2013
January 14th
Steve Ellicott sat in his car in rush hour traffic.
Alex "Round-Dog", Ripington was on the radio ranting away.
Today's topic was the 9th anniversary of the time a disgruntled sports reporter tried to kill him with a car bomb. The same day, a guy named Richard Marks actually did get blown up, but there was no mention of him.
Steve turned off the radio, and thought back to everything that lead up to this moment.
Sometime in the 1940's.
Mort Pizzby sat at a booth in a diner drawing on napkins, and gloomily contemplating his lot in life.
He was a failed graphic artist who currently had a gig illustrating high school science textbooks.
He doodled out a water molecule.
A circle with two smaller circles.
At an adjacent booth, a two year old sat in a high chair messily eating cake, and saying "Yummy Youse! Yummy Youse!".
The piece of cake was off of a whole cake on the table made to look like a cartoon rat.
The child was saying the rat's name wrong.
Mort looked at the napkin, and wrote "Yummy Youse".
He doodled on the water molecule until it looked like the face of a tree frog.
He drew a body under the face, and now it was a tree frog with tuxedo and tails, and spats.
A cartoon empire was born.
Sometime in the 1950's.
Yummy Youse became a comic strip, became an animated cartoon, became a string of animated cartoons, followed by many other characters, then movies, then merchandise, then television once it was invented, then finally, the crown jewel, Pizzbyworld.
A fired and disgruntled employee of Pizzbyworld now sat at a booth in a diner, drawing on napkins.
His name was Ed Ellicott.
He drew Yummy as an evil life choking anaconda.
"Too on the nose", he grumbled.
He drew the anaconda strangling Yummy.
"Better!", he said.
He drew Yummy's face shape made out of tires with the anaconda wrapped around it.
"Hmm...", he said, mental gears turning.
He drew himself as a superhero with the snake and tires logo as his chest symbol.
Next to this character, he wrote "Captain Carburetor".
"Yes!!", he said aloud, and then looked around to see if he'd been noticed.
He snuck out of the diner with the napkin, holding it like it was the blueprint for a water powered automobile, or a formula for lead into gold.
Sometime in the 1960's.
Ed stood before his 10 year old son, Steve, in the Captain Carburetor costume, waved his hand towards the auto salvage yard he now ran, and said "soon this will all be yours".
Steve scrunched his nose in disappointment.
Sometime in the 1970's.
Ed was dead of a heart attack.
Steve was 25.
He had some choices to make.
He looked at his dad's corny old costume, and then a magazine he was holding about the new video tape machines that were coming out.
He turned to a page with a picture of a home satellite dish, then pulled out a marker pen, and doodled the anaconda from the Captain Carburetor logo around it.
He turned another page, and saw an ad for satellite descramblers.
He wrote "Captain", above the word "Descrambler".
He nodded, and knew instantly what his future would be.
Sometime in the 1980's.
Steve's son, Perry, sat in a high chair messily eating cake.
It was a Yummy Youse cake.
"Yummy Youse! Yummy Youse!", he chanted.
Steve's mother in law saw the mess, crinkled her nose, and said "lovely".
Steve thought to himself "someday, I'm going to do something to really spite you, you mean old broad".
Sometime in the 1990's
Steve shuffled through his son's old comics, and noted how many crossovers there were.
He found a pattern to the crossovers, and in that pattern, he unlocked how all characters in fiction go together in this infinitely expanding uber-verse.
And within this uber-verse, there also included movies.
From this, Steve concluded that to be at the heart of this uber-verse, was to rule the world.
And there was only one real-world way to be at the hub of all of it.
Steve Ellicott opened Lovely's.
Across the parking lot, was Hannalee's grocery store.
The mother in law didn't approve.
"Good", he thought.
2011
October 20th.
Hannalee's.
Dusty Irwin wandered through the grocery store, and then stopped dead in his tracks.
There was a display of Halloween masks, and one of them hypnotically grabbed his attention.
Meanwhile, at Lovely's, Steve was stocking tapes.
The latest Astro Gallop boxed set was out.
Meanwhile, Perry Ellicott threw out some old junk.
One of those bits of junk was an old science textbook.
A textbook that was still reusing the water molecule illustration drawn by Mort Pizzby.
Perry flashed back to his dad helping him with his homework, and being enthralled by his dad's description of acids, and what they could do.
In his imagination, he had imagined the sizzling of acid to being like the quantum dissolvers in Astro-Gallop.
2013
January 14th
Steve Ellicott sat in his car in rush hour traffic.
He was back from his flashback.
It had taken half a minute.
Traffic nudged forward an inch.
Outside his car window was an apartment building.
Inside that apartment building, Dusty Irwin awoke from a memory nightmare.
"Fuckin memories...fuckin life", he mumbled.
2016
October 31st
Steve Ellicott finished reading the latest Shmegalamonga Halloween post.
It was the sixth one, with the theme "witch's brew".
He switched back over to the Lovely's homepage, and got back to work.
He looked out at the shelves, and saw the expanding new section of tapes in transparent green cases.
Inside those transparent green cases were transparent green cassettes with green glitter embedded in the plastic, and with green hologram stickers of the JS mask for the top label.
Local kids were making fan movies of individual chapters of Jade-Shade's adventures from Shmegalamonga, and bringing them to Steve in various formats.
Steve would then transfer them to one of the green tapes, put on the JS label, write the chapter name and number, insert a printout of the text chapter as liner notes in the case, then rent them out, and give the money to the filmmaker.
Kids who rented them out became inspired, and would make their own sequels and crossovers to those chapters.
And so on, and so on.
The fan-canon stuff he put in purple cases.
Fan-canon that got secretly rented by Dusty or Irma got a JS and/or Chokecherry seal of approval sticker.
That encouraged kids to make even more films.
The JS section of the store was slowly taking over.
Steve walked along the JS section picking up random cases, and noted how the box descriptions progressed like JS chapters, and vice versa.
Steve grabbed the tape for Season 2, Chapter 20, and popped it into the machine.
2013
January 14th
Steve Ellicott sat in his car in rush hour traffic...
“Dune: Part Two” Score Seeks An Oscar
5 hours ago
8 comments:
No way would old video stores not save the world in your universe.
Jack Chick and the guy who sang "You Spin Me Right Round Like A Record Baby" or whatever it's called, dead on the same day. God's got a sick sense of humor!!!
No more Chick tracts....snifff....sobbbb....CRY!!!!!
"Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" didn't do much for me. On the plus side at least I found little in it embarrassing aside from that dumb scene with Chekov getting interrogated by sub goons. The girl that replaced Kirstie Alley gets dismissed in ONE SCENE that's like a joke considering how much people hated her and everyone said that blonde whale woman in the movie is the Trek equivalent of Kate Capshaw in "Temple Of Doom" but I didn't really mind her.
Is there any point in me actually trying to watch "The Walking Dead" somewhere down the road? EVERYTHING gets spoiled and discussed as loudly as possible and I don't know what the hell to say here.
Jack Chick, holy shit!
Though...he had to have been like...fuggin 100 by now.
"Spin me round", guy. Damn, 2016 keeps sucking. :-(
ST4. Ehh..it's a mixed bag. Cheap effects, lazy cotton candy score.
But, the humor was a welcome relief after the gloom of 3.
You're gonna vomit at 5.
But, you gotta see it to truly understand the legacy off the odd numbered curse.
TWD....man...if this were just 2 years ago, I'd beg you to get into it...but man...I'm contemplating whether I even wanna keep going with it myself.
Jack Chick was I think 93. Born in 1923. This is rumored to be a pic of him:
http://jimmyakin.com/wp-content/uploads/img81.jpg
Pete Burns ("Spin me round"): I figured this guy would get more attention because now he comes across like a precursor to the whole transgender thing (he looked a HELL of a lot different in later years than he did in 1985!). Also I mentioned that I always associated that song with an Internet .gif of Link spinning a sword around over and over, with the song playing, and it was from one of the crappy old Zelda cartoons, only to have someone on another board mention "THAT'S not the thing most people on the Internet people associate it with!" thus causing Meatspin to immediately begin playing in my head. Arrrrgggh. (I'm assuming you know what Meatspin is; if you don't, don't look it up, it's gay porn.)
Don't worry, I'm gonna watch ST 5 and 6 even though I know 5 is the punching bag (well I guess "Nemesis" is a punching bag too.) I gotta see it. For now I think I'd actually rather watch 3 than 4, even though I was lukewarm on 3. And I'd rather watch TMP (1) than either, even though TMP is kind of obviously falling short of what it wanted to do. (Also since I don't care for 4 much but like some aspects of 1, this means I don't buy the odd-numbered curse thingy...)
TWD: Since everything's been so loudly spoiled for me I just went ahead and watched the baseball bat scene, just to see what the big deal was, then almost died laughing at the lame shot of the dude's head smashed on the ground with his hand twitching. Even without having watched the show I can tell you don't end what is supposed to be one of the biggest most anticipated TV death scenes ever with a tacky grossout shot, imagine if "Breaking Bad" had shown Hank's brains going all over the walls or something at the end. Then I realized "hey, isn't that the Asian dude who fell into a pile of zombies and was eaten two years ago?" when THAT was spoiled, then went back and found out that they'd lamely copped out of that by having him crawl under a dumpster and live somehow. THAT'S what this show does?!? I mean, "Sopranos" and "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" were both spoiled for me because everyone couldn't shut up about each big plot twist back when those were on, but I went ahead and binge-finished those two and still managed to enjoy them.
See, the thing of it is, looking around the Internet, the effect is hilarious: the Glenn beating-death scene seems to have almost everyone VIOLENTLY PISSED OFF but everyone, y'know, WATCHED IT and it seems like most people are going to keep watching it. Neat hat trick this show has pulled. I see now why people are calling it "Clickbait TV." Is this the "Red Wedding" legacy? (That was spoiled for me too.)
Yeah, the gore level of Glenn's (Asian guy) death* wasn't what bothered me (although it is for a lot of folks), because that's almost exactly how it was depicted in the comic, so they were honoring the source material, but it's what you just mentioned about the dumpster fake-out, and milking it with flashback episodes before they got to the reveal of the fake-out, and then they milked this death all summer long, instead of having it be the finale.
They take their audience for granted, and play stunts like that, and its pushed me to the brink.
Its danced the line between playing around, and outright disrespect.
*Abe's (redhead bearded guy) death was added, but he died sooner in the comic, so he was on borrowed time.
People who didn't read the comic were more shocked more by Glenn, because he was such a beloved character, and nice guy, and he's been there since the beginning, so people started thinking he'd survive the whole thing.
Oh, and saw "The Witch." Hey, it's pretty good! Nicely directed little atmospheric period piece folktale with a creepy atmosphere and a few good shocks/creepy images. Any ambiguity over what's happening has to be followed from the beginning of the movie; this isn't just some film that ENDS on an ambiguous note to screw with you. I've never heard of the writer/director or any of the actors before but they all do really well and it looks like actual research was put into the thing.
I recommend! And it's only 92 minutes long, yay!
You'll be happy to learn "God Particle", is actually Cloverfield 3!
Well...."10 Cloverfield Lane" had very little to do with "Cloverfield"--really, the title is the only part AT ALL that connects to the earlier movie. It's good for reasons that have nothing to do with why the original "Cloverfield" was basically crap.
I guess since 10CL was *good* though that I could bother to see "God's Particle." The concept seems passably interesting enough.
And and, I scored "Halloween III" for $.50 on DVD since Hastings Entertainment Superstores are collapsing into a heap of dung. Doo dee doo dee doo dee doo dee Happy happy Halloweeen, halloweeen, Halloweeeen, happy happy Halloweeeen, Siiil-ver Shamrock!
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