Any long series of thoughts from ousted Community creator Dan Harmon is bound to contain some gold and other precious minerals. Such was the case at CommuniCon over the weekend. Harmon revealed he didn’t watch the season four premiere. (“I’m the last person that anyone wants to hear from”) and talked about his future (“I’m going to exhaust my access to network TV, which I’m doing a good job of … then I’ll try to emulate Vince Gilligan with basic cable, and whether I’m successful or not, I’ll have more time to do a feature script at that point.”) Most juicily, Harmon revealed that Community almost paid tribute to Nicolas Cage in a fashion that no one — least of all the Internet — would have been able to handle.
The plot would have had Jeff pretending a class called Nicolas Cage Appreciation existed, resulting in an actual class being created, with the curriculum involving all Cage’s films being shown to a captive classroom in one night. “The thing about Nicolas Cage movies is … unless you’re a total cynical dick, you have to embrace the fact that Nicolas Cage is a pretty good actor,” Harmon says. “He’s done a lot of weird, dumb movies, but that was supposed to be the point of the episode — that Nicolas Cage is a metaphor for God, or for society, or for the self, or something. It’s like — what is Nicolas Cage?” Since the episode never happened, we’ll never know.
