GalleyCat finished its remix of Horatio Alger’s Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake.

Eighty-four people – including writers of prose and poetry, artists and videogame designers – volunteered to rewrite a page Alger’s tale of rags to riches. GalleyCat has assembled these rewrites into one Frankenstein monster of a remix.

Some channeled H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Kerouac or Quentin Tarentino. Others drew their page as a comic book or rewrote them as Twitter feeds. Roheeni Saxena wrote her page as a pair of sonnets. Paul K. Tunis somehow used his page to explain the concept of Schrodinger’s Cat.

(Any reference to Schrodinger’s Cat is endearing to me. I watched Big Bang Theory for a season too long just because they mentioned the concept in one of their season finales.)

I rewrote the first page of chapter 25 (page 90 on the link) as a series of rhyming couplets. (I gave up on making the meter work, but I did manage to rhyme “Phoenix” and “V-6.”) Now, I can say I collaborated with Duane Swierczynski, the man who wrote Cable for Marvel Comics.

But Jenny Sparks, a freelance videogame designer, made the best contribution (p. 98). She recreated her page as a series of screenshots from an 8-bit role playing game. She even worked an Oregon Trail joke into her biography. (Creative, cool name, love of Oregon Trail – I’m guessing Jenny Sparks has to beat the suitors back with a cattle prod.)

Jason Boog, the man behind the remix, said he specifically chose Joe’s Luck because it’s awful. Its dialogue is so wooden, it’s a fire hazard. (Don’t like that joke? I have others. How about “so wooden, it can float on water?” No? “So wooden, UCLA tried to hire it as a basketball coach.” Whatever, I quit.) Without fear of ruining a classic, the remixers could let their ideas run rampant.

The entire project is available as a free e-book in abridged and unabridged versions.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com