The Greater Pop Culture Context of Xanadu

I truly love Xanadu. I don’t ironically love it. I don’t love it because I laugh at it. I don’t even love it for its camp value. I love Xanadu because there’s something earnest in it.

I also maybe love it because the first time I saw it I had taken codeine cough syrup — for medical reasons, I should point out, but thank you nonetheless, UCSB student health services! And although every subsequent viewing has been comparatively less twinkly, even the most sober viewing makes me think of that first time, in all its hazy, grape-flavored glory.

Codeine or no codeine, I’ve seen the movie many times, but it wasn’t until I had to write about it for People that I realized it’s not just a weirdo roller-disco fantasy existing out its own, as a vestige of the ’70s that somehow squeaked into the ’80s. It’s a movie that has a lot of connections to classic movie musicals, and I felt like other pop culture nerds who love Xanadu would be interested to know how it fits in.

(BTW, the majority of all this information is in the People piece as well, but I felt that it was all weird and surprising enough that I merited posting twice.)

Foremost, while it’s not a remake of the 1947 musical Down to Earth, exactly, it’s heavily inspired by it. Down to Earth has Rita Hayworth playing Terpischore, the muse of dance, who descends to the world of mortals, falls in love with a Broadway producer and helps make his new musical a success. (Xanadu, meanwhile, has Olivia Newton-John playing Terpischore, arriving on Earth to inspire the guy from The Warriors to start a roller-disco, and I guess that was the early 1980s equivalent of putting on a popular stage musical?)

Down to Earth is kinda-sorta a sequel to the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan.

Down to Earth isn’t a continuation of the story, but it does feature three characters from Here Comes Mr. Jordan, two of them being played by the same actors from the first film. Here Comes Mr. Jordan also features a plot about otherworldly beings meddling in the lives of mortals, but in this case, it’s angels.

Here Comes Mr. Jordan was based on Harry Segall’s play Heaven Can Wait, which was later remade as the 1978 film Heaven Can Wait, starring Warren Beatty.

The play was adapted into a movie a second time in 2001 with Chris Rock, though confusingly it used the title of the semi-sequel, Down to Earth.

Outside of that chain, it gets more complicated. Xanadu stars Gene Kelly in his final role as Danny Maguire, a former band leader who has lost his muse. In the 1944 movie Cover Girl, Kelly plays a character by the same name, who works in a nightclub — you know, like an aspiring bandleader might. Also, the film has Kelly romancing Rita Hayworth, who would go on to play the muse in Down to Earth.

It’s just a coincidence, but it’s a happy one, in that it allows both Xanadu and Cover Girl to project onto each other a little, and make the former seem like another spiritual successor to the latter. When Kelly’s character dances with Kira, you can imagine that he’s thinking of Rita Hayworth, and in a way, Kira is that character.

Furthermore, the big Xanadu scene that Kelly shares with Newton-John has them dancing together in a way that’s remarkably similar to how Kelly danced with Judy Garland in the 1942 film For Me and My Gal. Check the two sequences out, back-to-back.

Kelly himself choreographed the scene, and to me, it makes Xanadu a more of a reflection on his long show business career than I realized before. And that’s sweet, in a way, because that makes me feel less bad about Kelly’s final film being labeled a commercial flop, even if it was a flop that eventually found a cult following of codeine-addled weirdos.

And there’s one more: The dance sequence for “Don’t Walk Away” transforms into a cartoon. This animation was one of the first projects done by Don Bluth, who had only recently left Disney at the time when Xanadu came along.

From here on, Bluth went on to do The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. You could make the argument that Xanadu therefore provided a first stepping stone for Bluth on the road to becoming a successful animator independent of Disney. You could even make a Xanadu-Arrested Development connection, since the latter’s Bluth family got its name from Don Bluth, but they wouldn’t have had Bluth not become a famous, recognized name. Xanadu helped make that happen. Thanks, roller-disco movie!

In the end, of course, Xanadu became a Broadway hit that received all the praise that Xanadu the movie didn’t get. (Below, you can watch the stage version of Xanadu in its entirety, if that’s something you feel like doing on a Saturday.)

And that’s cool, but to me not quite as cool as the fact that it’s a Broadway musical adaptation of a roller-disco classic that was a remake of a sequel to a film that had already been adapted into a movie and which had been a Broadway play in the first place.

Dem muses, I tell you.

That Time Tiny Toons Made a Domestic Violence Joke

Sometimes you wake up and suddenly remember a single gag in a cartoon you haven’t watched for twenty-five years.

The Tiny Toons version of Tweety Bird is Sweetie Pie, a smug, pink little thing that is thoroughly unpleasant. There’s this one short, “Eating Between the Lines,” that’s solely about her efforts to eat Bookworm, a sort of non-speaking non-character that is a worm who likes books. It plays like a typical Wile E. Coyote short, with Sweetie trying repeatedly to catch Bookworm and then getting injured, but there’s this one gag that happens in which Bookwork drops a book on Sweetie. After she gets smashed on the head, you see that the title of the book is The Mike Tyson Story, and Sweetie says “Now I know how Robin Givens feels.”

No, really.

Looney Tunes, Tiny Toons and a lot of other cartoons throw in little winks to adults who may be watching — the character of Shirley the Loon is at least conceptually a joke about Shirley MacLaine, and that is also a weird thing to include in a children’s show — but is it surprising that people thought this joke was okay? I mean, it’s not that funny, for one. And Givens alleged Mike Tyson abused her in 1988, so the joke wasn’t even all that timely. It just seems like the kind of thing to which a censor would respond with, “Yeah, maybe we don’t need this joke about the lady who got beat up by her killing machine of a husband?”

My take-away on this, I guess, is that 1990 was a very different place than 2015 is, in that if a kids’ show made a similar joke — say, with Rihanna and Chris Brown in place of Givens and Tyson — the internet would be instantly in a state of outrage about it. Twenty-five years ago, you could get away with more when you thought that no one was looking, or at least no one had a means to instantly, publicly tell the world that they were offended.

Sweetie’s voice may sound familiar if you watched Dexter’s Lab. It was provided by Candi Milo, who was the second actress to voice Dexter, and you can hear a little bit of Dexter in the way Milo voices Sweetie.

When cartoons were weird, previously:

• How Tiny Toons taught me what bigamy was
• That one Twin Peaks-inspired episode of Darkwing Duck
• That one Milli Vanilli episode of the Super Mario Bros. cartoon
• Betty Boop Laughs at Your Quaint Understanding of Reality
• That one overtly sexual episode of Batman

On Retro-Futuristic Clamshell Phones

Read any think piece on It Folows and you will hear about the importance of Yara’s clamshell e-reader phone. It’s the mystery device on which she’s reading The Idiot throughout the film, and director David Robert Mitchell specifically created it so that a real smartphone didn’t immediately date the film.

As he explains in an interview with The A.V. Club:

That e-reader cell phone — or “shell phone” — you’re talking about is not a real device. It’s a ’60s shell compact that we turned into a cell phone e-reader. So I wanted modern things, but if you show a specific smartphone now, it dates it. It’s too real for the movie. It would bother me anyway. So we made one up. And all of that is really just to create the effect of a dream — to place it outside of time, and to make people wonder about where they are.

It seemed vaguely familiar to me, and I think that’s the point, but I couldn’t place exactly why such a device would seem familiar until this weekend, when I realized there’s a precedent for a retro-futuristic clamshell phone.

April O’Neli uses one in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. Not that it’s intentional, necessarily, but if we’re having a conversation about retro-futuristic clamshell phones…

The Greatest Movie Synopsis You Will Read Today

Courtesy of IMDb and a dedicated plot summary writer. Yes, the movie seems batshit in its own right, but you really have to appreciate that the writer decided that the best possible way to summarize this film was to include his own critiques and asides. Also, I have no clue what last-act plot twist is being described in the final two sentences — nor why the he felt it necessary to give away the last act in what should ideally be a three-sentence tease.

Got problems? Need a shrink? Call an alcoholic reporter instead. Janet Ames is a war widow who deeply resents the five buddies of her husband, whom he died to save, although she only knows their names. She is approaching a cafe where the first of the five men, whose names are on a list in her hand, is employed. Her plan, whatever it was, becomes somewhat secondary when she is ran over by a truck and is taken to the hospital unconsciousness. There, in one fell swoop of an amazing coincidence, she is identified by Smithfield Cobb, a reporter addicted to drink — probably because of his name — who also happens to be the fifth man on her list. She regains consciousness but is unable to walk, although the best medical minds in the building say she has no personal injury that prevents her from walking. Smithfield sees right off that her problem is mental, and he decides he will cure her by using psycho-analysis and suggestion — the man came equipped — to wipe away her perception that the five men whose lives her husband saved at the cost of his own were not worthy of the sacrifice. He describes to her each of the other four men and makes them all seem to be worthy and successful men and prime candidates for induction into the Jaycees. He lies of course, but all in a good cause. He gets around to himself and tells her he is quite a distinguished journalist — with a capital J — and the next thing anyone knows, Janet is dancing around the room and fully cured of her boiled-up resentment, or whatever. But, wait... It isn't over. Smithfield is ashamed of telling her all these lies, and he flees for the nearest bar and is working on becoming a complete basket-case. Janet follows and she then proceeds to overcome by psychoanalysis and suggestion — can't overlook that one — a cure for him.

Rosalind Russell’s expression on the poster, by the way, makes it look like a taut thriller. I really don’t know what to think.

The Guilt of Janet Ames. I can’t think of a less enticing title for a movie.

With “It” Being Hilariously Outdated Streetwalker Garb

This week, I had to watch Pretty Woman. I realize that I grew up in a generation of kids who watched this movie willingly and repeatedly, but I wasn’t allowed to, I’m guessing because my parents wanted to leave explanations about prostitution to the Bible. As a result of not having grown up with it, I kind of hate Pretty Woman. I think if you see it when you’re a kid, you just accept it as good. If you see it as a grown-up who has the slightest inkling about what a prostitute’s life might be like, you can’t get past its phoniness. In fact, the only part about Pretty Woman I really enjoy is Laura San Giacomo, and that probably puts me in a super-minority.

In watching it in order to write even the dinkiest listicle about it, I realized that my fashion vocabulary completely failed me regarding Julia Roberts’ first costume in the film. You know the one: the most streetwalkery, the least hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. It’s hooker with an aluminum spleen at best. But while I didn’t know how to describe it beyond “What the fuck is she supposed to be wearing?” and thereabouts, I could liken it to another pop cultural woman of the night.

In the original Final Fight, you encounter a female enemy, Poison, who’d later go on to become playable in the Street Fighter games. She’s never stated to be a prostitute, but she is a streetwalker in the literal sense: She trots up to you as you scroll down the street and attempts to kick your ass, just like every male enemy does. Poison lacks Vivian’s thigh-highs and the smoking jacket, but the two characters are baring similar amounts of skin beneath their tank tops. And then there’s that hat. The Pretty Woman hat is either a pageboy cap or a Greek fishing hat, according to my panel of experts. And while most probably assume Poison is wearing a cop hat, reappropriated punk-style, I think it’s actually a Greek fishing hat.

Were Greek fishing hats in style for a certain class of woman in the early 90s? I have no idea. Was the Pretty Woman outfit representative of something a prostitute would have actually worn? Or would she have looked odd and out-of-place even in the skantastic fashion netherworld that was Hollywood Boulevard in 1990? Again, not having been in the market for prostitutes when I was seven, I can’t say.

And in case you’re thinking that Poison’s outfit might have been a tip of the hat — that is, the 90s prostitute hat — to the most famous hooker of the era, it’s not. Pretty Woman hit theaters on March 23, 1990, and FInal Fight first hit arcades in December 1989. Poison technically debuted first, so the two designs probably originated separately, though I’d be interested to know if they were both inspired by a real-life look, hookery or not.

Who Wore It Better? — previously:

• Gwen Stefani / Ghirahim
• Bob Dylan / Jean-Ralphio
• Amy Sedaris / Lil from Squibillies
• Bjork / a gerenuk
• Jane Lynch / an angry ostrich
• Lena Dunham / Little Critter
• Kim Kardashian / a sex robot from a vintage Japanese comic book
• Fiona Apple / some other chick wearing an octopus hat
• Kris Jenner / Eclipso
• Michael Cera / Edith Crawley
• Lana Del Rey / Camilla Rhodes
• Adam Scott / Seth Gabel
• Tabatha Coffey / an angry, white cat
• Grace Jones / a cassowary
• Coco / the Venus of Willendorf

What Ever Happened to that 1991 TV Remake of Baby Jane?

In 1991, ABC aired a TV movie remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the 1962 Bette Davis classic whose success launched the entire “old ladies doing fucked-up shit to each other” genre.

This new Baby Jane is to the original as the Carrie Underwood Sound of Music is to the Julie Andrews version — by no means better, but perhaps an object of curiosity to the morbidly pop culture-minded. Aside from updating the original’s plot to that wonderful late-80s, early-90s inter-decade bleed, the remake happens to star two real-life actress sisters in the lead roles: Vanessa Redgrave as the wheelchair-bound Blanche and Lynn Redgrave as the able-bodied but demented Jane. For me, that was gimmick enough to seek out the film online but not gimmick to make the movie especially good. Perhaps the real-life sisters angle would have worked better if the film were remade on a regular basis, pitting a different pair of famous sisters against each other — Kim and Kyle Richards one year, the Mara sisters the next, the Olsen twins after that.

A boy can dream.

I’m posting about the remake today, however, to draw attention to one scene that stands apart from the rest. Here, watch.

I think it plays like something David Lynch would direct were he to dabble in hagsploitation. The griminess of Hollywood, the further inter-decade bleed, the jazzy soundtrack to Jane’s search for her manager backstage, the fact that Lynn Redgrave is dressed like the Joker’s mother by way of Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart — it all echoes Lynch’s work, even if I’m fairly certain it’s all coincidental.

As it plays on, this scene gets more surreal in a Lynch-like way. Jane breaks down mid-performance, time slows and the camera lingers on the weirdos who have attended this performance for some reason — in particular the dark-haired woman who is also dressed in a babydoll dress and may be explicitly dressed as Baby Jane Hudson. (Is Jane then duetting with herself? That seems like a particularly Lynch-y question.) The scene would tie in very neatly to the “theater of the mind” motif that Lynch uses in Twin Peaks with the Red Room and in Mulholland Drive with Club Silencio. It’s just so happens that David Lynch didn’t direct this. I hope other Lynch lunatics see the parallels nonetheless. And I hope the Lynch-illiterate who had tuned in back in 1991 just to see those two classy British acting sisters caught this scene and wondered out lout what the fuck they were watching.

Jane may be the film’s villain, but it’s hard not to feel her heartbreak in this scene. I’m not sure if credit does to Lynn Redgrave for finding the humanity beneath the melodrama or to author Henry Farrell, who created such a compelling tragedy when he wrote the book upon which the original movie was based.

By the way, Blanche’s drag queen double is played by John Glover, the campmaster who I will always see as the very fey Dr. Jason Woodrue in Batman & Robin and the mildly less-fey-but-still-in-the-ballpark Lionel Luthor from Smallville.

The Return of Lorina Dunlop

I wouldn’t have ever found Night Gallery had it not been for Lorina Dunlop. And as you should expect from a story that involves Rod Serling, this one has a twist at the end.

More than a year ago, I wrote about a mysterious woman in a painting that I'd found at a thrift store. I didn’t buy the painting, but I did name the woman: Lorina Dunlop. It was hard not to invent a character for this spear tip of a woman who apparently commissioned a portrait and told the artist, “Paint me as I am. Paint my rage.”

In the end, someone else bought Lorina and took her home, where her disapproving eyebrows are surely darkening whatever corner he’s stuck her in. Through the magic of Google image search, Lorina’s owner actually ended up on my blog, where he told me in a comment that Lorina reminded him of a segment from Night Gallery, the macabre anthology series Serling did for NBC after the cancellation of The Twilight Zone. It’s the one that The Simpsons parodies in the fourth Halloween episode, where paintings introduce the various vignettes, and indeed, each segment of Night Gallery has Serling introducing a painting that somehow figures into the plot of the subsequent story. It’s all of the typical Twilight Zone-style, straight-to-the-camera narration — and, for the record, I love The Twilight Zone — so it’s all deliciously hokey, and meted out with every possible dramatic pause. (“A man on a train… who’s about to be confronted by the thing he fears most: A woman… who’s made of dogs… taped together… yet no one else notices. Now what happens when he finds out… he’s… a… robot. Here’s a painting of a creepy doll that we found.”)

Last night, I finally watched Lorina’s segment, “Eyes,” which starred Joan Crawford as Claudia Menlo, a cruel, rich woman woman who undergoes experimental surgery that can restore her sight — but for only twelve hours. In a traditional, Twilight Zone-y twist, there’s a citywide blackout at the moment she removes her bandages, and Menlo only sees a few fleeting moments of a sunrise before her time is up. She never gets a chance to gaze upon her extensive art collection, which, now that I think about it, is a strange thing for a blind woman to spend years amassing, and why didn’t she plan her twelve hours of eyesight so that it would happen during the daylight anyway?

The entire segment — which was directed by a then-unknown Steven Spielberg — is currently available on YouTube.

And here’s the painting of Claudia Menlo.

Funny how Claudia — a self-motivated harridan who doesn’t mind in the least that her procedure necessitates the donation of a living person’s eyes — still looks softer than Lorina, who presumably was not a TV villain in need of ironic punishments. I’ll continue to wonder why Lorina’s painter made the decisions he made, and I’ll continue to have a pretty solid hunch about how the final product ended up at a thrift shop in the first place.

This story about Night Gallery has a bizarre pop-cultural footnote. In its syndicated form, Night Gallery includes pared-down versions of its original episodes as well as the entire two-season run of The Sixth Sense, a completely unrelated, non-anthology ABC series about paranormal investigations. These episodes were themselves chopped down from sixty to thirty minutes. Rod Serling filmed intros for these segments too, as if they belonged in the original series, but as Wikipedia notes, “Serling's newly added introductions usually covered the introductory scenes and plot point set-ups that had been removed.” And if that weren’t confusing enough, there’s the awkwardness of tuning into an anthology series and sometimes getting the kind of Twilight Zone one-offs you’d expect and sometimes getting serial segments with recurring characters. Weirdest of all, however, is the question of Joan Crawford’s final acting role. A few sources note Crawford’s Night Gallery role as her last, but it's not. Her actual final acting role was in a Sixth Sense episode titled “Dear Joan: We’re Going to Scare You to Death.” (So I guess it worked…?)

So in the end, as the result of an inexplicable syndication packaging decision, Joan Crawford’s final acting role kinda-sorta was on Night Gallery after all. And if you click above, you’ll see Crawford four years older than she was in "Eyes," playing the innocent victim but looking oddly more like Lorina Dunlop than ever.

There’s one major plus to The Sixth Sense being rolled into Night Gallery, however: Anything airing after the Night Gallery opening credits instantly seems more appealing. They’re beautiful — straddling the line between creepy and weird, and perfectly capturing the transition from 60s psychedelia into a bolder 70s brand of supernatural.

Weird TV, previously:

• Return to the Land of the Giants
• Ethel Gets Eaten — Nancy Cartwright and the Twilight Zone Movie
• The Twilight Zone Lousy Plot Generator
• Button, Button — Who’s Got the Button?
• The One Brady Bunch Where Everyone Gets Shot to Death

Twenty Things About Bones That You Didn’t Know and Also Probably Don’t Care About But Here I Go Anyway

There’s this funny, quirky thing I do where I watch Bones. Isn’t that hilarious? Aren’t I such a unique little diamond?

I started watching it for reasons I can’t quite remember, and now I just continue to watch it. I won’t say that it’s on the level of the great shows that everyone’s always suggesting have created a New Golden Age of Television. In fact, it’s a weekly procedural, which a lot of TV people would probably say makes it the opposite of deep, universe-building dramas such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad. But as far as procedurals go, Bones is at least better than your NCISes and CSIs and SVUs and the rest of the letter shows that have blank slate law enforcement officers solving crimes without enough room to allow actual character growth.

But I assume you don’t watch Bones, and I also assume you mentally shut down when your parents try to talk to you about it, so I figured I’d do you a solid and tell you twenty things that I think you should know about the show.

1. Bones takes place in a bizarre universe where people are almost never murdered with traditional weapons. It’s always something irregular or makeshift — the propeller blade from an antique motorboat or a scrimshaw fishing knife — that delays the investigation. I don’t know why I skewed maritime with my examples, but you get the idea.
2. The show takes place in the greater D.C. area, generally, but the vast majority of wilderness locations look remarkably like Griffith Park.
3. And while the central setting of the show is the Jeffersonian Institute, the exteriors of this supposed building are actually the L.A. County Natural History Museum. (The staff are not amused if you ask where Bones is.) This creates the neat situation where Dr. Temperance Brennan works in the same building as where Sally Draper got her period for the first time.
4. Despite what you might initially guess, the show is not a spin-off of Small Wonder and the central character is not a grown-up version of V.I.C.I. the robot girl. No, despite the way she talks and acts, Dr. Brennan is a human woman. (Though like Small Wonder, weirdly few people suspect that the person who talks and acts like a robot actually is a robot.)
5. Dr. Brennan is played by Emily Deschanel, the sister of Zooey Deschanel, who appeared in a Christmas episode as Dr. Brennan’s equally deadpan cousin. (“On Planet Deschanel, Emotion Is Forbidden.”) This character seems to suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder rooted in Benjamin Franklin trivia. Shortly thereafter, Zooey Deschanel scored the lead in another Fox show, New Girl. So there you go.
6. Despite the fact that Dr. Brennan has trouble expressing and understanding basic emotional motivations, she is also the author of a best-selling series of books. That seems strange but also prescient.
7. To expand on a tweet by Jules Klausner, the show is called Bones because Dr. Brennan specializes in analyzing bones and also everyone calls her Bones and also she has sex with multiple partners.
8. Even though the show is chiefly concerned with the analysis of dead bodies — and we’re talking about humans reduced to bug-ridden glop here — every single major character falls in love with someone who works in the office. Even Cam’s daughter dated one of the interns for a while, until the writers were all “No, not that anymore. No.”
9. One of the characters is named Angela Montenegro, and she is an artist who is magic and owns a magic computer that can do anything. Like, Cam will say, “Angela, can you show what it would look like if a ferret ate the victim’s genitals and then burrowed through his genitals-hole into his chest cavity and then exploded out his face?” And then Angela is all “beep beep boop” and then she makes a computer animation that looks early 2000s of that thing happening. She is magic.
10. No one ever just tells anyone anything. They say something like “I need to show you something,” and then the whole cast assembles in their room — it’s usually Angela’s office — and then they explain everything.
11. In the show’s third season, they had a recurring villain whose name was Gormogon, which is a slightly better name than TKTK Weird Serial Killer Name Will Fix Later TKTK.
12. There was an episode where Stewie Griffin was a guest star.
13. Patricia Belcher (perhaps best known as the ineffective psychic in Jeepers Creepers) plays Caroline Julian, a criminal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office who has appeared in 39 episodes of the show and who has exactly two personality characteristics: (1) gruff but loving and (2) calls people “cher” and “cherie.”
14. Bones and her team are assisted by a rotating cast of interns that basically functions like the lesser members of Super Friends — personality types and ethnic types not represented in the main cast. We’ve got a white guy, a black guy, a depressed white guy, a Muslim, a rednecky white guy and exactly one woman. No East Asians or gays yet, but hey — Bones got renewed for another season.
15. That female intern, Daisy Wick, is noted in the IMDb trivia for the show: “Daisy Wick is the name of one of the secondary characters. Daisy Zick is the name of a real-life murder victim from Battle Creek, Michigan in 1963. The crime remains unsolved.” So that’s fun.
16. There was a kinda-sorta-but-notta Veronica Mars reunion in a 2010 episode that featured both Enrico Colatoni and Francis Capra. They did not get to interact, sadly, to say nothing of them getting to wink at each other.
17. ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has a recurring role on the show, playing himself — and Angela’s father. I want there to be a “She’s Got Legs” joke in an episode about a corpse who had her legs sawed off.
18. It’s possible that Bones currently takes place in the future. The fifth season ended with the major characters departing D.C. for a year and then reuniting at the start of the sixth season. If the show took place in the current year when it started in 2005 — and why wouldn’t it? — that time jump means that Booth and Brennan are solving crimes in the year 2015 already.
19. I frequently watch Bones while I’m doing other things — say, washing dishes or cooking or exercising but not eating anymore. I have a good reason. One specific episode, “The Gamer in the Grease,” featured a decomposed human body being found in a grease reclamation truck. It took glop to new levels and I actually had to stop eating for the night. The episode, oddly enough, was directly inspired by the documentary The King of Kong, which was weird for a number of reasons.
20. Finally, the staff psychologist, Lance Sweets, is played by John Francis Daley, whose post-Freaks and Geeks existence is proof that puberty, like Angela’s computer, is magic.

Get it? Bones? BONES?

Invitation to a Terrible Movie

Tonight, Hollywood salutes the year’s best movies, but I say that’s garbage. Anyone can make an award-winning movie. Just walk into the cinema section of your library, and there are literally dozens of books advising you how to properly make a film. Much harder, I’d wager, is making a terrible movie that people will forget about, and in tribute to shitty cinema, I present to you Invitation to Hell.

A TV movie that aired on NBC in 1984, Invitation to Hell is notable today because it was directed by Wes Craven. “Oh, the Wes Craven of landmark horror films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream?” No! This is the Wes Craven from Vampire in Brookyln or Shocker or that movie where the old lady gets killed by a basketball. But while Invitation to Hell is pretty bad overall, it has enough good moments — wonderfully made-for-TV special effects, utterly baffling line readings and references to 1984 computer technology that sound hilarious today — that it merited a Cliffs Notes version. So here you go, movie nerds, horror fans, Craven completionists and people who just have nine minutes to spare: everything you need to see from Invitation to Hell, including all of Susan Lucci’s shitballs wackadoo outfits.

Things to note:

• Yes, you are correct: The plot does play out like a supernatural blend of two Simpsons episodes: the one where the family moves to Cypress Creek so Homer can work for the villainous Globex Corporation and the one where Marge joins a ritzy country club and figuratively loses her soul. 
• And yes, Joanna Cassidy in the role of Patricia looks a bit like Maureen Prescott.
• The cast is a who’s-who of people who did better elsewhere. In addition to Susan Lucci, there’s Brenda’s mom from Six Feet Under, Punky Brewster as the daughter, Bastian from The Neverending Story as the son, Frank Fontana from Murphy Brown as the dad’s friend, Patty “The Bad Seed” McCormack as the friend’s snitty wife and even Anne Marie McEvoy (the one and only Kathy Santoni) as the neighbor girl.
• Blame the dialogue on Richard Rothstein (Universal Soldier, the original Bates Motel), but you can’t say the movie doesn’t have a few nice shots, at least for a TV movie.
• It wasn’t Craven’s only TV movie. He also directed Stranger in Our House in 1978. It starred Linda Blair, which makes her cameo in Scream make a little more sense.
• Is the whole movie a parable about the dangers of moving your family to the San Fernando Valley? Sure, why not?

If my condensed version isn’t enough for you, the full version is currently posted on YouTube. I also found an on-air promo that triggered all kinds of TV nostalgia.

And in case you just don’t have nine minutes to spare — ahem, FANCY — here’s the opening scene and then nearly a minute of Robert Urich’s family kicking the shit out of him.

Pop culture that time forgot, previously:

• A weird little story about Wes Craven and Sharon Stone
• A genuinely odd passage from Robert Bloch’s Psycho II
• The amazing opening credits to Land of the Giants
• That episode of The Brady Bunch where everyone gets shot to death
• The weirdness that is the two halves of the ’80s action series Cover Up

Return to the Land of the Giants

As much as I enjoy feeling like a smartypants, I’ll admit that feeling smart can’t compare to learning something new. And it’s on that note that I present to you the opening credits to the bygone ABC sci-fi series Land of the Giants, a Lost in Space-ish show that centered around a small band of travelers marooned on an Earth-like planet where “humans” are twelve times bigger. The series ran on ABC between 1968 and 1970, and I’d literally never heard of it before yesterday.

It’s dated, but in the best possible way. Watching this crisp version of the show’s opening credits, I almost feel like this is a contemporary thing made to look old. It’s exactly the right combo of hokey and earnest.

Obviously, I love it. If you’re interested, you can watch the whole first episode here. There’s also a very Saturday morning, very Filmation version of the opening credits here.

What is it about dated sci-fi that appeals to me so much? I suppose it’s the now old-timey versions of what might have back in the day suggested something futuristic. Compare, if you will, the opening credits to the early ’70s ITV series The Tomorrow People. (Yes, the one that’s currently being remade on The CW.)

I wish every show on now could begin with something that sets my mind on fire as much as this. Not having been alive when these shows were first on, I wonder why that is.

But really, I wonder why that is.

Polly Lou Livingston: Sexy Elephant

If you don’t watch Adventure Time, you most likely have no interest in Polly Lou Livingston. Really, even if you do watch Adventure Time, you still might not know who she is. Let me tell you: She voices Tree Trunks, the miniature green elephant who bakes pies and who somehow gets to be the most sexually mature character on the show.

This may sound strange, me reading sexuality into a cartoon character on a show for kids, but trust me. On a show on which so many episodes focus on love of one sort or another, it’s notable how Tree Trunks has longings that burble forth in the form of depth-charge flirtations and a twangy, confident sensuality that you don’t normally associate with cartoon elephants. (Yes, she’s more grown-up about it than LSP, even if LSP talks about it more.) The most recent Adventure Time saw her marrying Mr. Pig, so perhaps she’ll burble less now, but I will guess that she won’t lose that sensuality. No matter what plotlines come Tree Trunks’ way, she’ll still be voiced by Polly Lou Livingston, the source of all that oomph. Her performance is so wonderfully unusual that each time I watch a Tree Trunks episode, I remind myself to find out exactly who this beguiling elephant is in real life.

I finally did.

Adventure Time was her voice acting debut, and she got the role as a result of being a friend of creator Pendleton Ward’s mother. Few pictures of her exist online, but a 2009 column on her in the San Antonio Current paints a more vivid portrait of her than any photos could. Key phrases:

• “Somewhere between a hinge in quest of lubricant and Blanche Dubois as channeled by Olive Oyl, there’s no other tonality quite like it.”
• “a genuine Lone Star Auntie Mame (or perhaps the love child of Eudora Welty and George Burns).”
• “Chardonnay held aloft, massive jawbreaker necklace firmly secured, red sneakers propelling her five-foot-two frame from air kiss to air kiss — she’s her own Andy Warhol ‘Happening.’ As Polly Lou herself puts it, ‘Darlin’, if you’re not having any fun with fashion you’re missing the en-tiiire point.’”

Still, her fashion sense is one that demands visual documentation, so here is every photo I could find:

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Of course, it’s her voice that makes me love her — and Tree Trunks. If you haven’t had the pleasure, please allow me. For example, here is Tree Trunks maintaining her genteel manners in the face of living wall of flesh.

And here is Tree Trunks in that same episode, proclaiming herself “the sexiest adventurer.”

Notably that episode ends in a way that underscores the sexier aspects of the character: her biting a crystal apple framed by branches that look peculiarly like labia. (And no, thinly veiled sexual metaphors are not exactly rare on Adventure Time.)

I mean, she is famous for her pie, first and foremost. In spite of or maybe because of that, a lot of her plots concern romance. She got a love ballad to sing with Mr. Pig, and Adventure Time chose to play it straight.

That same San Antonio Current column offers three sentences about Polly Lou Livingston’s love life: “I met my husband, Bobby Livingston, on a blind date in Rockport when I was home from Stephens College one summer. He was a Corpus Christi boy, recently out of the Air Force. We both transferred to the University of Texas together and were married for 49 years until his death in 2000.”

I posted the “Dream of Love” clip because it’s the first thing I thought of when I read about her husband having died. Even though she was voicing a cartoon elephant, I suppose Polly Lou knew what she was singing about.

Other Golden Tickets

Willy Wonka, that mauve madman, endangered the lives of far more children than just the five who famously toured his factory. Everyone who had a proper childhood knows of Charlie Bucket, Augustus Gloop, Mike Teavee, Veruca Salt and Violet Beauregarde, but they weren’t the only children that Wonka allowed to nearly get processed into his signature products. In an effort to sort through old, unread and saved emails, I found one I’d sent myself last year — no content, just the subject line “Miranda Mary Piker.” When I finally looked her up, I learned she was a golden ticket-winner whom Roald Dahl ultimately nixed from the final version of Charlie and Chocolate Factory.

Here is the highest-res version I could find of the only illustration I could find of her. It’s by Lauren Child — not longtime Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake. I’m not sure what it was actually for, but it’s labeled as being Miranda.

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And a few years ago, the Times published the omitted passage, which details how Miranda offs herself when she investigates the machine that makes Spotty Powder, a new Wonka product that makes children look as if they have the chicken pox and therefore get the day off from school. A “nasty-looking girl with a smug face and a smirk on her mouth,” Miranda objects to anything that allows children to shirk responsibilities, apparently because her schoolmaster father has brainwashed her. She and her awful father then disappear into the Spotty Powder room to smash up the machine that makes it, but the rest of the group hears screaming that suggests a bad end.

An excerpt: “You villain!” [Mrs. Piker] screamed. “I know your tricks! You're grinding them into powder! In two minutes my darling Miranda will come pouring out of one of those dreadful pipes, and so will my husband!” “Of course,” said Mr. Wonka. “That’s part of the recipe.”

Although I can’t access the Times posting of the “Spotty Powder” chapter, I did find the entire passage here. She even gets her own Oompa-Loompa eulogy. Best lyrics: “So we said, ‘Why don’t we fix her / In the Spotty-Powder mixer / Then we’re bound to like her better than we did.’”

It’s perhaps a grimmer elimination than was met by any of the children in the final version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You’ll remember that the book’s final pages tell you that the four bad kids all survive despite the seemingly fatal circumstances of their exit from the tour: Veruca emerges from the “bad nut” bin covered in garbage, Mike gets taffy-stretched to enormous proportions, Violet gets juiced (but remains purple), and Augustus gets squeezed thin by the fudge chute. Given that only Miranda’s “death” scene exists, it’s tempting to imagine that she wasn’t so lucky, though getting pulverized into Spotty Dust is maybe better than never existing at all.

At some point, Roald Dahl spared Miranda from complete obscurity, however. Outside the context of Wonka Enterprises, Inc., Miranda was fed into a peanut brittle machine:

via the illustrator, p.j. lynch

I’m not sure when this poem was first published, but it sure seems like Dahl wanted to make use of those lost Oompa-Loompa rhymes… and also fulfill a dark desire to crush mean little girls into an edible form.

Miranda is not the only Wonka victim to be blinked out of existence. The Roald Dahl Museum has posted a revision-by-revision roster of all the golden ticket-winners, their personal failings and how they “died” in their respective versions of the story. (It’s rather like a slasher film, isn’t it, with virtuous Charlie being the final girl?) The revisions offer a peek at Dahl’s creative process and his wilder visions of terrible children and the nasty fates they met.

In the first 1961 version, for example, it’s Charlie plus these nine other kids:

• Augustus Pottle, who falls in the chocolate river
• Miranda Grope, ditto, despite Augustus’ example
• Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck climb in wagons running from the vanilla fudge mountain and end up the Pounding and Cutting Room
• Violet Strabismus
• Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside and Terence Roper who each cram a whole mouthful of warming candies and overheat
• Elvira Entwhistle, who falls foul of the squirrels in the Nut Room

In a second 1961 version, it’s these six aside from Charlie:

• Augustus Pottle, who falls into chocolate river, and goes to the Choc Fudge room
• Miranda Mary Piker, ditto, but who goes to the Peanut Brittle room
• Violet Beauregarde, turns purple after chewing gum
• Henry Trout, climbs in a vanilla fudge wagon
• Marvin Prune, [pages missing from draft, so we never find out what happens to him]
• Veruca Salt, tipped down the garbage chute in the Nut Room

From a 1962 version:

• Charlie Bucket, a nice boy
• Augustus Gloop, a greedy boy
• Marvin Prune, a conceited boy [we never find out what happens to him, as his exit isn’t included in this draft, and he was then dropped]
• Herpes Trout, a television-crazy boy
• Miranda Mary Piker, a girl who is allowed to DO anything she wants
• Veruca Salt, a girl who is allowed to HAVE anything she wants
• Violet Beauregarde, a girl who chews gum all day long.

Two later revisions chucked Marvin Prune and Miranda Mary Piker. I’m now more concerned with how the final five transformed over time. For example, at what point did Dahl realize that Gloop was a better name than Pottle for a pudgy German boy? How did he go from Henry Trout to Herpes Trout to Mike Teavee? And why does “vanilla fudge wagon” sound so inexplicably raunchy to me? How has popular culture not yet found a purpose for the perfectly evil-sounding Miranda Grope? Or the perfectly pitiful Violet Strabismus?

Final discussion question: Is it strange that the first movie adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory put the emphasis on someone else by titling it Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Even if the plot itself still treats Charlie as the main character?

Pop culture minutiae, previously:

• Charlotte Braun, the Peanuts character Charles Shulz murdered
• A midnight swim with Anthony Perkins
• The two Anns and the two Maes in Arrested Development
• Win Butler’s granddad and a horrifying guitar robot
• The singing, dancing, mystery-solving actresses of the 1940s

That One Brady Bunch Where Everyone Gets Shot to Death

Were I to take an informal poll about favorite episodes of The Brady Bunch, I’d probably hear people suggest the one where Marcia takes a football to the nose or the one where we meet the new Jan Brady. I wouldn’t expect to be surprised by any of the answers, because I grew up on Brady Bunch reruns — 5 p.m. on weeknights and an hour-long block at noon on Saturdays, after cartoons ended — but I’d be thrown if I heard “the one where Jesse James executes the entire family.” “You’re drunk!” I’d say. “Or you’re remembering a rerun you saw when you were home sick with a fever, because that never happened.”

Only it did happen.

There’s a fourth-season episode titled “Bobby’s Hero” that’s all about Bobby’s brief fixation with Jesse James. In a fantasy sequence — maybe a result of Bobby Brady’s own fever — the whole family exists in wild west times. The Bradys are riding a cardboard make-believe train that gets boarded by Jesse James, who proceeds to rob them and shoot them in the head. He doesn’t fire. He just announces “bang” as he points the gun at them. But you do hear them scream and you see Mike, Carol, Alice, Greg and Jan slump down in their seats.

I can’t tell if it’s more disturbing to see this now as an adult, but you have to admit: That’s pretty disturbing, at least by Brady standards.

There seems to be some notion online that this episode was banned from syndication. I’m not sure if was, but I’m certain I never saw it when I was a kid, and I’m pretty sure I saw all five seasons cycle through multiple times. (There’s some notion also that the one where Barry Williams is visibly stoned onscreen was banned, but I remember that one, even if I didn’t read anything into his clumsy grinning at the time.) I wonder if any other TV Land kids saw this one?

Bonus Brady trivia: Did you know that Robert Reed was written out of the show’s final episode because he thought the plot was too stupid? Because I didn’t.

Old TV, previously:

• The weirdness of Cover-Up and its two halves
• A “Spordelia”-era Sarah Michelle Gellar
• Kathy Santoni’s African adventure
• Twin Peaks’ Killer BOB gets just a little creepier than you remember
• How Shirley Temple made Mr. Belvedere famous

Lena (the) Hyena

Like most children of the 80s, I was emotionally scarred by Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. And yeah, I don’t know what the creators were thinking with the whole Judge Doom reveal at the end either, aside from possibly fulfilling their part of some sort of dark pact with the American nightlight industry. It truly was a messed-up thing to unleash upon our young psyches. But as horrifying as Judge Doom was, it’s not the scene that haunted me. Now this may be one of those moments where I’m revealing more than I realize, but the scene that actually gave me nightmares starred a different scary toon: Lena Hyena.

If you don’t remember, Lena shows up in a scene in which Eddie is trekking through Toon Town in search of Jessica Rabbit. Eddie thinks he’s found her, but the sexy silhouette proves misleading: He’s actually just found Lena, a hag-faced anti-Jessica who reacts to Eddie’s presence with an unbridled lady lust not often seen in children’s cartoons. Eddie, of course, wants no part of her — really, no part — but Lena pursues him anyway. Something about her lusty, pop-eyed wild takes bothered me to the point that I had dreams about her chasing me down, making kissy-faces and showing me her weird lady underwear. Ahem.

Here’s the “A MAAAAAN?!” scene in case you don’t remember:

As with much of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, this scene is actually rooted in cartoon history, or at least thereabouts. A similarly named character appeared in the Al Capp comic strip Li’L Abner. (And in case you don’t follow me on my various social media, the title character is far hunkier and much less Baby Huey-esque than his name might imply. Just FYI.) In Abner, Lena was purportedly the ugliest woman in the world — even fouler than existing hag characters such as the witchy Nightmare Alice and the undateable Sadie Hawkins, the latter of whom the dance is named. From Wikipedia’s description:

Lena was so ugly that anyone who saw her was immediately driven mad. No sane person, therefore, could tell you what she looked like. After weeks of teasing his readers by hiding Lena's face behind “censored” stickers and strategically placed dialogue balloons, Capp invited fans to draw Lena in a famous nationwide contest in 1946.

That contest — which elicited over 500,000 entries and which was judged by a Justice League of beauty experts consisting of Frank Sinatra, Boris Karloff and Salvador Dali — was won by Basil Wolverton, whose take on Lena was truly, mind-bendingly gnarly.

If that image rings a bell — and it did with me, despite the fact that I didn’t grow up reading Li’l Abner — it’s probably because Wolverton’s uniquely awful take on ugly popped up in old MAD magazines, reprints of which I did read during my youth. Examples:

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 And here’s a detailed look at that Lena sketch:

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Comparatively, the Roger Rabbit take on Lena doesn’t look half bad. I can only imagine how scarred I’d have been had Lena Hyena been an animated version of Wolverton’s gross-out horrors.

Pop culture minutiae, previously:

• The singing, dancing, mystery-solving actresses of the 1940s
• Little Nell: Beyond Rocky Horror
• Everything you know about Mr. Belvedere is about to be dropkicked like a jacket
• M(adam) Butterfly: an introduction
• Claudine Longet: a real renaissance woman

It’s Better Down Where It’s Wetter

A strange trend for you to consider.

The Abyss

Released: August 9, 1989

Plot summary: A civilian diving team are enlisted to search for a lost nuclear submarine and face danger while encountering an alien aquatic species.

Leviathan

Released: March 17, 1989

Plot summary: Underwater deep-sea miners encounter a Soviet wreck and bring back a dangerous cargo to their base on the ocean floor with horrifying results.

DeepStar Six

Released: January 13, 1989

Plot summary: At the bottom of the ocean, the DeepStar Six has just discovered a new and deadly alien menace.

The Evil Below

Released: July 1, 1989

Plot summary: A down-on-his-luck sea captain goes treasure hunting for a wrecked Spanish galleon that is rumored to be cursed by God and protected by supernatural forces.

Lords of the Deep

Released: April 21, 1989

Plot summary: Man has finally conquered the ocean. America's first self-contained undersea laboratory is the pride of the nation, and expectations are high for an elaborate undersea mining operation. What wasn’t expected was the inhabitants of an undiscovered world.

The Rift / Endless Descent

Released: March 9, 1990

Plot summary: An experimental submarine, the Siren II, with a very experienced crew is sent to find out what happened to the Siren I, mysteriously disappeared in a submarine rift. Things go awry when they begin to find things that shouldn't be there...

My takeaway: WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED IN 1989? What made people — and Hollywood especially — so terrified of the ocean? What about the ocean are we no longer so terrified of? Are we foolish for ignoring the brackish menace at our shores that Hollywood tried to warn us about back in 1989? Is it weird if The Little Mermaid painted a far rosier picture of the ocean back in 1989? What was Disney trying to cover up?

But no, seriously, my takeaway: What so affected the human psyche during this time period that we all turned our attention to the depths of the sea, if only for this brief period?

Where Are All the Gods?

Here are the opening credits to a show you probably haven’t seen, and, if you have seen it, you probably haven’t thought about it in years: Cover-Up.

I bring it up only because it’s so strange to watch this slam-bang opening sequence — which plays like so many others from shows I watched in the 80s, what with the posh life contrasted against action, feminine beauty against masculine can-do, Hart to Hart-style — and have it all look completely unfamiliar. I’ve never seen an episode of Cover Up, and it almost seems like a “red universe” thing: superficially familiar even though I know I haven’t seen it. (I would remember a set-up as implausible — even by 80s standards — as a photographer and a special forces agent taking on globe-hopping missions disguised as fashion shoots.) It’s pop culture déjà vu. In the red universe, this Jon-Erik Hexum might have had Tom Cruise’s career — or at least Pierce Brosnan’s.

Of course, he didn’t, but not for the reasons you might think. Just a few weeks into the show’s first season, Hexum accidentally killed himself on set when he fired a gun loaded with blanks into his temple. Amid some controversy, CBS replaced Hexum with a new character played by the equally hunky Antony Hamilton, who stayed with the show until its cancellation in 1984. Hamilton died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1995.

The Hexum-Hamilton split itself seems like a blue universe-red universe thing, but I suppose in the end the paths converged to the same point. Clearly, though, both actors appeared in the show during their prime, and the casting director certainly had an eye for a particular type of leading man.

let: jon-erik hexum; right: antony hamilton

As far as coincidences go, it’s worth noting that the theme song to Cover Up was sung by the subject of a recent post here on this blog, E.G. Daily, who was dating Hexum at the time he died. On some level, that makes me think about what might have made her create a career out of voicing cartoon characters.

Kathy Santoni: The Africa Adventure

(The long and short of it? This is one of the weirdest pop cultural connections I’ve made in my life.)

Those of you who also cling to memories of childhood television may remember Kathy Santoni as D.J. Tanner’s friend but sometimes rival on Full House. Kathy started out as a mentioned-but-unseen character in the style of Maris Crane from Frasier, but she eventually appeared on the show. This fact actually lost me a bet once in college, because these were the things we discussed in college and because I also completely forgot about the episode where D.J. starts going to junior high and realized that she is a stupid baby because she doesn’t wear make-up and doesn’t have yabbos like Kathy Santoni, who blossomed into womanhood over the summer break and now dresses like dancer from The Grind.

Here’s a photo if you, like me, need your memory jogged:

this is what reads as hot on abc family tv in 1989. feel weird about it.

Kathy appeared four more times after that first 1989 episode, and I don’t remember any of those either, but IMDb says that Anne Marie McEvoy played her in each appearance. Not that I need a reason to bring up Kathy Santoni, but she’s relevant as a result of something I blogged about a few days ago: the 1992 video game Ghost Lion, which features the amazingly, horrifyingly early-90s, Lisa Frankensteiny box art you see here:

i will never get tired of posting this, btw

Ghost Lion, it turns out, has one more thing going for it aside from the tragic time capsule that is the box art. Someone on Tumblr pointed out that the game was based on a movie — a Japanese movie, in fact, that used Western actors but that was filmed in Egypt. I checked IMDb. Nothing. I did some rudimentary Googling. Nothing. Finally, at long last, I turned up a VHS cover.

The movie exists. Based on this page, either the title was Pyramid in the Distance: Legend of the White Lion or that is just a literal translation of the Japanese title. (In Japan, the video game Ghost Lion was titled Legend of the White Lion.) It doesn’t appear the movie was ever released in the U.S., even though it was filmed in English and featured American audience-friendly Anne Marie McEvoy in the lead role of Maria, the girl who ventures through Egypt on some search for her parents that may or may not involve a white lion. The movie doesn’t show up on her IMDb page, but nonetheless, yeah — the girl with lime green stretch pants and stripper hair on the box art of the video game is, kinda sorta, Anne Marie McEvoy, or at least a version of her, which means she has the unique honor of doing something that only major action film stars and professional athletes ever get a chance to do: play as herself in a video game. And that’s pretty good for an actress whose second-best role after Kathy Santoni on four episodes of Full House is a supporting turn in Children of the Corn.

kathy santoni again, in a sense — via

It just strikes me as peculiar that the film doesn’t show up on IMDb at all. The director, Mataichiro Yamamoto, doesn’t even have a directing credit on IMDb, although he is credited with producing some better-known stuff such as Lone Wolf and Cub and Azumi.

I don’t know why there’s so little information about the film online — or at least on the English internet. But even without anything further, I’m pretty stoked on this as being a means of making Kathy Santoni relevant, if just for a moment. Middling reviews of the video game Ghost Lion notwithstanding, I’d be curious to see how the game plays. I’d also be curious to know how Andrea Barber feels about Anne Marie McEvoy getting to be playable in a video game so long before Kimmie Gibbler made her eight-bit debut. Surely, some me-minded game programmer can make that happen, no?

Video games footnotes, previously:

• The video game with a Peter Gabriel-composed theme song
• The video game that made you chose between the princess and the lurpy gay old man
• The video game that featured a really offensive version of Jim from Huckleberry Finn
• The video game that inspired an Owen Pallett song
• The video game where the princess dies at the end
• The video game called Oh Shit!
• The video game starring the Nintendo heroine no one talks about