Making The Felties a Reality

What's it going to take?

I set up a MySpace page for "The Felties" two years ago. And by "page" I mean "log-in". I hadn't even checked the e-mail account associated with The Felties in months. I logged in last week, and discovered my MySpace page was in danger of deletion. Oops.

I passed the third anniversary of this blog a couple of months ago (woo hoo!) and it has finally dawned on me that "The Felties" has been percolating for -- oh, about five years. It's no "Chinese Democracy" but even by my standards, that's pretty bad procrastination.

I haven't done anything on this project since December of last year, when I spent half of a day thinking up "blue" material. That didn't go too well.

I feel a bit trapped by "The Felties." As I wrote to a colleague in an e-mail from January of this year:

I've taken a huge time-out from The Felties. It got to the point where nothing I can do on the project will satisfy what I 'want' to do. I don't want it to look as crappy as Disembodied Animal Head Theatre, for example. I was working on a related project with a producer friend (I did some puppetry on a children's pilot he put together) using two of the Felties characters, but I have such a clear cut idea of what The Felties are, I'm just too unwilling to let someone else monkey with the characters. Maybe I'm being a bit obsessive. So I'm stepping back and giving it some air.

I really want to do something (anything?) with "The Felties." At the same time, I don't want to do something that sucks. The problem is that the idea is fully realized in my imagination, and there is literally no way I can duplicate it in reality. Not with my limited resources.

I'm a theatre guy, so I know all about "making do" and "keeping the show on the road." But this is different somehow. I just can't seem to wrap my head around it; making the compromises I'd have to make in order to get something done. (I toyed with the idea of putting the entire property -- puppets, designs, scripts, logos, websites, etc. -- on eBay. I'd undoubtably reneg on the auction.)

I think I'm going to just have to do something. Resign myself to the fact that it's not going to live up to my wildest expectations, and instead let it live. The first webisode will be crappy, but it will be.

Evolution is a part of life, and I should take my own advice more often. A quote I frequently reference from the song "The Sojourn of Arjuna" by the inimitable Future Man comes to mind:

A man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the absolute, he must evolve toward it.

Plenty of artists I respect have been down this path before me:





You make do, and improve as you go.

Let's hope I don't let another year pass before I do something with "The Felties." It's time to buck up and take that first step.