January 07, 2005

Leonardo (the artist, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle)

I'm reading a biography on Leonardo right now. It turns out that for all his brilliant successes (The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, his notebooks full of unimplemented inventions and groundbreaking anatomical studies), he had tons of failures. For instance, a giant bronze statue of a horse that was never completed, a few different canals and waterways that didn't operate as designed, and some paintings that he started but never finished. He also tried to build a giant sphinx out of Legos, but ran out of yellow pieces. In this respect, it is my pleasure to announce that I have a lot in common with Leonardo.

I, too, have had many brilliant ideas that have started with the greatest intentions but ended in the trash heap. One of these was a role-playing videogame based on Perfect Strangers. Which one do you want to be? Larry or Balki? It's your choice! Go through the day as a power-broking Chicago businessman dealing with the annoying yet lovable quirks of your foreign-born cousin Balki, or experience the wonder of being an immigrant in the United States, getting American expressions hilariously wrong and in general working your "fish out of water" schtick through a series of wacky hijinks. Unfortunately, this idea did not catch on, supposedly due to the fact that I have no experience making videogames, and that Perfect Strangers hasn't been on TV in 15 years. My own personal theory is that, like Leonardo inventing the tank, sometimes a culture just isn't ready for the ideas of its foremost thinkers.

Another great idea I had is "Kegs o' Kool-Aid," in partnership with my friend Adam. Our personal research had shown that people love drinking stuff out of kegs. Currently, the only beverage regularly served out of kegs is beer. But drinking beer makes you feel weird and say things you don't mean, like that you think Prince would be hot as a chick, or that you are kind of curious what human flesh tastes like. Kool-Aid does not suffer from this problem, tastes delicious, and is much easier to make. Unfortunately, this idea was also a failure, as "big beer" crushed our idea in the early stages. By early stages, I mean when we first got drunk and thought of the idea, then passed out and forgot all the details. Posted by mill1991 at January 7, 2005 01:26 PM | TrackBack

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