The Post profile of Mike Judge demonstrates why it's a good idea to hang onto and nurture those brilliant concepts you had at age twenty-four:
... Judge's first animated short, "Office Space (Featuring Milton)," foreshadows "Office Space," his live-action office-satire hit nearly a decade later. In another early short, his arrested adolescents Beavis and Butt-head swear and stare — well before they would become household names. And in one of Judge's early rough animations, we're lectured by a health-food-obsessed eco-goodnik— a direct tie-dyed forebear to the father figure who debuted Wednesday night on ABC's "The Goode Family" nearly two decades later.
If you look at Seth McFarlane's early shorts, you'll see the early green shoots of Family Guy and the whole McFarlane comedic approach. And bits and pieces of the Disney Silly Symphonies found their way into Disney features years later.
Alluring ideas never go away. They get sliced, diced and used again (with embellishments) in newer productions. (To be fair, a number of bad ideas also crop up again and again.)
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3 comments:
"Office Space" was a hit?
It's a cult hit that did well on DVD.
Actually, it's far more about hanging onto and nurturing your individual experience as an artist rather than hanging onto ideas. Too many 24 year olds today rush into the center of Hollywood and cheat themselves out of key formative self-investment, and LA is more than happy to cheat them. The end result is shallow cut-and-paste corporate film-making. No point of view, no voice and nothing to say. Everyone has ideas, and all of them have been done before. Lack of individual entrepreneurship and risk-taking leads directly to kiss-of-death vision-by-committee and marketing by focus group.
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