This year I shared seven ideas I have for very distant TAPAS productions, most of them in the medium of animation - "Team Salmon" being the hypothetical animation division of TAPAS. The official additions to the blog will, effectively, be the third draft of these presentations, the most current and up-to-date version of the stories that exist right now. The September 2018 version for the historical record.
KEYS & KINGDOMS
A series meant to promote the tabletop RPG of the same name. As the Keys & Kingdoms RPG is, in my mind, more important than the cartoon, I'll be including a post about the game as well.
The Style
CGI animation. Fairly realistic with just a bit of style, like a gritty video game or the illustrations in an RPG sourcebook.
The First Episode
We open on a bright stained-glass surface within a dreamlike black void, where we find Kukino, a young boy who looks an awful lot like Sora from the Kingdom Hearts series.
Words appear in the air to advise Kukino on his upcoming journey - but he's too intrigued by the floating words to pay attention to what they're saying. Eventually, this mysterious text-only narrator gets him to settle down and make a decision: a sword, a shield, or a wand. Naturally, Kukino equips both the sword and the shield and tucks the wand into his belt.
The narrator grudgingly accepts this, and continues to give Kukino a tutorial of sorts, ending with a battle against something dark and hulking. It has to be a genuinely exciting, tense battle scene, setting the tone for the future of the series, in which fighting and its effects on people are depicted with at least some grit and realism.
And then, we have Kukino waking up on the beach of his island home. Needs a name. He plays his banjo and sings a little country song about wanting to explore the world beyond his island, singing "This old world... is too dang small." Once his little verse is over, he's greeted by Mizuka, a cute redhead who converts the song to some 80s pop but with the same tone and message, then finally Yamato, a dark and brooding boy with silver hair and heavy eyeliner, switches it to heavy metal, then all three of them come together, blending the three styles into the melody of Kukino's country song.
Once that's over, the trio start collecting materials to build a raft they'll use to sail away and explore the world, in the meantime having some practice battles with some other kids, all very comedic and yet real; we're making fun of all these events, but at the same time, the audience is invested in Kukino and his friends and his world. At the end of the day, the trio watch the sunset.
Then, the focus shifts to elsewhere, to the castle of King Moishe, where Kalle Anka, the rather duck-like court magician, discovers a letter from the king and rushes off to tell guard captain Dingo about it.
The Setting
The RPG campaign world of my creation, tentatively named Cosmos, a world with a globe we'll have to create, maybe even a galaxy or at least a solar system, with various locations corresponding to the seven "themes" of the RPG, scattered all around the planet.
The Characters
As you may have gathered, the cast of the Keys & Kingdoms cartoon is a direct one-for-one translation of the cast of the Kingdom Hearts series. We'll always have to figure out how to put an interesting, amusing, copyright-friendly twist on each and every one of them. Let's focus on the six main characters of the first game:
Kukino: The equivalent to Sora. Depicted as a clueless but well-meaning country bumpkin who lugs around a banjo everywhere he goes in addition to his magnificent key-shaped sword (I think I'm going with Soulkey as the name for the setting's Keyblade equivalent - and you can bet it'll be an item in the RPG as well). While easily distracted and not especially competent, Kukino is not stupid, able to analyze people with his simple-minded wisdom. His lack of finesse with his weapon will be emphasized and be the subject of a lengthy character arc. Musical segments associate him with country.
Yamato: The equivalent to Riku. A brooding, gothic boy in heavy eyeliner. His struggles with the dark side are emphasized a bit, constantly simmering with angst and anger - actually doing that, rather than merely being accused of it by the fans. His musical genre is heavy metal.
Mizuka: The equivalent to Kairi. Her personality is stronger than it is in the series, just as sassy and flirty as she was in the first game, and maintaining a glimmer of that throughout everything she goes through. She wears an excess of makeup and speaks in a New York accent. Her musical genre is 80s pop.
Kalle Anka: The equivalent to Donald Duck. As in the KH canon, he is court magician of his kingdom. In this depiction, he is also a morally-gray vizier motivated entirely by pragmatism, and voiced with a thick and sinister Swedish accent.
Dingo: The equivalent to Goofy. As in the KH canon, he is captain of the king's royal knights who fights with a shield. This is a much bigger part of his personality in this portrayal, abiding by a knightly code of honor and espousing the pacifism that his shield represents. He is voiced in an impression of Sam Elliott.
Hanzo/Thanatos: The equivalent to Ansem/Xehanort. A villain cloaked in shadow throughout most of the early portions of the first story arc. His nature as the setting's equivalent of a Heartless is represented by being fully ruled by his emotions, which swing wildly.
The Further Story
The original plan was for a ten-volume series, with each volume corresponding to a game in the Kingdom Hearts series. I don't want to do that anymore. While I still want the characters and locations to very obviously match up to those of Kingdom Hearts, I no longer want the story to do the same. So, the time must come to come up with an actual story for this. Even the first episode may no longer correspond to day one of Kingdom Hearts. But the concept is the same: we're making fun of Kingdom Hearts with music and silliness, but also taking advantage of KH's setting and concept in a better, smarter way than the series ever actually has.
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