Every country in the world has TV soaps populated by characters with whom their viewers are totally familiar. Some are villainous, some are lecherous, some are funny, others are tragic. All are larger than life.
Drag and Drop Soaps makes them interchangeable, because in post editing they are carefully masked, cut out and isolated from their backgrounds, complete with dialogue, and tagged in a way that makes them individually viewer selectable on broadcast.
This means that they can be targeted by the viewer, cut from their regular programme, then dragged and dropped into place in another soap, where they continue to act out their part.
Obviously this creates visual anomalies and conflicts, with the resulting programmes becoming spectacles of surreal confusion (that's the whole idea). Extra characters appear in the recipient programme leaving animated holes and gaps in the donor one.
At last Ena Sharples can finally share a milk stout with Joan Collins in the Rover's Return, whilst Albert Tatlock adjusts his cloth cap and says something like "By gum, this is a rum do"-- xenzag, Apr 03 2008 On the one hand it sounds pretty doable already; they have graphics programs that can animate dead movie stars into new roles using previously existing footage... just mash up that program with a "Sim City" AI thing.
On the other hand I hate soap operas...-- FlyingToaster, Apr 04 2008 I like the idea...i think its funny that one can drag/drop whole characters w/dialogue to another place and potentially fit in since i always considered most soaps to be identical in what they say and do. (croissant)-- quantass, Apr 04 2008 Metasoaps?-- normzone, Apr 05 2008 I'd like to see some serious research into finding a single unified soap algorithm.
Once this has been achieved, televised simulations could be populated with digitised characters - and even allow for the drag and drop functionality described here.-- zen_tom, Apr 05 2008 Not being in possession of a device for receiving broadcast television signals as they are being broadcast, i don't see soap opera, but this is enough to make me want to, were they in this format.-- nineteenthly, Apr 05 2008 random, halfbakery