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04/15/2006: And Sometimes Robin is Dick


I recently learned something amusing about the scripts for the animated daytime show "The Batman." Some lines look like this:

BRUCE
I'm late for the opera.

And some lines look like this:

BATMAN
Looking for me, Joker?

It's an interesting case of the clothes making the man. If the batsuit is on, bye-bye Bruce. It makes me curious about what would happen in a scene in which Bruce actually puts on the suit, while uttering dialogue at various stages in the process.

You probably don't have anything that peculiar in your produced example scripts, but study how they do their character names anyway. For each character, note if they're labeled with their first name or their last name or both. Make sure you do whatever the show's writers do. Is it House? Dr. House? Doctor House? Probably not. That looks weird.

This may seem insultingly trivial, and I apologize for that, but it is easy to forget to check something like this. You've been looking at the pages of your spec for so long, a character name is the kind of thing you don't even SEE after a while.

And while you're at it, double-check the spelling of all the names. I once read a Star Trek: The Next Generation spec in which Geordi was misspelled as Jordi, Riker was misspelled as Ryker and Q was misspelled... well, let's just marvel at the fact that Q was misspelled. When I pointed it out to the writer, he wasn't overly concerned. After all, he reasoned, if the show bought the script, THEY'D know the right spellings.

Make the effort. Getting these things right will not be noticed. But getting them wrong will be.

Lunch: a cheeseburger meal from the McDonald's drive-thru, eaten while sitting in heavy traffic. The fries were especially salty and delicious and the Coke seemed unusually fizzy.