Title: Blackout Author: Lance Falk and Eric Clark ACT ONE Twilight in Megakat City, with a storm on the way. BOOM! Jake and Chance's regular battle of wits with Burke and Murray is interrupted by a violent shockwave from underground. (an effect felt all over the city). Simultaneously, there is a sudden power outage in the wide local area. Our boys hustle their "guests" away, grab flashlights and bolt for the secret hangar. Jake starts up the emergency generator and Chance activates the giant hangar viewscreen. Ann Gora (from show one) is broadcasting live from the epicenter of the disturbance. It is unbelievable! The local power station has disappeared. In it's place is an enormous bottomless pit! The Swatkats jet into action. At the site, three strange looking robot drones emerge from the pit and take up a triangular position in the sky. Between them, they project a mammoth viewscreen against the clouds. On this screen appears the meglomaniacal fiend BLACKOUT. This armored, impressive and (intentionally) melodramatic villain demands full political power over Megakat city or he will continue to abscond the city's power stations. The city will be plunged into darkness and chaos! Razor and T-Bone are having none of this! They engage the agile drones in a wild air combat. The tiny laser projecting devices prove challenging but not unbeatable. The peerless combat flying of our heroes blast Blackout's toys into scrap! T-Bone flies over the 'bottomless' pit for a closer look when the jet is seized in the mighty grip of Blackout's "gravity beam" (the same force which grabbed the power station.) The jet begins an uncontrolled spin into the gaping maw of the pit! END ACT ONE (Editor's notes: In series TV, most episodes run 22 minutes before commercial breaks are inserted to flesh them out to half an hour. Traditionally, there are two major breaks in any animated series ep, and the action is generally tailored so that the commercial breaks occur during a cliffhanger or some plot point that makes you eager for more. In scriptwriting, the commercial breaks occur at the end of each "ACT"; so, as we're at the end of "ACT ONE" now, we would expect to see an ad, and another at the end of "ACT TWO". "ACT 3" of course ends with the credit roll. If you already knew all this stuff, spank me). ACT TWO Razor deploys a half dozen "bungee grapples" from every side of the Turbokat into all sides of the pit, causing the advanced jet to "sproing" free of the gravity field. Callie signals the cats for an emergency meeting. She informs them that the city cannot afford to lose more than one more power station before the whole city is plunged into total darkness. (The coming storm ain't gonna help the situation either!) Callie introduces top police scientist ELLIOT KLIBAN. A nebbishy type given to over-reacting, never the less, Elliot's scientific brilliance may be of help, according to the deputy Mayor. Kliban warns emphatically about the danger of confronting Blackout, a cat who controls gravity itself, but the Swatkats are undaunted. As if to punctuate the mood, the storm chooses that moment to begin. Meanwhile, Feral and Manx are having a serious disagreement. The craven Mayor is prepared to give in to Blackout's demands. Feral insists on a chance to stop the techno-terrorist. Manx reluctantly agrees. ACT TWO (..and a half..) ...Feral insists on a chance to stop the techno-terrorist. Manx reluctantly agrees. Kliban predicts Blackout's next target: the city's main power station which powers Police Headquarters and City Hall. The Turbokat arrives on the site in moments. Below, Feral and his squad endure the heavy rain and stand guard around the station. As if cued by a dramatic flash of lightning, Power station number two is yanked violently down! (this is the first time we actually SEE this efffect, in all it's violent glory) <<--editors note: these guys don't pull any punches about the "violence" aspect of bad-guy behaviour, huh?-->> The ground shatters, tall electrical towers are yanked free of their moorings. Feral and his men have to jump free of one such tower as it slams into a flooded area of the street. The standing water is electrified and even causes a few parked enforcer vehicles to explode! This is more than the Swatkats can take! The hell with Kliban's warnings! T-Bone points the jet toward the newly-formed pit and dives into the abyss, full throttle! It's one hell of a ride, but T-Bone manages to retain an iron-like control over the screaming, diving jet. The TurboKat's control lights illuminate an amazing site far below. The huge power station disappears beneath a pair of mammoth doors at the bottom of the mile deep shaft. The doors close below, creating a smooth landing platform (remember the false volcano lid in "You Only Live Twice"). When the landing platform closes beneath them, it creates a fortunate side-effect: the gravity beam shuts off. The Turbokat makes a gently vertical landing on the metal floor of the shaft. A second door slams shut above the landed jet, trapping it in the bottom of the mile deep pit! Night-vision goggles reveal a staggeringly huge network of Carlsbad type caverns. Razor suggest a little recon work. The boys launch in a cyclotron missile, complete with sidecar. The cave path leads to a high-tech metal corridor in the bowels of the cave. Suddenly, Blackout's automatic defences attack! T-Bone and Razor split up (the sidecar can operate independently) and blast a path through the gauntlet of lethal devices. (lots of cool stuff, whirring blades, acid spray nozzles, laser beam-eyed flying squid-shaped robots, etc. etc) The melee turns desperate as the cyclotron weapons are exhausted. A small cave-in seperates the two cats and the speeding T-Bone is forced to crash into a metal wall. Under Blackout's direction, hovering robot sentries grab the big unconscious SwatKats and take him away. ACT THREE T-Bone awakes to find himself in Blackout's massive and complex control center. In true movie cereal (sic) tradition, Blackout gloats and taunts his captive audience. A few key phrases give Chance enough clues to uncover the secret identity of "Blackout"...none other than Elliot Kliban! Kliban unmasks and brags about the effectiveness of his dual identity. Government drone during the day (using his position in the Enforcers to misdirect them) and meglomaniacal arch-villian at night! "As Kliban, I warned you to stay away, now that you know my secret, you must DIE!" raves Elliot. Meanwhile, Razor has reached the Turbokat. Activating it's VTOL hover mode, he sets off in search of his pal. (Periodically we cut to him blasting his way through the caverns, fighting robot defence drones all the while). With minutes to go before "Blackout" uses his gravity beam to steal a third and final generator, T-Bone asks the Enforcer scientist "how did a weenie like you ever build this amazing complex with it's array of advanced and evil technology?" (*author's note* don't worry guys, my real dialogue will be a lot more natural than THIS!) "found it!" laughs Kliban. (in flashback) he tells of stumbling upon this complex during a routine enforcer investigation, months ago. "It had been abandoned for decades, but everything still worked perfectly!" An evil scientist made it his 'nine lives work' constructing the complex and it's diabolical devices in order to blackmail the city government (a very young Manx, enjoying his first term) out of fifteen million dollars. "The funny thing is, on the eve of implementing his scheme, the ORIGINAL Blackout won THIRTY million in the city lottery!" "He just covered everyting in covers, left the keys and instruction manual on the floor, and split to retire on some tropical island. He also left a note wishing good luck to whoever finds this joint so his life's work won't be for nothing!" (It should be noted that Kliban bases his whole 'villian persona' on old movies he watched as a kid!) Kliban finishes-up his narrative to throw the switch, when the Turbokat explodes through a wall into the command chamber! An entire SQUADRON of robot sentries are on his heels! Razor blasts the main control panel into slag. Elliot panics. Now he has NO WAY to control the sentries! (OR open up an exit from the place!) A well placed shot frees T-Bone, who grabs the scrawny wanna be world-beater and stuffs him into the jet. When all three cats are sealed-up in the Turbokat, Razor gets a crazy idea to save them all. The x-ray beamer reveals that the ocean is on the other side of the far stone wall of the control center. The daredevil weapons officer blasts a jet-sized hole in the wall, causing the sea to rush in the chamber, with metal-tearing force! T-Bone puts the 'pedal to the Metal' and powers the jet against the tide and out into open ocean. The flood of water causes the entire subterranean complex to explode in a spectacular display of underwater pyrotechnics! Amazingly, the Turbokat bursts from teh ocean into open sky and begins it's long flight home. *author's note again* I KNOW the physics are kind of ridiculous, but it is dramatic and this IS a cartoon! Weeks later, the Swatkats receive a (forwarded) letter from a remote tropical island paradise, it reads: Dear Swatkats, "Thanks for shutting down that Kliban guy, it's weenies like him that gives us mad scientists a bad name! respectfully yours, The REAL Blackout. THE END