I hope everyone is doing well and staying home as much as possible. I’ve been working on wrapping up the rest of these blogs so I can get back to writing fiction.
For this week’s Wayback Wednesday, we’re going back to 2014 to discuss one of my all-time favorite things I have written. It’s not Sick as My Secrets, although that was first posted in 2014. (Don’t worry, SAMS fans; I’ll get to that one in a couple of weeks.) No, this week, we’re reflecting on something a little lighter: Return of the Pandaskunk, the second part of The Pandaskunk Saga!
Title: Return of the Pandaskunk
Written: December 2014 – February 2015
Straightforward synopsis: Upon learning there is another pandaskunk, Nick and Brian seek her help to save Christmas after Santa Claus is infected with Nick Plague. Meanwhile, Disneyland is invaded by the miserable Misfit Fans, who intend to destroy the happiest place on Earth.
The story behind the story:
As mentioned in my blog about The Gift of the Pandaskunk two weeks ago, I never intended to write another pandaskunk story, which is why I let Patches the pandaskunk sacrifice himself to save the world in the first one. But in 2014, I got inspired to write a Christmas story, and it wouldn’t be Christmas without a flying pandaskunk, now would it?
The inspiration for this story, oddly enough, came from Ebola. This year it’s all about Coronavirus, but 2014 was the year of the most widespread Ebola outbreak in history. Ebola was all over the news, especially after several healthcare workers were infected in the United States. I found Ebola morbidly fascinating long before 2014, as evidenced by one of my contributions to 1000 Ways to Kill Nick Carter. In fact, I’ve had a stuffed Ebola virus for years – my first of several purchases from Giant Microbes. (I also have HIV, herpes, and zombie virus – haha!) Anyway, the spark that kindled the idea for a pandaskunk sequel was singing “Ebola-la-la-la-la… la-la-la-la” to the tune of “Deck the Halls.” I remember standing in the shower, where many an idea has been born, trying to come up with more lyrics to go with it. I was cracking myself up with the Ebola Christmas song parody, but where could I use it? Why, in a story, of course! A Christmas story!
It wasn’t long after I started trying to come up with a plot for an Ebola-themed Christmas story that I decided I might as well make it a sequel to my last Christmas story, The Gift of the Pandaskunk. Sure, the pandaskunk died at the end, but it made sense to me that if Patches was created through Flower the skunk’s wife accidentally being inseminated with panda sperm that was supposed to have been sent to the San Diego Zoo, there would be a mother panda at the San Diego Zoo that was mistakenly inseminated with skunk sperm, creating the same sort of hybrid. And since I already included the Star Wars universe in the first story, Patches could still appear as a Force ghost, Obi-Wan Kenobi style, to tell Brian, “There is another pandaskunk.”
That other pandaskunk became Patches’s “sister” Petunia, named after her father, Flower. Her story began as a parody of Dumbo, as the other pandas in the San Diego zoo made fun of her for having a big, fluffy skunk tail. The first stanza of the poem in the Prologue was taken directly from the stork scene of Dumbo, as was a lot of the dialogue in the first scene of Part IV.
I did a lot what one of my readers once called “scene-stealing” in this story – essentially, plagiarizing bits of other writers’ work for the sake of parody. I hope no one considers this actual plagiarism because all of the quotes and passages I “stole” were interwoven and used in new ways as they were incorporated into my original plot. I referenced so many different movies, shows, and books, way more than I did in the first pandaskunk story. Just for the fun of it, I tried to compile the full list below:
- Dumbo
- Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
- You Have to Fucking Eat
- Outbreak
- 00Carter
- South Park
- Star Wars
- Harry Potter
- Snow White
- Peter Pan
- Independence Day
- Signs
- The Backstreet Project
- Captain Planet
- The Lion King
- The Land Before Time
- The Hollow
- Cujo
- Elf
- Breaking Bad
- Old Yeller
- TaleSpin
- Winnie the Pooh
It was so much fun intermixing elements of all of these with my own storyline. I especially loved combining Voldemort and Emperor Palpatine with the magic mirror from Snow White for Flower the skunk’s storyline, turning him into a blend of Professor Quirrell and Darth Vader.
The second half of the story was mainly a parody of Independence Day, which is a movie I’ve always loved. I still have my VHS copy of it, which I’ve never replaced with a DVD or Blu-Ray because it’s on TV so often. So when it came time to start spoofing dialogue from the movie, I had to watch it the old-school way. Thankfully, I still have a working VCR that I can hook up when needed. I spent much of my winter break rewinding and fast forwarding that damn tape, trying to capture the dialogue I needed. It was worth it, though. One of my favorite scenes in the story, which still makes me laugh when I read it, is in Part XII when Kevin gives his “President’s speech.” I always have to look up the music from that scene in the movie to play when I read that part. (Here it is, if you want to do the same.) I also crack up at Nick’s line, “I played a pilot in a movie once, Kev. I belong in the air.”
It was also fun re-familiarizing myself with The Backstreet Project comic, which I hadn’t read since it came out in 2000. I had forgotten just how funny that comic was. Don’t even get me started on the webisodes! I loved having Brian and his magic basketball be the key to taking down the Misfit Fans.
Of course, I also couldn’t resist mocking Wylee again, focusing on that truly hideous line of clothing Leighanne had been having Brian model. I tried to make up for it by having Wylee save the day, between Leighanne’s ugly clothes saving Brian’s life and the Wylee trailer being used to deliver presents in place of Santa’s sleigh.
This time, I left the door open for a potential threequel by not killing the pandaskunk at the end, although I did kill off Princess Kujo. I let the sentry of the Misfit Fans, Mariah a.k.a. Audrey, escape, so she could potentially be their new leader in the next story. I also let Santa die (of Nick Plague, not Ebola) and had Nick get diagnosed with HIV, which was a reference to Sick as My Secrets, which I was writing at the time, and also the “Woodland Critter Christmas” episode of South Park, which (spoiler alert) ends with the words, “And they all lived happily ever… except for Kyle, who died of AIDS two weeks later” and Kyle shouting, “God damnit, Cartman!” Of course, this choice made things a little awkward five years later, when I did finally get around to writing a third story in which Nick, for continuity’s sake, had to be HIV-positive. Sorry, Nick.
I’ve enjoyed writing all of this silly pandaskunk stories, but of the three, Return of the Pandaskunk is definitely my favorite. It’s more epic than the first one and more clever than the third. If you asked me what my favorite story is that I’ve written, I’d feel compelled to say Curtain Call, but if you asked me what the cleverest story I’ve written is, I think it’s this one. It took some creative thinking to get everything to come together and make sense in a weird, fantastical way, and I’m really proud of how it turned out. It took me five years to attempt writing a third story in the series because, prior to last December, I could never come up with another plot that could even come close to living up to the first and second one. Mostly the second one.
I’m hoping to get the third one finished soon. That’s my next quarantine project!