SS Minnow (TV series)

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SS Minnow title card "almost certainly" from Season One [99.8% stoch-prob rating].
Pitch card for SS MINNOW.
Allegations of JFK's involvement with SS MINNOW are "difficult to verify", says APTO math detective Niles Cartouchian.

SS Minnow is a dramatic television program set on a purported "uncharted desert island" during the Second World War.

The plot is loosely based on actual military-industrial-criminal efforts to develop the fictional yet illegal drug Clandestiphrine.

Premise

SS MINNOW infographic.

What appears to be a secret death camp on an uncharted Caribbean island run by Nazi officers during the Second World War in collusion with an unlicensed transdimensional corporation based in the White House ⁠— is actually a highly realistic cover story for psycho-medical experiments of Lovecraftian dimensions involving the fictional yet illegal transdimensional drug Clandestiphrine.

Cast

I have already cast Dennis Hopper as Gilligan, but the other roles are open and waiting for your audition.

Can be yourself, a real person (preferably deceased, otherwise I require permission before making fictional statements about the living), or perhaps a fictional person. Or something.

Guest appearances

Many historical figures are expected to make guest appearances, and actors will be needed for these roles as well, including —

  • Reinhard Gehlen —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Gehlen

  • Sidney Gottlieb —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Gottlieb

  • George Hunter White (of "Operation Midnight Climax" infamy) —

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Midnight_Climax

And a special guest appearance by military intelligence operative and maligned patsy Lee Harvey Oswald (who really should be cast as Gilligan, but I already promised Hopper he could have the part, and one doesn't welsh on Hopper, not for all the JFK fragments in Dallas).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Harvey_Oswald

Controversy

Yeah but if your mashing it up with Hogan’s Heroes a Nazi cell on a Caribbean island makes more sense.

Exactly. One small qualifier – it’s a Nazi-American cell. Like the OSS, but run by a Devil who holds the soul-markers of Meyer Lansky and Sidney Gottlieb and George Hunter White.

Spinoffs

User ludd pitched a spinoff show:

OK but if it is to be the Caribbean how about The Bahamas and the Rich Dudes could be Edward VII (Nazi as) and Wallace. There is no potable water on the island - except for what can be extracted from coconuts. In the wreck all the drinking water is lost leaving only copious amounts of Gin - which turns out to actually be hand sanitizer (Gotta be a Laurence Olivier type - is it safe?) and maybe a Werner Von Braun type (the professor) whose job is to find funky tech ways to restore the hand sanitizer to water …or gin.

Origin

The show was pitched by Karl Jones to a select cabal of investors and transdimensional drug enthusiasts on Friday June 12, 2020. The pitch was approved by both groups in less than twenty-three seconds, with a unprecedented 99.41% stoch-prob rating, with the Season One greenlit for retrotemporal production as early as 1964.

In an unpublished interview, Jones says that the idea came to him "while yammering on the Boing Boing comment board."

Jones wrote, in a comment on the Boing Boimg discussion board:

My satire here is primarily Nazi-American history: ratlines, Paperclip, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gehlen_Organization Gehlen Organization], maybe throw in a little Philip K. Dick for color."

Boing Boing user ban

In the course of developing the show, Jones (user karl_jones) received a pre-ban warning about his behavior on the Boing Boing comment board from a board moderator. Rather than comply with the terms of the warning, Jones "doubled down on Farewell Boing Boing".

In a reflective moment, Jones wrote: "This [my user ban] has nothing to do with SS Minnow, or the thread where I developed Minnow. It's a private feud of my own making."

Episodes

SS Minnow script excerpt showing the "SS MINNOW" stamp. Two items anomalies stand out:

(1) "KEY WEST HARBOR" (MINNOW's port of departure)

(2) The final passage: "CUT TO: GILLIGAN FISHING A BRIGHT METALLIC CYLINDER FROM THE OCEAN, CAUSING A LUMINOUS SCHOOL OF TINY PHOSPHORESCENT SWASTIKAS TO FLOAT UP TO THE SURFACE AND DRIFT AWAY WITH THE TIDE"

Several versions of two distinct episodes have been recovered as of June 2020.

Quantum reverse steganography of program data received on June 12, 2020 reveals two episodes, both believed to belong to Season One:

No generally accepted sequence has been established, although there is some speculation [citation needed] that "Ratification" is the Season One finale episode; notably, Niles Cartouchian has spoken about his "warm, fuzzy-stochastic feeling that Ratification nicely wraps up the Lansky-Gottlieb-White conspiracy arc", and that the episode "secretly contaminates [the viewer] with enough high-grade Clandestiphrine to rewrite the history of neuroleptic retrotemporal interrogation."

Reaction

SS Minnow has been called "a reboot of Hogan’s Heroes as a death camp on a desert island in the Caribbean during the War. Like Hogan’s Heroes, except not funny. Hogan’s Heroes considered as a Möbius strip of semi-precious evil."

In the News

Fiction cross-reference

Nonfiction cross-reference

External links

Social media

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