LOGLINE: The space travelers land on a deserted planet, but the machines of the former civilization still are functional and mistakenly create an environment of fear for them
TAGLINE: Journey to where no cat has gone before.
Scaredy Cat was filmed in August 2018 and was the first Cosmic Cat episode. Nick Mulpagano did the voice of Johnny Reo, and the crew was James Hedges, Tim Barr, Tim Raygor, Benny Estrata, and Hayley Jones. Scaredy Cat was an idea about landing on a planet where only ancient machines still existed, the civilization that created them had long since disappeared. Since the purpose of the machines was to create whatever environment that the now vanished civilization wanted, they now attempt to serve Will by creating the only environment that they know about him, by scanning movie DVDs that Will on his spaceship and thinking that's how life is for him. In my story the civilization had to leave the planet before a nearby star went supernova, but their ancient machines survived and were still attempting to serve our current inhabitants of the planet. I wanted the machines to use the movies to try and create a familiar and friendly environment to serve the space travelers, knowing nothing more about them than what they could decipher from their movies, but not knowing that they were at the same time endangering them. This episode has several parodies in it. The ghost scene comes from a Loony Tunes cartoon where Sylvester the cat sees the ghosts in a spooky old hotel and Porky Pig doesn't. The showdown from the movie The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is parodied, and the Monster from the Id in the movie Forbidden Planet makes an appearance. You can see a model of that Monster from the Id on the console when Will sets Penny's food bowl down next to it, which foreshadows the Monster from the SuperId's appearance later on. The title sequence was inspired by The 1930s Flash Gordon serial shorts with Liszt's Les préludes music and those lightning bolt wipes. After the first draft, I thought it would be more cinematic to show the machines scanning books rather than DVDs since I could show pages turning and also incorporating the last book, a parody of the Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax. Rather than completely change the DVD parodies that I had written and liked, I just changed them into book titles instead. There are "Easter Egg" clues to what the next episode was to be about hidden in this episode. They are the Keeper's staff in the ancient ruins. The Cosmic News magazine that Will is reading has the article titles Bigfoot Found On Juno (who appears in the next episode's zoo) and Lila Cranes Shocking Discovery. Lila was the character in Pyscho who discovered the mummified corpse of Norman's mother. The other news article is Do Aliens Run An Intergalactic Zoo? On the cover of the Western magazine that Will reads is title of an article written by Warren Marcusson. Marcusson was a character on a Twilight Zone episode who crashed landed on Mars and who thought people are alike all over, not realizing they also had zoos there. One of the Penny's books that will searches among is Mittens Goes To The Zoo written by Andrea Perkins and illustred by Samuel Conrad. Andrea is the name of the zoo curator in the next episode and Norman Bates in Pyscho was played by Anthony Perkins. Samuel Conrad was the other astronaut in the Twilight Zone episode who discovers he's in an alien zoo at the end. The War and Peace book implies that Penny is smarter than she appears, which is the idea behind a future episode.

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