The Season 5 bonus chapter
details a number of unused ideas for episodes of Calvin & Hobbes: The Series, all of which are recounted below:
Unused Season 5 plots:
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"Tracking a Mystery"
"This would've followed Elliot's movements throughout Seasons 1 – 4. We ended up deciding against it because it wasn't exactly fascinating to see the series from Elliot's point of view. The other main characters were off having their own adventures, saving the planet, and meanwhile, Elliot's just wandering around, possibly oblivious to it all."
Tropes:
- Lower-Deck Episode: For Elliot.
"Cowpokes"
"This would've been about Calvin trying to find a way to deal with Moe's bullying by watching as many cowboy movies as he can, looking up tough guy techniques that he can use himself. He then dreams up a cowboy world scenario where he's the local sheriff, Andy is a bartender, Sherman is the local preacher, Socrates is the panicked idiot, Susie is the schoolmarm, and Elliot is the drifter. The twist at the end would've been that Hobbes was the desperado that Calvin had to duel with. This actually got partly written, but we ran out of steam with it fairly quickly as we grew bored with the opening scenes."
Tropes:
- Cowboy Episode
- Dream Sequence
- Fighting Your Friend: Calvin and Hobbes.
- One-Word Title
- Taught by Television: Calvin tries to invoke this to help himself stand up to Moe.
- Twist Ending: Hobbes is the desperado, and Calvin must duel him.
"Toboggan"
"Not much to say about this episode. Calvin and the gang would've gone sledding one wintery day on Sneer Hill. I'm not sure what would've happened in this episode, but I remember some vague idea that they accidentally awaken an ice demon under the hill, and they have to find some way to destroy it."
Tropes:
- An Ice Person: The demon.
- One-Word Title
"Claustrophobia"
"Swing's idea for the penultimate episode. Calvin, Hobbes, Andy, Sherman, Socrates, Elliot and the MTM would all become trapped in a single room for an entire episode, all the while being manipulated by some mysterious force. This one got cut when we realized how much harder it was getting to write these stories and we decided to reduce how many episodes we did."
Tropes:
- Locked in a Room: The plot.
- One-Word Title
"The Game of Love"
"There was also talk of a new Valentine's Day special, once again focused on Andy, but this time, he had a crush on a girl who acknowledged his affections, and therefore manipulated him and treated him terribly. It never got past a one-sentence episode summary. Too bad, because this one sounded interesting…"
Tropes:
- All Love Is Unrequited: Subverted.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Andy's crush.
- Titled After the Song: Likely named after the Santana song of the same name.
- Valentine's Day Episodes
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Plans
"Initially, there was talk of actually increasing the number of episodes to twenty-five instead of the usual twenty because it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Calvin and Hobbes at the time. I dimly recall plans for a special episode that might have been a two-parter that would've dealt with this, but as real life got in the way and slowed the process down, the twenty-fifth anniversary came and went, and as a result nothing happened."
Tropes:
-
Milestone Celebration: The 25th anniversary of the original strip. - Two-Part Episode: Possibly.
Other unused episode ideas:
"Monophobia"
"There was one idea for an episode wherein Socrates wakes up one day to find that he's the only person left on the planet, and we follow him as he slowly goes insane. Imagine a social leper like Socrates suddenly having no one to talk to or pull pranks on."
Tropes:
- The Aloner: Socrates.
- One-Word Title
- Sanity Slippage: Socrates undergoes this without anyone to interact with.
"Alternate"
"This would've been a TV Movie wherein Calvin and Hobbes find themselves traveling through an alternate timeline where they meet Calvin as an adult, having sold the MTM and become a millionaire, only for the people he sold it to use it to go back and change history, resulting in a Time War between differing countries as they all attempt to go back in time and change history in their favor."
Tropes:
- Alternate Timeline
- Made-for-TV Movie
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Multiple countries attempt to do this, leading to a war.
"Freudian"
"This was an idea I was secretly toying with to be the Series Finale one day. It would've basically had the revelation about just what Hobbes is. He would've turned out to be an extension of Calvin's inner-maturity, projected outwards onto a stuffed toy tiger. In the end, I discarded the idea and never brought it up, feeling that Hobbes' reality was best left ambiguous."
Tropes:
- One-Word Title
- Wham Episode: Hobbes is (or rather, would have been) really an extension of Calvin's inner maturity.
The Socrates Storyline
"This is a storyline that I had actually designed for Season Six. I planted the seeds for it in Season Five to mislead readers here and there, making them think it was the story for that season. It will now have to be dealt with in other stories. Hopefully, it'll actually happen. ;)"
Tropes:
- Adaptation Expansion: Was adapted into The Collective. It got eleven chapters. Most storylines in the series proper last seven at the most. (Although, the Equation of the Universe is a very big deal, so they kind of had to expand it.)
- One-Word Title
- Red Herring: A lot of them in Season 5 proper.
- Wham Episode: Where to begin? Calvin was born in 1979, and has been frozen in time ever since. In case you had any doubts about the tigers' reality, Socrates' red tail is an intelligently-designed indicator of the Equation of the Universe. The Kleins and Rupert Chill's species have been at war for an eternity. The Chills Bad-Wolfed the name throughout space and time.
"There aren't many unused story ideas. We had this weird rule that there had to be twenty episodes per season, plus holiday specials, so we found ourselves using episode ideas that were really mediocre just to fill the slots. Sometimes we'd just give a title and a one line plot summary and just hope we could come up with a story to fill it."
