Love is in the air at Fanboy Comics! In this magical month of romance and enchantment, the FBC Staff and Contributors decided to take a moment to stop and smell the roses. In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day, a few members of the Fanboy Comics crew will be sharing their very personal “Love Letters” with our readers, addressed to the ones that they adore the most.
To the Clowns in the Sky,
Space. The Final Frontier. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Too far away for me, and I have little patience to sit through a history lesson. I prefer my sci-fi to take place in a not-too-distant future (possibly next Sunday, A.D.) way down in a place called Deep 13. Do I need Vaders and Mauls when I can have Forresters and T.V.’s Franks? Why deal with Klingons around Uranus or 1000 Falcons when I can hang out with the gang of the S.O.L. (Satellite of Love)? Why bother with an effeminate golden droid with a bad British accent or a blue and silver extra large suppository that won’t speak in the same language as everyone else? Or a whiny farm boy, a smug smuggler, or an even more smug Captain? I prefer the likes of robots made from spare parts by a man trying to stave off insanity by loneliness and depression from being exiled by evil overlords. Or as many call them . . . bosses. This is the life I’m more partial towards, spending my days cracking wise on crap movies with a couple of robots. It’s the American dream.
Sure, I grew up on the likes of Star Trek and Star Wars, but once a boy hits puberty, he requires a certain type of snark that the prior could not provide. Watching the bots – Crow with his special brand of “I don’t care,” Gyspy with her motherly advice, and Tom Servo with his oh-so-expressive face – made becoming a man a little less awkward.
MST3K was with me throughout high school and college, watching over me like a gentle, sarcastic giant. They weren’t all good times, but they taught me about how you must get through life with a smile, even if you sometimes had a tear in your eye, or snot leaking out from your nose. Most were swell times, making inside jokes with other MSTies, references used to this day that have outsiders going, “The hell?” To that I say, “Huzzah!” On the other side, we had to learn to take the bad with a stiff upper lip and learn to look on the bright side. Like when Joel left . . . Mike came in to fill the void in our hearts, or how to deal with even bigger boo-boos, like when the show got canceled. This was the time of a still-burgeoning Internet, an Internet where Napsters ran free, and The Facebook was only for college folk. Even then, we got a small fix of that “Best Brains” brand humor with a website called “Timmy Big Hands.” (R.I.P.) More recently, offshoots of the show have sprung up involving various cast members. Rifftrax takes the same concept as MST3K, but since it’s a bit easier these days to simply download an mp3 than torrent a movie, all you need to do is download the audio track of commentary to play over the film you already own. Or stole. Either way. Since it’s commentary only, they can now lampoon huge Hollywood blockbusters and small Hollywood lacklusters alike. Cinematic Titanic runs a similar route with other members of this once beautiful cast.
The point to all of this is that if you love something, set it free, and if it comes back to you, even by force or in another incarnation . . . it was meant to be.
With all the love I can spare,
Big McLarge Huge
(a.k.a. J.C.)
