Walt Disney is fond of proclaiming that everything he ever made reality into this world ‘started with a mouse.’ I find myself very honored and humbled to say the exact same thing. The Foxfire world started with a mouse who’s as close to Mickey as you could get and still call him original. Johnny Briz is an homage to the classic animation with all it’s wonder and magic it held, and the desire for me to take that wonder and magic and kick it into overdrive. Disney Magic, Fox Attitude. Nothing better epitomizes that motto than Johnny.
–David Foxfire
Johnny Briz is my oldest and possibly most loved character in my stable, and I still get to enjoy working with him over at the Disney Echo site. I promised myself that I’ll be making a coherent origin story of him, and with the Script Frenzy 2010 project, I didn’t disappoint. He’s pretty much my answer to Mickey Mouse and a way to show what Disney Magic would look like if allowed to be free from corporate constraints.
This book is a sketchbook as well as a script book. Along the storyline, you’ll see plenty of illustrations and liner notes, most of them placed in this side area. With the way my Aspergers-ridden mind works, this feels the best way to show my ideas. Of course, your mileage is permitted to differ.
I’m also willing to provide a little give and take on the art style as well. Most of these illustrations are just sketches, and can be easily changed. I don’t necessarily need those producing this script to use my art style verbatim, but to experiment with their own or see to setting the characters into what accepted style of the company. I’m more than willing to provide some give and take on the characters to put them into a workable form.
The story begins, strangely enough, not with him, but with a human named Amber Merichello. She’s an avid Disney Otaku with dreams of becoming an Animator, hoping to bring back hand drawn cartoons in the age where marketability and computer generated imagery are the rule of the day. Having management who doesn’t know their head from their asses, much less what appeals to kids outside of them getting their parents to buy them stuff, is also a wall in her way. And then of course, there’s the current economy putting a damper in everyone’s dreams, especially Amber’s.
When she wished on a star while riding a light rail train home, she didn’t even think that her wish would be answered just like with Walt Disney’s fateful train ride. But then again, Mickey Mouse came from Walt’s head into a drawing pad, not physically fly into the train car Amber was in and almost plow her over. But that’s how she met Johnny, all two foot five inches of him.
Amber took the mouse into her house so he can recover from whatever happened to him up to that point–having a vet for a mother helps–she found out more about her little friend, and a section of Reedy Creek’s history they didn’t tell her.
Well, they did tell her about some other characters being born in what is legally called the Reedy Creek Development Center. Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog is a prime example. She just didn’t know of any mouse colonies on the boondock areas, where Disney isn’t building anything and is only there as protected wilderness, until Johnny told her about it.
Rumor stated that the colony is founded by a group of mice and rats that escaped from a science lab after acquiring human-like sentience through an experiment. It was Walt himself who discovered the colony, and declared it out of bounds for any building there.
The origin somehow got romanticized into a story, and later on a movie, by a splinter group of animators during the 1980s. It was a movie that was scoffed by the Reedy Creek denizens . . . until little Johnny came into their world, in the spitting image of one of the characters.
The green-eyed mouse proved to be special, showing a courage streak above and beyond the others, as he dreamed of one day becoming very much like his namesake. He even picked up parkour free running and Tae Kwan Do to create a unique spin on his wishes. They would serve him well when one of the scientist set up another experiment that was a bit too close to the colony for their comfort.
It was Johnny who investigated, and it was Johnny who found out the hard way what they were doing: He was caught in the fire of a matter reduction and expansion machine, which caused him to grow to his current height. The next thing he knew, he was perused by humans he thought shrunk themselves and after that, he was sailing into a light rail train. The rest Amber knew.
And Amber found out a way to address both their wishes: She set up a series of videos of Johnny to post on the Internet. It started with just Johnny out and about, but grew into actual staged shorts that eventually go viral.
It’s only a matter of time before Johnny finds out that his dreams have taken him beyond what he’d expected, not to mention more complicated. He has to deal with fame, Disney finding out about him, a psychotic movie mongrel with delusions of adequacy, a science lab that requires armed guards, figuring out how to get back in touch with his home, and the possibility of other mice like him cavorting about in the Human world.
Such is the story written in script form–My first script–inside this book. It’s the result of over two decades of development for the Johnny Briz character–back when he was a fan character of that very same movie mentioned above–until he can pretty much stand on his own. And with a little luck, maybe he’ll branch out in his own series as well.
