Let's play a little game - guess the title

[palenoue]

Insect Nation - First thing I thought of was the “Miniscule” videos on youtube (there’s lots of them up there but this is the first one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EknFC2ZjkvY) which I think would make for a great show, or set of fillers, but doesn’t fit in well with the whole science fiction theme of the network.

Second thing I thought of was where you take scenes from classic science fiction movies have the visuals removed and the soundtrack is played over footage of insects (this counts as parody so you don’t have to worry about being sued). You could also take old radio shows that are now in public domain, like The Blue Beetle (http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206754038) reenacted by a real blue beetle! Okay, maybe not enough for an entire show, but would make for great 1-3 minute fillers. Could also be done with kittens, puppies, bunnies, etc. Or you could take famous scenes, like from Shakespear or other plays, and have them reenacted by robot puppets. You could make an entire half hour show made up of short clips like this.

Or you could put short audio tracks on your web site and challenge fans to make their own puppets (or whatever) to act them out. The only restriction being “No Humans.” Then you take the best and edit them together for a half-hour show. You could even challenge your fans to make the short audio bits for other fans to puppet-ize.

Or it could be an ongoing real science show where you set up a web site that challenges visitors to make a short video (30 seconds to 3 minutes) explaining something scientific or doing a demonstration of a scientific principle. They post their videos on youtube or whatever and the best ones are put on the network. End of the season you give out prizes for various categories (best demo, best explanation, best disaster during a demo, best costumes, etc.) Winners get a hug from Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Don’t know why I think of fan-submitted science videos for the title “Insect Nation,” but it just keeps popping up.

[dwileman]

_Steel and Glitter_ as the show I'd most like to see (while hoping the city won't have the personality of Agatha Heterodyne's castle. It would have to be *very* skillfully written and carefully voiced ["This is Wallace Greenslade, saying "Winds light to variable"]).

_Glitterwings_ has already been partially invented --by the Pentagon of all groups.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cov7-XWUa18
You will note that it does not so much fly, as fall v-e-r-y- slowly, most of the time. This might be am interesting quirk to put in the show's main character, and perhaps even a flight pattern to copy.

_Insect Nation_ sounds like the title they're most likely to actually produce (remember the original contest?)

[wiseowl]

Random trivia:

"Miniscule" regularly appears on Disney channel. This probably means that Disney owns it. If so, that makes me wonder why it's on youtube - Disney is not known for sharing. Heh.

[palenoue]

Totem Wars - Two major-league tech colleges exits on either end of a big city (which remains unnamed throughout the show) and they have always had a rivalry going on. From sniping about who's gotten the most patents to hacking the cafeteria computers so they serve "Savory Meatloaf in Sauce" ten days in a row. This year the students are taking it a bit more personal than ever before and keep coming up with bigger and more impressive stunts. At the end of the first episode, where each college scores a significant victory against the other, someone welds together a short, but quite wide, totem signifying each victory on the banks of the river that runs between the schools, and the students decide to dominate the totem for their college before the year is out. At the end of each episode (or the beginning of a couple) a new addition to the totem is discovered that reveals who "won" the weeks battles, and sometimes the meaning of the new addition needs some figuring out as to how it relates to the stunt.

As the stunts get more and more spectacular/absurd/noteworthy/dangerous/law breaking, there are growing hints that maybe there's someone behind this sudden intense rivalry. About the time it's revealed that the desire to prove geek supremacy is actually a thesis project in manipulating social tendencies on a mass scale, the grad student behind it all realizes things are getting out of control and tries to stop it, with mixed results. Nobody knows who it is that's building the totem, but it serves as a focal point for the series. Students tend to plot their capers with the totem in view, when the two tribes need to meet for some reason it's always at the totem, the more active students tend to wear totem decals on their clothing and laptops, etc. It isn't until the very end of the last episode does the viewer see the deans/presidents of the two colleges putting up the last segment of the totem while reminiscing about the good old days when a major prank was simply taking a professors car apart and reassembling it in the library.

This show should have wide appeal in the geek sphere of demographics as long as you don't get fanciful with the physics. Try to keep things as realistic as possible without blanding it down. For instance, adding CGI or video effect fire to a real fire to make it more interesting is okay, setting something on fire that would never catch on fire in the first place is a certain no-no. This would have the attraction of real-science science fiction, "Junkyard Wars" type of makeshift devices, "Revenge of the Nerds" type of geek revenge, and caper movies type of espionage (like hacking into JPL's intern projects servers to gain access to NASA's telerobotics network in order to reach a proposed Mars rover project the other school is doing then remote-piloting the rover across campus to break into the anthropology lap and manually hack into a grad student's secured laptop (had the wi-fi removed and other functions disabled to prevent traditional remote hacking) in order to doctor the images that are to be used the next day for a major presentation on research into feather evolution on dinosaurs so it looks like the fossils died while in the midst of a wild party, complete with fossilized beer kegs, bongs, togas, pizzas, and assorted party hats (although you don't see what they were doing to the laptop until later when the student gives the report to a group of visiting dignitaries), then they have to get the rover back to the lab without being discovered and that's where problems pop up, like security guards, friendly dogs that want to play, students trying to find a quiet place to make out, students trying to find a noisy place to party, etc.) And of course it's a fun show to watch, a great way to lighten your spirits after watching too much Terminator and Battlestar.

[palenoue]

Oh Noes! We is outta show titles! Now what game are we going to play?