Twenty Years Countdown: Stories Striving for Inclusion

  By: Andrew Bermudez

(Mustache Maniacs Film Co. Headquarters; June 10, 2023)

    It's now June, with half of the year to go before the start of Twenty Years Young, so we're going to start counting down by taking a moment to look at some of our upcoming projects and, in this case, how we're going to reinforce our commitments from 2020!

The Holy Land Paragon and Gertrude and Lily: Twin Tales of Adventure, Race, Cultural Identity, and Gender

    When it was first announced on February 1, 2021, the book The Holy Land Paragon acted as a sort-of narrative shift for us. True, adventure stories are far from novel for us, and we've written several short stories in the past, but how this would play out is taking a new turn. For starters, the characters were determined from the get-go to be ethnically diverse, ranging from Hispanics to Jewish intellectuals, a black professor, and more. The book doesn't comment as much on this topic however as it does on questions related to tradition, gender roles, and culture, mainly through the protagonist, Lily Washburn, who is a graduate student working on a dissertation related to the Biblical story of Deborah.

    Race, however, does play a major role in the lead-up short story Gertrude and Lily, one of the short stories that will be featured in Tales Across the World: A Short Story Collection when it is released on July 3, 2024. That story focuses on Gertrude Dainman, one of the secondary characters from the film Johnny Thunder and the Trail of Botnik, and her growing student/teacher relationship with the aforementioned Lily Washburn. Since Gertrude is canonically black, this does get touched upon when related to her job promotion and, without spoiling the story, acts as a major plot point near the climax.

Why Does This Matter?

    "But wait!" we hear you say. "I came here to be entertained! Isn't that what you're supposed to be doing?" Well, yes, we still want to make our projects as entertaining and engaging with our audience as possible, but we want to do more than that. Look at New Friends ~ An Environmental Fable. No doubt, that film was entertaining in its own right, but the film also acts to inspire change in the viewers to protect the environment, and that was without mentioning climate change even once.

    In that same manner, we want to better represent minority groups that may otherwise feel left out of stories in the past. Sure, our stories haven't really confined characters to boxes based on their ethnic origin (though Johnny Thunder and the Secret of Marco Polo is pretty guilty on this front), but at the same time, we've had a problem with underrepresentation in the past. Sure, we've had positive representations of minorities in the past, such as the skilled secret FBI Agent Mr. X (played by black actor Adam Shefton), the goofy, but witty and highly intelligent, butler George (pictured above; played by black actor Tyler Shefton), and the quirky-but-intelligent gadget technician W (played by Hispanic actor Al Bermudez), but this topic is one that we have avoided in the past. However, that was less by active choice and more by necessity. 

What Happens in a Medium that Can't Explore Race?

    During the early stages of development for A Future in the Past, concerns were brought up about the character of Leo Pickford. In case you were not aware, Leo Pickford is canonically a black character (since in his live action appearance in Kilroy Was Here!, the character was played by Adam Shefton, a black actor). However, as a brickfilm, A Future in the Past has to cast everyone with yellow skin, since LEGO has confirmed that the yellow skin is intended to be race-neutral. While lengthy talks were held on how to tackle this issue, it was determined that it would be better to just use a yellow minifigure for Leo Pickford, since otherwise that would make him a lone black person in an otherwise now-completely-white world, as well as break the integrity of the official canon. However, while this later affected other projects (Gertrude Dainman in Johnny Thunder and the Trail of Botnik, pictured above, is canonically black, even though her minifigure uses the yellow skin tone), this also brought up another point of contention: brickfilms are not a good medium to discuss race, since the medium is, by its nature, colorblind. So if The Holy Land Paragon is able to explore these topics of race, class, religion, and national identity by virtue of being a novel, how can these discussions take place in a brickfilm environment? That is where Basking in Fields of Green comes into play.

Basking in Fields of Green: Exploring Love, Handicaps, and Relationships

    This film, which is expected to be released on July 14, 2024 as our annual BRAWL entry, has its plot planned out in...broad strokes, to put it frankly. We can't really pin down the exact course of this film yet, in order to mold it to the contest theme that will be announced at the start of that week, but we are working out how to make this story more inclusive. We want to explore handicaps, but not at a superficial level. We want to not only represent handicaps visually, but also how the non-handicapped characters react to these individuals. There are several details still under wraps, but we can confirm that one of the more prominent secondary characters will use a wheelchair, while another character will explore handicaps that are otherwise invisible to the average person.

Get Ready for Twenty Years Young!

    While this may be a lot for some of you to digest, we want to use this celebration to tell stories that are meaningful and impactful! But we still have half of the year to go before this celebration begins, so we have a lot of ground to cover between now and then! Join us next time for a first look at The Fourth Mustache Maniacs Film Co. Fan Choice Awards! Until that sneak peek debuts, VOTE FOR THE AWARDS TODAY!!!