Scarlet Pictures

Episodic Storytelling

The Adventures of Jules and Verne

A steampunk steam locomotive with glowing headlamp crossing a trestle bridge through red rock canyons.

This proposed "Back to the Future" spinoff can be adapted for television/streaming, movie theaters, or comic books. These stories will engage the fan-base and fall into "Back to the Future" canon without necessitating a remake or sequel. The original trilogy can remain intact.

Overview

Season 1: Overview

Jules and Verne's adventure begins with the unfortunate death of Doc Brown. Jules and Verne solve Doc's riddle (ala Journey to the Center of the Earth) and begin their first mission to save the space-time continuum.

Season 1 of Jules and Verne is "Sherlock (Cumberbatch) meets Back to the Future." Homage is primarily paid to Jules Verne novels and the original Back to the Future trilogy. These stories could be retrofitted to remove the Back to the Future references, allowing them to become generic time-travel adventures (but that takes a lot of the fun out of it).

Green cloth cover of an antique edition of Journey to the Centre of the Earth with gold lettering.

Themes

  • Individuals need to work together to survive - and so do societies.
  • The sciences and the humanities are both important to mankind. The sciences show us how the world is, and the humanities show us how we should be oriented in the world.
  • Sometimes, the fate of the future depends most on those who "should" matter the least.

Hard Science Fiction

While Back to the Future, and Jules and Verne like it, are not scientifically viable stories, the spirit of Jules and Verne is to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Modern ideas about time travel (Ronald Mallett on Wikipedia; Stephen Hawking on Forbes) combine with the rules set by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis to create a fantastic, but reality-based, approach to time travel.

Read the episode summaries

The 5 Dimensions

This series plays with the 5 dimensions that allow us to know where we are (and when).

  • Dimensions 1 and 2 are "X" and "Y" which is essentially your latitude and longitude. These coordinates allow you to know where you are on the surface of the earth.
  • Dimension 3 is "Z" which is your altitude. This coordinate, with "X" and "Y", allows you to know where you are in our three-dimensional world.
  • The 4th dimension is time. Time, as it relates to our lives on earth, is simply the reading of a calendar, and clock. As it relates to our known universe, however, it is relative to the thermal cooling since the big bang. While clocks and calendars are human constructs, time is as real as the universe itself.
  • The 5th dimension is our version of reality. The multiverse on Wikipedia, which has yet to be explored by humans, contains infinite permutations of reality. Just as there are numeric coordinates for X, Y, and Z, and just as there are labels for your place in time, there are also coordinates for your place in the multiverse.

Jules, Verne, Michelle and their friends discover this throughout their adventures, and become the first people to navigate through all 5 dimensions.

A wristwatch with a sundial and compass face worn on a wrist.

Characters

  • Jules, a young man with a mustache and top hat in a Victorian brown suit, framed by brass clockwork gears.

    Jules

  • Verne, a young man in brass goggles and a leather jacket, standing in front of a large round machine.

    Verne

  • Michelle, a young woman in a yellow hooded raincoat inside a dim workshop.

    Michelle

  • Kronos, a dark armored machine figure with glowing orange eyes.

    Kronos

  • Strobe, a young woman with a red and yellow mohawk and silver circuit markings on her face.

    Strobe

  • Donald, a man in green-tinted goggles bent over a glowing green device in a lab.

    Donald

  • Marcus, a heavyset man with curly hair and glasses in a black cape and orange waistcoat.

    Marcus

  • Morel

Episodes

A steam locomotive racing toward the viewer through streaks of blue and white light.
  1. A cluttered workshop full of tools, clocks, and machinery under warm hanging lights.

    Episode 1

    Jules and Verne

    Jules and Verne discover a breakdown in the space-time continuum after the death of their beloved father, "Doc" Emmett Lathrop Brown. By working together, they save their timeline and learn to finally work together.

    Read the script on Google DriveListen to the audio on SoundCloud

  2. A battered armored pickup truck with roof lights parked in a gritty industrial street.

    Episode 2

    Michelle and Kronos

    Michelle has created a community in 2085 of people who shouldn't exist, but were created due to the paradoxes that time travel have created in spacetime. Her goal is to find a place where they belong, and protect them in the meantime.

    Kronos is awoken by some of their activity, and his goal is to eliminate anomalies and paradoxes from existence. Thus, Kronos and Michelle are at odds.

    Read the script on Google DriveListen to the audio on SoundCloud

  3. A stainless steel DeLorean parked in a dim stone tunnel lit by hanging lamps.

    Episode 3

    The Multiverse

    Jules and Verne wonder about the inconsistencies of their father's stories, and begin to conduct their own experiments using the new time-traveling DeLorean. They realize that each decision they make creates a new timeline, and time-travel up to this point has really been more like ants walking up and down different branches of a tree. They theorize that they should be able to fly from branch to branch, like a bee, without having to go back and find the origins of a timeline's deviation.

  4. A man standing beside a large glowing green ring machine in a dark lab.

    Episode 4

    The Message Machine

    Michelle and Strobe realize they need more time to map the theoretical multiverse, so they travel to 2030 to 'borrow' a time message machine. They set up the "Ronald Mallett-style" time message machine in 1910 that is connected to her computer in 2085.

    Kronos is still bouncing around time. It appears that he has to take a long series of wormhole combinations to get back to a time and place where he can hurt Michelle and her friends.

  5. A sunken many-level city on the ocean floor surrounded by fish and shafts of light.

    Episode 5

    20,000 Years Under the Sea

    Jules and Verne travel to 2185 to see the state of the world in the photos that appear to be taken over the ocean. They discover that, in fact, the earth is covered in water and all of the land has disappeared. They see tic-tac shaped ships active on the surface of the water, and they appear to effortlessly fly into the sky, and plunge under the water.

    They discover a lost society - possibly the motivation for the lost city of Atlantis - that has lived deep under the water for thousands of years. They have evolved separately from humans and look like what 20th century humans would call aliens. The vehicles that they saw were drones - unmanned crafts that explore the surface and space. Jules and Verne benefit from this technology.

    These people are actually from far into the future, and to survive the challenging climate of future-earth, they had to go back in time and live in secret, under water, so that technology can continue to progress, allowing humanity to eventually find a home on another planet.

  6. Episode 6

    The Browns and McFlys

    Jules, Verne, Michelle and Strobe all end up in 1955 at what Doc Brown calls the "possible center of the entire space-time continuum." Kronos realizes that this is the best time and place to (from his perspective) "correct" the timeline once and for all.

    Jules, Verne, Michelle and Strobe all appear in the background of the "story within a story" which occurred in Back to the Future 2. Together they defeat Kronos.

Research

Merchandising

Back to the Future merchandise continues to sell, despite low investment in the brand or the fan base. Energizing the fan base by providing new stories and IP would produce additional merchandising opportunities.

Google Trends map of US search interest by state, with rising related queries such as "nike back to the future shoes" and "new back to the future".
US search interest by subregion, beside the rising related queries. The first five listed are "nike back to the future shoes", "new back to the future", "watch back to the future", "back to the future full movie", and "back to the future nikes", each marked Breakout.