Lorax rewrite ideas
had some ideas for a rewrite of The Lorax (the movie, not the book)
Audrey doesn’t exist, instead Ted has a group of friends who are your typical gang of troublemakers
Thneedville is very dirty and a lot more dystopian looking (probably looking a bit like the city in Machinarium)
O’hare isn’t really a character in this but his company still exists as one of the big corporations that run Thneedville, of which there are many
Ted’s desire for the new whozit or whatsit leads his grandmother to be all like “have you ever seen a real tree before?” leading to her telling him to go and visit The Onceler
When Ted tries to leave the city the first time, it doesn’t go so well because the air outside is incredibly toxic (he probably just gets a cloth mask for that)
I don’t have a lot to say about the middle point of the movie (AKA The Onceler telling his story before he started selling the thneeds) other than The Lorax and the animals not being annoying (and maybe there’s an explanation of why they can’t just take off a bunch of tufts from Truffula trees)
It’s The Onceler who convinces his family to start cutting down trees instead of pulling off the tufts and not the other way around (and in fact his mother is clearly not very keen on the idea but goes along with it for the sake of her son)
There’s probably something about Ted’s grandmother either being an assistant or a family member of The Onceler’s to explain how she knows all of this
Of course Biggering is here (did you expect anything else?)
At first The Onceler tries to play off the last tree falling down by saying he’s still rich, but then his factory breaks apart because a seed (yes, the LAST SEED) got in the gears, and his empire collapses soon after
The victory at the end is much more small scale, only a bit more grand than in the book, we cut to a few years later and see that Ted and his friends have set up a makeshift greenhouse at the edge of the city to grow the trees (as well as likely some other plants) it’s not much, but it’s a step in the right direction (and Ted likely delivers one of the trees they’ve grown to The Onceler)
Bit of a visual note here, the Onceler still has a face, but for most of the movie we don’t see what his present day self looks like, while as his story goes on and he keeps biggering, his face is obscured more and more until he begins to resemble his original book self with only the green arms and monstrous eyes, but as he tells his story in the present, his face becomes more and more visible until we finally see it unobscured at the very end