LOGLINE: Penny's joyride in the spacepod to a space station and a newly acquired robot create a trust problem for Will.
TAGLINE: Without trust, how do we proceed?
While The Cat's Away is in production and will be coming to film festivals this year.
While The Cat's Away has my biggest cast so far, and they are so talented. The original script had no mention of the dance scene, but when I found out the Jared Dominguez, who was first cast to play a 1950s greaser character, was an excellent jitterbug dancer, along with his wife Bre, I had to work that dance into the movie, so they both play two roles. As a reference to the TV show Lost in Space, Bre wears a Penny Robinson dress in the scene where Will is looking for his cat Penny. A reference to the spacepod scene in 2001:A Space Odyssey is included as a parody, also the floating pen and the Pan Am stewardess. The Dracula scene was just a short paragraph in the script but I had fun building it into a longer mini-movie within the main movie, as well as bringing the characters back for the end credits. The space station set was also one of my largest sets taking up half of the stage. The miniature of the space station was inspired by structures in the Loony Tunes Marvin the Martian cartoons, and also the Jetsons. I wanted it to have a retro Route 66 tourist trap look and even added incongruous details like outside fire hydrants, phone booths, mailboxes, trash cans, and junkyards with old cars. The robot is also meant to have a retro 1930s art deco look. I has parts and tubes from 1930s radios and chrome trim from 1950s Ford cars. Even the front instrument panel contains a 1930s Ford instrument cluster. The two mouthless aliens were a late addition to the script. They are to play a larger role in future episodes but I thought it would be fun to introduce them in this episode. Although the space pod has appeared in previous episodes, it was originally built with this episode in mind. In keeping with the retro technology of the series, it was built using a lot of vintage aircraft parts. References to the next episode about time travel include Marty's cap and Sports Almanac from Back To The Future, and a flux capacitor hanging in Haney's shop. The Haney character first appeared in the episode "What The Cat Dragged In" as a aerospace salvage yard owner on Earth who sold Will his spaceship. Music from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet was used over the end credits to as a reference to the 1931 Dracula movie where Swan Lake played over the opening credits.

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