5 Times Fans Had To Take Matters Into Their Own Hands

5 A Friday the 13th Court Case Spawned Multiple Fan Films

Jason Voorhees has remained dormant for a lot longer than seems reasonable considering that horny, annoying teenagers never went anywhere. Are we supposed to believe that a dude who made his way back from both Hell and outer space is finally dead for good? Not entirely, as Lebron James tried to do something with the series not too long ago. We're not gonna lie, Jason doing windmill dunks with victims' heads would for sure get our $15 on opening weekend. But the ongoing legal battle between screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham has prevented Jason from inevitably adding a Cavs Heat Cavs Lakers jersey to his already confusing athletic closet.

Miller has the rights to the first Friday the 13th script, but the ownership of "adult Jason" is currently up in the air. So in a strange case of life imitating art, people still don't give a shit about young Jason. This, however, hasn't stopped several fans from making their own unauthorized adaptations. Within the last few years, we've seen the release of multiple successfully crowdfunded films based on the series (Pro tip: put Friday the 13th in the title of your Kickstarter for guaranteed bank).

Never Hike Alone is about a hiker stumbling upon the infamous Camp Crystal Lake, a place that, despite being the scene of almost a straight decade of recurring murders, is still standing -- along with the one person who thinks it's a nice place to live:

Then we have Friday the 13th: Vengeance, a follow-up to Friday the 13th Part VI that throws Jason's father in the mix and tells the story of survivor Tommy Jarvis's family trying to put an end to Jason for good like so many succeeded at before them:

At this stage, even the people who worked on the original movies are getting in on the action. Friday the 13th Part VI director Tom McLoughlin wrote his own fan film called Jason Never Dies, and the upcoming 13 Fanboy is expected to feature five-time Jason actor Kane Hodder, Adrienne King from the first two Friday the 13ths, Lar Park-Lincoln from Part VII, and Corey Feldman from Charlie Sheen's nightmares. For the time being, this is the best Jason fans are going to get outside of our fantasies -- like that one where this dumb lawsuit happened in the 2000s, and prevented Jason X from being a thing.

Fallout fans got spoiled when Obsidian Entertainment released New Vegas a mere two years after Bethesda's Fallout 3. The back-to-back hits were so well-received that we were immediately treated to another Fallout installment from Bethesda ... half a decade later. And although the people at Obsidian repeatedly expressed interest in doing another sequel, their public offers were shot down by the non-player characters at Bethesda (no doubt, with some kind of retro-futuristic gun). The fan community got so impatient waiting for new games that we ended up with a ton of bootleg projects to complement the zero official ones we'll get between now and whenever that Starfield thing sees the light of day.

After six years, the New Vegas fan mod Fallout: New California (originally called Project Brazil) was released for PC users for free. Set in the vicinity of the San Bernardino mountains after Fallout 2, players find themselves in the middle of a vault conflict that comes about when their fellow residents discover that one of their own is part of the shady self-proclaimed government organization known as the Enclave. The game is complete with its own original soundtrack and voice acting contributions from more than 20 different actors who were kind enough to take a break from paying their bills.

Still in development are way more mods than anyone has time to play. Fallout 4: New Vegas will be a recreation of New Vegas with the Fallout 4 engine, and Fallout: The Frontier aims to do New Vegas in the Pacific Northwest. Additional Fallout 4 mods plan to explore locations Bethesda hasn't gotten to yet, with Fallout: New York, Fallout: Miami ...

... and Fallout: Cascadia ...

... which takes place in Seattle and claims to contain "the biggest modern Fallout map ever created" -- all being worked on for longer than people have been bitching and moaning about Fallout 76. At this rate, if Bethesda doesn't speed up the process in some way, they're going to run out of places for people to set their homemade games.

3 Salvador Dali Couldn't Get His Marx Brothers Movie Made, So A Fan Made It Into A Graphic Novel

A Marx Brothers movie written by Salvador Dali doesn't sound like something that would necessarily be good, but it certainly was something that only Salvador Dali intended to make. At some point in the 1930s, Dali became friendly with Harpo Marx, and before long, they were exchanging paintings of each other and posing for whacky pictures together. Dali loved the Marx Brothers and really clicked with Harpo even though they could barely communicate due to the language barrier. And to show Harpo just how much he appreciated his friendship, Dali sent him quite possibly the most Dali Christmas gift ever: a harp with barbed wire for strings ...

We guess the idea was to give it to someone who wouldn't shout out in pain.

By 1937, Dali had written a short screenplay for a proposed Marx Brothers movie called Giraffes on Horseback Salad. It's a strange, nightmarish story with Harpo serving as a weird sort of stand-in for Dali who falls in love with a shape-shifting "Surrealist Woman." There's also a healthy dose of giraffes, anthropomorphic cactuses, and a bunch of other trippy shit sprinkled throughout. Groucho, for one, was not impressed, but Harpo went with Dali to unsuccessfully pitch it to MGM founder Louis B. Mayer anyway. For better or worse, the studio didn't think his vision was worth preserving on film, and the script was presumed not worth finding for many years after.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when an intrigued author dug up its remains and turned it into a comic book. The crazy set pieces are hard to imagine on a screen -- or anywhere other than a comic book, for that matter. It would've cost the studio a fortune, and without a doubt would've baffled audience members who didn't smoke peyote beforehand. With the assistance of a comedy writer, an illustrator, and a composer, Josh Frank punched up Dali's insane idea with Marx-like one-liners and its own soundtrack to become a fully-realized but still very insane idea that's arguably a better book than it would've been a movie.

After Nintendo impressed the few people they convinced to buy a Wii U with Super Mario Maker, some naturally expected or at least hoped we'd see more classic games get the same treatment. One in particular that the company didn't think would work was Zelda Maker. Thankfully, they were alone in that thinking and a fan set out to prove them wrong. Justin Sink took it upon himself to make his own Zelda Maker and it was predictably well-received -- by everyone except Nintendo, that is.

The early build (that quickly became the late build) contained a lot of the usual suspects from the original Legend of Zelda games. Players had plenty of familiar objects, weapons, and characters to work with to create their own outdated pixelated worlds, from rocks to Octoroks and everything in between. Though, ultimately, no amount of boomerangs and life potions was enough to prepare anyone for the unavoidable boss fight against the most fearsome enemy out there: Nintendo's lawyers. Sink had no choice other than to make his dream come true into an infringement-free game called Legend Maker, which was more akin to getting stuck with Team Sonic Racing and wishing you could just play Mario Kart instead.

Since Totally Not Zelda Maker was not what Sink set out to make, he used his new creation tool to build a unique game of his own called Runiya. It still bears more than a passing resemblance to The Legend of Zelda, but seeing as how nobody knows what the hell a "Runiya" is, the odds of it ever being on Nintendo's radar aren't very good. On their end, Nintendo took no advantage whatsoever of all the free publicity they got from an amateur game designer who did something they didn't think could be done and showed them how much interest there was in the idea. Instead, we were blessed with Super Mario Maker 2 ... because that's the game fans wanted so bad that they tried to make it themselves.

For whatever bizarre reason, the people at CBS decided to start colorizing old episodes of I Love Lucy on an annual basis a few years back. But rather than going with authentic-looking colors, they chose to color Lucille Ball's famous red hair bright orange, resulting in her looking less like she did in real life and more like an Instagram clown filter. Here's Lucy in an actual color photo from the 1950s:

And here's how CBS would like to introduce her to younger generations:

This is the type of colorization you get from a talented dog that is smart enough to use Photoshop, but still unable to overcome being colorblind. It's what we expect Lucy to look like if the Ricardos lived next to a nuclear testing site. The only way this color palette makes sense is if Lucy and Ethel were secretly sentient Easter eggs. Enter Zach Smothers of Pop-colorture.com, who did his own colorization of I Love Lucy using a realistic color palette and presumably none of the budget CBS had to work with. What we end up with could actually pass for Lucille Ball instead of a Ronald McDonald's mom:

Soooo ... maybe throw a little bit of that disposable income Zach's way and give the pre-school class with the highlighters a rest? You know, for the sake of not making comedy history look like a bad acid trip?

Check out Yingandyan.com for all the conjoined twin jokes your little heart could ever possibly desire.

Top image: Bethesda Softworks