About this Fanfiction [Spoilers]

Commentary/disclaimer on a fanfiction

In 1991, Hanna-Barbera ("Scooby Doo"; "The Flintstones"; "Superfriends") premiered The Pirates of Dark Water. It was an animated action/fantasy series in the tradition of the studio's older action cartoon series, such as "Space Ghost" and "The Herculoids," and particularly "Thundarr the Barbarian," but done on a more lavish scale and budget and with considerably higher artistic ambitions. This was, after all, the same era that birthed the "Disney renaissance" at the movie theater, and "Batman: The Animated Series," "Animaniacs," and "DuckTales" in television, and Hollywood's cartoon studios were of a mind to push boundaries.

After debuting with a 5-part miniseries, the show continued with two 8-episode seasons before being cancelled. It is not really remembered, and I only discovered it after stumbling over some clips on YouTube. I was interested enough that I bought and watched the made-to-order DVD from Warner Archive, and enjoyed it enough that I couldn't stop thinking about it.

It was an ambitious show, and one of the earliest animated series to try to establish a series-long through-line, though of course most of the episodes were written to be watched, understood, and enjoyed as stand-alone stories. Set on the fantasy water-world of Mer, it told of Ren [btw, a very unfortunate name for a serious cartoon show to give its hero in the same year that Ren and Stimpy premiered], an exiled teenage prince trying to save his planet by collecting thirteen treasures. In this quest, he is helped by the usual unlikely crew: in this case, a pirate, a barmaid, and a flying monkey. He is opposed principally by a pirate-king greedy for the power that the thirteen treasures would confer on him. Most (but not all) the episodes involved the recovery of one of the treasures from a new and unexplored corner of Mer.

The show was at its most ambitious in trying to construct a reasonably coherent and imaginative fantasy world, though to the extent it did so it comes off more like "Star Trek" (with lots of disconnected islands rather than planets) than like "The Lord of the Rings." But there was more than enough to keep it interesting, and it was better done than a lot of similar series have been.

So why try to rewrite it from the ground up, as I am trying to do here: ""The Pirates of Dark Water" (Act 1)" ?

First of all, this is not an attempt to do a full reimagining, as I tried (and never finished) with "Marvel Spider-Man: The Alternate Series" . This is only an attempt to reimagine the pilot/miniseries.

There are many good things in that pilot, but it is also more than a bit of a mess. As I turned it all over in my mind, I isolated what I thought did not fully work, and imagined other ways of doing what it actually did well, then tried to fit them all together. What has remained and what has changed?

What remained
Ren is a prince living in quasi-exile, raised by a lighthouse keeper. On a stormy night he rescues an old man who has escaped a pirate-king, Bloth, and who recognizes Ren as his son. The old man is the king of the realm, who charges Ren with recovering the "Thirteen Treasures of Ruel," which are instrumental in defeating the "dark water" that is slowly infecting the planet. The first step of this quest is to recover a compass from its guardian Alomar, at the abbey of Galdebar (who proves rather different in form than Ren imagined him to be). Ren is aided in this initial quest by a monkey-bird, Niddler, who captured him and took him to Bloth before helping him to escape.

What changed
The original 5-part miniseries moved at a frantic pace from situation to situation without ever developing much atmosphere, and the entire plot described above was accomplished more or less in the first 20-minute episode. The rest of it was taken up with a lot of other stuff designed to pad out five full episodes that could be watched independently of each other.

There is nothing wrong with this, but I wanted to write a short animated movie, with something like the pace, atmosphere and scope of one of the DCAU DTVs: something that told a single, cohesive story with the feel of an actual movie. To that end, I jettisoned everything except Ren's first goal and the events instigating it: the search for the magic compass (the first treasure, which will lead him to the others) and the assembling of a company of friends. In other words, a large-scale adventure that would launch (rather than be the first few episodes of) a series.

I also felt that the original story was too scattershot in the backgrounds and motivations of the characters it assembled: that Ren, Niddler, Tula, and Ioz were the ones who came together felt more like coincidence and accident than the result of any kind of story logic. There had to be good reasons that these characters in particular wound up together, and I wanted to construct such a reason.

What is new
The second-largest change in the story is the obscuring of Ren's identity and background as a prince. In the original series, he learns this fact about himself within the first few minutes. In my reimagining, Ren never learns this, and it is never clearly stated who he is really is, but there are so many hints that any reasonably alert reader (viewer) would be able to do the math. I also obscured the fact that his kingdom has fallen (again, something shown by the original series), and made him believe not that he is in exile from a broken realm, but that he is a minor kind of policeman laboring in the service of a prince far from the center of a powerful, seafaring kingdom.

I did this mostly because I've always liked stories about princes who don't know they are princes, and which show them learning how to be "princely" (in a meritorious way) before they learn the truth about themselves. But I also felt that, in a series, it would also work as suspense and as a plot hook. Suspense, because the viewers would know more than Ren, and would be waiting to see when and how he learns the truth. A plot hook, because the facts that should lead him to deduce his identity would also be things he would discover or pursue across the length of the series.

The most important addition is the new character Rathka, who appears as Ren's older, more experienced brother. I say "appears as" because Rathka presents himself as Ren's older brother, and Ren believes that he is, but he is not in fact. (Though this fact too is never disclosed in my script, and would be another eventual reveal in the series.) Rathka is Ren's mentor and protector, but he is also the link that motivates Ioz and Tula (friends of his) into joining the party.

The last, major original addition to my version is Malamba. Bloth is the main antagonist in both my version and the original, but he remains in the background in both. In the original, most of Ren's direct fighting is with Konk, one of Bloth's henchmen, but although Konk is reasonably competent, he does not feel like a real threat. I wanted Ren to have to fight something really horrible and powerful, and Malamba is my attempt to present something of that sort.

I have divided the story into three "acts" of approximately equal length, even though these would be far too long to squeeze between commercial breaks on television. Rather, they are to break up a very long script (122 pages), and also to separate it into its largest cohesive components: the instigating events at the lighthouse and on Bloth's ship; the gathering of a company at Janda-Town; the exploration of and final confrontation on Galdebar.

If you wish to see the original series for comparison, it can be viewed at The Internet Archive  .