Friday, October 19, 2012

From the Idea Hole: Team Spartan

A while ago I had this idea for a kids cartoon about teenage spies called Team Spartan. The basic idea would be that the world's greatest spy, British secret agent Jack Spartan, goes missing while on a top secret mission, forcing his agency to assemble an elite team of new recruits to help save the world in his stead. The twist - much like the prototypical secret agent of fiction James Bond, Jack Spartan was a Lothario with a penchant for finding a new woman to bed on every assignment, and the kids soon discover that they are all in fact Spartan's illegitimate children from these various affairs.

The idea would be that he secretly kept tabs on all of them growing up, providing for their education while secretly guiding them to learn the skills necessary to follow in their collective father's footsteps, knowing that they were all part of a contingency plan should he ever die out in the field. The Search for Spartan would be a running subplot until it is discovered that he never disappeared at all, but rather retired to a private island to die, revealing that his years of debauchery have led to him developing an inhuman cocktail of nearly every sexually transmitted disease combined into one super virus.

I had a whole list of characters that has been long since lost to moves and computer crashes, and what I remember from the rogues gallery is pretty slight. The villain most important to the story would have been Professor Coldstone, a wealthy supervillain forced to place himself into a specialized form of active cryogenic freezing where he can still communicate, but must be wheeled around by his enigmatic assistant Ms. Beverly. It would be revealed at some point that the disease that cost him his body is the same that is now killing Spartan, caught by their mutual affairs with the comely assistant.

There were at least two villains I remember as being direct parodies of Bond villains. The first was one whose name I can't remember, who was inspired by Blowfeld, specifically his penchant to return again and again, often showing signs of injury from his previous encounters, like a scar or a wheelchair. The idea would be that this guy has been through this process one too many times, and is now basically just a sac of organs in a very sophisticated life support machine. The other was a version of Goldfinger who was literally sexually aroused by currency.

There was also Commander Killskull, an island dictator too committed to his skull motif to realize that he often overdoes it, Chairman Meow, a cat with the mind of a dead Chinese communist, his robot assistant Mr. Matrayoshka, with several mini-versions of himself inside his body like a Russian nesting doll, and finally The Finger, a man with a cybernetic index finger out for revenge against Spartan for dismembering him. I'm sure there were others, but they aren't coming to mind at the moment.

By the end I had this idea that because they were the children of Spartan Babes, that like Bond Babes, their last names would all be the second half of a double entendre, but with normal first names. When we would reveal the full names of the mothers, the joke would be that they were actually comically unclever in their execution. For instance, the resident computer expert would be an Asian girl named Shelly Huang, and we would find out that her mother's name was Loav Suk Huang. An Irish Spartan named Kyle O'Plenty would visit his mother and introduce his friends to Rimjobs O'Plenty, and so on. The only one with a normal name would be the leader, who was the product of Spartan's affair with his Moneypenny-esque prim secretary. 

Anyway, there's another project for you that will never get made. Team Spartan. You know, for kids.

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