Saturday Night Showcase> Godspeed (Pilot)

Here’s something that’s been in my Watch Later list for too long.

Godspeed is a pilot that posted to YouTube in late 2023. Created by Olan Rogers of Final Space fame, the pilot follows a girl on a dying Earth, the result of something in space. She travels with a karaoke robot around the area looking for signs of life, signs of hope. Her biggest worry? That she’ll be forgotten, even though she still hopes that her uncle will come save her.

The pilot seems to be an episode one. While going over the pilot for CBS’s failed Transformers attempt for Saturday morning, I came across the Transformers Wiki entry on the failed pitch and this statement:

• The pilot’s odd backstory is another example of meeting the network’s requirements, what with the whole conquest of Earth happening offscreen. In the section “HOW TO WRITE A PILOT”, Scott brings up the crucial detail that “99 OUT OF A 100 TIMES THE NETWORK DOESN’T WANT AN “ORIGIN ” PILOT. “The reasoning being that an origin story is usually unrepresentative of the show as a whole, while a random adventure can better demonstrate what the show is going to be like on a week to week basis.
• Another piece of advice is that if “you’re trying to sell a show to a network exec, you want to reveal as much of the show as you can in the pilot.”

Remind me to bring that up again in the next part of the pilot script review. This, however, is an origin pilot, as where Iris starts isn’t where she’s going to end. Events lead to her true adventure. Here we’re just setting up the reason for the adventure. I guess either method makes sense.

The pilot has some decent sized actor and voice actor credits: “Featuring the voices of Troy Baker (The Last of Us), Claudia Black (Farscape, The Nevers), Bryce Charles (Big Nate), Coty Galloway & Olan Rogers (both from Final Space) and a few surprises.” I don’t know who the surprises are, but Bowie the karaoke bot sounds a bit like Patton Oswald to me. At any rate, enjoy.

The latest report I have going into this comes from five months prior to this posting. Rogers claimed in a YouTube post that he is close to having the full funding he needs for a six episode season, since these days that’s all you need to have a “season”. It was 13-16 weeks when I was a kid. He’s also joined online animation studio GLITCH, creators of The Amazing Digital Circus. That might delay things depending on what he’s working on. I hope he makes it. This does look interesting and I missed out on Final Space, which I hear is a good show.