The Lone Ranger: Issue 1: Origin by Who was that masked man? (Based on the original story, The Lone Ranger by Fran Striker) - Series, Sci Fi, Thriller - A Texas Ranger exacts revenge against the criminals that murdered his family. - pdf format

Writer interested in feedback on this work

The Lone Ranger - IMDB, Wiki, Video/Trailer

I'm trying.
I'm really trying.
I'm really, really trying.

I keep reading "KIT Car', and that "Tonto' is (or appears to be)  the computer AI voice in the car. Or is he the passenger? I never see him, I can't say for sure. He's always a VO, so...he's not in the car. So who's in the car with Ried? (One of the occupants..")  Then, on p5, "Tonto" is the one driving the Charger. ...no, it Reid's Charger (p12) And come to think of it, wee still haven't seen Tonto. Hell, Reid's car isn't even called Silver, nor is it silver.

Instead of going sci-fi cyberpunk road warrior, I think I might have favored more of a steampunk flavor. But that's just me, because right now...it's so radically different and KIT (T) makes me think of Knight Rider (coincidence given the challenge? mm mmm


Maybe I'll get back to this later. As for right now, I'm out by 15.

Why is he saving the nearly empty water bottle. Is this Mad Max?

Damn! 176 mph in the open desert! That's pretty incredible. These cars better have super floaty suspension or else they'll be flying all over the place.

Ok, this seems to be half Mad Max, half Knight Rider and just a pinch of Lone Ranger.

Tons of chit chat after the opening chase/shoot out. I'm getting the vibe Reid maybe isn't the Lone Ranger yet? He still has his wife and kids.

What's with all the vaping?

Ok, here we go, everybody take a second and learn from this. Here you have a semi silly, talking Chargers named Tonto, vaping, laser pistols, radio DJs talking about annexing TX. Its a little goofy but ok. I'm still reading. But then at the first opportunity you go all hyper Saw violent. The brains of Ried's wife literally blown from her skull then his young son Ethan.

TOTAL CHANGE OF TONE. It's jarring. It doesn't fit. It's lazy. You lost me. As a screenwriter you have to show some craft and maturity at times like these. Think of how this would look on screen, really look on screen if it was actually filmed and not cut out, and ask yourself if this is what your story really needs and what you honestly have to show. I see too many act like bulls in a china shop when it comes to depicting violence as if out grossing your competition is what matters most. Had your story kept this tone throughout then ok, it's a style choice but as it's written there's no style here.

What if you kept the focus on Reid the entire time and and we are left to imagine what happens to his family through his expressions alone? Or the camera only sees the silhouettes of what happens the the fam? Or simply cut away before the triggers are pulled? There's a lot of ways to approach this and you went with the lowest common denominator. Do better and don't even ask me how this would ever get on TV if this is the level of violence. I don't like.

The one thing I did like was making the Ranger black as a shout out to Bass Reeves, the real life lawman who the inspiration for the Lone Ranger TV show.

Errr...hi writer,

Okay, so I see the Lone Ranger (never made sense to me, he had Tonto to help out, not very lonely) and think to myself "this will be alright, how could it possibly go wrong?".

I see Mad Max comments above, I second them, but even the last Mad Max didn't just go and use gratuitous gore for the sake of it, George Miller is a bit more than that. I'll come clean, I don't like slasher stuff and I don't like rather pointlessly questionable violence on page or film. You can show psychopaths in a variety of ways, take Begbie from trainspotting, he's a good psychopath and uses a knife too but there's something else there, an x-factor that just jumps out at you. Bart, in my opinion, lacks the kind of charm that could even attempt to get you out of this gorey hole.

Anyway, enough of the young child and pooch murder stuff. The storyline wasn't for me. We all get visions in our heads when we write, but your vision just didn't come across on the page for myself. You can write, you can clearly write, but the descriptions lacked depth and the characters lacked charm.

I'm probably being a bit harsh here, but the actions quite annoyed me rather than grossed me out, and you've obviously been round the block a few times so I'd expect more of an outcome.

Anyway, I'm bound to be a minority, usually am. Feel free to ignore my comments, tis just an opinion, and best of luck with everyone else.

Cam

Well, this is not for network TV. HBO or Amazon, for sure.

The logline says it all and I found myself skimming around pg. 12 since I knew what was going to happen. I'm a huge Mad Max fan so I could envision whare you were going with a lot of this. If Reid was driving one of the last V-8's, it would have been a Mad Max reboot.

With the existence of vaping narcotics, it's interesting they're still dealing in good old fashion smack. Old school.

Good job, writer.

Shooting from the hip. Suggestions and opinions, take it or leave it.

Pg. 1 - solitaire...chess...seems like an odd fit

Pg. 2 - a seat belt....how politically correct.

Pg.3 - ahhhhh pollution violation, this is all starting to make sense.

Pg 5 - so is this a show where we wear seat belts but also use profanity??? Both styles can work but you have to stick to one

Pg. 8 dog butchering is a bit much, same thing with eating dog intestines

Uhmm, I like the world building you go for, but it’s just too inconsistent for me to jump into.

First a confession: I thought the 1949 TV pilot was boring as fuck. It moved at a snail's pace, and the a/v was so poor, I couldn't understand a damn word they were saying. It felt like an eternity and I couldn't wait until it was over.

Right out the gate, "issue" should be capitalized as part of the title. Look at Star Wars, for instance.

Also, title should be in ALL CAPS.

"black and white" should be hyphenated, since it's an adjective.

JOHN REID. You're keeping the classic Lone Ranger's name. Wait,

*SPOILER*

he's black. Nice, fresh twist.

Tonto is KITT now? Okay...

Is Tonto still a V.O.? You need to tell us if he is.

Shouldn't "Chess" be capitalized? Never mind, Google says lowercase.

It's a good idea to hyphenate multi-word adjectives.

Quoted Text A kit car

You basically gave away the blatant Knight Rider influence.

Quoted Text Plasma strips surrounding the rim of the Charger emit red and blue pulses as it accelerates quickly.

This reminds me of the DeLorean turning blue before it time travels.

Quoted Text They’re using SHIELD.

Knight Rider and now Marvel?

Quoted Text A readout indicating credits versus prison time scroll(s) as the offenses mount.

Quoted Text a chem pen - a vape filled with narcotic chemicals.

Thank you for explaining that. I had no idea what you were talking about.

Quoted Text JED (VO) He’s got a point. Ain’t see(n) no rain here for three and a half years now. It’s getting hotter, and drier.

Is this an intentional grammar flub?

Quoted Text On the back seat

It's usually "in" the back seat. And also, backseat is one word.

OK, especially in dialogue, should be spelled out "okay."

Quoted Text High intensity, capable of ten five[-]second bursts.

Quoted Text I[.]D[.]?

In dialogue, it's "I.D." unless you're talking about your mind's "id."

How does Kyle know about Tonto? Repeat offender, perhaps?

Earbud? Why not use real headphones instead of those puny things?

It's V.O. and O.S. (with periods).

Quoted Text Fuck! Bitch!

Welcome to TV-MA cable.

M-W doesn't recognize "pincer" as a verb.

Bart's mansion. You've just secured that TV-MA rating.

Lackey? Is that the dude's real name?

Quoted Text REFLECTED IN DECKER’S SHADES:

Bold and Italics are almost always banned in screenplays, or at least specs.

Quoted Text Decker and Jonah , greet Bart.

Do Decker and Jonah greet Bart, or are to telling them to?

Quoted Text Bart looks around[,] then lands his gaze on Decker. Jonah straightens up like he doesn’t have any problem.

Quoted Text (drifts off[,] uncomfortable)

Then again, the dialogue breaks onto the next page. I'd use an action line instead:

Quoted Text Decker drifts off, uncomfortable.

Quoted Text Call him. Call , Ranger Reid.

Unnecessary comma.

Quoted Text Decker approaches, double[-]taps his earbud.

You have a few issues with commas and hyphens.

Are these hogs the new Silver?

Wow. Network TV will never touch this.

Quoted Text abosrb absorb

I will admit to having numbly read the last few pages. Ironically, I'm already as bored as I was watching the '49 pilot.

Quoted Text without he [him] seeing her face.

Interesting ending.

What the hell did I just read? This wasn't for me at all. If I had rebooted The Lone Ranger, it would've been a gritty spaghetti Western. Leone meets The Hateful Eight. This couldn't be further from any version of The Lone Ranger. Even the Johnny Depp Disney film is more faithful in that regard. I felt like I was reading Mad Max or Knight Rider. What does The Lone Ranger have to do with any of this? This might as well be I Love Lucy, it's so dissimilar.

Couple of nitpicks before moving on to other things:

You title it “Issue 1: origin”. Should be “Episode 1: Origin”.  Issue would refer to a comic book.

Texas Rangers aren’t assigned to the speeding and traffic enforcement (I’m from Texas, FYI). They’re more an investigative and crime enforcement unit.  But maybe in this new Wild West you have them this is what they’re reduced to.

How does Reid survive a shot to the back of the head, then get up and start functioning like a normal human?  Or maybe at this point he’s not. I can’t tell. He’s biting off the heads of snakes and drinking blood so who knows.

Basically my thoughts on this is that it’s not really a reboot. It’s more a derivation of Mad Max combined with Knight Rider. Others may feel differently. I thought the writing itself was fine, probably a good indication the writer knows their stuff, but I’m totally turned off by the gratuitous violence, especially towards children and animals.  I think you could get the message across without showing it.  To me that’s just a line you don’t cross.

If you could rework this to remove that excess violence then I might be more on board with this, but as it stands now it’s a no go for me.

Gary

I know nothing about The Lone Ranger, so I went into this blind.

Can't say how it is as a reboot, but as an original piece this held my interest. You are very good with descriptions, really cool images in here.

What's a three second beam?

Some pretty intense and wicked violence. You get some brownie points here. :D

Was really digging this until the ending. Not satisfying at all. What a weird place to end this story.

This was really well written and it seems like a lot of thought went into this. Good work.

~Zack~

Writer,

Hate to say it but I bailed at page 12. IMO, your biggest issue here is over writing. I found it incredibly hard to visualize the world I was in. There was a lot of detail inserted, some repetitive, and it made a bunch of your action blocks awkward and difficult to follow. But from what I gathered I still found it hard to follow exactly who Reid was, and why he was doing what he was doing. Then I hit the part where you decapitated a dog and had some kid chowing down on its innards and, well, that was the point where I felt to continue would just lead to more confusion. Nice try, though. It just didn't work for me.

Steve

Hey writer,

this one may belong to the oldest shows of this challenge. You got a Science-Fiction genre reference so let's see how you handled it.

p1 a mix of Knight Rider here with Tonto as a "program"?? Interesting, clearly another good first page here.

P2 aiming at some climate-related themes??

up to P5 nice world-building and chase

p6 I wouldn't kill the girl. The movies are partly for relaxation; I always hated it when the girl was killed by the bomb in The Untouchables, honestly, I dislike the whole movie just for that one scene alone-- If you sacrifice a young person to the plot, there must be a damn good build-up and reason IMO. It's an easy fix here though, so I'm still on board here for sure.

P8 shifts into very dark

Did you mix up Butch and Bart by accident, regarding what Troy said?

P11 not sure how shield works, make this understandable, otherwise it's a rather weak way to make a conclusion of this "accident" – same with "creds" and the drug dealing beat around the girl… the delivery of the dialogue is too complicated for me to understand the context of who did what to whom, which drugs where, when, why…

P14 nononononononono, you cannot slaughter children on screen – nobody does this in the film business. It's something you just don't do, especially not like this.

Honestly, what were you thinking? You should research about this topic regarding violence against children in the movies. I'm quite sure someone has written a dissertation about this topic.

I actually bail here. I really hope you deal with the topic and understand the mistake. You're good on structure, writing and action beats, creating some original moments (that said the story wasn't for me), but all of this means nothing if you won't internalize that this is a huge mistake. I hope you can reflect on my advice without any harm.

An interesting re-telling of the original Lone Ranger. That he's black is no big deal, but having Tonto be a Knight-Riderish car AI seems to limit the plot possibilities.

Having Texas kicked around like a rat in a spittoon could be fun, but apparently one of the consequences of its demise is the rise of evil doers like Bart Cavendish, who has free rein to butcher any manner of animal or human. How this state of affairs came to be requires some explanation rather than no explanation.

Giving Reid four kids for the bad guys to kill, along with his wife, seems like overkill to me. And I don't see how it's possible for Reid to survive being shot in the head at point-blank range.

You got me lost when you started explaining what the girl stole. And who she took it from.
I'm thinking you have to stick with Reid and Tonto all the time. You show us the villains, and you really take your time with them.
Also, this is the mix of apocalyptic and some kind of high technology era - and the mix doesn't work for me very well.
I've never seen a movie where the two mix, I suppose.

And then, what do they do? What are they using children for? I suppose you could tell us in the earlier pages. I apologize if you did and I missed it.

But then you slaughter the children one by one. I don't know, I'm afraid to continue reading.

I saw the title and the sci-fi tag and worried this might turn into some version of Space Ghost.

Thankfully it did not.

I'm not sold that any law enforcement agency is going to name its AI Tonto. Rights issues (in a universe in which the original show existed) aside, it's the Spanish word for "fool."

There is a market for really violent stuff on pay TV, but this is just too much. P.M. said earlier that just you don't slaughter children on screen. I don't watch really violent stuff myself, but I'll take his word for it that you can't do it center-screen.

You can blow up a bus full of children so long as it's in the distance. Or blow up the entire planet of Alderaan. You just can't have a kid dissected in front of the audience. Part of this is obviously cultural: you'll offend far more people than you'll entertain. The other part is practical. No sane parent is going to let their child play a scene where the child is ruthlessly gutted, dismembered, etc.

(In scenes where a pre-teen is supposed to be some psychopath or something, I've always seen the actions described, or shown in an ambiguous way, and never do you see any real psychopathy on-screen other than the child not reacting when a heinous act (that the character knows he committed) is mentioned. It's almost like the production crew went out of their way to fool the kid into thinking something else entirely was going on in the story.)

There's really no way to fool a kid with "Everything's okay. The slashed throat make-up is just a Hallowe'en costume. So, when I say 'action,' you go all lifeless in the eyes, and let your mouth hang open. But everything's okay. Your mom has your teddy bear right there backstage." A teen actor might be capable of this, but even for a teen character they'd probably go with a baby-faced adult.

Dial back the horror a bit, and I think the story can mostly work except for the execution scene.

1. The laser blast that puts a hole straight through everyone else's head just takes a bit out of the back of Ried's head? And no bad guy thinks the battery might be low, shoot him again? FYI, if you want this brain damage to explain his change of behavior (I think he was just really really thirsty), the back of the brain controls vision. The front of the brain controls personality.

2. Generally, dumb luck is relegated to the first scene or two of a show. In crime dramas where the killer slips up and leaves a victim alive or somesuch, there's an explanation ("The unsub is devolving." "Our pursuit has pushed him out of his comfort zone." Anything.). Surviving a fatal gunshot for no apparent reason is just dues ex machina.

Some rearrangement could rescue this scene. You've established that this future Texas is impossibly hot and parched. They tie Ried to a pole, make him watch executions that we don't see, and leave him there to die slowly. Somehow he escapes. It could be that a methodical search for the missing Ranger happens to find him just in time, but again the hero's escape should not come down to dumb luck.

The final scene struck me as ill-fitting. Decker can be a dirty cop and an ass without also being a burglar. Presumably Reid is to be the good guy in the following episodes, so we'd expect him to do something at least mildly heroic at the end of the episode, such as not taking bloody vengeance.

There's a lot of good writing here. It went off the rails at a couple points, but I think it's fixable.

p5 you are handling the scenes very professionally. I'm digging the ranger high-tech car. Very cool.

Although they have the edge on
speed, it’s... well, it is a human
driving.

I can't get enough of AI with attitude. Love it.

Shit. That Bart dude is intimidating as fuck. Kid eating a dog's intestine? Holy shit.

Hover-gurney! Sweet. Sorry, that was a bit insensitive. Respect to Bart dude.

Shit, man. That scene with the boy. You shouldn't. My God. It was too much. Which makes for good screenwriting.

In order of the ones you’ve known
the longest.

Fuck. I'm not sure I can keep on reading. You are doing a pretty damn good job.

Yes. A little justice at least in the end.

Final thoughts.

But you know what? I could have forgiven your choice of ending this right after Reid regained conscience. You already did an amazing job throughout the script. This is the best I read so far. But I need to give you some tips. Hmmm. When Reid came back to life, I would have expected a beautiful emotional interaction between him and the corpses of his loved ones. To kick into the survival mode that quick although more realistic but I really wanted you to milk the drama more out of that scene. It was in a way a missed opportunity.

5/5 Perfect score for you man. I got nothing to say. You are above my pay grade. I can't give you any real valuable feedback.

Yowzer. This is rated M for close-your-eyes-and-block-your-ears-until-it's-over.

I love the beginning. It's Knight Rider meets Mad Max and I'm totally on board. I love our introduction to Bart (I picture Jeff Bridges) and everything right up to Bart showing up at the scene of the "crime".

Then the problems begin, starting with how much they keep talking about Reid, what he did, getting him there, what they think is going to happen, what they're going to do, yada yada yada. After the fast pace of the beginning, just get to it already.

The violence ramps up to ultraviolence and it's purely gratuitous. You could easily tone it down and it would be just as effective. This is cringe-worthy levels of violence for the sake of it, and it turns your otherwise compelling antagonist into a mustache-twirling comic book villain.

Another problem is Reid proves to be just plain stupid. Not a great character trait for our main protagonist. KITT--I mean Tonto--steals the show, I'm totally on board for more of that, but Reid is either dangerously naive or oblivious to the world he lives in and I don't want to wait for him to get smart enough to be interesting.

Four kids? In that hellhole? With water so scarce? Are they rich? I don't buy it.

This has tremendous potential. The first half hooked me good. It went off the rails after that. I could see this as a show, even though I don't know exactly what each episode would look like after that ending.

How does a game of solitaire get ruined by a momentary distraction?

I kinda dig the update here. Reworking the Lone Ranger motifs in a futuristic setting is clever. But decapitating a dog? Hot damn. Even if you got it passed the censors, the audience would never go along with it. I’m not sure anyone expects or wants a Lone Ranger reboot to be this gritty

“Reid sucks at the hole in Troy’s head, drawing out what remaining blood he can.” — I’m really unclear why this part’s necessary, either for the script or for Reid. Just let him put the eyeball on the scanner and be done with it. Does it really have to be more gross than it already is?

Once it’s all said and done, I think the massacre of the family is far enough into darkness without having to include the decapitation of a dog and slitting a kids throat. The main problem with those first two scenes is they’re repetitive. Both serve the function of showing how brutal Bart is. But we only need that message once. Might not need it at all in the beginning since it’s clearly received with the murder of Reid’s family at the end.

Despite thinking this is too dark, it’s easy for me to see how this could work and end up being a clever reboot. Decent job with the concept. The execution over does it though.