of art. Eventually, the putty begins to move on its own, reshaping Allison’s features without her control. She wakes up each day with a new face and body, each more grotesque than the last. The horror intensifies as she realizes the putty is not just altering her appearance, but is actually consuming her. As her sanity begins to slip away, Allison must confront the horrifying truth. The putty, now a parasitic entity, is slowly taking over her body and mind. In a race against time. She must find a way to remove the putty and stop the transformation before she loses herself completely.

[Shep]
So she attaches a zipper to it on her back.

[Thomas]
Just slips right out of that skin.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
When you talked about her being able to sculpt it, but then it being different, I thought that it was going to be hardening and she was going to turn into a sculpture.

[Emily]
Mmm. Ooh.

[Shep]
So it went a different way than I thought it was going to.

[Thomas]
I mean, maybe if we choose that one, it could end that way. It’s too late for her.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
That seems like a very Stephen King-esque thing, right? Nope. No happy ending. This is just how it ends.

[Emily]
Yep. Yep.

[Thomas]
She’s a sculpture now.

[Shep]
Yeah. When you’re talking about, it’s a race against time. No, she’s not going to win.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
That’s because all body horror movies, they don’t have happy endings.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
No, that’s what makes them extra horror-y.

[Shep]
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

[Thomas]
I also thought about: An amateur scientist creates a nanoparticle putty that he hopes will help people be able to make repairs around the house. Somehow, the putty escapes from his basement lab, growing in size as it absorbs material, the putty has a strange connection to the scientist’s daughter who is able to control the mass. Think The Blob meets Colossal. My last idea is: An Encyclopedia Brown style story where kids use Silly Putty to help them solve a mystery in their town.

[Shep]
You had me at Encyclopedia Brown.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Some of my favorite books as a kid.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Don’t, don’t go back and reread them.

[Shep]
I did. They are awful.

[Thomas]
They’re so bad.

[Shep]
They’re so bad.

[Emily]
Are they just full of racist humor and sexist drama?

[Thomas]
They’re just not good.

[Shep]
They’re very, very basic.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Some of them don’t give you all the information.

[Thomas]
Yep.

[Shep]
And it’s like there is no way to solve this mystery because it’s like I was supposed to know that that vase didn’t have any water in it?

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
How? You didn’t mention that part.

[Thomas]
All right, Shep, let’s hear your pitches.

[Shep]
All right. A scientist invents a rubber like putty that bounces and stretches as if it had a mind of its own. Wait, that’s Flubber. Also kind of Silly Putty, bounces and stretches.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
A scientist uses putty to temporarily recover his burned face, but he also has anger issues. Thats Darkman.

[Emily]
Yes, it is.

[Shep]
Okay. An actor uses putty to temporarily recover his burned face, but also he must defeat the Batman. There are a lot of people using putty to repair their burned faces in fiction.

[Thomas]
I thought you were going to say an actor uses putty to extend his manhood, but that’s an episode of Friends.

[Shep]
I had completely forgotten about that. And you brought it all back.

[Emily]
I apparently still have forgotten about that.

[Shep]
It wasn’t to extend it. It was to make it look like he wasn’t circumcised.

[Emily]
Oh.

[Thomas]
Was it? I don’t remember. And then it, like, falls off during the audition.

[Emily]
That’s right.

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
I remember now.

[Shep]
Okay. How about a spy couple on maternity leave in New Orleans is called back into service when a previous enemy of theirs steals a new experimental explosive putty, the most powerful explosive ever developed, which is Undercover Blues. I spent so much time trying to think of a new putty story, and then when I got to this one, I just spent the next hour watching clips of Undercover Blues, which is a movie I love.

[Thomas]
It’s a great movie.

[Shep]
Anyway, here’s an actual pitch: In a Sci-Fi future, people use emotion putty to pull out their emotions. The people become more logical and reason-driven, but the putty changes shape and color, driven by the emotions it extracted. A scientist wants to be even more logical and experiments with large amounts of the putty, extracting more emotions from her than ever before. It takes the shape of a handsome face. And the scientist concludes in her logical state that deep down she is lonely. And at the end of the day, when it comes time to reset the putty for its next use, she hesitates, having grown attracted to the imagined face it formed. And I was like, wait, this is just Pygmalion. There are no original stories. So that’s my pitch.

[Emily]
Futuristic Pygmalion.

[Shep]
Futuristic and even the emotionless future, that’s just Equilibrium, isn’t it?

[Thomas]
Yeah, I think you’re right. Well, which of these is standing out to us.

[Shep]
Well, I like the one where the scientist used putty to repair a burned face. I thought, “There’s an original story.”

[Thomas]
Shep, in your pitch, presumably, there’s some sort of a nanoparticle that’s run by AI that pulls the emotions out, right?

[Shep]
I mean, I didn’t include an explanation. It could be whatever. It’s a movie. You can make the explanation whatever you want. So let’s say nanoparticles. You looking for overlaps between the different-

[Thomas]
A little bit, yes. But also, I was thinking if it’s an AI driven nanoparticle, then I was thinking it would maybe take on a personality of this guy and start to become almost like a living thing.

[Shep]
Mmm. See, as she falls more in love with it, every time that she has it extract more of her emotions, it’s just more. It just keeps reinforcing itself.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
All right, let me read through these again. The Blob meets Colossal. Colossal is the one where she is also the giant claymation kaiju?

[Thomas]
Is it claymation? I don’t remember, but, yeah, she controls the big kaiju in her dreams or something.

[Shep]
Something. I like the Encyclopedia Brown one, because I like mysteries. We have had trouble writing mysteries in the past, though.

[Thomas]
Yeah. And I feel like one of the big difficulties with that one is that we’re going to have to come up with all the different uses and how that helps them solve the mystery. So there’s an added layer to it. It’s not just about, “Oh, create a mystery and solve it.” Although if we’re doing Encyclopedia Brown style, then apparently it can be basic AF, so.

[Emily]
Well, yeah, it’s a kids mystery. Who ate the lipstick?

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
It was Sven. He’s got it on his teeth.

[Shep]
He’s got red teeth. That gave it away.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Shep]
They didn’t mention the red teeth throughout the whole thing, but he wasn’t talking.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
Therefore, he must have red teeth, so that’s why he was keeping quiet.

[Emily]
Now I’m imagining Peter Falk, like, revealing that to a classroom full of kids.

[Shep]
See, you just put in my mind that Peter Falk is Encyclopedia Brown. So he’s solving mysteries for a quarter, smoking his cigar.

[Thomas]
So are we doing Young Columbo?

[Shep]
Yeah, Young Columbo!

[Thomas]
So, to get Sven at the end, they throw the silly putty at him, and he’s like, “Ow.” And that’s where he finally says something. Like, “His teeth are red.”

[Emily]
Yeah, that’s how Encyclopedia Brown shows everybody.

[Thomas]
Well, it seems like we have a kid’s mystery, some sort of a body horror type of thing-

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
Or Pygmalion, which could be a rom-com or a romance.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
I don’t know if it’d be, how much com there would be in that one. But.

[Emily]
I don’t know. That was pretty funny when they did it in My Fair Lady.

[Shep]
Maybe the face that the putty takes the shape of is actually based on someone that she saw. Like, that’s not a made up face.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Shep]
That’s a real face of a real person that she could meet.

[Emily]
Oh, like the Lionel Richie music video.

[Shep]
Yes. Oh, no. There are no new ideas. Damn it!

[Thomas]
This is what makes writing so hard. Or one of the things.

[Shep]
Yes. How do you come up with a completely original idea? So, the nanoparticle putty that escapes and starts the grey goo scenario-

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
That’s kind of a horror.

[Thomas]
Kind of. I imagine it more as like a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids type of thing. That sort of a tone, and-

[Emily]
Okay. Why does she have a relationship with it? Why does it respond to her?

[Thomas]
My assumption was that she knows the dad is working on this material, and a toy of hers breaks. So she takes it down to the basement and uses it to fix her toy, and it works. The nanoparticles do their job. She’s like, “Great.” And she leaves with the toy, but it still has some of the goo. And as a result of her interacting with it, probably with her bare hands, and- I don’t know. So that’s why that connection exists.

[Shep]
It’s her tiara that broke. And then when she puts the tiara on-

[Thomas]
Yeah. There you go.

[Shep]
The goo can read her thoughts, and it’s Big Hero 6.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah. And he’s a little blobby, too. So.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Okay, so she interacts with it before it’s fully done. Right? That’s how it builds the connection?

[Thomas]
I think that connection is an unintended consequence of her interacting with it.

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
But it’s definitely not ready to leave the lab.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
But, yeah. So she interacts with it early. She thinks, “Oh, my dad has this thing.”

[Emily]
I like the idea of her doing bare handed-

[Thomas]
Oh, maybe she has some injury, and the nanoparticles fix that injury. So as a result, they are in her system. So they have done their job-

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And there are some nanoparticles in her system, and that’s how they communicate to each other.

[Emily]
But the fixing her would have to have been a mistake. How little is she? How young is she?

[Thomas]
Like seven, eight, I imagine.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
So she probably has, like, a scrape or something that.

[Emily]
Well. Cause I can picture her going downstairs to use it to fix the toy because that’s what her dad’s using it to make repairs around the house.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Would it be that she has a cut on her, and then while she’s using it to fix her toy, it gets on that wound, and then it heals it that way, and that’s what builds the connection?

[Thomas]
Sure.

[Shep]
See, for a kid, I imagine that she just thinks this is the thing that fixes things, so she puts it intentionally on the scrape on her arm.

[Thomas]
Hmm. That’s a good idea, actually.

[Emily]
In that case, then I would like her to be six, because I feel like that’s something my six year old would do, but not an eight year old.

[Thomas]
Okay. I mean, young is good, so.

[Shep]
I want to change everything we have so far.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
There’s a scientist. He’s developing. He or she, is developing this nanoparticle putty for healing wounds.

[Thomas]
Shep, it’s men who are going to destroy the world. So.

[Shep]
Well, wait. Wait for it. Wait for it. Scientist has a daughter who goes into the lab and uses some of the putty to heal her arm that the scientist doesn’t know about. The scientist has a couple of- The experiments have proven successful in animals.

[Emily]
Mmm.

[Shep]
It started with plants. Plants work. They tested on animals. Animals work. It’s time for testing on humans. And there are a couple people with, like, horrific burns on their face, for example.

[Thomas]
Dry, flaky skin that’s just mysteriously leaves these open sores and.

[Shep]
Yes. Also a good, you know, so I’m saying there are a couple of patients.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
And so as the movie goes on, at first it seems to work. It seems to heal everything back to pristine condition. And it’s like, “This is great. And, you know, not only for this, like, maybe we could use it to de-age people,” et cetera, et cetera. But it starts to turn. And so you have the sculptor whose face starts to become horrific, every time she wakes up it’s worse and worse and worse. And you have the other person with the burns on their face, and it starts to, like, take over their body. But that doesn’t happen to the little girl, so why not? What is the difference between them? And I think it’s the adults are trying to control the putty and force it to do what they want. But what the putty does, like, silly putty pressed on a newspaper, it’s just a reflection of what it touches.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And so they’re trying to control it. So it thinks, “Oh, I’m supposed to control them? That’s what I’ve learned.” Because it’s learning AI nanoparticles. But the little girl never thought that. She doesn’t think, “I have to control this putty to-,” you know, do whatever. She’s just living in harmony with the putty.

[Emily]
So her pure and innocent heart makes the putty work for her,

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
And the cold, jagged, experienced hearts of adults warp it and twist it into something evil.

[Thomas]
Well, I wonder, too, if it’s keying into their emotions or their anxieties.

[Shep]
You trying to pull in the emotion one also?

[Thomas]
Yeah, I am.

[Shep]
See, the sculptor is obsessed with beauty because she’s making the beautiful sculptures, and she herself wants to be beautiful, and so it gets warped by that. Must be beautiful. Must be more beautiful.

[Thomas]
Once she wishes she could sculpt herself to be this idealized version of herself.

[Shep]
Right! Because she doesn’t feel beautiful, and it’s a reflection of how she feels. She feels like a monster.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
And so that starts showing up on her face, and she’s like, “I knew it!”

[Thomas]
Mm hmm. And so is the burn victim there? Maybe they assume it won’t work because other treatments in the past haven’t worked, and so it kind of doesn’t matter what the nanoparticles do correctly. They’re reflecting back the like, “Oh, this is what you anticipate you will look like.” So it reverts. Like it works at first, but-

[Shep]
Or. So I’m looking through Emily’s. What if they just, they were so hurt by this injury, they’re still in constant pain. They don’t want to live anymore. They don’t want to exist anymore.

[Thomas]
Hmm.

[Shep]
And so the putty starts erasing them.

[Thomas]
Right. So the putty is almost like a jinn, where it gives you what you want in the worst possible way.

[Shep]
No, it gives you what you want in the way that it thinks is the correct way, but it’s not very smart. It’s putty.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And the child just wants to be healed, so she’s healed, and life goes on.

[Shep]
Or she wanted a companion. So, like, it takes up residence in her arm, but she talks to it. “Look at this, Mister Putty.”

[Emily]
I’m liking this idea. With this creepy growth.

[Thomas]
Yeah. The talking scab. “Hey, Cindy.”

[Emily]
“We should go set that house on fire.”

[Thomas]
So does this putty then start to take over? Do we have a grey goo scenario that begins? The putty needs material to be able to do its job. The girl, like you said, she just wants things to be healed, and so it heals her. And, “Oh, you know what? It worked for me. It could work for my doll, that has part of her arm is torn, it’s starting to come off.” So she puts some putty on the doll, and it works. And so she-

[Shep]
And now the doll can walk around the house and be the creepy, you know.

[Thomas]
Well, and all she wants is for things to be fixed around her, the broken things around her. And so the putty is like, “Okay, that’s what I need to do.” And that’s its mission, that it goes off to do. But in order to do that, it has to acquire material. And because it isn’t being fed carefully by a scientist who understands what it needs and how to give it that material, it just starts dissolving things around it.

[Shep]
How does the story end?

[Thomas]
Right. Because if the putty is responding negatively to being controlled, then what? Like, how do you control it back into the tube or-

[Shep]
It’s not responding negatively to being controlled. It’s being taught that you should strive for control. So it’s not like going, “Oh, you’re not going to control me. I’m going to control you. I’m going to show you.” It’s like, “Oh, we should be in control, and I’m stronger than you are. So.”

[Thomas]
At the end of The Blob, don’t they not actually defeat the blob? They just sort of put it into a stasis, I think. I forget. It’s been a while.

[Emily]
I don’t think I’ve seen The Blob since I was seven.

[Thomas]
So I wonder if, do they defeat the goo? How would you defeat goo? Realistically? You’d have to EMP it or something.

[Shep]
See, that’s why I’m asking. Is this a horror movie?

[Thomas]
Well, yeah, that’s a good question. If it’s a horror movie, then I don’t think it has a very good ending. But if it’s a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids Movie, then-

[Shep]
Yeah, if it’s a horror movie, then at the end, the scientist thinks that they’ve defeated the goo because it was out there, you know, dissolving cars and people and whatever, and they shot it with fire extinguishers and put it in stasis. Then he goes home and reassures his daughter that it’s fine, it’s taken care of. And she’s like, I know that it’s fine and taken care of. And the whole house is actually made of goo now. It just dissolves the father right from the floor.

[Thomas]
She was a goo daughter the whole time.

[Emily]
Well, how do you make it a happy ending? What could we do to make it a happy ending? If it was-

[Thomas]
Oh, there’s some kill switch that turns all the goo off. It turns the nanoparticles off.

[Emily]
The sorcerer comes in and undoes the spell.

[Thomas]
Well, I imagine that early on, the goo eats the control device. And so over the course of the film, the scientist dad has to, or mom, has to build a new control device.

[Emily]
Does it listen to the little girl all of the time? Or is it just, she was just the impetus for it to fix things? Like, does she- can she still be like, “No, no, let’s not do that,” and it’ll be like, “Okay, we’re gonna go do this now.”

[Thomas]
Yeah, I mean, I guess like, you don’t want it to end up like that one Twilight Zone episode where the kid has magic powers because you don’t want her to be horrible, but you also don’t want to traumatize her where it’s like, “Oh, this is your fault. You’ve been in control of this blob. You’ve been eating the whole city.”

[Emily]
Right.

[Thomas]
So, yeah, maybe it’s just that it’s not that she controls it, it’s that she helps it escape accidentally and that she gives it that goal of trying to fix things, but it was unintentional.

[Emily]
Does it create some kind of conflict with the nanobots if it’s supposed to fix things, but in order to fix things, it has to destroy things to get the material to fix other things?

[Thomas]
Well, maybe the conflict then is not, or the desire is not that it will fix everything, but it starts to run out. The putty that she takes, because it’s using itself up to make all these repairs. And so what she wants is more putty so that she can fix more things. And so the putty goes, “Ah, I need to collect materials.” And so it just starts eating stuff up and becoming a bigger and bigger blob.

[Shep]
Is this an animated movie? Is this a live action movie?

[Emily]
If you wanted to have a happy ending and be sweet and cute and family friendly, it would be animated, I think, because that’s easier to get away with- if we paint ourselves into a corner, it’s easier to get away with “Well, that doesn’t really make sense, but it makes movie sense, so it’ll be fine.” Whereas if it’s live action, I think it’ll just be a turn off to the parents, and I don’t think the kids would want to watch it. I don’t think it really matters overall, though.

[Shep]
Well, if we’re doing the grey goo scenario, we don’t need the other experimental participants.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Okay. If it’s grey goo scenario, it only eats things, not people.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So she didn’t have an injury on her arm because we’re not doing that. We’re not doing body horror. We’re getting rid of all of that.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Emily]
Yep.

[Shep]
She fixed her toy and then releases it into the wild somehow. Oh, she’s a fan of some TV show, some cartoon, and she wants the city to be more like that city that she sees in the cartoon. And so it starts going out and converting the town into this kind of cartoon town, not injuring the people because it doesn’t eat people. It only eats things.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s good. I like that.

[Emily]
Sounds careful.

[Shep]
How do they stop it?

[Thomas]
Is there a control device that the parent scientist has in their basement that always has to be running in order to control, in order for the nanoparticles to work? So they have to somehow get to that control device and shut it off from there?

[Shep]
See, this is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

[Thomas]
Yeah, I was thinking that.

[Shep]
How does it know what the town looks like? She must watch the show with the goo.

[Emily]
Okay. So I had this thought while you guys were talking, but I thought you would poo poo it.

[Shep]
That’s not how this works.

[Emily]
So she uses it to fix her doll, stuffy, toy, whatever.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
And then it works, and it’s fine. And the thing kind of, it kind of animates the toy a little bit, though.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Emily]
So she gets to talk to the toy.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Emily]
And then she has a tea party with the toy, because now the toy is animated, so she can have a tea party with the toy. And their little ceramic teacups break, so she goes in the basement and gets some more and then fixes the teacups outside. That’s how it gets released into the wild. And then while she’s watching it with the teddy bear, watching the show with the teddy bear, she’s having the conversations with it, and the ones that were left outside start to go and filter through the city and make the changes.

[Shep]
Why does she fix the teacups outside?

[Emily]
Because that’s where they were having the tea party, and it got interrupted because the teacup broke. So she ran inside really quick and got some more putty, because me being a child, I would not have brought the thing into the house to where the thing to fix it was. I would have brought the fix it out to where the tea party was. It’s child brain.

[Shep]
Okay. She fixes the one toy that’s broken and it animates. And so she’s carrying it around, she’s having fun. She’s watching the show with it and talking about it. It’s a character from the show.

[Emily]
There you go.

[Shep]
Like, “Oh, there’s your home, there’s your (whatever).” And as it starts to get animated and start to move, she’s like, “Oh, this is wonderful.” And she takes her other toys down and animates them as well. And then now that she has a handful of these living toys, has the tea party, outside.

[Emily]
Mhm.

[Shep]
Because. Beautiful day. Oh, they watch-

[Emily]
Right.

[Shep]
That’s an episode of the show where they’re having a picnic or something.

[Emily]
Perfect.

[Shep]
And so she’s like, “Let’s go have a picnic outside.” Whatever. She has the picnic outside with the toys, and then her parents call her back in, and she leaves all the toys outside. And maybe that’s one of the things she’s talking about. Like, “I wish that I could live in (wherever),” but then she gets called back in, so she goes in. She just leaves all her toys outside because that’s the very kid thing to do. And so all the toys get up and, like, collectively decide, “Oh, we are going to convert this town into that town that we saw.” And so they go out, a bunch of toys. So you can have that scene of, like, you can have the pseudo horror scene of the creepy doll, you know, stalking someone, whatever.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
But it’s played for comedy because it’s a kid’s animated movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
This lady keeps seeing it, like, in her rearview mirror and keeps following her, and she stops at a light, and it’s next to her, and then it touches her car and starts converting her car into the cartoonish, whatever the car looks like in the cartoon.

[Thomas]
Right. That’s good.

[Emily]
I like it.

[Thomas]
So how do they stop it in the end?

[Shep]
They play the ending theme song from the show, which means the show is over. And so that’s how they do it at the end that gets all the toys, because the toys keep expanding with other toys that they find.

[Emily]
I love the idea of the little girl, like, her parents are like, “We’ve tried everything,” and they’re all desperate. And then she looks at him and was like, “Well, the show isn’t over yet.”

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
“This song always plays when the show is over.” Like, just very “Duh.”

[Thomas]
Oh, and is it one of those, like, kids type of shows? So there’s, like, “Put away your toys” song at the end of the show, there’s, like, a cleanup song.

[Shep]
Yep. That could be a thing that they could have done.

[Thomas]
“You gotta clean up. Gotta put everything back the way it was.”

[Shep]
“Gotta put everything back the way it was.”

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. There could be one episode like that. They figure it out, and then they play that episode or play the songs from that episode.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Yeah. All right, well, this seems like a good time to take a break. And when we come back, the rest of our episode for Putty.

[Break]

[Thomas]
All right, we’re back.

[Shep]
So we know how it ends and we know how it begins. Are there funny incidents to throw in the middle as the toys are rampaging through the town?

[Emily]
Well, there is. There’s always lots of funny things.

[Shep]
Yep. There’s got to be a house that gets converted.

[Emily]
Oh, there’s got to be a dog that gets a special haircut to look like the cartoon dog, like a poodle or something.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
It’s not a poodle, but it gets a poodle cut.

[Thomas]
You gotta have the guy who’s on a cell phone or something, he doesn’t even notice the change, or he doesn’t care. He’s reading a book and it’s got coffee in his hand, and everything sweeps by and changes, and he just takes a sip. Doesn’t notice, doesn’t care. So I feel like the end of the first act is the putty starts to make changes or is that way earlier? Because I feel like the inciting incident is her toy breaks and she goes down to fix it.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Thomas]
So we get a little bit of that setup. The parent talking about the putty.

[Emily]
I think you’re right. That would be the end of the first act, is them going out, because she’s gonna interact with that first toy for a little bit first and then realize how much fun this is.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
And then get the other toys to do and do the little tea party and everything.

[Thomas]
So then what’s the end of the second act? So that’ll be the lowest low.

[Shep]
That’s when they don’t have a hope of stopping it. They’ve called in the military. They’re evacuating the city.

[Emily]
Well, what kind of actual real life consequences are these changes causing to people, other than it looks silly? I mean, there’s got to be, like, structural damage, you know, like, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is destroying houses. It’s becoming too much.

[Thomas]
Right. And you have rotting food everywhere.

[Emily]
Right. And this is just. It’s making everything cartoony? So what? You live in Roger Rabbit world for a day,

[Thomas]
I think it’s one of those things where, like, cartoons don’t have adult things. So there’s no money, there’s no surgery, there’s no critical infrastructure. There just sort of are things that aren’t- they’re, like, cute but not useful. So lots of people can’t do their job.

[Emily]
So the cartoon style things still have to obey the laws of physics. So that bridge that looks cool in the cartoon is not structurally sound and collapses, and now they’re all trapped on the island.

[Shep]
Which is great because that isolates all the toys.

[Thomas]
Yeah, that’s good. The military helicopter comes in, and as soon as it touches down, it, I don’t know, becomes something that’s not a military helicopter.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Something funny.

[Shep]
Well, a cartoon helicopter with a big smiley face on the front of it.

[Thomas]
Right. Do they try to drop bombs and as soon as the bomb hits the ground, it turns into-

[Emily]
Cotton candy.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Something that’s not explosive.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Or they become glitter bombs. It’s just (pchoo pchoo) glitter everywhere. And all the stuffed animals that are in the street are like, “Yay!”

[Emily]
Does it make other toys and things come to life too?

[Shep]
Yes!

[Thomas]
Oh, yeah.

[Emily]
Okay, is this going- okay so they’re just being bombarded with that.

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
I like that.

[Thomas]
Is there some major industry in the town that is essentially wiped out? There’s a giant fishing industry or something and-

[Emily]
Nope, can’t be fishing.

[Thomas]
Oh?

[Emily]
That’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

[Thomas]
Oh, is it?

[Shep]
Yes.

[Emily]
Yeah, it’s tuna or. No, it’s not.

[Thomas]
God damn it.

[Emily]
It’s anchovies?

[Shep]
Yeah, something like that.

[Emily]
Something like anchovies or something like that.

[Thomas]
You know, I don’t give my memory enough credit. I just don’t know that I know these things. I have no recall. It’s there.

[Shep]
I mean, it’s an island. What industries are is it going to have?

[Thomas]
But the reason I was thinking fishing is because you have to kill the fish to sell them, to can them, whatever. And so the cartoon world doesn’t have that.

[Emily]
Yeah, it could be a canning, fishing industry or forestry or something.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Can’t clear cut a forest.

[Shep]
Not when all the trees are singing cartoons.

[Emily]
Yes, that’s right.

[Thomas]
And axes turn into something. Lollipops or something. You know, there aren’t axes in this cartoon world.

[Shep]
Stop making them food. That’s Cloudy with the Chance of Meatballs.

[Thomas]
I was trying to think of something that’s vaguely axe shaped. Yeah. So people aren’t able to get more food?

[Emily]
Does it actually turn them cartoony? Like, is this animate? Is this Roger Rabbit where it’s in real world, turn animated?

[Shep]
I mean, I was picturing an animated movie so it could make them look whatever, because it doesn’t have to be real.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
So not like Roger Robert, where it’s a mix of live action and cartoon.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
Okay,

[Shep]
It’s a mix of.

[Thomas]
It’s, like, Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs where-

[Shep]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Shep]
Realistic cartoon and less realistic cartoon.

[Emily]
Okay.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Emily]
Cause I was thinking if we, if it, well, either way. But if it was Roger Rabbit style, then it would be, when they do send the food, when they start running out of food and they send it in through ships or planes or whatever, it becomes cartoon food. So it not only looks at you and talks to you and has a face, but it also is just ink.

[Thomas]
I was thinking you were going to say it would be, like, all sweets and cakes and things that aren’t healthy.

[Emily]
Or that.

[Thomas]
“We have to have nutrients. We need vegetables and stuff.”

[Shep]
Well, see, if it can convert biological material, why doesn’t it convert the people?

[Emily]
Hmmm.

[Shep]
So you’re opening up Pandora’s box.

[Emily]
Correct. Nope. Good objection. Sustained.

[Shep]
I was going to say that people evacuated the island. The cartoons have taken over the island. I like the idea that there is some industry or resource that they do there on the island. So it’s like, they can’t just abandon this island to the cartoons. Corporations aren’t going to like that.

[Thomas]
It’s the world’s supply of cadmium is on this island and-

[Shep]
It’s Manhattan. It’s all, you know, banking and-

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Whatever. All the money is being converted to monopoly money.

[Thomas]
Exactly. There’s, like, a huge- there’s, like, a Fort Knox type of place. It’s all the money is being stored there.

[Shep]
Yeah. If the money is stored there, then now there’s a ticking clock. They have to stop it before it gets to that location. Even if they evacuate all the people, it doesn’t stop the situation.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
Although kids wouldn’t care about some bank location. Whatever.

[Emily]
Yeah, but kids also don’t care about anchovies. And Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs made in an anchovy. They couldn’t get anchovies out. So kids, what I’m saying, will accept whatever adults tell them is bad. So-

[Thomas]
So the nuclear power plant. Um.

[Emily]
I was thinking of, like, it being a silicon thing, like the island produces, creates a silicon.

[Shep]
It makes computer chips.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It’s the wafer factory.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
Turns them into actual, like, wafer cookies.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Yep.

[Thomas]
So what did we decide what the lowest low is?

[Shep]
I mean, the lowest, low is they’ve evacuated the island of humans, but the toys are still taking over and they’ve converted the industry to cartoon.

[Thomas]
And the military can’t stop them.

[Shep]
The military can’t stop them. The military has tried dropping bombs. It doesn’t work. Every minute that goes by that they don’t stop it, it’s costing them millions of dollars. Is there a threat that it can get off the island? Where it’s like, “We got to stop this right now because they’ve learned to make cartoon boats.”

[Emily]
Well, yeah. Couldn’t it make like a cartoon bridge or something? Or-

[Shep]
Well, you talked about before, it made the bridge, the cartoon bridge, and it collapsed.

[Emily]
Yeah, because it still has to obey the laws of physics.

[Shep]
Right. Or maybe it keeps trying to make the bridge and it gets a little bit further each time.

[Emily]
Hmm.

[Shep]
That gives it, like, a visual indication of how close it is to escaping.

[Emily]
Oh, yeah. And it’s learning structural integrity as it’s building it because it keeps collapsing.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
So. Yeah.

[Thomas]
But it’s making it a little bit more realistic in terms of the structure each time.

[Emily]
Yeah, yeah.

[Shep]
Right.

[Emily]
Yeah,

[Shep]
It’s WarGames. It’s learning.

[Thomas]
Yeah. What would be the mid second act turning point, then? Is that the evacuation, or is that a little too early? I think that’s a little too early. So if the end of the first act is the transformation begins, the city starts being transformed, and the end of the second act is the island has been evacuated.

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
Then what is that mid second act turning point?

[Shep]
If we are thinking about escalation…

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
So at the beginning, the toys escape from the yard and they start converting stuff. But it’s very subtle to begin with. They’re converting the other toys. They’re converting little things. So you can see, like, people are interacting and they’re having their, doing their normal day. And, like, in the background, things are changing a little bit at a time, but nobody’s noticed. The turning point is when it reaches the tipping point and they start converting more and more stuff very, very rapidly because that’s how exponential growth works.

[Thomas]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
You don’t realize it until it’s too late. It’s an allegory for global warming.

[Thomas]
Oh, right. You’ve totally got the guy who’s holding the sign about it all being fake. It comes by, and it changes his sign and changes his clothes.

[Shep]
He’s got a sign about global warming being fake?

[Thomas]
How about this grey goo situation being fake.

[Shep]
See, that’s why they cut the scientists funding. They were afraid of that scenario, and so the scientists took their work home with them. And that’s why it was in their basement. They’re so close to a breakthrough. You know, it’s just-

[Thomas]
I wonder if that’s part of the end of the second act, that lowest low, where it’s like they have this idea, or they have an epiphany of some sort, because that’s been part of the problem. This stuff is basically like magic. It works so well, but we can’t contain it. And so they realize how to contain it, and they go to put that into action, but it’s too late. Like you said, by the time you realize what’s going on, it’s too late. So at the end of the movie, they are able to contain it because they’ve put everything back because of the cleanup song.

[Shep]
Right. It’s what you said earlier. They have some sort of transmitter or something that makes it stop working once it gets a certain distance away. And so they go and they implement that with the grey goo that they have in their basement and they test it out and it works or whatever, but it does nothing to the ones that have already left because they’re already gone. So, yeah, you introduce the solution that doesn’t work because all the stuff is too far away.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
And then they get them to come all the way back and then reprogram them in one location and the problem is solved forever.

[Thomas]
Okay.

[Shep]
It’s still kind of a horror movie, but a kid’s horror movie.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
It’s like Mitchells versus the Machines.

[Emily]
Yeah. That’s a kid’s horror movie. This is still a horror movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah. Yeah.

[Emily]
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a horror movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
Don’t bring up Mitchells versus the Machines. That’s, first of all, it’s AI taking over and doing all that stuff. But also that’s a really high bar.

[Emily]
It is a very high bar.

[Thomas]
It is.

[Shep]
Ridiculously good movie.

[Thomas]
Yeah. I think part of what makes it difficult is that the nanobots are not acting maliciously. So I’m not, off the top of my head anyway, thinking of an instance where the quote unquote “good guys” or the main characters try to do something to stop it, and then it doesn’t work because, “Oh, we anticipated that, and we outsmarted you.” Or, it’s really more of, like The Blob. Like, we don’t know what it wants. We don’t know how to stop it. It’s just this force that just keeps coming. I mean, if you think about the blob, half of that movie is trying to warn people and nobody listening, and running around town and discovering a little bit more and a little bit more, and then, yeah, all of a sudden, it’s like swallowing the diner.

[Shep]
I mean, that could be this. You have the scientists, once they realize what’s happening, they try to get the word out. They try to stop it as soon as possible.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Shep]
But no one believes them until it’s too late. Again, it’s global warming.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Shep]
So what characters do we have? We have the child. We have the scientist.

[Thomas]
I feel like the scientist’s spouse as well, because that gives the adults a way- It allows the adults to talk to each other about adult things that the child can overhear, that we, as the audience can kind of overhear.

[Shep]
Okay, do we have a police officer that they go to to try to… It’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs again. Do they have a mayor that they go to? Oh, no, it’s Ghostbusters.

[Thomas]
They have a comptroller and-

[Shep]
Yes, there we go.

[Emily]
The ombudsman.

[Thomas]
Yeah. A fireman? Has that been done?

[Shep]
No! Fireman’s perfect!

[Thomas]
All right. Yeah, the neighbor across the street is a fireman.

[Emily]
Mm hmm.

[Shep]
And then, of course, we have the military from The Iron Giant.

[Thomas]
Yes.

[Shep]
Oh, maybe that’s the thing. So speaking of The Iron Giant, the nanobots are going to run down. They’re going to run out of energy. But the military dropping bombs on them gives them that energy back. Like the scientist is trying to stop it before it gets out of hand. But, you know, it’s expanded all over. They evacuate the town, but the scientist is like, “It’s okay, they’re going to run out of energy.” But then the military drops bombs and recharges them all. That’s when it really starts taking over and starts converting entire buildings.

[Thomas]
Sure. The military thinks, “Oh, these are electrical devices. We will zap them and fry them.”

[Shep]
Right.

[Thomas]
And so they have some sort of EMP bomb or something that they drop, and it sends out this huge energy burst that they use to re-energize. And the scientist is like, “You fools!”

[Shep]
Yes.

[Thomas]
Ooh, I just had a thought. The scientist and the family and everything, everybody is forced off of the island. They have to leave the island, too.

[Shep]
Right. Yes.

[Thomas]
And so the scientist and his or her family, their family, sneak back on a boat. They come back to the island illegally.

[Emily]
Of course.

[Thomas]
Because the scientist knows, “I’ve got to get my stuff from the lab. That’s where the device is. And we need to boost the signal on the device.”

[Shep]
And then?

[Thomas]
It doesn’t work, obviously, or for some reason they can’t get to it. I’m not sure what the reason is exactly, but we need a cleanup song to happen before that works.

[Emily]
Oh, they can’t get to it because it’s cartoonized everything in the house, so they can’t even find it anymore because it doesn’t look like what it did when they left the house.

[Thomas]
Right! Because that thing doesn’t exist in the cartoon world.

[Emily]
Right. Like it’s still in there, but we just don’t know what it is.

[Thomas]
Right. Yeah, it could be any of these things could be that thing.

[Emily]
Yeah.

[Thomas]
And it also doesn’t work because it’s been turned into a vase of flowers. And vases of flowers don’t send out nanobot restriction part- um, rays or whatever. Because it wasn’t turned on, because the nanobots were not in use. They were in their stasis chamber. But the little girl opened the stasis chamber to get them out.

[Shep]
So how do they get the whole town to play the cleanup song?

[Thomas]
Ah, there’s a blimp that just flies around the town.

[Emily]
Yeah, I’m sold. Anything with a dirigible.

[Shep]
I’d watch this, if it were as funny as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. It’s not going to be as funny as Mitchells versus the Machines. That’s impossible.

[Thomas]
Right.

[Emily]
No, because they have Doug the Pug.

[Thomas]
Yeah.

[Emily]
Never going to beat Doug the Pug.

[Thomas]
Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts on today’s episode about Putty. Did we manage to fill in all the gaps.

[Shep]
Oh, god.

[Thomas]
Or was it just silly?

[Shep]
(In pain) Ugh.

[Emily]
He he!

[Thomas]
Let us know by leaving a comment on our website, reaching out on social media, or sending us an email. Links to all of those can be found at AlmostPlausible.com. We’d love to hear feedback from you about our podcast. What works, what doesn’t? What should there be more or less of? Visit the contact form on AlmostPlausible.com to let us know. Emily, Shep, and I look forward to hearing from you, and we’ll keep your suggestions in mind when we record the next episode of Almost Plausible.

[Outro music]