Johnny Briz Character Sheet Published: November 14, 2010 Johnny might have been named after a character in "The Secret of NIMH," only because he arrived after the movie was shown (and promptly laughed at) as an infant with the spitting image of said character, but that's the sole connection between Johnny Briz and anything from the actual story behind the movie. Johnny's rodent village has a similar origin, with a group of rats and mice that escaped from a science experiment on an intelligence-improving serum, but the experiment took place in the University of Central Florida at Orlando rather than some seedy NIMH-sanctioned laboratory. And the location of the village is located in what they call Reedy Creek. That is a small stream located in an area west of Orlando more legally known as the "Reedy Creek Improvement District." You know it better as Walt Disney World. (On the record, the village is located east of Animal Kingdom, in an area designated as protected wilderness in the region. Because of the location, Johnny was fed with a steady stream of cartoons in the high-tech village (Those who built the current Reedy Creek is known to pick up technical stuff left by their corporate human neighbors, repair them, and install it in the bushes around the colony. Pro Tip: If you pick up something that someone just discards, it don't count as stealing.) He watched not just classic Disney cartoons, some of the earlier Don Bluth (he's the only one in the whole village that likes 'Secret of NIMH') and in recent times, Sonic SatAM and Sonic X. It all rolled around his head and created an ambition in Johnny to go to the human world and be a cartoon star himself. The reason is similar to Kermit the Frog, another character said to originate in Reedy Creek: He just wanted humans to smile at him and now think of him as a pest. With his talents in Parkour and Tae Kwan Do and a personality similar to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, or even Mickey in his youth, he could be a great action star. Johnny got his chance in a roundabout way, when a secret lab was set up a bit too close to the colony. While all of Reedy Creek bickered and fretted, Johnny snuck his way into the lab and discovered the experiment on enlarging and shrinking matter. By accident, he fell into the enlarging way and was turned into a two-foot-five giant of a mouse. Or an actual flesh and blood version of a cartoon character in the eyes of the scientists who chased him away. He was later found by Amber Merichello, a budding animator living in Celebration, Florida, who is discovering how hard it is to break into an industry lead by corporations who have no idea how to make a decent cartoon. She took him in, and after caring for him a bit, she set up a series of You-Tube-like videos of his antics that went viral, making Johnny's dreams come true as the latest internet star and an corporation-free alternative to the tailored and pigeonholed cartoon characters of today. --- Johnny Briz is my oldest and one of my most beloved characters in my stable. He's well known in the Disney Echo online community, and has a script in the works (My first Script Frenzy project) which will be posted in 2011. A mini-site devoted to Johnny will be constructed at foxfirestudios.net once the script is released.