I caught a repeat of the TV show Castle last week where Castle and his mom are taken hostage during a bank robbery. It's a great episode and it got me thinking about how many times I've seen a bank robbery storyline in all the shows I love (and I love many). Psych titled theirs "Gus Walks into a Bank" and it is hilarious. Not only did I laugh throughout, but there were fun twists and turns. Burn Notice had an "if you can't beat em, join em" take on it in "Bad Breaks." The list goes on and on, but my favorite rendition has to be "Monday" with Mulder and Scully in the X-Files. It's a deja vu spin on a TV series archetype.
Stories are constantly recycled, repackaged, retold. Very environmental. So how do we create something fresh and still remain loyal to the subject matter that draws us? I love bank robbery episodes because they're always life and death, "That's my partner in there!" type deals. Psych managed to crack me up so I love them forever. Mulder and Scully gave me a captivating puzzle. That's what we have to do, stretch our imagination and put our own stamp on it. Jeaniene Frost's Night Huntress series has zombies that keep their souls. They're called ghouls and to make another ghoul you have to go through this whole song and dance. Marissa Meyer gives us a post apocalyptic cyborg take on Cinderella.
So I guess I'm a reader/viewer/writer who loves story archetypes. How about you? On a side note, I wrote a guest review on the adult blog PRUF Reads for the awesome NA Romance novel Tragic by J.A. Huss. Click HERE to check it out.
(By Brocken Inaglory (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons)
