Smash a teenager in 20 steps!

I caught the end of Final Destination 3 (3!) last night and as I was watching, I hashed out the plot for a prequel movie. It occurred to me that the convoluted deaths in these movies are just like the Rube Goldberg machines we made in physics class in high school, except in this case there are no coins flipped but sometimes somebody might get a sheet of plate glass dropped on them.

(I am fully aware, of course, that the Rube Goldberg idea is not new [probably because it's so dang obvious], as a Google of "final destination" "rube goldberg" turned up 920 hits. I'm not trying to claim originality here.)

So here's my idea: Rube Goldberg dies in 1970, at the ripe old age of 87. When he gets to the pearly gates, he gets hired on by the Angel of Death as the Traveling Assistant to the Angel of Death. The movie could be about Rube's coming of age as the Traveling Assistant to the Angel of Death, with all sorts of hilarious hijinx naturally following as Rube learns his job. At first, he resists the job, claiming he just wants to flip light switches. He'd have to bear heckling from Death's other assistants about his bizarre methods and then get a pep talk from St. Paul about perseverance. By the film's end, of course, he'll be much better than the Angel of Death at getting the job done. So every time Death screws up and people get away, Rube gets up off the bench and takes care of business.

Just think about that next time you're watching Final Destination and you witness another Goldbergian demise: Rube's up there, pulling the levers and figuring out how to smash a teenager in 20 steps.