Gahan Wilson is a wonderfully twisted cartoonist. I first saw his work in the pages of Playboy and later in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Gahan Wilson cartoons have a kind of sad/horrible/funny feel to them. One of the cartoons from F&SF had two robots standing over a rotting corpse sitting at a table, one of the robots speaks-He hasn’t eaten anything in weeks, I’m starting to worry about him.
The Wife has been a big fan of Sci Fi for a long time and used to read the wonderfully odd Omni Magazine, where Gahan Wilson also contributed the occasional bit of work. According to the Gahan Wilson website the Plot Generator was written for National Lampoon, but I feel pretty sure that The Wife was not a reader of National Lampoon. But then, you never really know about people, do you?
You have to love the simple elegance of Gahan Wilson’s Sci Fi Movie Plot Generator-They Eat Us-The End. They Leave-The End. They Live Happily Ever After-The End. It’s the kind of thing every writer should have a good look at-either to follow it’s advice, or avoid it. The Plot Generator flow charts is good for a giggle, but you can also watch modern movies and see that the basic formula hasn’t really changed all that much.
Jocelyn Paine has taken Gahan Wilson’s SF Story Generator into the modern age and all you have to do is reload the page to get a new SF Plot. It’s pretty silly stuff, but I like it.
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That’s too funny!
The sad thing is I can actually myself using something like that. 🙂
Happy new year!
Jen aka dark passenger
I agree with your wife – it was published in Omni Magazine. It was on the back cover of an issue – and was artfully drawn as I recall.
I know this because I used this flowchart to write a program in Pascal in college. I couldn’t think of a final project and was leafing through one of my old Omni magazines and saw the flow chart on the back. Inspiration! I sat down and spent the next 24 hours writing a 1000 line program as my final (got an ‘A’ for the program!) exam project.
This is wonderful! I miss OMNI, one of the best magazines ever.
Thank you so much for making this available.