The Magical Ivy League Robe
A homeless man in Harlem, digging in a dumpster for food, finds a Columbia graduation robe. He keeps it, thinking he can sell it, but he finds that nobody wants to buy a graduation robe that he found in a dumpster. That night, he gets caught in the rain. Soaked, and with nothing else to change into, he puts on the robe. The second he zips it up, he becomes a genius. The robe is magical! He’s able to get a well-paid job, an apartment in Gramercy Park and a girlfriend who loves him, all thanks to the robe, but there’s a catch. When he takes it off, he’s of average intelligence again, which means he has to wear it all the time.
So of course there are a lot of situations where co-workers and his new friends and his girlfriend are encouraging him to take off the robe, and he has to keep coming up with excuses for why he can’t take it off, like that he’s sensitive to tight clothing, or that he’s naked underneath. And naturally, one day the robe gets destroyed in the wash (his girlfriend puts in too much bleach, turning it white) and all hell breaks lose as he tries to function in his new life as his old self. But he finds out that all along, the robe just gave him confidence - the intelligence was inside all along.
A similar idea: Someone is at a doctor’s office and accidentally knocks the doctor’s Ivy League diploma off the wall. It smashes onto his head, transforming him into a genius. Since you can’t have conflict if he’s a genius all the time forever, you’d have to manufacture a catch to go with this one.
1 year ago