U.S.S. Spam Supplemental

This is supplemental to the video found here.

Fun Fact: The original line in the script was actually “A&W Brand Root Beer” but when I went to buy the props, my local store didn’t have cans of A&W so I went with Mug. Now you can impress your friends with that little piece of information.

For any of you who didn’t get the joke at the end of the credits, Arby’s has a promotion going on where they want people to submit their own commercials to them about how Arby’s is “good mood food” whatever that means, and to incorporate that new tag line into the ad. Unfortunately, the guy who tells you this in the commercial seems douchey enough from the get go, and then they decide to auto-tune him saying “Arby’s is Good Mood Food” and it sounds just awful. I guess that’s why they need Joe Shmo to make commercials for them, as their ad execs hire this douche and come up with craptastic slogans like “Good Mood Food” because “I’m thinking Arby’s” was soooo bad a slogan.

If I were to make a commercial for them, I’d have two people, probably mid-twenties men since that seems to be who they’re targeting with aforementioned douche commercial, sitting around talking about how crappy they’re feeling, then one says to the other “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” and they look over at each other to see the Arby’s hat floating above each others’ heads and both go “Aw, yeah.” Cut to them eating at Arby’s and obviously having a great time, over which an announcer, not a jackass with baby’s first vocoder but an actual announcer, say the slogan. I, however, don’t really have the technical know-how to do the whole hat thing, nor do I have enough people around here to film that with, nor do I think the local Arby’s would want me just filming in their place. That’s because for some reason the person who came up with that awful ad I hear quite often starting up a Blip video is a professional at making ads while I am a jobless guy making silly internet videos in my infinite spare time.

Back to the subject of the video, that whole thing with “Sorry Again” is actually more true now then when I recorded the video. Why in the world do the spambots all go to that one page? Seriously, is that page highly frequented so they think it will reach a bigger audience there? Why? This world is a strange place.

You know what, just for fun, I think I’m going to allow all the spam that shows up on this page. We can see how much of it accrues over time.

Posted in Text, U.S.S. | 4 Comments

There Will Come Soft Rains Supplement

This is a supplement to the video which can be found here.

What I said in the video, I truly meant. I do love this story, I did read it when I was a young and it was a major factor in my subsequent love of Science-Fiction. Not only is it a great story, it is a great example of how science-fiction can use exaggerated versions of reality in order to talk about a myriad of real-world subjects at once.

The Martian Chronicles is filled with such as Bradbury is quite good at them. And yes, some of the stories in that book aren’t nearly as good as others. And yes, that one story did give him a lot of trouble. Interestingly, there’s a story in The Illustrated Man entitled “The Other Foot” which is, in many ways, the sequel story to “Way in the Middle of Air” but in a different book entirely.

The Illustrated Man is filled with such oddities as it is simply a short story collection and the framing device is patently ignored after the first couple stories. It is also full of some really good stories worth a reading, but don’t even begin to try and place them together in the same universe. It simply doesn’t work.

As for the poem, I do like it as dark as it is. I don’t recall any other works of Sara Teasdale, but maybe I should try and find some sometime to see how her other work fairs out.

As for any naysayers who would argue that the poem isn’t science-fiction, well, I would point out that the narrative of the poem is that of a world in the future in which humanity has been wiped off the Earth by war.

If it were anything but a poem, there would be no questioning that synopsis was describing a work of science-fiction. Genre isn’t dependant on length or even style, it’s dependent on subject. If your work, whatever it is, is about magic and the like, then it’s a Fantasy. If your work is about terrifying your audience with frightful imagery, then it’s a Horror. So, whatever the work is, even a poem, talking about the future and technologies is Science-Fiction.

Final thought. If you want to see something rather creepy, but quite well made, there is an animated short adaptation of the Ray Bradbury short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” made in the CCCP that can be found here.

Posted in Text | Leave a comment

U.S.S. Triskaidekaphobia Supplement

This is supplemental material to the video that can be found here.

My research for this video taught me some things that I didn’t know before, which is always fun and interesting, like exactly where the term “Blue Moon” is from. I also learned about cultures that I have little knowledge of.

I do hope that I have gotten all my facts correct and I will make edits here if anyone tells me that I got something wrong. I don’t mean to misinform.

Yes, I do kind of have a problem with the number 13, so I thought making our thirteenth video here actively address it was to help alleviate some of that. Either way, it will be more motivation to make sure another video comes out next week so I can have 14 ASAP.

Hopefully, I’ll have no more to add here as I got things right. If not, I’ll update this page as needed.

Posted in Text, U.S.S. | Leave a comment

Barbarella Supplemental

This is a text supplement to the P.R.S.F. video that can be found here.

In my perpetual attempts to delegate all praise and accept all blame, the initial translation work on my French was done by Stephanie Smith, but the horrible pronunciation and the goofy subtitles are entirely my own doing. You may recall Stephanie Smith for her art Teddy uses in his video which can be found here. Also, if you want to get some fine jewelry, she makes that too which can be found here.

Fun fact about Jane Fonda in this film: she had to turn down starring in both Bonnie and Clyde AND Rosemary’s Baby to keep filming Barbarella, which was directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim. Also, apparently Sophia Loren turned down the role, so Vadim asked someone to play the lead before his wife.

Another point, while that is Marcel Marceau may have had a speaking role in this film, that wasn’t his voice you were hearing. Marcel did the French language track of Professor Ping and he was dubbed over in English, so you’d have to watch it in French to hear the famous mime speaking full sentences and not just the “No” from Silent Movie.

For those of you who may be wondering, from what I read, Duran Duran did in fact get their name from the character in this movie. It’s not just a strange coincidence that it sounds so similar. So, for any of you out there wondering where the name of Duran Duran came from, you are now fully enlightened on the subject.

Actually, on the subject of music, there seems to be more songs about, in one way or another, Barbarella than almost any other character sans Santa Claus I’ve ever seen. Is there something about this movie that just lends itself to music?

A few years ago this film was adapted into a stage musical, proving once again that any damn thing can and will eventually become a musical.

Posted in P.R.S.F., Text | 2 Comments

U.S.S. CE Supplemental

This is supplemental material to the video found here.

Again, I am fully aware that there is no one out there who will care at all about this discussion, but I do.

I have never really figured out when and where the whole idea of Common Era started from, but the PC quality of it is quite obvious. I seriously have no love at all for any ideals of political correctness. Yes, we should be aware of other people’s sensibilities and not actively just go about insulting and offending people. That does not mean, however, we should change around all we do and how we do it.

The most egregious examples in my opinion are the folk etymology ones which feminism in particular does quite a bit of, most notably the spelling of “womyn” when actually “man” is shortening of the old English word “wereman” where the “were” in it denotes a human male, much as Werewolf means a wolf man. The “man” part just denotes being part of humanity. The other one of those that, again due to my historiography predilections, particularly bugs me is “herstory” to oppose “history being his story”, when, of course, history is an Ancient Greek word, a language which surprisingly lacks both the English words of “his” AND “story”.

The straw that broke the camels back as it were for me was once at college when the Womyn’s Group on campus was having some sort of week celebrating women with daily events, no problem there, until I read the list of events and one day they we’re; having a discussion about menstruation, but they didn’t call it menstruation, they called it mynstruation. I found that immediately both highly annoying and unbelievably funny. When you’re at the point of doing things like that and herstory, changing words not because of their meaning but do to random chance of letter placement, you’ve gone off the deep end.

I also like to point out my own personal joke I find exceptionally funny about the word “womyn” and that is the choice of using the letter “y”, not because of the simple fact that it sounds nothing like the letter its trying to replace, but the simple fact that a “y” is the defining characteristic that makes a male with a thus named chromosome.

I know that was way off topic there by the end, so let’s go completely off topic a different direction. In the last two U.S.S. episodes I promoted some member of That Guy With the Glasses, so why not randomly do so again?

Uh… The Cinema Snob. Yeah, that guy’s funny, watch some of his stuff. Nothing to do with this episode, but… he has a two-parter on the movie Caligula, part 1 and part 2, so that’s somewhat related, right? Well, you can find him on That Guy With the Glasses or at his own site.

Posted in Text, U.S.S. | Leave a comment

I, Robot Supplemental

This is supplemental materiel to the video found here.

Fun fact about the book I, Robot: its name was taken from an earlier short story by Eando Binder where the classic creator-killing robot gets put on trial for his actions, despite them being an accident in this case. That short story was even once made into an episode of The Outer Limits with the same name starring Leonard Nimoy and another in The Outer Limits The New Series in the 90’s. So Asimov’s wasn’t the first and his book has nothing to do with the original.

However, it wasn’t trying to be like the original. This movie purported to be an adaptation to the book and failed on just about every front. Reminds me of Starship Troopers… I’ll probably get to that abomination eventually.

Another fun fact on the same vein is the short story “I, Robot” by Cory Doctorow written in 2005. He wrote it in response to the fact that Ray Bradbury blew up over the fact that Michael Moore called his documentary about Bush “Fahrenheit 9/11”, obviously an allusion to his book Fahrenheit 451. Doctorow found it ridiculous for Bradbury to claim such a degree of ownership over the title to his classic work and wrote a series of short stories with the same name as some of the most famous pieces of science fiction.

This story has nothing to do with any pervious version of I, Robot (actually it probably has the most in common with this film), but again it’s not trying to be an adaptation of an earlier work. An interesting note about U.S. copyright laws is that the title of the work is never copyrighted with the content. You can use the name of other works as your heart desires; however, don’t be surprised when its fans get upset at you for it.

Isn’t history fun? No? Well, I find it all very interesting. Hey! Same to you, bub.

But seriously, there’s a lot of stupid things in this movie that I didn’t have time to talk about: how the military didn’t show up because apparently USR controls it, this one really stupid CGI shot of a shotgun shooting out a window, how Sonny is sometimes rather intelligent and sometimes really foolish. There’s a lot to talk about and I couldn’t stuff it into my already too long video.

So, to sum up, this movie sucks, history is cool and Isaac Asimov thankfully never lived to see this film.

Posted in P.R.S.F., Text | Leave a comment

I Am Legend Supplemental

This is a text supplement to the video that can be found here.

I have to say, The Last Man on Earth is an extremely good movie, but is also probably one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. I would still suggest seeing it. The Omega Man, though I’m not spelling the title correctly as they spell it with an omega, is also a good movie too as Charlton Heston is always good when you put him at the end of the world. I Am Legend may have actually been the superior film to it, though, if it wasn’t given the new ending.

That brings up one of the obvious changes that was left in. When Neville puts his daughter on the helicopter, she makes a hand gesture telling him to remember the butterfly. It is weird even in the actual movie, but it does absolutely nothing in the theatrical version. In the real movie, he remembers it when the lead infected makes the butterfly on the window and they have a moment of connection between them.

On the note of his daughter, I am serious that you should all be thanking me for not putting “Whip My Hair” in the video. It is one of the most irritating songs I’ve heard in awhile. To be fair, that’s partially because it’s been awhile since I head “I Kissed A Girl” which is probably the most annoying song I’ve ever heard, at least to my personal taste. But, back to “Whip My Hair”, she manages to say “I whip my hair back and forth” at least 6.8 googol times in the course of a three minute song.

It is quite annoying.

Back on topic, an interesting note about the book I Am Legend is that is considered to be an influence on Romero in creating Night of the Living Dead as it includes many of the same plot threads and themes.

See, you can’t say you don’t learn anything from reading these things… unless you already knew that. In which case, did you know that William Shakespeare died on the same date as Miguel de Cervantes, author of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, but they actually died weeks apart because England hadn’t yet changed their calendars.

Already knew that too? Oh well. Maybe next week.

Posted in P.R.S.F., Text | Leave a comment

P.R.S.F. Poster Wallpaper

Here is the first wallpaper from us here at the Irrehensible T.J here free for the fans, just right click, or control-click and choose save.

Posted in P.R.S.F., Text | Leave a comment

U.S.S. Flamingo, Supplemental

This is a text supplement to the video which can be found here.

Ok, for those of you not in the know, Flash Forward was an awesome show on when I was younger that I watched all the time. It was an awesome series staring Jewel Staite as Becky and Ben Foster as Tuck. I may sometime do a video or something on it if I can find the footage, but that show was awesome.

As for Kim Possible, I stand by every word I say in this video. It’s seriously a lot of fun and worth watching even for people older then the intended audience. The same is not true of TaleSpin. That one is a bit too childish in nature for an adult.

Oh, about TaleSpin, I’d like to thank Allison Pregler a.k.a. Obscurus Lupa for the episode of her show she did about the show Tales of the Golden Monkey because it was at that point that a. I became familiar with the show, and b. I realized that TaleSpin was totally drawing from it.

I had always wondered where the idea of the biplane, the island and the juice bar, i.e. this whole crazy series, came from, and seeing some of Tales of the Golden Monkey does explain it. If you see the show and are familiar with TaleSpin, you’ll see what I mean.

Particularly, there’s Louie. Louie is the King of the Apes in Jungle Book, so why would he be a bartender in this show? I think the answer is that in Tales of the Golden Monkey, there’s a bar called the Golden Monkey, where the titular idol is, that is run by a bartender named Louie. If that wasn’t enough for them, Louie is actually played by Roddy McDowall, who famously starred in almost all of the Planet of the Apes movies and was the only actor to appear in all five films as well as the television series. In other words, he’s famous for being an ape, and Louie is the King of the Apes.

So, thanks Lupa. You can find her stuff on blip, on That Guy with the Glasses and at Making You Stupid.

Posted in Text, U.S.S. | 2 Comments

Playboy and the Slime God Supplement

This is a text supplement to a video that can be found here.

“Playboy and the Slime God” is a really funny story and most of the stories in The Wizards of Odd are really funny, but I was serious about it being a bit of a pain to get my hands on. I don’t recall how I first heard of it, but when I went out looking for it at the time; none of the bookstores anywhere around had it. I did, in fact, send to England to get my copy.

The odd thing is, when I was looking things up, the edition I have has the cover which, if what I read is to be correct, was the cover for the US printing, not the original UK printing, despite the fact that it reads “First Time in Print!” on the front.

Furthermore, I really don’t believe that my copy is from the US: not only because I had to get it in England, but they use English grammatical rules and conventions, not American ones. The most obvious being the single quotation marks on all speech in the book. This could just be a matter of lazy American editors not looking over what they had when they re-printed it, which may also explain the “First Time in Print” boast on the cover, but that seems a bit odd.

You know, I bet as soon as people start watching this video, I’m going to be inundated with comments calling me an idiot because it’s actually the easiest book in the world to find and I was somehow just looking on the wrong damn shelf.

Either way, the book is worth the hassle to find.

Want to hear a random fun fact? Colleen Camp plays Yvette the Maid in the 1985 movie Clue which I use clips from in the video. At one point in time, Colleen Camp did a Playboy spread, the focus of this video, and her first film role, at least according to IMDb, is an uncredited part in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, the final movie in the Planet of the Apes series and sequel to the subject of my first review. See, I told you it was random.

Posted in P.R.S.F., Text | Leave a comment