FLAPJACKS: So guess what I saw today?
ME: I am fairly sure I don’t want to guess.
FLAPJACKS: Aw, come on.
ME: The new Bond flick?
FLAPJACKS: Nope!
ME: Watchmen six months early?
FLAPJACKS: if that was the case, why would I spend valuable lording-it-over-you time making you guess?
ME: Porn?
FLAPJACKS: Other than porn.
ME: Then I have no idea.
FLAPJACKS: Tomcats!
ME: I thought you said it wasn’t porn.
FLAPJACKS: Google it.
ME: Oh god. I remember this. I think one of my roommates rented it.
FLAPJACKS: Not me, though.
ME: No, no, not you.
FLAPJACKS: But it’s fantastic.
ME: It’s dogshit.
FLAPJACKS: It’s fantastic dogshit.
ME: Now you’re just talking crazy talk.
FLAPJACKS: No, seriously! There’s an entire franchise here, just waiting to be born!
ME: It made less than fifteen million dollars at the box office.
FLAPJACKS: But every person who paid money to see it in theatres is a loyal Tomcatteer, just waiting to spend money.
ME: Wait, can you even nickname them? Doesn’t the community have to self-nickname itself?
FLAPJACKS: I’m leading the charge.
ME: To profit off of them.
FLAPJACKS: I didn’t make the world. I only try to exploit it.
ME: You realize that Tomcats made, like, half the box office that Serenity did.
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
ME: And that Firefly fans are such a most deranged group of loyal freaks they make the Klan look like a bunch of part-time hobbyists.
FLAPJACKS: Irrelevant. Tomcat Power will leave such manias in the dust.
ME: Fandom for a movie that is seven years old and flopped at the box office is going to do this.
FLAPJACKS: Do not underestimate the strange powers of Jake Busey.
ME: Okay. I do not believe your premise in any way and in fact strongly believe that you have gone insane.
FLAPJACKS: Understandable!
ME: However, I am intrigued, despite myself, and wish to hear your plans for the franchise.
FLAPJACKS: I have some ideas here. Take a look.
(Pause.)
ME: This appears to be a hand-drawn poster you did in crayon for Tomcats 2: Tomcats In Space.
FLAPJACKS: Exactly!
ME: You think this will work, do you?
FLAPJACKS: Filmmakers have exhausted bodily-fluid gags as we know them. Hell, we saw Zack and Miri Make a Porno and when one guy gets shit on his face, the audience did not so much as elicit a pained “oooooh” of titillated amusement.
ME: So your plan is –
FLAPJACKS: – to do all those same gags over again, but this time in zero gravity! Audiences will flock to see Jerry O’Connell drinking pee in orbit!
ME: Ew.
FLAPJACKS: See, it is outer space, so the pee will take the form of a sphere.
ME: Unfortunately, I understood that perfectly.
FLAPJACKS: It will be like magic, and reignite the careers of all involved.
ME: Even Shannon Elizabeth?
FLAPJACKS: Outer space semen whore Shannon Elizabeth.
ME: And if Tomcats 2: Tomcats In Space is a success, what then?
FLAPJACKS: Tomcats 3: High Seas Tomcats.
ME: To be followed by Tomcats 4: Tomcats Go To Africa.
FLAPJACKS: Tomcats 5: President Tomcat.
ME: Tomcats 6: Back In Time, Tomcats.
FLAPJACKS: Tomcats 7: Trial Of The Tomcats.
ME: Tomcats 8… I’m out of ideas.
FLAPJACKS: Well, see, that’s where we loop it all around. By that time Shannon Elizabeth will be, like, forty or something.
ME: Uh huh.
FLAPJACKS: So we will get a new cast that we don’t have to pay a lot of money, and make Tomcats: The Early Years.
ME: Genius.
FLAPJACKS: And then we kickstart things all over again with Tomcats: The Next Generation.
ME: Couldn’t you instead reboot the franchise? Find new actors to re-envision the roles of… whoever Gary Busey and Jerry O’Connell were?
FLAPJACKS: See, this is why you need to be on board.
ME: I need to be on board.
FLAPJACKS: Well, who else am I going to get to write these movies?
(There is a lengthy silence.)
FLAPJACKS: Come on, man! It’s your big break! Seize the day!
(More silence.)
FLAPJACKS: You’re going to beat me savagely now, aren’t you.
ME: Yes.
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And thus, a horrific beatdown did occur.
I’m alomst afraid to say this, but Firefly fans may be the most rabid fandom known to man. Which is really saying something.
I almost got assaulted by a female Firefly fan at a midnight screening of Serenity. She kept trying to give me her brown coat manifesto and handmade zines. After I politely declined her materials several times she got hostile with me and started screaming I wasn’t really a fan of the tv show and movie. I didn’t say anything because she was obviously living in another dimension. Instead, I relocated to the other side of the theatre. What worried me most was the number of people (all wearing brown coats) who comforted her and glared at me like I had shunned a movement.
Isn’t that the flick wherein a diseased testicle bounces to and fro within a hospital, before finally landing on a doctor’s lunch? (Said doctor, of course, eats said testicle thinking it a harmless meatball.)
Wasn’t somebody supposed to film a porno on Mir? Where’s that stand in the planning stages?
Wait, is the testicle-eating scene in Tomcats or Serenity?
Tomcats 8: Catz in the Hood.
“Catz In The Hood” is so good I wish we had thought of it.
ILoveJerryOConnell: Yes.
I caught Tomcats once or twice on Comedy Central, on one of those days I was too lazy to bother flipping the channel. Its…not the worst movie ever made.
1. I like to think that your knowing how much Tomcats made at the box office — as well as relative to Serenity — off the top of your head is not merely dramatic license, but an actual fact you have at your command for just such an occasion.
2. You must have seen Zack and Miri at a different theater than I did, because the crowd I saw it with erupted into laughter and applause. It was the funniest thing their eyes had ever beheld. But I suppose it is possible none of them had ever seen a film before.
““Catz In The Hood” is so good I wish we had thought of it.” -MGK
No charge. 😉
I have to agree, Firefly fans are pretty scary. I thought H2G2 had a crazy-obsessive fanbase (especially around the time the movie came out), but it doesn’t even come close to Firefly fans.
Farscape had some pretty devoted fans, too, but even they weren’t as scary. Actually, I bet half the Firefly crazies are the same people who obsessed over Farscape getting canceled. They gravitate to cancelled shows like moths to a flame. A flame that is apparently also a gravity well, otherwise that metaphor doesn’t work.
I’ll miss Flapjacks. He was good people…
MarvinAndroid: While I wasn’y obsessed over Farscapes cancelation, I was raging like you wouldn’t believe. Ending on a cliffhanger? What kind of asshole does that to a fanbase? Oh, right, those fuckers over at SciFi. And the Peacekeeper Wars was not an adequate subsitute for a fifth season. Completely fucked up my birthday.
NCallahan: Sort of. I think they filmed on the zero-G ‘vomit comet’ jet. The film was called The Uranus Experiment, and there are clips online. And yes, for all you perverts out there, it does feature a money shot in zero gravity.
Eurotrash did a feature on it, years back.
Tomcats 9: The Musical?
Transformers has a pretty rabid fanbase, too, compounded by the fact that the franchise has had so many different continuities over the years that there are miniature holy wars brewing over which is the True Transformers and which isn’t. The crazy lady that thelibrarygirl described could just as easily be a Transformers fan.
(Amusingly enough to me, I’m betting that any Transformers fan reading this post knows which specific Transformers fan she could be.)
I realize that the “If I Wrote The Legion” series can be frustrating considering the current state of the comic… but don’t go to the Dark Side MGK! 🙂
I am a fan of both Firefly and Serenity, but I try to keep the spewing of spittle-flecked inanities to a minimum. Perhaps it is because I love Joss Whedon in a purely intellectual way, but I love Nathan Fillion in a way that is more, um, biblical. So, the use of the brown coat would be for bedroom play only, and not as an ideological expression of my identity.
Actually, it doesn’t. They merely faked the “zero gravity” by having the actors do knee-bends while they were having sex (to simulate floating) and shooting at odd angles, and the “zero gravity money shot” was just a regular money shot filmed in the same way.
I know many things I should not.
I signed a nondisclosure agreement, so I can’t give a name, but I DID see WATCHMEN six months early.
SPOILERS AHEAD
I saw an unfinished version of Watchmen at a test screening recently. I had been strenuously avoiding having any hope in regards to this film—I’ve been burned too often. The graphic novel is so much about its own medium, and so long, dense, and interconnected, that I didn’t think it could be filmed at all. I’ve remained determinedly agnostic throughout the hype campaign for this film, a campaign of which I am now a part.
Because seriously, I loved it.
Not unreservedly. For one thing, there were whole scenes in the version I saw where the CGI had been barely sketched in, and wirework fight scenes lose some of their magic when the wires haven’t been deleted yet, so I’m judging an only mostly-finished work, but there were other flaws. I was drumming my fingers with boredom during Rorschach’s interrogation, which I should not have been. It was one area where the necessary truncation of the story to fit a movie really damaged the scene; the sense of emotional tension and fear from the comic was just gone. I laughed out loud during the godawful sex scene between Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, which was painfully reminiscent of the sex scene in 300, and went on for what felt like an hour over the single worst version of “Hallelujah” I’ve ever heard. The guy playing Adrian Veidt did not much impress me, as he seemed to be playing a villain. If you’ve read the comic, you’ll understand why that isn’t really Adrian Veidt. Also, the scene where Dan and Laurie are beset by muggers is much uglier, including Laurie ramming a knife through a guy’s neck and then using him as a shield against bullets. Hopefully some of the more specific problems will have been edited or otherwise fixed by the time the movie is released.
That being said, I loved it. The opening credits sequence, recapping all the backstory and history of the superhero phenomenon, is one of the best bits of visual storytelling you’ll see onscreen this year. (Well, next year, actually.) The action is generally excellent, fun to watch and viscerally enjoyable. The characters are who they were in the comic, with much of the dialogue preserved verbatim. Dr. Manhattan is only weird the first time you see him; surprisingly quickly, he just becomes something you accept. The amount of dick he displays may be edited out, so if they decide to be chicken about it, let me just tell you for the record: Dr. Manhattan was uncircumcised when I saw him. Nite Owl’s ship Archimedes is gorgeous and fun, as are almost all of the costumes and props. Perhaps most importantly, Rorschach’s mask shifts constantly. It’s gorgeous; the material is clearly cloth, the black marks look like nothing but ink soaked into it, but they move and change all the time, and it is TOTALLY cool.
The story’s set in 1985, and it looks like 1985. Rather perfectly, in fact. The uglier aesthetic excesses of the decade are toned down, but people have 1980s hairstyles, drive 1980s cars, and wear 1980s clothes, all of which adds up nicely to remind us of a world where nuclear armageddon was something people simply took for granted as imminent. It’s a delicate and tricky visual feat to pull off, but they do it surprisingly well. Also you get to see Lee Iaccoca shot through the head, which is always fun.
All that’s nice, of course, but if the story’s not preserved, it’s just eye candy. And yeah, not everything is there. There’s no pirate comics, no newsstand-guy at all, except briefly at the end. Some of the backstory is compressed, other parts are overly prominent by virtue of having been left in after their context is gone. But the story is there: the sad, mad leftovers of the superheroes who couldn’t save the world from itself, reviving their old identities for one last adventure in which they heroically fail to stop one of their own, the man bent on saving the world through mass murder. The brutal honesty and honest brutality of the Comedian are there, Rorschach is butt-ugly and profoundly disturbing, as he should be, Dr. Manhattan is beyond good, evil, and humanity, but somehow sympathetic nonetheless. Dan and Laurie are flawed, vulnerable, scared, and deeply screwed-up, but when it comes down to it, they’re superheroes and can’t escape that fact. I’ve known these people since I was a kid, and I recognized every one of them, with the only-partial exception of Ozymandias.
As an adaptation, the analogy that comes to mind is The Lord of the Rings. If you’ve read those books and seen the movies, you’ll know what I mean.
For all the tremendous faithfulness to the comic, though, there is one big change. There is no giant alien monster, no colony of artists to create it, no telepathic pulse to kill millions. Instead, Adrian vaporizes multiple cities around the globe in such a way that it appears to be Dr. Manhattan’s doing. The external threat that humanity unites in fear of is Dr. Manhattan himself.
This makes a certain amount of sense. The alien creature is an element extraneous to the world of the story, and while that’s part of the point, movies are unforgiving of such elements. Without the full detailing of the world the length of the comic made possible, there’s no room to fit in an alien creature without it feeling like a cheat. Dr. Manhattan is an impossibility we’ve accepted, and the ugly and paranoid nature of the world we’ve seen makes it perfectly plausible that they’d assume he was punishing them for almost starting a nuclear war. Speaking just for myself, I say it works.
In summation, I recommend this movie. It does for superhero movies some of what its source material did for superhero comics: it takes a set of tropes and ideas the audience has learned to accept, and uses them to tell a story they’ve never been used to tell before. It’s not perfect by any means, but I’m making space on my DVD shelf for the bigass deluxe edition I already intend to buy.
Eurotrash lied to me!
Eurotrash lied to me about porn!
I feel so… violated.
I’m almost afraid to say this, but Firefly fans may be the most rabid fandom known to man. Which is really saying something.
Nope. Twilight fans are no only *more* rabid but they’re going through puberty at the same time.
There is *nothing* scarier.
Twilight parodies
I’d love to go to Mars but not sure I want to go that bad. Can I at least drink my own recycled pee? I am glad I wanted to grow up to be a dinosaur. If I had wanted to be an astronaut instead, I would be pretty sad right now. 😉