Wherein I read things, laugh [or not], and pass them on to you…
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Frank Darabont’s Amazing Walking Dead Episode That You’ll Never See:
Wondering how the second half of Walking Dead season two will be different without Frank Darabont at the wheel? Here’s one brilliant storyline the ex-show runner had planned, which was straight out of the Twilight Zone. And sadly, it will probably never see the light of day.
***
[Darabont said to me], “Look, I think it would be really cool to tell a prequel story about how Atlanta fell. Do Black Hawk Down, but with zombies. And have a few main characters pass through, like a Twilight Zone episode [and] the lead will be you. And your character will go through and you’re a soldier and all these horrible things happen, the chain of command breaks down, and eventually you have to take out your superior officer to save a bunch of people. Then, eventually in the end, you get bit.”And [Darabont is] pitching me this, “You’re crawling and you crawl into this tank and you have this grenade and you’re going to blow yourself up. But you set the grenade next to you and you die. Then, we reprise the scene from the pilot, where Rick crawls in the tank and there’s a zombie there.”
And if you look closely, I played that zombie because we were setting up this prequel we were going to do. If you watch the pilot of Walking Dead, that’s me in the tank as the zombie. And then Rick blasts him and he gets deafened, and he gets that grenade which saves him at the end of the season. Well, we were going to tell the history of the grenade. We were going to tell, also, how another character who is being introduced in the second season how he comes to a certain thing. They were going to do all this cool stuff. Not doing it now. Why? Because AMC wanted to save a few bucks. That’s just one example of the king of cool, awesome forethought that this guy put into the show that is now absolutely for naught.
***[io9.com/6 jan 2012]
