Cameron Stradling: Retro Future Reference

Some other reference and terms to look up: Retro Scifi, Retro Future, Rocketeer, Sky Captain, Captain America, Iron Giant, War of the Worlds, Jetsons, Shorpy.com, Vincent Di Fate, Frank Kelly Freas, Forbidden Planet, Plan 9 from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Raygun Gothic, Streamline Modern, Cyberpunk, Metropolis, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Dr. Grordborts, Limbo, http://retrofuture.soup.io/, Retropolis, World On A Wire, Retronaut, Starcrash

Ideas for Plot!

• ·         The era is World War II – during the height of the war.
• ·         Government hosted technology to simulate war – to train soldiers in warfare. Or could be primitive technology to infiltrate the enemies dreams – create an alternate reality – think Inception, but with war.
• ·         Possibly illegal technology – the designers of this simulation could be a conglomerate of aunts and uncles of the same family – they found a cheap and easy way to test it – on their own niece/nephew.
• ·         Idea: the technology gained self-awareness, possibly has an addictive effect – so that the person wants to keep going back to the alternate reality.
• ·         Another idea: the AI has taken form of several ‘aunt’s’ or ‘uncles’, scattered throughout the area. They each live in their own domains – they need to be stopped in order for the niece / nephew to be freed. Think maybe Wizard of Oz; this is basically the character’s mind and memories, this is their mind’s interpretation of their aunts and uncles.
• Maybe the two uncles who are in it for money - they want to sell this technology instead of using it for warfare - keep people hooked on this alternate reality - but there's a bit of an argument in the conglomerate of aunts and uncles - so this is more for themselves.

What do you guys think? I'm a firm believer that you need a stable plot in order to graft things around; it's fun to go out and explore our own ideas, but even for the concept, we need a basis for what these characters, in their rawest form, are. When George Lucas wanted a main villain for Star Wars III, he basically said "robot looking villain, he's evil, yada yada yada!".