Kevin Is a Blocker, and Kevin Has a Family
The writers' bible for the Lemmings cartoon that was never made, in which a network discovers that naming one of them costs more than anybody budgeted for.
Behind the curtain+
The Lemmings history is the spine: a franchise that died because television demanded memorable characters and the whole premise depended on the creatures being interchangeable. Once that click happened, the rest of the front page turned out to be the same machine breaking in other rooms. A humpback mother staying with her stillborn calf while the thread argues over whether the word "possibly" is scientifically permissible. Four hundred comments on "a historic" against "an historic", which is a class argument in a grammar costume. Birds turning out to have regional accents. A site inviting models to upload their own weights, and commenters pointing out that a model no more knows its weights than you know your neurons. A man at the top of the page insisting he built the architecture a year before the company that got the credit. A small American toolmaker closing because the arithmetic stopped working. All of them are the same question with the labels swapped.
A writers' bible is the exact document in which a mass gets converted into characters, line by line, with a budget attached, so the form is the argument rather than a costume laid over it. The sources were deliberately fused below the section level: the whale, the article ruling and the birdsong share one Standards memo, because all three are a lawyer deciding which words may be applied to a creature; the weights, the cold reading and the priority dispute share one clearances memo, because all three ask who owns the inside of a thing. Nothing gets its own slot. The physics proposal at the end is the animation department solving a budget problem, and the horror is left unremarked because the document cannot see it.
LEMMINGS: THE SERIES Writers’ Bible, Third Revision Prepared by Development for Children’s Television Workshop Internal. Not for circulation.
1. Premise
One hundred small creatures walk in a direction. They will continue in that direction into whatever is waiting for them. You are given a limited number of assignments and a quota: save sixty, and the other forty are the cost of saving sixty. The property has shipped on twenty-four platforms and outsold everything else this company has made by an order of magnitude, a figure which gets repeated at the top of every meeting immediately before somebody explains why it has to change.
The note from the network is one sentence. Who are they?
2. Our Cast
They are nobody. That is the product. They are a generic mass, all of them identical, and the pleasure of the thing is arithmetic performed on a crowd: you spend this one here so that those ones get across. Television cannot run on that. Television runs on memorable characters, and so the note stands, and so we have made the sprites larger and given them faces.
Research has been encouraging about this, though not in the way the network expects. In test screenings, children were already naming them. Nobody prompted it. Given a hundred identical creatures and eight minutes, a child will pick one, call it something, and follow it to the end of the level, and will tell you afterward, with total confidence, what it was like. The personality was never in the sprite. The audience brings it and installs it for free, which is the whole trick and always has been, and the correct response would have been to leave a space for them to put it in.
Instead the network’s position is that if the audience is going to do it anyway, we should do it officially. So: Kevin is a Blocker. A Blocker stands with his arms out so the others turn around at him, and he does not move again, ever, and at the end of the level you detonate him. This was previously a mechanic. It is now a bereavement.
3. Voice and Casting
The audience needs to tell them apart by ear, so each gets a regional accent. We know this works. It works on birds: give a listener a few notes of a yellowhammer and they can place the county, and the birds themselves are doing it to each other, holding dialects across valleys for reasons nobody has fully settled.
What has not gone smoothly is deciding who gets which. Two sessions have now been spent on it, because assigning an accent assigns a class, and assigning a class quietly assigns something else: which of them the audience will agree to lose. Nobody says this out loud. Everybody arrives at it. The Digger is northern and the Climber is received pronunciation and the room’s own arithmetic about who is spendable was in the casting sheet before anyone noticed putting it there.
The matter came to a head over a single letter. The Blocker’s line in episode four is “This is a historic day,” and the dialect coach queried whether it should be “an historic,” and the room went at it for the rest of the afternoon: whether the h is sounded, whether the softened version is period, whether it is merely posh. The ruling is that both are correct and the choice depends entirely on who is speaking. We have therefore defined our cast, in writing, by which of them aspirates an h. The line was reassigned to the Climber, who dies in the same episode.
4. The Rules of the World
The arithmetic must stay visible on screen. If the audience cannot see that sixty were saved by spending forty, we have a show about a crowd walking.
Animation reports that at the new sprite size the deaths now read as grisly rather than amusing. Art has been asked to reduce the sprites. Casting has been asked to make them more distinct. Both notes were approved in the same meeting, by the same people, and neither was withdrawn.
5. Standards and Practices
Standards has issued a single ruling covering mourning, and it is reproduced in full because paraphrase has caused problems.
We may allocate four seconds of silence per casualty. Legal wanted zero and Research wanted six. The precedent offered was documentary: a humpback mother observed staying with her stillborn calf, maintaining position beside it for several hours and possibly days. The word possibly has been struck from the narrator’s copy, on the grounds that a range is an admission and an admission is a liability. This is why the narrator will say the mother remained for several hours, which is shorter, firmer, and less true.
The vocabulary schedule follows from the same instinct. The survivors may not grieve; they pause. A lemming may not have wanted to cross; it proceeded. Nothing in the series knows anything, though several things in the series respond. Standards will not approve a verb that implies an interior, and Standards has also required, in the notes attached to episode four, that the audience be moved at that moment, and has budgeted the four seconds precisely in order to move them. The department can forbid the word and require the feeling in the same document and has not registered that these are the same claim arriving from opposite ends. It is the same officer who ruled on the article in section three. It is the same job: sitting in a room deciding which words are permitted to attach to a creature, and discovering, every time, that the question of which words you may use is the question of whether there is anything there to use them on.
6. Rights, Clearances and Credit
Correspondence received at the studio, signed Kevin, requesting a copy of his own model sheet and turnaround.
Legal’s position is that the model sheet is a work made for hire and that the subject of a drawing has no interest in the drawing. Animation’s position is that it would do him no good in any case, since he could not read it: you do not know your own line weights any more than you know your own neurons, and a thing has no privileged access to the file that specifies it. Both of these were offered as reassurance. Neither is one. The letter is almost certainly from a child, which nobody has said, because saying it would end a conversation that several people in the room are enjoying.
A second letter arrived the same week, differently signed, asserting that the premise was submitted to this company in March of last year, that the submission can be dated, and that the Created By card is therefore wrong. Legal’s position is unchanged and was not even rewritten for the occasion. The subject of a drawing has no interest in the drawing. File both under the same heading, which is: who owns the inside of a thing, and the answer this company gives, which is whoever is holding the pen.
7. Merchandising
Plush at two sizes, vinyl at one, a boxed set of the eight trades.
The model shop that cut the maquettes has closed. The owner sent three paragraphs citing operating costs, a doubling of what it costs his people to live near the shop, and changed purchasing habits, and it is the only document in this file written by somebody who made the things he is describing. Purchasing has located a cheaper shop overseas. Domestic production discontinued. The line item is unchanged, which is the point: from where this file sits, a closure and a saving are the same event with different paperwork, and the arithmetic in section four is the arithmetic in section seven, and nobody drafting either one has noticed that they match.
8. Episode Springboards
“Ninety-Nine” Kevin blocks. The others get across. We hold on him for four seconds. Standards approved this before casting gave him the name, and has not been asked to look at it since.
“The Quota” The gang must save sixty. They save sixty. Writers have flagged that there is no version of this script in which the audience does not count the other forty, now that the forty have faces, and have asked whether the faces can come off for this one episode only. Denied.
“The Naming Day” The tribe discovers that each of them has a name. Second act to be determined. Nobody in the room could work out what happens next, which is the most useful thing this bible contains.
9. Note on the Third Revision
Animation has proposed a solution to casting and it should be taken seriously, because it clears every open item in this document at once.
There is only one lemming. It appears one hundred times per episode because it is crossing its own path, the same creature threaded backward and forward through the level so densely that it presents as a crowd. This is apparently a real idea in physics and was raised at a Tuesday production meeting by a storyboard artist, and it resolves everything on the list. One voice actor. One model sheet, one plush, one line of merchandise at every size. One accent, which retires section three. And the mourning allocation collapses from four hundred seconds per episode to four seconds total, ever, for the entire run, since there is only the one of them and it is fine at the end.
Standards raises no objection on the grounds that nothing in the series dies, it merely has not got there yet. Merchandising has asked whether the plush should still ship in packs of one hundred and has been told yes, because the packs are what sells.
Approved, pending a name.