Five was all we needed to take down Nazi Germany.

I hope you’ve sufficiently recovered from yesterday’s exposure to the possum trots.  But if you’ve still got the fever, we’ve got The Cure.  It’s Friday and we’re in love because it’s time for another adventure into the minds of my readers we call Prompt the Squirrel Fridays.  I’m down to eight prompts left to leave me banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how I’m going to answer them in a way that will leave you basking in the luminescent aura of my super creativity.  Don’t worry, you won’t be needing any sunscreen to protect your tender skin from that… though you should be warned that my brain waves have been known to cause cancer in lab rats.

Oh, look Brain! I’ve grown a third nuticle!!!

This week’s prompt comes to us from the distant shores of Malaysia, submitted by longtime Nest follower The Lone Grey Squirrel.  Yes, I’ve found out I’m far from the only sciurine on WordPress… there are many more of us nutty critters to be found out there blogging away.  So, what did LGS ask of his comrade in acorns?

Evil Squirrel the Movie! Who would be in it and what would it be about?

Evil Squirrel! You’re never going to work in this town again!

Well, we already answered that first question last week… filling out our cast with a veritable who’s who of the unemployed cartoon character world.  So this prompt seemed the logical followup to our casting call.  You can’t just throw together a bunch of D-Listers and expect the public to flock to a movie theater near them if you don’t have an awesome story for the players to act out…. or at least enough of a story that we can put together a really cool, action packed trailer that will completely mislead moviegoers as to what the film is actually about.

Who cares if it’s just one scene in our whole movie… let’s sell it on the mass squirrel attack in the opener!

Well, if we’re going to carve ourselves a slice of the Hollywood consumer pie, we really should look at what the hottest trends are and piggyback off of the leaders.  There is no room for originality in this script when there’s money to be made!  Just like the 60’s were all about musicals, the 80’s were stuffed to the gills with campy horror and dance flicks, and the 90’s were all about how sick we could get of seeing Tom Hanks desperately try to win another Oscar… the 2010’s have definitely been the domain of the superhero thriller.  If your protagonist wears a gaudy spandex costume and has a super secret billionaire identity, you will soon be a rich man.  If you can make two of them fight against each other for a few minutes rather than actually bothering to save the world…. well, you’ve just won the summer, my friend.

Who’s side are you on? As if that wasn’t a rhetorical question…

The Nest regrets that it has but one supercritter to give for its theatrical blockbuster, but boy is he a dandy….

Faster than a speeding Pigladillo!
More powerful than a chileh fart!
Able to leap tall unicorns in a single bound!  Well…. almost…
Look up in the sky!  It’s a buzzard!  It’s a blimp!  It’s….

The Masked Marsupial fights for truth, justice, and all of the hot geek chicks that come with the gig.  Sure, he was a one-off gag I created for a Mama/Eejit drawing challenge a couple years ago, and he’s gotten a whopping two appearances in my comic series.  And unsurprisingly, he got himself killed both times.  In fact, finding stupid ways to die while utterly failing at saving the day is The Masked Marsupial’s only noteworthy superpower.  But we’re sure he’ll be a hit with the kids who love watching cartoon characters get blown up and violently dismembered, only to return safe and intact in the following scene…

Rated PG for Possum Guts.

So we have our superhero… now we need a major crisis for him to solve.  Fixing Social Security would be too boring, and who wants to see our hapless possum in tights die from an infected paper cut?  Overthrowing the North Korean government would require a lot of travel and be too expensive for our measly budget.  Maybe we should invent some catastrophe that would cause panic in the streets… now what kind of disaster would make the citizens of our fictional city suffer in their jocks the most….

Aha, I got it!  Cellageddon!!!!

Just a moment… my banking app isn’t working for some reason…

What the… I can’t text! Noooooo!!! I don’t want to have to actually pay attention in class!!!!

What happened to Facebook!?!? Help!!!!

Even this old piece of shit isn’t working! Someone…… SAVE US!!!

Who’s the dastardly fiend who could be behind this massive cellphone outage that is crippling the nomophobe culture and threatening to bring down social media as we know it!?!?!?

BWAHAHAHAHA!!!!! Your wires are yummy, fools!!!

Now if this were reality, I’d be buying that squirrel free corncobs for life.  But since most of the world would see this as the worst international disaster since Justin Bieber’s debut album, we need to find a hero that can put a stop to this nefarious villain and bring peace and order back to a city whose people are incredibly frustrated that they can’t even tweet about this major historical event to their 8 billion followers.  Never fear…. the Masked Marsupial is here!!!

Bring it on, pouchbaby!

Spying the bushy tailed vandal trying to make an escape, The Masked Marsupial commandeers a tanker truck full of gasoline and chases the mangy rodent at top speed through the middle of rush hour downtown traffic.  Concerned citizens rush for cover as our lemon lime spandex hero mows down chileh vendors, fire hydrants, taxi cabs and anything else too slow or inanimate to get out of his way.  Running a red light causes our masked maniac to plow through a bus full of possum scouts, which rams into the front entrance of the possum hospital, which causes it to collapse on top of the possum projects next door.  Fortunately, the movie audience never sees the massive body count from this ill-fated maneuver on the part of our hero and just oohs and aahs over the cool crashes and explosions.

You can’t make a movie without killing a few red shirts. Any director will tell you that…

Finally, The Masked Marsupial corners our nefarious, service interrupting rodent in a dead end alley.  Our possum protector utters a trite, but memorable line that we’ll definitely be putting in the trailer as he floors the accelerator.  Being a squirrel, our villain can only scurry back and forth across the street as he’s eventually crushed underneath the weight of the tanker’s tires.

Enjoy the moment, Bust…. er, Masked Marsupial.

As the scene cuts away from the now flat evil genius splatted out all over the alley, we are treated to the stoic face of a superhero who is professionally soaking in his moment of glory…. at least until he and his truck full of several thousand gallons of gasoline smash directly into a poorly located nuclear power plant… leveling the entire complex and everything else within a ten mile radius, as well as releasing enough toxic radiation into the atmosphere to heat a metric fuckton of microwaveable burritos.  But of course, all the audience wants to know is…. is this the end for The Masked Marsupial!?!?!?

Hell is for heroes.

So in the end, the death toll amounted to one pesky squirrel, a beloved superhero and half of the city’s possum population… much of the city and surrounding suburbs got leveled and declared uninhabitable for the next 69,000 years… and naturally, the 4G smartphone service citizens demanded was never even restored.  Also among the collateral damage of this colossal turkey were several thousand theaters nationwide that were destroyed by angry moviegoers who were denied refunds for having to sit through this 90 minute travesty that will probably sweep the Razzies next year.  Well, you know what that means…. it’s time for us to start working on next year’s sequel!

If you bring him back, they will come…

Thanks to Lone Grey Squirrel for helping me demonstrate why Buster has no business in show business, and assuming The Masked Marsupial doesn’t end up destroying the universe at some point in the next 168 hours, I’ll be back next Friday with another reader prompt the critics will undoubtedly pan…

This film gets two limp wrists up with an ass slap on the side for some sexy possumses in tight tights!