Memories are weird sometimes. Especially early memories.
You know the kind, right? One of those mental images that takes you years and years to identify, and yet it's etched onto your brain? And sometimes you remember it incorrectly, or make an incorrect assumption about it?
One of those nagging mental impressions that has stuck around with me for a couple decades is something from an episode of the 1997 Honey, I Shrunk the Kids TV series.
It was from an ad- I never saw the actual episode. My memory of it was that it was about the characters either entering a film noir detective movie or time traveling back into the 1940s. There was an albino sewer alligator involved, and it gave me the impression that sewer alligators were a cliché or trope that was common in detective/gangster movies- a misconception that stuck with me for years afterwards until I started actually watching real detective movies like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.
But I could never quite shake that image, and it crept into one of my own works- The Adventures of an Evil Minion, which, among other things, is full of cartoony exaggerations of film noir, so albino sewer alligators are in it (at one point they were crocodiles, but I've since changed my mind).
It took forever for me to figure where it came from- I only found it yesterday. For some reason I couldn't find a Honey, I Shrunk the Kids episode guide that matched the description until then.
As it turns out, somewhat unsurprisingly, I was misremembering it. It wasn't about film noir movies, nor was the alligator albino. Not sure why I thought it was- maybe the colors were washed out, and I made the connection between things living in the sewers and those pale, almost white-skinned cave-dwelling creatures (although I'm not sure if I heard of them yet).
It's from the episode "Honey, Let's Trick or Treat". It's actual plot is about a book of urban legends coming to life- sewer alligators, and a killer with a hook for a hand.
But, as it also turns out, I must've conflated it with an ad for another episode, "Honey, Whodunit"- which is about writing a mystery novel set in the 1940s.
The reason I had to have conflated the two is that this episode also has a killer with a hook for a hand- the same hook! The weird part is that I don't remember either character, but I don't see any other explanation.
So there you go. A childhood memory distorted and reshaped until it became a misconception, and finally an idea for a cartoon.
