FFAF: My Pitch for a Movie, Video Game, and Restaurant

Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Welcome to Free for All Friday here on the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers Apologist, Trent Horn. Monday and Wednesday we talk apologetics and theology, but on Friday we talk about whatever I want to talk about.

And today I want to talk to you about three big ideas I have that I think would be a lot of fun. I wish that I had the time and the resources to pursue them myself, but I don’t. So I’ve sat on these for a little while and I’m hoping maybe somebody else can take them. At the very least, I’d love to hear what you guys think. If you’d like to leave comments for Free For All Friday episodes, definitely become a subscriber @trenthornpodcast.com. I’d love to see your comments there. You can also reach me at my website, trenthorn.com. If you actually did want to pursue some of these because hey, if they became something, maybe I could get involved a little bit down the line. You never know.

So that’s all I want to talk about. These are my three ideas, my napkin sketches, and I just want to see what you all think of them. So it’s a restaurant, a video game, and a movie. They’re three separate ideas. It’s not like I have a restaurant video game and movie that are all the same idea restaurant, the movie.

Here’s the first one. It’s a restaurant that I call Kid Town or something like that. The idea of the restaurant is that it makes you feel like a kid because at least in one section of the restaurant, the chairs, the table, the bowl, the utensils are all 50% larger. And so when you go to eat there and the food that you eat is like adult gourmet versions of food that you had as a kid. So macaroni and cheese, but with seasoning and it’s really good. Gourmet deluxe peanut butter and jelly sandwich. If you had it as a kid, like a gourmet hotdog. But it’s food that you would order as a kid, but it’s gourmet, it’s adult.

And when you go and you eat there, you feel like a kid because you have to climb up into the seat. The fork and the bowl are a lot bigger, like they’re 50% bigger. I was thinking maybe the servers could act like your mom and they walk around on stilts, so they’re kind of towering over you. I’m debating whether they should treat you like a child and you’re like, “Can I have a dessert with this?” “You didn’t really finish your food so I can’t give you a dessert.” Maybe they playfully rib you a little bit. I don’t know if the entire restaurant should be this way. I’m thinking there could be one smaller section where if you reserve it, you can go there and you can eat in all the weird stuff. And other parts, if you just want the gourmet kid food, you can just go to that regular section of the restaurant.

I don’t know if the whole thing has to be that way, but it’s novel, it’s fun. I don’t know. And I think also with restaurants, one thing that I can tell if a restaurant is good or not is the size of the menu. I feel like restaurants that are really mediocre, you open up the menu and it has 50 or 60 different foods that it prepares. And I feel like when you do that, you just can’t get it right. You have so much food, it all starts to blend together and it doesn’t taste very good. So when I go to restaurants and I see essentially chain restaurants, they usually have the big old menu and they got a lot of different food on there, and usually it’s not good. The best restaurants that I’ve ever been to are the small hole in the wall places, a one-page menu. Maybe they serve six or seven things, like a little bistro type place or something like that, and they get it done right.

I mean, think about fast food, for example. What tastes better In-N-Out or McDonalds. Well, I don’t know if Whataburger would fit into this as well. A lot of people love when I come out to the Midwest, it’s so funny. People are In-N-Out’s terrible, Whataburger’s the best. I’m like, Whataburger’s fine. Maybe I’m just an In-N-Out enthusiast. Maybe that makes me a heretic to you. I don’t know. But I feel like most people can agree In-N-Out regardless of the In-N-Out Whataburger Feud, most people agree In-N-Out is better than McDonald’s. In fact, if you see the founder, the movie the Founder with Michael Keaton, it’s a biopic pick about the founder of McDonald’s, Ray Crock. And he’s actually not a very good person.

He’s the protagonist in the film, but he’s also kind of the antagonist at the same time. It’s really interesting. And so it starts, he’s like a salesperson and he ends up selling milkshake machines to diners and things like that. And the diners are always awful. They get your order wrong, they take forever. There’s scoundrels there, teenagers, you don’t like being around. And you go to McDonald’s, it’s an assembly line. The food is crisp, and fresh, and it’s just really good. I always think that In-N-Out is a lot the way McDonald’s was 50-60 years ago, that they’ve still managed to keep a streamlined very simple menu. And so they know how to get the food right, because they’re not trying to do a million different things. So if I was to do this kid town restaurant, I’d want it to be just eight or nine gourmet versions of Kid’s Foods and you get the added bonus of feeling like a kid with the overgrown furniture, utensils, waitresses walking around on stilts, whatever that might be. So that’s idea number one. It’s a kid town restaurant.

Number two is a video game. And by the way, this one also relates to kids. Where do I get my ideas? I spend all day with my kids sometimes. When I’m not at work, I’m at home, I’m watching the kids and I’m playing with them. And an idea pops in my head like, oh, well what if this happened?

This is an idea for a video game and it could be a steam video game. So popular video games now, back in my day, when you got a video game, it was usually put out by a major company and you went down to GameStop and you paid $60 for the disc. And you went home and you put the disc into your Xbox or your PlayStation, whatever it may be. But now a lot of hit video games are designed by independent game developers or indie game developers.

And so they make these short, simple games that you buy for $5. I think it’s on steam maybe you can buy these games. The idea is that aliens abduct you and they de-age your body. So you go back to being a baby, but your body develops at a faster rate. So instead of having to wait a year for your body to grow up after the course of a few hours or whatever it may be in the game, you go from being a baby that crawls around, to being a toddler that stumbles around, to being a toddler that can really move and get into things. And you’re kept in this weird kind of prison that resembles a suburban home. And you have these robots that are your caretakers. And the idea is you have to try to escape and outwit them using your baby skills, toddler skills, things like that.

So in order to go around, you have to do on the controller for example, or part of the keyboard, you might have to keep on the screen a little ball between a circle. And that’s like your balance control. So when you’re at the toddler stage and you’re learning to walk, when you try to get around a level, you have to balance on the controller. That way you don’t stumble and fall, for example.

You use things like your cries to get attention, hiding mechanisms. You use different things to try to achieve your objectives, to escape from different areas or other things like that. So I don’t know, that’s just being around kids they’re so fun. And now it’s really funny to me, John Paul has gotten really good at hiding. I’ll be like, John Paul, it’s time for your bath. And he just runs off gleefully laughing, and I look and I’m like, oh my gosh, where is he?

I’ll find him in little cabinets. He is just super good hiding in places. I also think it’d be fun for the baby game. When you go into different areas, the world seems really, really scary to you when it’s actually pretty normal things, but that’s just how the world would look like to a toddler. So it could have a quasi horror element to it or something like that. And you idea is you try to progress through the game, get to the end, be restored to your full-grown self and escape from the aliens. But mostly it’s about trying to be a game where you are the protagonist as an older infant toddler using your different motor skills and that kind of environment to solve puzzles, escape your robot nannies. I don’t know. I know this probably sounds weird to a lot of people that’s Free For All Friday.

So I just talk about weird things sometimes. And you might think that’s a really weird thing and you know what, you may very well be right. But other people, I don’t know. That could be a fun thing. I’ve seen some weird games on Steam that seem super fun that start from weird ideas. One of them is just what if you were stuck in a giant cauldron and you had a little oar or stick and you have to use that to get up a mountain? That’s a weird idea, but it’s a super popular game on Steam, for example. What if you’re on an island and you’re in a train and you’re trying to stop a devil spider train? That’s a weird idea, but it’s a really popular game that’s out there. I think it’s Choo Choo Charles is what it’s called. So who knows, I’m Not a baby. Maybe that will be one to throw in the running. So that’s my restaurant, that’s my video game.

The last one is a movie, and I just really want a movie that I can take my kids to. I was so excited to take my kids to the Super Mario Brothers movie because it wasn’t woke and it wasn’t inappropriate for them. Was it a great movie? No. Well, I think for example, Puss and Boots and The Last Wish is a great movie. I enjoyed watching that with my kids. I would watch it again with them. Super Mario Brothers movie is not as good as that or as Into the Spider Verse, but it was a fun movie. It was an enjoyable movie. It was fun to finally take my kids to the movie theaters and show them something without having to worry about woke LGBT propaganda being shoved down their throats.

It amazes me. People like corporate America only cares about money. Capitalism is awful. I don’t even think they’re capitalist really. They can make a lot of money if they just made stuff that appealed to the widest common denominator. But they’re not their ideologues. They don’t care if they lose money and go bankrupt. They have to push their woke religion. Or at least many people who work at these companies feel that is their, that’s their religion. That’s what they want to do. They’re not just about making money, for example.

Oh, real fast. I’m making an edit to the episode. So I have a movie idea I’m going to share with you all, but I remember there was another movie idea that I had been thinking about recently that I forgot to add to the episode. So I’m going to drop it in here and then you’ll hear my first idea as we go forward.

So there was a movie back in 1967 called The Producers. I hope you’ve seen The Producers. It’s a dark comedy. It was directed by Mel Brooks, who’s genius, by the way. Starring Zero Mostel Zero Mostel I think, and Gene Wilder. And so they play these, a theater producer and his accountant, and they’re involved in a kind of scam. They realize that you could actually make more money selling shares for… I forget exactly how the scheme works, but you sell a lot of shares to investors for a particular stage production. But if the stage production bombs on its very first night, all the investors think that they’ve lost their money so they don’t bother asking for a return. So if you oversell the shares into the investment, it doesn’t matter because nobody’s going to ask for a return. So you could end up making more money on a movie that bombs if you do this kind of overselling scam basically.

And so what they do with this is they try to create the worst musical possible that will bomb on its first night. So they come up with a musical based on Adolf Hitler, I think it’s called. It’s called, yeah, Springtime for Hitler, A gay romp with Adolf and Ava at Birch’s Godden. So they get a neo-Nazi to write the script and it’s over the top, but it ends up becoming, it backfires on them because they hire this hippie to play Hitler. And he does it in a very over the top satirical way. And everyone treats it as if it’s some kind of satire on Nazism instead of an endorsement of it. So people love the film and the scheme blows up in their face. So based on the producers… Now, there was a reboot of this done, I think in 2005 with Nathan Lane.

I’d want to reboot the producers again, and you would do the same premise. It’s a scheme. You oversell a musical and the producer and accountant are trying to create the worst one they can think of, but it actually ends up being a big success. And here’s what they do. They try to make their kind of liberal individuals, liberal woke people in Hollywood and Broadway. And so they purposely make the most anti woke stage musical they can. Everything offensive they can think of, they throw into it homophobic, transphobic, racist, everything they say that is anti woke. But it ends up being a smash hit because people are just sick of woke stuff and they really, really like this. And so then their scheme gets exposed in that way. So it’s the same basic principle, but it also allows you to comment on the fact that it’s amazing movies nowadays that try to be woke, often end failing.

And movies that just appeal to a broad audience like the Super Mario Brothers movie or Top Gun Maverick do really well. And because they’re purposely not trying to be woke, and I think even something that’s anti woke given the current climate could do really well. So that’s just it. That’s what I wanted to drop in here.

And then now let’s just segue into my original recording with my first idea. The movie idea stems from just a desire. I’d love for there to be a movie, a kid based action movie, kind of like from the nineties where you have teenage protagonists and they have to save the day and it’s fun and exciting. I remember those from the nineties all the time. And I wish we had something more like that for kids to be able to go and see.

So this would be the movie and it’d be based on a video game loosely, Portal. Portal, the movie. So the Portal video game came out, oh gosh, a while ago. I remember it was probably like in the two thousands when Portal came out. And it’s a cool game. It was part of the Orange Box collection for Xbox. And you’re in this weird research facility. You wake up there and you have a portal gun and you’re trying to outsmart this AI and solve puzzles. The portal gun allows you to shoot an entrance portal and an exit portal. So allows you to bend space like you shoot a portal opening into one wall, you shoot it through the opposing wall and then you can walk through them. So if you look it up online, you’ll see what I’m talking about. You shoot an entry and an exit hole and it can lead to really interesting physics.

So if you shoot an entrance hole next to you, and let’s say there’s a big drop beneath you and you shoot the exit hole at the bottom. Or sorry, the entrance hole, let’s say there’s a drop, 50 foot drop. You put the entrance hole there and you put an exit hole behind you, you could fall the 50 feet, go through the entrance hole, then shoot out the exit and go across a gap or something like that. So it’s neat little puzzles with physics you solve with this kind of portal gun. Would I want to move these based strictly on the game? No, because the game kind of like half-life, it’s based on a silent protagonist who doesn’t talk so that you can really be the protagonist. That would not be fun to just have a game with somebody who’s quiet and is going through a research facility.

And you don’t want to take it too seriously either. It’s a fun mechanic. The only thing I’m taking from the game for the movie is the artificial intelligence GLaDOS that goes nuts. And the portal gun itself.

So here’s my idea. This is kind of like stereotypical cheesy nineties movie plot. It’d be in three acts. Act one, we set up our characters. Teen whose dad works at a research laboratory, teen with friend, maybe the teen is a boy, the friend is a girl. Is something going on between them, I don’t know? Maybe by the end of the movie. Little bit of friction there, but not very much. Very, very light. They’ll figure that out till the very end. But you have your team protagonist. Their dad works at this laboratory and so he goes to see it and they’re working on this portal gun technology.

And somehow through implausible, you got to suspend disbelief a little bit here he acquires the portal gun and takes it out into the real world. So act one is about learning about all this setting the ground rules. Act one culminates with stealing the portal gun and leaving the research facility. When the teenagers do that, GLaDOS, the artificial intelligence that runs the research facility, locks down the facility, but they’re able to escape and they don’t realize what’s happened. Act two is when they go out into the real world and they just have fun with the portal gun, they go to school with it, do all kinds of fun things, and they’re having the time in their lives. End of act two is when they realize that GLaDOS has locked down the research facility and their dad is trapped there with these other people. And nobody can get in.

They’re going to use the portal gun to go in and rescue them. And when they go in to rescue them, they think they can get them out quickly and they can’t. So now they have to get through the research facility to save their dad and the other people. And it gets harder because the research facility has things like walls. And this is from the game also. It has walls that are covered with a particular kind of paint. So the portal gun won’t work. So you have to really be creative to solve puzzles to get through there. And they have to do that. At the end, they defeat the AI, save their dad. And then maybe funny post credit sequence with the dog and the portal gun. I don’t know. Okay, so that’s my idea for Portal the movie. Just a fun kids movie based on this. Has that kind of nineties feel to it.

We don’t need a grim reboot of everything. What if we did a grim reboot of it? No, stop Christopher Nolan with the grim reboots. We can just have some fun. Okay, we can just have some fun.

So to summarize, the Kid Town restaurant where you can be like a kid again, the baby video game where you have toddler and infant mechanics and you have to escape the aliens that de-aged you. And then the Portal movie nineties teen movie, having fun with the portal gun.

I’m sure some people are thinking, Trent, you are just a nostalgic mess. What is the matter with you? Are you just thinking about childhood all the time? I think about it a little bit because my kids are going through the phase of, I did. I am almost exactly 30 years older than my oldest son. And so it’s so fun to see him understanding the world and the things that he enjoys. I really enjoy the fact that there are things we can share together, mutual interests, and that just, that’s great. That’s one of the joys of parenthood. So yes, I do think about this kind of stuff a lot. And maybe, who knows, if someone took these ideas, it could bless others as well. But hey, I hope this is helpful for you guys. And yeah, I hope you have a very blessed weekend.

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