Friday, May 2, 2008

Re-Run Theroy

I have this theroy about what happens to cartoons if they're not being developed emotionally or physically after a long period of time. They start to repeat alot of the same things over and over again until something breaks the cycle. That might be why some stay younger and/or some grow older. I'm still not sure why some grow older at different paces and speeds when others seem to stop dead in thier tracks. Several answers could be popularity or redesing of the characters (like cartoon plastic surgery) .
Think of a re-run cycle like this, it starts a few days after something horrible or something wonderful happens (near Apacolyps or best friends leave or a new baby or something crazy). Soon you'll find yourself doing the same thing everyday with no progress, it just becomes blah. You don't notice this is going on until one day if just dawns on you that life is boaring. By then days, weeks, or years might have gone by, but to you it felt like hours or just a few days. The cycle ends when you deside to change it or when something comes in to change it. If you deside to change it you only get a short period of time to stop the cycle otherwise you'll have to wait for another cycle to go by. The length of the cycle depends on how long you were caught in the cycle.
The length of the cycle is measured in 2 ways. 1) how many years in real time were you locked in one and 2) the diration of the cycle. Some cycles could just reapeat the same day or same moment over and over again (There was a Xena and X-files ep like that). Those ones are easy to break out of because you notice that things are repeating easier. Harder cycles to break are the ones that repeat every month or every 10 years (and so on). Hypothetically, you could be locked in a cycle for 10 years of real time but you were only repeating the same 7 months over and over again before some different happened.

One reason a character gets locked in a cycle is determined by the character's determination to forget about time and space. One good excample is that with movies with sequils with huge tiem gaps between the sequils. The gap between Starwars ep. 3 and ep. 4 is huge, and apperently growth of Luke and Leila is not important enough for us to see it. Even though real time is obviously progressing, none of the characters cared about time and space enough to have interesting character development. An easier example might be like in Pokemon. We fallow Ash and his friends all over the world but in certain caises we meet up with Ash's mom, who is obviously just at home doing nothing important enough to care about until that one ep where Ash desides to call her (which he sould do more often, she's your mother god damn it) and we see that she's doing all right. She is stuck in a re-run loop, even though we don't see her in it, she can't be doing anything worth mentioning and we assume she's been doing the same thing over and over again. She would break her cycle when one day she desides to try to contact Ash on her own, but lord knows how many times she looped in ther cycle to realised she needed to call her son.
When Ginger went missing from Rokko during the 1930's to the 1990's, she was locked in a re-run cycle. I'm not sure what type of repeating time phrame she had (if she repeated the same day or month, or longer) but she was only able to break her cycle when Rokko went to the house to find her. Rokko was never really in a cycle during the 50s-90s he was trying to find a way to stay out fo trouble. He was only locked in a small cycle during the 40's while he was being tortured. He broke out of it when Crikkit came in and saved him. If there isn't anybody looking for you from the normal time phrame, you'll most likely stay in you're cycle until you desised to go out and break it yourself. Rokko and Ginger never tried to break thier cycles because they didn't think they could or were in one. Ginger wasn't going to go out to find Rokko because he said he would come back. Rokko had given up hope of escaping on his own.

When a character desided to break out of his own loop it's always alot tougher and for good reason. There are many stories about characters (mostly villans) being trapped for 1,000s of years in a vortex waiting for someone to let them loose. The reason they're trapped for so long is because nobody is looking to set them free. These characters can influance outside characters to setting them free, but it's only with the Aid of characters from outside of the loop who can do it.
Ginger's family hit a rerun loop just about after Gigner got married. It took them forever to figure out what they had to do to get out of it, which was to make sure Rokko never met Ginger. The family's history would repeat on Ginger's father's birthday, which was the day Rokko came into town, then loop around for 5 years. The family is so pissed off at Rokko that they can't let the day he kidnapped her die, the loop would start at a later date if they didn't feel that that day was so important. So many years later (present day to Ginger) they deside to break cycle and invite her to her dad's party and see if they can get Ginger to stay with them. Hoping that she will see that Rokko in a moronic drunk (which is how they know him, not true anymore) because they're still stuck in 1910s. They know that if Ginger stays with them on this day, the past 100 years will erase and start all over again.

So Ginger and Rokko go to see her family thinking it's still present day. The two of them struggle to deal with the family's predjudices. Ginger's brothers encourage Rokko's drinking, turning him into a angstful drunk, pissed off at the family's ridacules and abuse. As Rokko gets drunker and drunker and Ginger starts to feel remorse for her family and wishes to stay with them, until Rokko gets her in a bedroom and they shag it up. From the bedroom to the gravel road, and from there to the car they go at it like maniacs. As Rokko drives away (Ginger twisting herself around him) the family get in their car to fallow to take her back. After a wild car chaise they elude the family for a while, and the two of them finish their fiesta in a feild. From over the hills Ginger see Rokko and Crikkit wandering around heading for the nearby town. Confused, Ginger soon realise that they're not in present day anymore. She hides Rokko from seeing his past self and takes him back to the road to escape history catching up with them. The come up a ways to only be blocked by Ginger's family. With the only exist back where Rokko and Crikkit are, Ginger makes a run for it, draggin present Rokko past his former self without making eyecontact. The two of them fall into an abondoned parking lot back in present day.
Ginger explains to Rokko that she thought he'd want to recapture his youth so if he met up with his young self, "they'd blow up time and space". The only reasons she ran behind the old Rokko was because she figured the old one wouldn't want to go to a place he'd already been and so the space behind him was safe. Rokko exlpains to her that even if history had started over again and Ginger's family had made sure they two of them would never met, Rokko would find a way to be with Ginger always. Because Ginger's family house was back in 1910, all of that location and property dissapeared to make way for the present day stuff. Ginger's family is still alive but they won't return for another 5 years to try to re-write history, but she only plans just to visit.


Warning Not for Kids>

More new characters

Here is another Young and Old comparison set drawings of some more consistant characters. Ginger of corse is in here. Not much changes with her except having children brought her body down to a confortable sag. What woman doesn't loose her pep through life, even the happiest of ones?

Now the two other characters are best excamples of background characters that I've given a little more depth. Sadly these two don't have names yet either. I have quite a few characters that I havn't felt like giving names yet but usually most people know who I'm talking about (it's sad when I have a name of a character and people don't know who I'm talking about). For now I'll called them Joe and FiFi

Joe is like a two tone Fry (furturama), just a normal guy hanging around a bunch of freaks. He would see Rokko and his friends running around town causing trouble and just wanted to be apart of it. When his friends and family ask why he hangs around such crazy people he just says "They make me laugh!" Occassionally he get involved with Rokko schemes but ends up getting in trouble in the end. When WW1 started, Joe was the only one of the boys to get drafted into the war. Tooki and Gilbur were 4F'd because of deformities, unlike Rokko they wanted to go off to fight. Rokko and Crikkit did everything they could to get out of being drafted and to a point of fakeing thier deaths. When Rokko heard that Joe was drafted he gathered all the guys together to go out to Europe to save Joe from the germans. They hired a captain to take them to Europe but they were attacked by a Krakken along the way. With great luck Rokko servived but got separated from his friends but desided to go look for Joe on his own. With Crazy luck Rokko stubbled into a battlefeild were Joe was stationed at...Right in the middle of a air raid. So here comes Rokko stumbbling into the trenches and dragging Joe to "Safety". After many arugements about patriotic duty and "saving ones own ass", Joe left with Rokko over the French contry side to find Rokko's missing friends. It wasn't long before the army found Joe and Rokko and court marshell'd them both. They were tacken to an army base where they ran into all of Rokko's lost friends, who had been picked up by the French Navy and tacken to the same base. There, they were all put up as entertainment, and met up with FiFi.
FiFi doesn't talk much, she laughs and yells but mostly she doesn't talk (probally because she doesn't speak english well). Originally I was going to have Rokko met Ginger while in Europe but I desised that this would be a better chance to introduce FiFi. While Joe is 18 FiFi is about 16-17 when they 1st met her. She did like Rokko alot at the time and when Ginger came into the picture she was jelious but she got along better with Joe. Even when Rokko was womanizing he never once tried to go after FiFi, she would hit him and drop heavey things on him while giggling. He didn't get the idea that she liked him at all. After a while her desire for him died and she fell in love with Joe. The two of them are the oldest looking of all of Rokko's friends. Not Sure why they aged more then the others over the years but it's always nice to have old looking characters.