Savannah: 7A

Decided to give a redesign to an old OC I used to draw in my notebooks back in high school. The snow's melting, as I type this I can hear rain on my tin roof for the first time since before Winter started, squirt guns, bubble soap, and sidewalk chalk are back on store shelves next to the Easter candy, Spring is around the corner, and the warm weather isn't gonna be far behind, and when that happens I have a habit of waxing nostalgic. There's just no time of the year I fondly remember from when I was younger more than Spring and Summer. Also being hard at work on the springboards for my Captain N revival, something I've wanted to do since college, only reason I haven't made much progress on them recently is because Captain N is about video games and there's some games I need to play first, which are RPGs and therefore somewhat long, has me thinking about other big dream projects I might want to get to when that's done, long-term goals. I'd love to do another fan-revival of a dead IP, maybe that Crash Nebula pilot Nickelodeon never picked up and aired as a Fairly Oddparents episode. I loved that episode as a kid and was always pretty pissed they never made more, I can either spend another twenty-two years wishing they'd rectify that when by now they probably forgot they even made that pilot in the first place, or I can do something about it myself. Like in that one Billy and Mandy episode where Grim's My Little Pony cartoon got cancelled and he was gonna kill a bunch of Smurfs to uncancel it, meanwhile Billy just got out some paper and animated a conclusion himself. Sure the whole joke was that it was stupid and low-quality, but it was SOMETHING, he did SOMETHING about it. He did more than some people do about anything. For such a dumb character he was actually the smart one in that episode.

The ultimate goal though is to make something original. Starting with the fandom-oriented stuff is largely part of the long-game, use the popularity of IPs to build up a following and THEN present them with my own shit. So that got me thinking of all those old cartoon ideas I spent my childhood genuinely believing I'd make when my degree from Bumfuck Nowhere Community College landed me a cushy job at Disney making enough money that I can have a scale replica of Luigi's Mansion built for me to live in because an unfortunate symptom of youth is unrealistic expectations.

I remember one in particular being like my dream project, the one I was most excited to do. It was called "LA7: Savannah," though that's not what I call it now, since then I've decided "Savannah: 7A" sounds better and makes a bit more sense. It would have been what I describe as a "Save the World and Get to School on Time" cartoon, a genre that was all the rage when I was growing up, between Danny Phantom, Ben 10, Teenage Robot, Jake Long, Juniper Lee, Kim Possible, Static Shock, Totally Spies, El Tigre, X-Men: Evolution, Miraculous Ladybug, 9th Grade Ninja, Big Hero 6, and probably a ton I'm forgetting, it's probably my favorite kind of cartoon.

Even as I grew up and am not a high schooler anymore, I still remember what it was like enough to relate to those characters, plus there's also the nostalgia factor. I may love King of the Hill and how well I can relate to it as an adult, but just because that show means so much to me doesn't mean EVERY cartoon I watch needs be designed to remind me what an adult I am, and people who feel otherwise overwhelmingly come off to me as insipid snobs with poles up their asses who would make fandom culture a better place if they chucked their routers off a bridge and promised not to touch the Internet ever again. So if someone was gonna make a cartoon specifically to entertain me, and I get to choose, I'd rather choose something I can use to get a break from being an adult and feel like I'm back in a time I remember fondly, in healthy twenty-two minute doses once a week or whenever new episodes come out of course. I have to say that because for some reason if you engage in nostalgia for anything ever, some people automatically assume that you're taking it to some extreme where your entire life revolves around being a sap stuck in your own past, probably because their youth was shitty and not worth being nostalgic for, so they unfortunately can't comprehend what is actually a natural human emotion that evolution programmed into us for a reason, therefore they can't comprehend what a healthy relationship with it looks like.

Back to the point I was trying to make. Savannah: 7A would have been about a high school girl, named Savannah obviously, who has the power to shift back and forth between her normal human form and a mechanical form she obtained from getting infected by nanites. The nanites were meant to enhance a person's natural abilities: making their bones and muscles more durable, their immune system more efficient, heightening their reflexes, etc., not quite to the point of being superhuman, just kinda above average. But she discovers that she can will the nanites to absorb even further into her, infusing themselves down into her very DNA, transforming her into a biomechanical entity named 7A, (originally the name was LA7 but I can't for the life of me remember what the L was there for, 7A is better cuz it's "Savannah" in L337 speak) who has superhuman variants of the boosts the nanites give to her human form, as well as the power of electrokinesis, which because of the way electricity works means she also has magnet powers, which since she's made of metal she can use on herself so she can fly. The villain would have been a scientist named Cletus Carter who helped invent the nanites by imbuing them with a radioactive chemical that powers them, and is also the reason they can alter her DNA in the first place as an unintended side effect. He had a daughter suffering from a genetic disease, with little time left and with no other ideas in mind, in an act of desperation he administered the mutagen to her, hoping the act of blasting her DNA apart and recombining it would fix what was wrong with her. It kinda did, she wasn't sick and dying anymore, but now she was a monster with no hope of living a normal life. Probably driven a little nuts at this point, his solution is that if everyone's a monster, nobody will be, so the episodes would have been primarily about Cletus Carter finding ways to expose people to the mutagen without it being traced back to him, resulting in someone getting turned into a monster that Savannah would then have to fight, often with it somehow clashing with something she's up to in her normal life. Like maybe a sports team she plays on is having a big game, if she's not there they'll all be pretty pissed at her, but oh no there's a monster attack, now she's gotta do the right thing and not the thing that's more convenient for her because that's what a hero does, maybe with a valuable lesson learned of some kind. This would allow Cletus Carter to slowly build up his own mutant army, so as the show progressed, each monster of the week plot would give him more and more of the resources he needs to progress an overarching plot where he collects everything he needs to enact some plan to mass distribute the mutagen and create that monster world he wants. Maybe he'd find a way to distribute the chemical into the atmosphere, or if you wanna get really wacky maybe he finds a way to convert its properties into a signal and distribute it through satellites or some shit, it's sci-fi so basically anything goes if you can make up enough technobabble to sound like it makes sense.

Unfortunately, Savannah: 7A will not be my attempt to bring back the Save the World and Get to School on Time cartoons from when I was a kid, because even after all these years I just can't really decide why this one specifically would need to exist over the other ones, what you would get out consuming this one over any of the others. Because all the other ones I grew up on had some kind of draw, something that made them stand out. Ben 10 absolutely spams you with creative and appealing character designs more than probably any of the others, and having them all be the same person prevents it from being an overbloated mess with too many characters. Miraculous Ladybug is less of a superhero show and more of a romance show that just happens to only work with superheroes (and unfortunately has a creator that would rather drag his feet on actually going anywhere with that until I got bored and stopped watching, but not before getting to see the episode where the writers literally put him in the show, didn't even change the name, as a villain who gets Akumatized because he can't take criticism, which is the funniest thing I have ever seen in my life). And 9th Grade Ninja's tone and presentation perfectly capture the zeitgeist of being a teenager in the early 2010s, I would know cuz I was in 9th grade when that show came out, sure we weren't calling everything that was cool "Bruce" or "The Cheese," but the slang we actually had was pretty much just as stupid, if not stupider, I legit spent my high school years wondering where the gas leak was and what was taking so long to fix it. What is Savannah: 7A's draw? Pretty much every plot point I described is directly lifted from somewhere. A bad guy who turns people into monsters, who's motivation is a dying or deceased loved one? Hawk Moth. Using a radioactive chemical to make said monsters? The ooze from Ninja Turtles, they even call it mutagen in that show too. The main character being a teenage robot? My Life as a Teenage Robot. The hero getting their powers from nanites? Generator Rex. Even the way she got her powers was by being near the nanites' container when it was accidentally opened during a science class field trip to the lab they were invented in. That's just SPIDER-MAN!

Honestly these were concerns I had back then, but any friends or family members I'd bring it up to would usually reassure me that everyone borrows ideas from stuff they've seen before, there's literally an entire South Park episode about how basically everything you could possibly think of was already done on The Simpsons. And they're not wrong, when you get down to it Danny Phantom is just Ghostbusters meets Spider-Man, but I was never fully satisfied with that explanation. Was it cuz I grew up as a self-loathing doomer and just didn't wanna hear anything good about something I made? That probably didn't help, but since then I think I've figured out why this just doesn't work like that. Ghostbusters combining with Spider-Man to become Danny Phantom was an UNLIKELY combination, it was two great tastes that went great together, but not quite like peanutbutter and chocolate, more like peanutbutter and ranch dressing, nobody realizes they do until they actually experience it. When George Lucas was making Star Wars, he didn't just borrow from other space stuff, he also borrowed from samurai movies, westerns, World War II, and 1950s Americana. That's a LOT more interesting than Savannah: 7A only borrowing exclusively from other Save the World and Get to School on Time cartoons, that just makes it come off as generic and paint-by-numbers. None of my ideas were added to it because I actually believed they would make the story better or more interesting, but more out of obligation because one or more of the other ones did it. The key to stealing ideas without being seen as a bland knockoff is to diversify your influence. Eat all the cookies in a cookie jar, someone will notice the cookie jar is empty, eat one cookie out of several cookie jars, nobody will know unless they were actually being anal enough to count them. But unfortunately, even after more than a decade of on-again-off-again thinking about this character and how to salvage her story, either so it can still be made into a cartoon, albeit an indie one animated in Blender probably with me and my friends doing the voices, or a webcomic, I just still can't really think of how to go about it, not a single one of my other interests or fandoms really stands out to me as something that could combine with my favorite cartoon genre in a way that would be particularly interesting. Maybe that's why there isn't as many of those anymore, the 2000s was like a supernova where the whole genre used up all the energy it had all at once, there's nothing else for it to do.

Maybe someday it'll come to me, but for now, Savannah needs to go here, so there can at least be something to show for all that time I spent in high school thinking about her, dreaming of a future that didn't happen, and if it does won't be in quite the same form I imagined back then