In 2006, Romero wrote several treatments for a proposed television series called, alternately, Zombisodes and Zomboid. The script is a cartoonish burlesque on zombie movies whose hapless undead protagonist is slashed, shot, blown up, crushed, run over, and otherwise punished over and over again. His jokey introduction sets the tone:

A world no longer in use. Deserted. No Cars. No pedestrians. Only RUBBLE drifting on the breeze.

WIND blows a NEWSPAPER up against a wall. It flips open revealing a BANNER HEADLINE:

            DEAD RISE!

            EAT LIVING!

We hear SLUGGISH FOOTSTEPS. A SHADOW appears on the pavement and LURCHES TOWARD US. After a moment, we see THE FIGURE that is casting the shadow. Male, Neanderthal-like, a bit of a gorilla… (call him ZOMBIE KONG)… his flesh is rotting. He’s been DEAD for quite some time.

FREEZE FRAME. SUPERIMPOSE TITLE:

            ZOMBIE

            (AKA: “DEADALUS STINKUS”)

The IMAGE UN-FREEZES. The Zombie shambles on.

Like Wile E. Coyote or Itchy and Scratchy, Zombie Kong exists solely to combat his nemesis, a woman the script dubs “T-Bird.” Zombie Kong isn’t particularly zombie-like in some ways: he cannot speak (though his inarticulate grunts are translated with subtitles), and he wants to eat T-Bird, but he’s also smart. He knows how to use complex tools. He devises intricate plans involving vehicles and weapons, all of which are foiled, either by T-Bird or be happenstance. He can operate cars and hot air balloons! He can plant explosives and fire torpedoes and set hilariously elaborate traps. The most narratively important aspect of his zombie-hood seems to be his ability to take punishment. He sustains such extreme injuries that he barely maintains bodily integrity. And yet he manages to carry on, holding the steering wheel with his teeth or using a wheelchair when necessary.

With each episode, Zombie Kong gets more and more exasperated, and he sustains increasingly absurd damage. The last few episodes end with explosions, with the 15th ending with several successive torpedo misfires. The first comes after Zombie Kong has, with great care and delicacy, set up a torpedo for T-Bird to run over when she passes. As the legless Zombie Kong begins to crawl away a crow flies overhead, and as it passes directly over him, it shits:

Zombie Kong cringes and squints his eye shut…

…assuming that the glob of shit is going to hit him.

It doesn’t.

It drifts on the wind…

…and hits the torpedo instead.

Squarely on its half-submerged blasting cap…

…with Zombie Kong still well within range.

KA-BLOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The 18th and final episode ending with an enormous stockpile of grenades, bombs, and the like being struck by a lighting bolt before T-Bird comes into range, setting off “an EXPLOSION equivalent to Hiroshima.”

In 2006, Romero was already at work on Diary, and he would make Survival of the Dead not long after that. After that, he would work with Steven Schlozman to adapt Schlozman’s novel The Zombie Autopsies into a film. He would write the Empire of the Dead comic and would begin the novel The Living Dead – completed after Romero’s death by Daniel Kraus.

Romero would sketch out ideas for another zombie movie, Twilight of the Dead, that takes place in an all-zombie village in which Big Daddy from Land of the Dead leads a zombie society onto which a lone surviving human stumbles. That story incorporates some elements of his early Kubrick-inspired writing about protohuman societies (including The Footage). That brief synopsis suggests an increasingly pessimistic approach to zombies writ large. Twilight’s zombies have not just formed a society, they have learned to live together, and alongside humans. Or, at least, the couple of humans they’ve encountered since the fall of Fiddler’s Green. The bulk of the story implies an almost utopian vision, the re-starting of civilization that Romero so often seems to yearn for in his zombie work. Big Daddy is a benevolent but stern leader, and the inhabitants of the village live together in peace. But things begin to disintegrate when invaders – also zombies – arrive at the village. It ends with the two groups of zombies at war, a pile of twice-dead bodies alongside the few who remain standing and fighting. Romero’s utopian vision has fractured, the zombies fighting among themselves just like the humans had. Humanity is doomed, even after its death.

Of all of these zombie projects, Zombisodes stands out for the ways in which it departs from and mocks the legacy of zombie movies. It’s funny and absurd, and it seems unlikely that it would ever be made. In casting a zombie as a decomposing Wile E. Coyote who loses most of his limbs, he created a scenario that could not have been realized in live action without a fairly massive special effects budget, and which was likely far too violent and gross for a cartoon. Writing several series of drafts seems to indicate that, at some level, Romero was serious about the project, or at least that he enjoyed writing it. However, it’s unclear who would have funded it. It could potentially be scaled down a bit to be realized on a fairly low budget, as there were literally only two characters, the setting was an open landscape, and the explosions and bodily destructions could be tempered somewhat for a television audience. But in 2006, networks weren’t looking for slapstick gore. 

The episodes are funny, and often corny, with its humor built around the increasingly elaborate, incessant destruction of Zombie Kong’s body. Silly as they are, there is in these drafts a kind of sadistic delight being taken in the litany of injuries and humiliations piled upon the zombie, composed not long after Romero’s return to the undead with Land.  He was clearly injecting some legitimate variety into the zombie formula, but perhaps also working out some frustration. It is hard not to see the script as punishment being inflicted not just on Zombie Kong, but on zombies writ large, a kind of therapeutic annihilation of the albatross that had been hanging around his neck for almost 40 years at that point. At the very least, it joyously stomps on the legacy of the undead.

- Adam Charles Hart