Tremors (1990)

I've been doing some research for the story I might write for Halloween this year. As I was saying last article, I am fascinated as to why Richard Harris, Liberace, and possibly Danny LaRue (though he seems to be a more supporting character in all this) were fighting over owning this very spooky Haunted House back in the late 1960s.

How I was looking at it and what was going through my head as to why when Richard Harris read about Liberace putting a bid on The Tower House in the Evening Standard he had a tremendous shock and ran out the door to acquire the house before Liberace could was because... how I perceived it... Richard Harris didn't want a gaudy American guy like him to own a cool spooky old Haunted House in London.

My dialogue for these characters would've been along the lines as something like this sample here:


Richard: Go back foulest villain to where thou cameth from! For this Haunted House shall solely be mine!

Liberace: A house this unique must be owned by me, Rich, the architecture and murals alone represent a historic value that far exceeds anything a Wild Irishman like you could ever comprehend. This Haunted House deserves to be one of my treasures. It is that wonderful! Now, please Danny, show this ruffian the door!

Danny LaRue: Shall do Lee....

Richard: Unhand me, foul villain!



Something like that, you know? But....

I've unearthed some statements in my research on the matter that, unfortunately, go against my initial thoughts as to why Richard Harris wanted to live in a ghost house. For in this interview with M. Parkinson, Harris specifically states why he wanted to live in a Haunted House in great detail as we shall see:

At the 5:10 mark,

Time-sensitive link: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q02FyXHYlFE&t=5m10s)

Richard Harris relates to Michael Parkinson implicitly the exact reason he wanted to live in a Haunted House... and....

...it was to break up with women.

Yeah.... in a way this is a let down. I mean I had all these ideas for dialogue already and thanks to this piece of evidence.... they all need to be scrapped.

He only wanted to live in a stupid ghost house so he could scare ladies away that he didn't want to proceed in a relationship with. It's a pretty childish reason to want to live in a Haunted House, I really must say, and it takes a lot of the mystique away from The Tower House.

I can still work with this, I think. I mean he still wants to live in it and so does Liberace... and Danny LaRue is still a factor. Right?

All of the noble dialogue and demeanor in the sample I gave to Richard needs to be altered significantly. Now a sample dialogue of my possible upcoming short story would be something more along the lines of this:



Richard: Liberace, you twit! You can't live in that Haunted House...

Liberace: Why not?

Richard: Look Lee, I'll level with ya, I met this smashing bird the other week down in Hammersmith and she was a whopper! We were madly madly in love and everything... but...

Liberace: But....what?

Richard: I've recently grown, yaaaawn, a bit bored of her, hmmm, her, hmmm, let us call them, her eccentricities. Yes, I tire of her eccentricities and need to live in this Haunted House to scare her away.

Liberace: Richard Harris! Well, I NEVER! How dare you!? You want to live in this beautiful house adorned wall-to-wall with priceless antiques and hand-painted murals just to scare women you've grown slightly tired of away? You are a true Irish scoundrel, Richard! You are nothing but a TRAMP!

Richard: Now hold on now, Lee...

Liberace: Danny, show this tramp the door!

Danny LaRue: Shall do Lee...

Richard: No! Listen! I NEED this house!



Hmmm.... you know I actually like it better this way with Harris as the bad guy. So, even with the unearthed evidence as to Harris's feelings sending my mental image map of this nonsense off-course... I think it still can be done by just switching Lee and Rich around as who's the good guy and bad guy.

I remember my story last year had this issue as well and was TOTALLY different than my original idea for it. Anyways...



Tremors (1990)

They were showing that film Tremors (1990) on TV a week or so ago... and man.... what a Classic. You can't just throw the word "classic" around all willy-nilly, you know, and also is it correct to call something from 1990 that? It was over 30 years ago this came out! Yet... it feels like only nothing but just yesterday.

Man, as a kid in 1990, I was scared of quicksand and lava and stuff... which are all floor-related pitfalls, right? I was like seven in 1990 and playing Mario 3 and dying in quicksand and stuff... I'd spend whole days not touching the floor by jumping from chair to couch to chair... all kids did this.

I read they are making a show called "The Floor is Lava" on TV soon... that should work. All kids at one point were scared of the floor. Tremors is quicksand or lava times 100 though. Worm Monsters. In the ground. That can come out. ANYTIME. ANYWHERE!

GASP says I! GASP!

I see Gremlins from that era making a huge cultural comeback the last few years but do young folks even know about Tremors? It's a true masterpiece too.

Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward (forever rest this man's eternal soul) team up to stop these things and its.... AMAZING! People talk about that six degrees this and that about Kevin Bacon like he's all about quantity and he's only super cool because he's been in so many films... no.... that's not why Kevin Bacon is cool.... Kevin Bacon is 100% about QUALITY, guys. He's a screen Icon and screen LEGEND.

Don't get me started on Michael Gross.

Okay, fine, let's get started on Michael Gross.

Michael Gross was the dad on Family Ties in the 1980s and every kid knew him as this likeable down-to-earth Dad's dad sorta dad sort of guy. He was the dad of Alex P. and Mallory. Everyone knew him. Type casting is a real thing in Hollywood where if you've built this fame around yourself off of one role... you can't try something new... or the audience will, for some reason, not want to see you do something new and they will be all weary of you.

As a kid, I was like, "why is the dad from Family Ties in this? What's he gonna do to help get rid of these worm monsters? Is he gonna sternly-but-fairly rebuke them and teach them a valuable life lesson? Pfffft."

Oh was I mistaken, friends. Oh, was I wrong about Michael Gross. Oh, my lands, was I in for a surprise.

Michael Gross? Guys, Michael Gross was a one-man worm-monster fighting-machine! This man couldn't be stopped! Along with Reba McEntire (his lovely wife) these two were like this hot-ass MacGyver couple who could make bombs and stuff and were a great boon to Kevin Bacon's and Fred Ward's resistance against the worm monsters that had invaded their small desert town.

Re-reading the first short story I ever wrote on here, The Swamp, I'd be remiss not to realize that Tremors (1990) was an influence. I mentioned once that Ace's story in Suikoden III was an influence on the writing style of it but the setting of that story, to me, re-reading it, is somewhat influenced by Tremors now that I think about it. Mine was a swamp town though there's was a dusty mountainy town.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you've never seen Tremors, you definitely should.

On The Modern Sports Fan and the Emergence of GM-ism.

Another month gone by. Gotta hit something out. It's already gonna be August again and then September.

I had a lot of free time during the pandemic and wrote some very fun and interesting stories over that time. Two years in a row, now, I've started a story in September that kept going until the end of October.

I had to pause last year. I get into this great rhythm of getting a nice short story running... and I get into it myself too... when they get going I'm kinda along for the ride with it. I'm still figuring out how much time I want to devote to being a writer guy. I like doing this so much, though.

Honestly, I have a good idea, for another spooky historically-inspired ghostella story again to do in September through October... but I don't know if it should become a tradition. It's a good mental exercise for my brain but it's time consuming and my reader base is pretty small.

In September, if I'm in a writing mood, I'll knock another one out, maybe. My idea is based off of one paragraph in this Wikipedia article that I find endlessly fascinating. It's an article about this house in West London that is rife with the screaming souls of orphaned children who's deathly prattles haunt the abode for eternity...

"The actor Richard Harris bought the lease for £75,000 in 1969 after discovering that the American entertainer Liberace had made an offer but had not put down a deposit. Reading of the intended sale in the Evening Standard, Harris bought it the following day, describing his purchase as the biggest gift he had ever given himself. In his autobiography, the entertainer Danny La Rue recalled visiting the house with Liberace, writing, "It was a strange building and had eerie murals painted on the ceiling [...] I sensed evil". Meeting La Rue later, Harris said he had found the house haunted by the ghosts of children from an orphanage that he believed had previously occupied the site and that he had placated them by buying them toys. Harris employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd., to carry out restoration, using Burges's drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum."

(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_House)

There's too much in this paragraph of Historical celebrity haunted house datum not to extrapolate into a ridiculous short story that starts on September 1st and ends on October 31st... even if I'm the only person who would want to read something like this.

Alright, so, in September, I'm probably gonna write some Richard Harris and Liberace Real Estate Fan Fiction!*

So stay tuned for that....I mean, there's so much to work with. I just find thinking about what this would look like very interesting... and wondering how these people felt that compelled them to fight over owning a haunted house full of the wails of long-forgotten orphans. Hmmm, it'll probably morph into something else by September though. Do I really want to write Richard Harris, Danny LaRue, Jimmie Page, and Liberace Real Estate Fan Fiction about children ghosts? I think it will, if anything, be a story BASED on all these people fighting over a haunted ghost house full of orphans.....hmmmm.... I don't know.... it's got too many factors. Too many factors. I can't visually see this being...like... you know.... any good.


*Maybe, uhhhhhhh..... I'm already having second thoughts.


Alright readers, what is our topic this month? It is about the Sports World the wide-wide-wide World of Sports....


The Emergence of "GM-ism".

Oh yes, the emergence of a blight on the Sports World that has been creeping on us for so long, and now has really become the main fashion a fan "enjoys" Sports.

The fan of today's Sporting World... doesn't engage with sports in the same way previous generations did. They are still as fanatic about the game or their team but in a much different way. They all seem to want to be the General Manager of their favorite team. They don't want to play for their favorite team, oh no, they don't want to actually play the game itself, at all, that's not for them. They don't want to watch their favorite team make thrilling plays and cool moves to win against out-of-towners from other nearby towns, oh no, that's not up their alley at all.... that's not gonna keep their attention... they want to run the team! They want to be hired to make phone calls to other GMs in hopes of saving a few bucks for the owner's bottom line! They want to negotiate a 5-year deal with someone or trade a guy away for some draft picks.

This is too much, I find.

When I was a kid... I wanted to be the baseball players. I wanted to play like them, and be strong and fast as they were. I wanted to field grounders that were far to my off-side and throw a dart to the first basemen to get the runner at first. I wanted to be like the players.... they were my role models. I wanted to be fit, and fast, and good, and sportsmanlike and everything.

In a lot of ways, this is not how sports are anymore, and I'm remembering older times. Sports are different now. The players are for the most part millionaires and the GMs are millionaires and the owners are billionaires... and the fans of the game are probably pretty wealthy too.

There's a graphic going around twitter today about how it costs like 300 American buckeronees to take a family of four to one baseball game or something like that, it was. Yup, I guess the fans are pretty wealthy now too, it seems.

I come from an older time, in a way. I think people read this and they see I write pretty well and am good with computers and stuff... and they probably think I'm this skinny geeky guy. In real life, all of my jobs have been physical... some of them very physical. Manual labor. Oh yeah. People in real life are kind of surprised that I'm like 225 pounds of working person in real life.

I'm from an older view of the world in a lot of ways. Where steel workers were big Polish guys named Joe Magarac, and football players were named Refrigerator Perry or Art Donovan, and baseball players were guys like Ted Kluszewski and Henry Aaron, and wrestlers were guys like Ax and Smash... Ax who literally spoke like his meals consisted of eating concrete and cigarette butts.

Call it "Old School", I guess? In Canada, Hockey is so big... and to play hockey is tough... which I never did, by the way, I was not tough enough for that... and to be quite honest... I like my teeth inside of my friggin' mouth instead of outside. Hockey in the 80s/90s when I was growing up was guys like Ken Daneyko, who's job was to play 80 games a year, get maybe oh, I don't know, like 10 points in those 80 games... as well as 250+ penalty minutes, a few hundred body checks into the boards, a few hundred elbows in the gut, and ... let's say.... a couple dozen hockey pucks in the face. It was filled with guys like that.

What I'm trying to say is... the further back you go... the more Sports were the working person's entertainment. I'm part of that mentality. We, as kids, wanted to get stronger so we could be like these guys... not think of ways of trading them so we could save money by using other guys who were possibly as good as these guys.

In a way, the change in mentality is for the best. You know.... you're better off knowing math than being able to take a slapshot to the teeth. No one can really argue that.

But, I think kids should still want to actually play them though. Possibly safer less-violent forms of these sports. Baseball was and still is my number one sport and it is by far the safest sport, I think. Kids should want to play sports to learn team-work and common-goal oriented stuff and to get exercise.

I think a kid who's thinking about how his favorite team should trade their best player so they can free up his salary to acquire some cap-space for their draft picks who are going to be needed to be signed in two years... is wasting their childhood.

Watch your favorite player to learn how they do their stuff... and when you go out to your own little league team or in the backyard... try and do the things they do. That's what sports is all about. Getting good at doing things.

Adults are more the problem of creeping GM-ism on the Sports World, though, by far. The internet is full of arm-chair GMs explaining to the twitter-verse how to fix such fantastically interesting dilemmas ... such as... how their team should've released John Valentin back in 1998 so they could've signed Arquimedez Pozo to a long-term deal.

Man, I was on a family vacation in Boston, as a young teenager in 1998.... and the level of vitriol on mainstream radio I heard there... still is with me. It's not worse than any other town... but... I think it was just the accents of that area that made it memorable to me. An arm chair GM was on the radio, he had called in to some radio station... and wanted John Valentin off the Red Sox in any way possible. It was totally insane. Colorful very colorful.... uh.... pure hatred over the air ways for this player. Can hatred be described as colorful? It felt vibrant this insane man's hatred of John Valentin. John hit like .247 with a decent .782 OPS at third base that year... but apparently deserved jail time and banishment from the region.

It is the accent though that makes that one stick out to my memories. Just this accent from Boston I wasn't familiar with at-the-time berated at-length John Valentin. It's in every town though, Montreal Canadiens fans might actually be the most insane vitriol-infused arm-chair GMs. Most often related to the coach of the team, though. Not as often the players. I have seen people paint their entire homes in graffiti if they want the coach of the Canadiens fired. You pass by a suburban home that has "FIRE THIS COACH!" written on the garage door.

One arm chair Canadiens GM that sticks out in my memory was a guy on the radio who called in angry about the performance of Mark Lamb, who according to the reference sites, played one year with the Canadiens in like '94.... and just like the Valentin guy... with this caller... the whole universe would have been set back into order and we'd solve global problems and get a plentiful wheat harvest... only if the Montreal Canadiens would just release Mark Lamb. What did Mark Lamb ever do to anybody? This guy played like 3 minutes a game on the fourth line. That's the answer to not winning a cup that year? Firing one guy filling in for injured guys? Come on.

They all wanna run the team. All of these guys. All of these bums.

You know where it gets even weirder though? Is wrestling fans who want to be the GM... of Wrestling. This is where it gets.... almost bizarre. Wrestling is a performance more than a sport.... and there's people who want to be the General Manager of a stage show.

I got back into the Wrestling during the pandemic because I needed a few more things to follow... I didn't follow it for 15+ years or so.... and I wrote about AEW a few times.... and I like to follow it and comment on it as mostly what a fan of it should do... and that's to watch it like it's a movie or a TV show... and not break the fourth wall down.

This is not how the majority of wrestling fans watch Wrestling. They watch it like arm chair General Managers like Sports fans do.... and you read things on the internet about what their team should do, in this case their favorite team is, of course, Wrestling... like the whole World of it... and its fragments of insanity that you don't see with other forms of arm chair general manager-ism.

They'll watch a wrestling show and say things like, "They shouldn't have let that feud end like that! They should have did a run-in to have a run-off so the Champ could've had a cell-match with the top contender at the next Pay Per View!"
 
Or something like, "Why would they put her in a match with her!? She can't sell the underhook reversed pile buster with the same ease and finesse as that other lady wrestler can! They really gave this booker the Booker of The Year award? More like the Worst Booker of the Year!"

...let's not forget to work in ALL of the insider terms, for this is the next GM of Wrestling writing now, so we gotta put in ALL of them... and they cook up things like..."They worked his heat off like THAT? He's too green for that... they should have just gave him a kayfabe injury and let his heat simmer for a few more weeks. What a bad way for them to work off his heat!"

These guys watch the most absurd, surreal, fantastically over-the-top smorgasbord of ludicrousness that is Wrestling... and want to be the guy in the back thinking about how they could make a better "house" at the Nassau Coliseum if they only kept the Brooklyn Brawler's feud going with Koko B. Ware. Because they think that Brawler has more heat up there and could sell, maybe, 50 more tickets.

I think kids still watch wrestling for the pageantry and the excitement though. They want to do back flips and suplexes and put their hands in their pockets and cool stuff like that. This is how you're supposed to watch it. You're supposed to see a guy do a super-plex through a table and go "Oh Cool!" when you see that.

The adult wrestling fans are the FULL most insane fans in the world maybe, today. Though other bastions of geek culture could effectively make a claim to that. How esoteric they can get over it is quite fascinating. How totally out-of-touch with anything the Wrestling fan can get. Oh and when they don't like someone? Oh....my goodness. When they don't like someone. It's a big deal. Move over John Valentin! Move over Mark Lamb!

John Valentin might have made a fan in Boston feel like the Red Sox have their head-in-the-sand with him at third base. Mark Lamb might've made a fanatic in Montreal lose his mind over him getting 3 minutes of ice time on the fourth line... but... if a Wrestling fan doesn't like a Wrestler? Well....

...They are killing the entire business of Pro Wrestling.

Oh yes, if a guy misses a top-rope drop kick by 2 inches instead of 1 inch? He has, in their mind, destroyed the time-old business of Professional Wrestling in a split second and it will never-ever be a viable business model again at any point of the future.

If someone makes a tiny error in the stage show? That's it... the entire business will die. It will never be able to come back and be like how good it was back when.... back when... you know... when wrestling was "Good."

General Managing a Wrestling show, or more-so backseat General Managing a Wrestling show is sort of like someone doing that to a Broadway play. I never read like Broadway reviews... I bet there are reviewers who write about Broadway plays like that too. People probably write things in that form of writing like... "Why did they do the Ethel Merman medley AFTER the Solo!? The Ethel Merman medley should always be BEFORE the SOLO!!!"

...and I guess they want the stage manager fired over the Ethel Merman medley coming after the main Solo...I dunno... we're going on too long here, my friends. It's time to stop writing when you get to the Ethel Merman joke of an article is what I've always believed.

So, yeah, just enjoy Sports and stuff. Play them, too! It's healthy to get involved and play sports and get exercise. Don't take this stuff too seriously, okay?

K? Bye.

Oh and ... there's a 60-75% chance I will write a Halloween story this year.

Final Fantasy VII

(Note: Final Fantasy VII: Remake is over two years old now but there's spoilers for this game)


Last article was about the SNES era and my favorite titles. It seems my top 4 are all RPGs. I really began getting into this genre in 1994 with Earthbound.

Hm, so my favorite Super Nintendo Games, note the italics there, were all RPGs. It's important to iterate the italics here as after 1996 or so that system was finished.... so to say these are my top four favorite video games of ALL TIME is incorrect. The last article was about my favorite SNES games.

After that system I got a Playstation, which again, similar to the last article where I proudly recalled how I chose SNES over Genesis or Turbo Grafx16, was the correct choice to go with. There was N64 and some others that came out too but I wanted the Playstation for .... Final Fantasy VII !

I remember seeing articles on the internet about the sequel to Final Fantasy VI back in like 1996... when the internet, by the way, was much different than it is now. It was cheesy and only really for geeks and Insane people (capital I insane people).

Video game stuff on the net back then was not like now. Now, video game news is like a billion dollar business but in like 1996? I'm not even sure if GameFAQs even existed yet. It was just personal webpages on Geocities and weird forums who would talk about video games.

Only geeks like me were on the internet trying to figure out all the secrets of obscure RPGs and trying to get translated patches of like FF5J.SFC and stuff. I remember video game nerdery was my first taste of wild internet fake news and stuff. People would just say fake info about things and it would have people wigging out over it. I remember there was a big debate on the internet in 1996 about the veracity of "Gogo is Golbez!"... after some rube just said that for no reason. People were combing the game front to back to find a made-up scene someone described of Gogo admitting he was Golbez in disguise.

Don't get me started on Shadow's Seventh Dream. Oh my goodness. Someone said they got it and it made Shadow stay alive in the ending screen of FFVI... Man.... I slept at thousands of inns over-and-over trying to get Shadow's Seventh Dream. It was all fake news though.... just a dumb wild internet lie. That might even be why I from a young age knew how blatantly untrsutworthy the internet was. It was rife with fake video game information. Wild nonsense stated by weirdos and crazy people... for no reason or gain.

Anyway, yeah, I saw an article about the sequel to FFVI and it had a grainy 1996 photo of Locke, Celes, and Shadow in 3D! It said the sequel for FFVI is coming to Playstation next year! That sold me. N64? I could care less... I didn't want an N64 at all.

I wanted FF7 (which at that point I thought had Shadow in it)... oh and Metal Gear too. I saw a video about Metal Gear, a grainy AVI video in 1996 about Metal Gear... and knew I needed a Playstation when it came out.

Other people were wanting to play the new Mario things. Mario 64 or whatever. I've never actually played Mario 64. I made the switch around 1996 to Playstation after being a Nintendo man for two console generations (NES and SNES).... and never looked back.

I was really into RPG games since about 1994 but it wasn't until Final Fantasy VII (the original in 1997) exploded the popularity of the genre in the Western World that others really were. RPGs were not popular in the West prior to Final Fantasy VII. Prior to that Japan was wigging out not understanding why no one was super into Dragon Quest over here because there it was insanely popular.

Dragon Quest (Enix) was destroying Squaresoft's Final Fantasy games in sales in Japan by huge margins... until Final Fantasy VII. I mean, before the seventh installments of each game in these franchises Dragon Quest was number one in the RPG world. It was a national landmark in Japan. Kids got days off from school when the next Dragon Quest game came out. Then when they hit their respected Sevens... Final Fantasy blasted into the lead. Just compare Dragon Quest VII to Final Fantasy VII it's like.... you can't.

Final Fantasy VII? It killed Dragon Quest. It blew it out of the water. Traditionalists in Japan were slow to accept that Final Fantasy had leaped over Dragon Quest in their genre duel... but that wasn't the case in America... the West had no great love for Dragon Quest... it wouldn't surprise me if Dragon Quest VII made 100% of its sales in Japan and 0% in America.

Final Fantasy VII.... took the world by storm. The video game world was never the same again. It blew everyone away. It was the first block buster video game, the first mind-blowing master piece the video game world had ever seen.

Now over twenty years later they've remade it... and like many trusted and beloved classics... remaking them is not easy. I'm not exaggerating that this game changed the video game industry forever in 1997. It really did. It's a daunting task to take this game and re-do it.

I recently got around to playing the Final Fanasy VII Remake... and I really liked it. Man, it's good. Let's write about it!

I'm gonna think of some sections... but I mainly just want to write about one thing about this game but if it's short or I still want to write more I'll think of some other stuff.

 

Final Boss: Nostalgia

Just like re-making Ghostbusters or Star Wars... re-making something considered as so classic and ground breaking as this game is really playing with fire. If you make it into an obvious cash grab? You make a lot of money but upset a lot of fans... and man like Star Wars heads or other geeks... video game people are a bizarre little bunch of folks. They take this stuff VERY seriously.

If you keep it exactly as the original and change nothing but the graphics? Why not just go play the old one again and not buy a graphicsed-up version? Also, maybe things from the old one didn't age well. I remember writing on social media when I heard they are remaking FFVII... wondering how are they gonna do Wall Market in full realism graphics? I mean, I remember Cloud accidentally walking into the wrong room and then taking a bath with over a dozen surfer dudes..... as well as many other wild things that happen in Wall Market.

In cartoony 1997 graphics it was funny. All the things in Wall Market were silly and goofy.... but in full realism graphics? Are they going to do these scenes? I really wondered what they would look like. After playing it, I gotta say I really liked the Wall Market scenes. They were cool... but... also at times... odd. Cloud dropping the cool mercenary act to do some pop dancing is full-on bizarre to see. 

Then the biggest problem with remaking a classic... the fans loved it for a reason, you know. Things that still have fans twenty years later have them for a reason. It is still remembered and regarded so highly because so many people loved it... you're playing with fire mostly because you can ruin a good thing. You can bring it back, a thing people loved, and make them angry that its not what they remembered.

As an amateur writer, I really thought it was interesting how they dealt with Nostalgia in this game in which...

....they made it the Final Boss!

They knew they were playing with fire and they brought it straight into the narrative itself! Not only that but it's the end boss of the game! That's very interesting to me.

I think people might've been confused by the Nostalgia Wraiths as I called them and new players must've thought it was just some whacky sci-fi gimmick... but those Fate Ghosts or whatever they were called were literally a symbolic force that represented fan nostalgia.

If you played the game in 1997 and loved it enough to play it again in 2020.... they know you know how the story goes. They know you know what happens in the narrative they are telling. That makes the story very difficult to write for a writer.

I was writing about confabulating writer/reader/concept last article, and I gotta say, I really liked how they worked with the old fans of this game's memories, emotions, pacing, and sense of tradition. It was a fun confabulation, I found.

You see, Cloud isn't having post traumatic stress flashbacks.... we are! We're remembering scenes from the past! We played this before!

Those Nostalgia Wraiths? They start ghosting around the narrative when WE knew something big was coming in the narrative!

It's a very interesting writing tool, I find. The game calls them Fate Harbingers or Destiny Harbingers or something... the plaster of the old narrative floating around the new narrative to keep it in place in a cast... and at the end of the game they gather at the center of Midgar to form a Tower of Nostalgia.... to forever keep the narrative of Final Fantasy VII in place! They are Harbingers of never-changing never-ending tradition!

That'll keep the old fans happy. Those spooky ghosts will keep the game they loved feeling like they remember it.. never changing... always pristine and clean in their wistful childhood memories...

But...

...what if the end of the original story was sad and possibly suggested that humans are a disease on our planet? Wouldn't that be the BAD ending? We have pleasant memories for the bad ending?

Did you ever think... maybe we didn't get the GOOD ending of Final Fantasy VII because the game was rushed or something? Maybe.... she could've came back?

Speaking of things like Gogo is Golbez and Shadow's Seventh Dream... the internet in 1997 was abound with fake news about reviving Aeris (she was not Aerith back then). Wild ridiculous rumors were everywhere on how you could over-level the Revive Materia and get her back... you could find the White Materia somewhere... you could do this... and that... and in the Japanese version there's multiple endings...blah bleh blah.... none of it was true. It was just internet nonsense.

Why was there so much internet nonsense about reviving her? Because it made sense and the people wanted it! The people wanted her to able to come back!

There's a bad ending in Chrono Trigger where Lavos destroys everything and then there's good ending(s) where we fly our time machine into him and destroy that no good embodiment of Evolution known as Lavos. There always seemed to be "Bad Endings" and "Good Endings" in old school RPGs.

There's a bad ending in Breath of Fire II where you sacrifice your life to turn into a dragon to sit over the mountain where Evil God lives... and then there's the good one where your dad flies your town into a mountain to bury that no-good evil God forever!

There was ALWAYS good endings that you had to work for in RPGs. Maybe this story, this frozen in time narrative of Final Fantasy VII, wasn't as good as we remembered it being... our dirty ol' Nostalgia is misplaced.... maybe this story deserves a GOOD ending like we all know it does!

I see you up there in that tower... a flock of spooky swirling ghosts! You dirty Nostalgia Ghosts you! Thinking all these Final Fantasy VII fans are just gonna sit back and mark out to the same old story again and again and again! You think we're gonna sit back and dwell on rosy memories of our youths!? You think we want to re-play Final Fantasy VII to rejoice in pleasant memories of the past!?

I don't think so, pal!

When Chrono, Marle, and Lucca went to 2300 AD and learned that a dirty alien from outer space was gonna burrow into the Earth and evolve at an incredible rate to one day rain endless fire upon us and kill all of humankind... did they just say "Okay. Cool"?

No!

They took it upon themselves to alter the course of the future by embarking on an incredible journey through time and space!

How did the original Final Fantasy VII end? Sephiroth murdered the one person, Aeris, who could save the planet ... then he rained endless fire and meteors on us, the lifestream went into high gear and stopped meteor from destroying the planet but it is highly suggested that all of human kind perished when meteor and the life stream collided... fast forward like a hundred years and who's left? Just that fire-dog and his kids. That's it.

I'm sorry but the 1997 ending was the BAD ending. We gotta work harder and get the good ending!

If the plaster that is holding this narrative in a permanent cast of sorrow, hardship, and a bad ending manifests itself as a gigantic evil purple monster who will stop at nothing to destroy all that oppose it with his many different-colored ghost minions? Well guess what... we still deserve the good ending. You can't stop this. You can't stop this train that we're on!

It wouldn't be the first time we had to work hard to get the good ending!

Did anything stop me from getting the Good Ending in Suikoden? I had to get all 108 Stars of Destiny to revive Gremio! Some of them hide in secret passages in caves and stuff in the middle of nowhere with no hint on where they are ... and there wasn't even internet guides back then to tell me where they all were! There wasn't..... but... I still revived Gremio!

Did anything stop me from getting the Good Ending in Breath of Fire II? I could've let my mother, the nice Dragon sleeping on the mountain that seals the evil Death Evans from our world stay up there a little longer and keep the world safe from evil but she's old and she's tired! She can't do it forever! She's done all she can! I could've done it... I could've sacrificed one of my friends to get the Final Dragon transformation and destroyed Death Evans... but I can't sacrifice one of my close friends, who I journeyed all over this land with, just to get the Final Dragon transformation (Affini) to destroy that no-good God Death Evans! I love my friends! I gotta get the GOOD ending! It's the Good ending or nothing with me! I'm gonna save that old man in that boss fight with the robot eye-balls.... because.... it turns out that guy is my dad and they got him strapped to some crazy eye ball machine just to power their dirty phony little church town with some evil life-sucking gadget! Sorry, but my dad's gonna power MY town NOT yours and he's gonna fly it right onto that mountain and seal that evil for good .... right after I destroy Death Evans! Even if I have to level up on that Giant Monster Island ALL DAY! I'm taking down that imposter phony God and burying him under my town! FOREVER!

I don't care how much work I have to put into it to get the Good endings! I'll get them!

I will get them.

Final Fantasy VII? I don't care if the Bad Ending from 1997 literally manifests itself in the game while I am playing it to keep the Bad Ending on-course and locked in an unalterable plaster cast! Won't stop me. The waves of Nostalgia for the past swirling around a tower of greed... forming an embodiment of sweet memories for the Bad Ending... I admit you are powerful... but...

We deserved the good ending to Final Fantasy VII over twenty years ago!

I'm sorry, Final Fantasy VII, but all of humanity doesn't perish when I play video games. I save the world when I play video games. All the time! Some mopey overly-emotional jabroni summoning a meteor to earth isn't how this one is supposed to end.

All you very emotional Sephiroth marks out there? Moping around like brats happy that he destroyed humanity like some pale nihilistic pseudo-sadistic weirdo!? Guess what? Your time in the sun is finally over. You're behind the eight ball now, fools! He won't succeed this time! I can feel it! I can feel it in my bones!

I can punish Destiny! I shall be punishing Fate! I will alter the future....

...and whenever the next episode of Final Fantasy VII: Remake comes out....

....I will GET THE GOOD ENDING!


 



Conclusion

Final Fantasy VII is a video game's video game.

...and what I mean when I say that is....

Let's say a video game could come to life and manifest itself as a video game yet in a corporeal form and that video game wanted to play a video game...

Now, obviously, being a video game... it would have high expectations on what it played... it being a video game themselves and all.

If this impossible scenario of a video game wanting to play a video game ever existed.... said video game would choose, of its own free will, to play a game like Final Fantasy VII: Remake.

It is, in that sense, a Video Game's Video Game.

 

My Fourth Favorite Super Nintendo Game....

People just seem to ask me this all the time. I mean, my three favorite Super Nintendo games are an iron-clad held and unchangeable opinion (we'll briefly speak of them), but my FOURTH favorite SNES title? Now that's a tough one!

There were just soooo many good SNES games, I mean, like... it was such a good system. Possibly the greatest of all time. I still, to this very day, feel bad for the kids I knew back then who got a Sega Genesis instead of the Super Nintendo (most kids had one-or-the-other and not both)... and these innocent-yet-misguided Sega kids would really try and pretend, or more accurately blatantly lie-to-themselves, that the Genesis was better than the SNES...

...Those kids must've had it tough. To live a lie like that for the entirety of one's childhood... these kids walking around school really saying things like "Sonic is the best! It's the best game! It's so much better than Mario World!" ... I mean... I really must say... the sheer level of fantasy that these kids were living in just to pretend they got the best Christmas present of their lives that year ... almost is unfathomable to me. It truly is.

Even they knew, deep down, that they were lying to themselves each and every time they uttered absurdities such as that. A kid would be sitting around the school yard, or gym class, or whatever... and would really say nonsense such as... "Echo the Dolphin? It's so cool. It's so much better than anything on the SNES..." ... and normal kids would be dumbstuck by it... and you didn't get annoyed with the Sega kid or try and counter their ludicrous claims ... you'd just sort of feel slightly bad for them. They were Sega kids, not SNES kids... they were like mole people... just living underground in this bizarre fantasy world they were forced to create for themselves just because they asked their parents for a Genesis instead of something normal.

Don't get me started on TurboGrafx-16 kids. There were those too... and you had to feel very bad for them. Imagine you get one system, one 16 bit system... and you asked for that friggin' thing!? Poor souls. Those poor tortured souls. Those children must have lamented their decision for DECADES!

Those poor poor poor young souls. Forever tormented by the lament of their botched Christmas list. I think about them every now and then... and try to understand their pain and their lament.

Those poor tortured souls of Genesis kids, and even worse, those tortured screaming child souls of TurboGrafx-16 kids... I pray for thee. I offer up prayer on high for your sad and tortured souls, my friends. I pray for them. I hope you found solace and healing in your adult lives.

Oh my, like, going to your friend's house, back-then, and learning they were a Genesis kid? It was like something out of the Twilight Zone is what it was. You think, damn, I played ball-hockey and baseball with this kid for many weeks and they never said anything weird like "I like Sonic!" or "Echo is cool!" or anything that made me suspect they were a Genesis kid ... and now... I'm in this kid's basement... looking at their TV and right there... RIGHT friggin' THERE... is a Sega Genesis? You didn't even tell me..... and.... why? Why didn't you tell me you were a Genesis kid? How could you go through your life, at school, at the baseball diamond, n' shooting hockey balls into nets ... for weeks upon weeks... and hide this from the other kids? How did you hide it? You even laughed and nodded when we talked, at great-length mind you, about Super Mario World and Mario Kart... oh my word.... just seeing that Genesis in a kid's house was like being whisked out of reality and into a bizarro-land so ... uhhh.... bizarre .... that you really had to take a breath and be like... "Okay, this is a Sega kid... okay... it's okay... they're just like the other kids except they have a Sega instead of an SNES... it's Okay.... just breathe."

Just breathe....oooooooof. Okay. Yeah, they're cool kids its just they made one great blunder. One fantastic mistake. It could've happened to anyone. I could've asked for a Genesis instead of an SNES too...

....No. I can't tell a lie. Let's be real here. For I would have never done something as unwaveringly insane as that. I would have NEVER in my wildest nightmares have asked for a Genesis instead of an SNES. Sorry but maybe I lack much diction in many aspects of life, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not wicked-smart but I'm not insane. I'm not a genuine crazy person.

I hope the torment of their screamingly incorrect childhood mistakes have healed. I do not scorn or pity the Genesis children... I simply pray for them... and hope that the inner-scars left by their mistakes of their forlorn pasts have since healed and they became functioning members of our modern society.

Anyways,

Me? Well, I had a great and cool childhood, you see. Why is that, you so humbly ask? Well, it is because I got a Super Nintendo as a kid. Oh. Yeah. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System... the S, N, E..... S.

....and my three favorite SNES games are:

Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI (known to us as III back then). To me, those are "The Big Three" as I like to call them. If in some month of our 12-month long year... I feel a little under the ol' weather as the old folks say... I might just hit The Big Three. Even though I've played these games many many times before ... I might just have to hit the three. They are, to me, the BEST Super Nintendo games of all time and most people who know me know that I consider them as such.

Yet...

What is my FOURTH favorite Super Nintendo game? Now, that....yes, THAT, question is a whole other matter. That is tough. I really actually don't know the answer to that. I could be on Jeopardy! or on the witness stand at a trial ... and if the question was....

"Kind sir, we are fully aware of what are your three most favorite Super NES games ... yet... the public-at-large wonders what your fourth favorite one is?"

To be frank with you gentle readers... I would be stricken with doubt and would likely be driven to a total and complete Loss of My Words!

My fourth favorite? I haven't even really ever thought about it. I mean, The Big Three, are like trusted friends and I would never hesitate to answer if a gentle soul was to ponder of me what were my three favorite Super Nintendo games...

...but...

My fourth? It's.... just something I've never explored inside of my own self. I've never contemplated, even for one second, what the fourth greatest game was. There's just so many.... like Mario World, and Mario Kart... and Mario All-Stars... and Mario RPG!

I'm growing confused. It's overwhelming. My thoughts are fragmented and... I have to say my mind is akin to a jigsaw puzzle whence I think of all the great SNES games.

You might as well ask me how many precious gemstones exist in the field of minerology and ask me to pick the most beautifullest gemstone of them all. It's ... almost impossible is what it is. What of all the finest pieces of art in all the museums of our long-and-storied society... could one just sit down and really pick the fourth best?

I think not.

Let's re-iterate and make clear that there is no real denying that Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VI are the greatest SNES games. Now, if you ask me to put them in order from greatest to less-greatest... we could be here ... all day. I mean if you asked me this one hundred times on one hundred different days ... the answer would likely always be different than the last. I'd truly have to go through these masterpieces with a finely-toothed comb, gentle friend.

Monday I might say: 1. Final Fantasy VI, 2. Chrono Trigger, 3. Earthbound..

Who am I kidding? That can't be right.

Tuesday I might answer: 1. Earthbound, 2. Chrono Trigger, and 3. Final Fantasy VI....

Yet, no, that can't be right. Surely it goes differently the order.

Wednesday? Why...I might go on at incredible length on how Chrono Trigger is the greatest video game ever created by modern humankind.

Thursday? I might find a reason why Earthbound is even more greater than Chrono Trigger. Friday... I might overhaul the entire order and start again.

It's just not something I can put into any sort of order. Which is a better game is not something easily filed away stamped, sealed, and then delivered. They are, all three, masterpieces in their own very special ways. Incredibly special ways.

So let's just leave it at that, shall we?


My Fourth Favorite Super Nintendo Game

Okay, let's get real here, friends. I can't go through life any longer not knowing what my fourth favorite SNES title is. It is eating away at me like a small fish eats away at the even smaller fish in the mouth of a much-much-much larger fish.

It pains me.... deeply.... not to know this about my own self.

Every time I walk down the gentle road and listen to the wind sweep through the trees, it is almost as if the wind is whispering to my ear...

...."Whhhhhat? Whhhhhhhhhat is your fourth favorite SNES game?"

Then, at my abode, whence I face the mirror.... I see a piece of My Own Self... Missing. I know I am incomplete. I must sit down, right here, and right now.... and look deep within the catacombs of my own shadowy interior... and figure this inner-engima out... once and forever.

Alright, so please bear with me. Or bare with me? Like.... we are chipping away the layers of ourselves as we journey down this mental road... I'd say we at some point will chip away so many layers that all that is left is bare... so.... yeah. Don't bear with me.... bare with me.

I shall now go into a deep meditation. I can't divulge which youtube playlists I open up while I do this. This is my secret process, unknownst to others.

Okay.... I am going into Meditation. Okay? Okay.

Alright. Okay. Alright. Yes. Going to figure this all out. Trust me. I will. Don't worry......

Yes. Okay, yes. Alright, so, after much thinking, focusing on my feelings, and after much deliberation. I have figured it out....

....the fourth greatest Super Nintendo Game is:

Breath of Fire 2!

It is. It has to be. This game is soooooo goooooood.

I've gone through too much mental gymnastics to arrive at this searing and life-changing conclusion. I feel I should just end this article right here.


Conclusion

My fourth favorite Super Nintendo game is Breath of Fire 2.



Edit (May 13th, 2022):

I wait a day or two to check for errors, because, if you do it right after, the text is too much still in your "mind's-eye" to catch the errors. You'll just over-run your version of it, that's still fresh, while proof-reading.

I like how one paragraph here turned out. Re-reading it, it is very Shepherdian. Specifically when he would use George Antheil's "Ballet Mecanique" as sound for the background layer to his paragraph.

I like how that one "Ballet Mecanique" paragraph turned out. It should, if done right, feel, as the reader-writer-and-concept are confabulating. I think I got it right.

(Ballet Mecanique, Antheil, G., See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi53TfeqgWM)

....though also, I'd also even refer to it as a Gottfriedian paragraph to some extent... reading it a third time. Both of them were influences on my writing so it would make sense.

Gilbert Gottfried

This year has seen many of our favorite comedians pass away. Norm, Bob, Louie, and now Gilbert.

The format of the last "Steve Martin" article from last month is still in my mind for writing. I think I'll think of some of the best Gilbert moments, today.

I have been a big fan of his for so long. I saw him preform live at Just For Laughs festival once and the audience gave him a standing ovation and he was bowing... it is a memory in my mind that is very crystal clear for me.

I remember writing when Norm MacDonald passed away that I had searched my blog and noticed I mentioned Norm in something like fifteen or twenty articles on here. I bet if I search this blog for how many times I've mentioned Gilbert it would be in that range as well.

He's mentioned on here in about seven or eight articles over the years. One article was praising his podcast which I listened to every week. I have enamel pins and an official membership card that I sent away for.

The Amazing Colossal Podcast with co-host Frank Santopadre was dubbed by them as sort of being a "before they go" interview with beloved celebrities of the past. It's interesting because a lot of celebrities of that nature aren't going to a talk show to promote anything... because they don't have anything to promote any more... so they will just talk about their life in show business in a very honest and fun way. There was one where Sonny Fox told war stories and it was just so interesting. It really is a historical landmark this podcast... it has so much information about show business from so many beloved personalities from so many different eras.

There are certain re-occurring stories Gilbert would tell all the celebrities guests that's become a long-running inside joke. As soon as he'd even mention Cesar Romero or Joe E. Ross... you'd start to laugh because you knew what was coming next.... thinking to yourself... "Oh no! Is he really gonna tell this crazy orange wedge thing to Adam West!?"

Gilbert was in show business for almost fifty years, I think. He always claimed he first preformed standup at fifteen years old in 1970. There's so much stuff to consider to even begin listing Gilbert Gottfried moments.

I mean, most people really know him from the cartoons. He had an "iconic" voice that is truly unique and would pop up in gigantically popular cartoons like Disney movies and things of that nature... but to me... I really know him as a trouble maker who like many truly funny people was like a walking nuclear bomb just waiting to go off ... and you just never really knew what he was going to do or where he was going to go.

He had a "green light" in the golden years of the Howard Stern show to walk into the studio and hang out whenever he wanted. He almost feels like a cast member of Golden Era Stern. He was so funny ... one time they called Jerry Seinfeld's answering machine and left an hour-long message with Gilbert pretending to be Jerry's son Jerry Seinfeld Jr. and doing an impression of Seinfeld the entire time. Gilbert's Seinfeld impression is amazing!

Speaking of "cast member" he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live... and whenever he spoke about this in his book or on his show... he was sure to make it clear that he didn't enjoy being a cast member on SNL.

He was in many movies. My memorable ones of his were the Beverly Hills Cop movie where he's not even in it very long but manages to be one of the most memorable scenes of the film. He was in the Problem Child films which are cult classics to many people (mostly the first one). He would often bring up on his podcast some of his lesser works that he's tongue-in-cheekingly "proud" of such as some of the later Rodney Dangerfield films, the Bobcat vehicle "Hot to Trot", and of course the forgotten Matthew Modine classic... Funky Monkey.

People know him for the Aristocrats thing, also dubbed the "Too Soon" fiasco... but I was already familiar with the Walking Nuclear Comedy Bomb (you didn't know when will just go off) this man was before that so it didn't surprise me as much as it did others. The "Tsunami Fiasco" was much more memorable for me because he just one day woke up and decided to write some jokes on Twitter and it just about almost ruined his entire life.

When he talks about that fiasco in his book or in his podcast he describes it as he would wake up every day and eat corn flakes... and one morning he looked at the corn flakes after the fiasco broke out... and just realized he wasn't famous anymore in a blink of an eye. It was all taken away in an instant. Fame is very fleeting. It is a very fleeting thing, fame is.

He was the first celebrity that ever interacted with a post of mine on social media... and this was like back in like 2011 when you never really thought celebrities would even use social media. Back then, I thought, celebrities lived in some far-off plane of existence outside of reality in some golden palace somewhere... now a days... we have come to accept that celebrities are obsessed with social media and how they are perceived in the public... but back then like a decade ago... it was still believed by common folk that celebrities were larger-than-life and not part of real life. I remember writing encouraging words on his page during his Tsunami fiasco and he "liked" it. It was so cool.

I saw his documentary and what I remember most from it was that he was sort of a Nomad... like a comedy nomad. He'd go around North America, do some clubs, stay in hotels, and then amass this vast collection of soaps and shampoos from hotels n' motels across this great land. I think people thought he did this because he was cheap and wanted free stuff... but... to me... it was a collection.... he went on so many journeys and had mementos from all of his travels and it is actually a pretty cool collection.

Traveling all over doing stand up for fifty years. To say this guy honed his act is an understatement ... he started at 15 and did it for 50 years! He was a stand up comedy Master.

I still remember spitting coffee on my keyboard while listening to him and Mario Cantone do When Harry met Sally as Herve Villechaize and Carol Channing. Now, if I re-listen to it, my mind is ready for it... but the first time I heard it... I wasn't... and I spit coffee all over my keyboard. It was just a barrage that I could not handle! It was so friggin' funny.

Another thing was that he would never try and be hip or placate to fans. Now a days an agent will tell their 50+ aged clients what they have to talk about to win over a certain demographic... but he didn't care about stuff like that at all....he did what he wanted to do and what he thought was funny .... like impressions of Old Groucho on The Dick Cavett Show .... talking about how Nunnally Johnson liked to smoke cigars and how, back then, people liked to put cream in their coffee.

He was a completely unique individual in our society that cannot be replaced.

I bet you anything, he's in Comedy Heaven now, and the God of Comedy is welcoming him into this spectacular comedy club with a nice hotel right next to it (so he doesn't have to pay for a cab from the club to the hotel) that has a beautiful array of free soaps and free shampoos in little tiny free bottles and the God of Comedy wonders if he has any questions....

....and he says....

"Yeah, just one........

..............Ben Gazzara is such a great actor.... why didn't he ever get a TV series?"

Goodbye, Legend.

Steve Martin!

I watched Steve Martin's new show the other week or so ago and I just want to say that I like Steve Martin. He's so talented.

He's been doing it for over fifty years now which is amazing. So this article, albeit probably a short one because it's almost the end of the month and I haven't written in here yet so I gotta write something, will be a look back at 50 Years of Steve and I will select my favorite Steve memory.

Fifty Years of Steve

Before we start listing memories I have of seeing Steve Martin doing things in movies or TV and selecting my favorite one... we must first state a personal memory of mine which involves my maternal grandma.

In the late nineteen eighties, she said once, that she saw a film with Martin Stevens in it... and to this day... I cannot watch anything with Steve Martin in it and not at some point remember this.

Anytime I watch something with Steve in it, my grandma's eastern European voice will pop in my head at some point and say "Theese eez da won with MARTON STEEEVONS!"

Every. Single. Time.

Anyways, that's neither here nor there and only exists in my memories so my grandma's comments can't end up winning this article in the end so let's think of some more Martin Memories we all share.

Now, being in entertainment for 50+ years, I'm sure I'll forget a few of his best things and its possible I haven't seen the entire Steve Martin catalogue either so bare with me... Alright, so here are my topics for this article:

1. SNL
2. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles
3. The Jerk
4. Only Murders in the Building

The best Steve Martin moment will be from these four topics.

 

SNL

It's odd to think that Steve Martin was never a cast member of SNL because so much of the early SNL (and let's face it... the best years of the program) were heavily marked by Steve Martin.

My all time favorite Steve Martin SNL Moment is his depiction of Georg Festrunk who along with his brother Jortuk (played by Dan Akroyd) are...

...Two Wild and Crazy Guys!!!

Similar to my Grandma, Georg is an eastern European, trying to make it in the Western World... and sometimes words, idioms, and phrases are jumbled as he and his brother learn the Ways of the West.

The funniest part of this scene, to me, is the "Sad Boogie to the Door" prior to the arrival of "The Foxes"... it's so funny. Even under duress and extreme sadness... Georg and Jortuk still manage to boogie and swing. It's so commendable of them. They are a hearty pair who are not defeated easily.

The costume designers really created something special in this. They look so silly, these two. It's the best.


Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is a very special film. I remember writing once that the theme of "Travel" always seems to work in story telling. Whether the characters have to make it down the Yellow Brick Road, or they have to make it to India to find Scriptures, or simply just have to make it home in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with their family... travel always works in story telling.

Steve Martin is opposite John Candy in this film, which when this came out in 1987, it really reverberated in the Comedy World as these two heavyweights were forming a comedy tag team.... a Dream Team, even. Steve Martin and John Candy were that big back-then individually and to think they were combining forces together in a film was a big deal.

This movie isn't really about Travel though, and I think people should watch this if they haven't seen it already, so I don't want to spoil any of it... but this film only at the surface is about Travel... and as we peel away the layers we quickly find out that this film is about something much deeper than that. Oh yes, something much deeper.

I can't really pick a favorite scene without spoiling the film in the process, and I want younger people to watch it, so I won't go too much into Planes n' Trains at any great depth. It is a very funny film yet with some deeply touching moments woven into it.

I truly consider this as one of the greatest films of all time. It really is.


The Jerk

The Jerk is a young Martin Stevens... I mean Steve Martin... in his youth. He's playing a very silly man who lucks his way through life. It's not the usual Steve Martin here, who in most cases, is the "straight man" to a more outlandish comedy partner... here, Steve, is the outlandish one and... he's very very outlandish in The Jerk.

There's a scene in this that is very memorable to me... where Navin (the Jerk)... who as a youth was orphaned and adopted by a family of African Americans... hears some gangsters use the "N-word" and flies into a rage! He defends his adopted family's honor by proceeding to fight all the gangsters.

It's something you can only really write into a film as silly as this but it works. Even under the most silly of circumstances, Steve Martin, still manages to weave into the narrative some deeply touching moments... even very early on in his career.

In fact, the contrast between outrageousness yet still finding a way to create deeply-touching moments amidst the outrageousness seems to be a running theme. I'm really starting to notice this as I reflect on the works of Steve Martin.

Deeply touching moments carefully woven into a patch-work tapestry of nonsense.


Only Murders in the Building

To be honest, I saw the trio who star in this show (Martin, Martin, and Gomez) doing the rounds on the talk show circuit to promote the show... and I wasn't sold on it.

I mean, the two Martins are close to seventy and they are teaming up with a pop star to do some kind of mystery show? I didn't know what to expect, and to be frank, I didn't think it would be good.

...but I was not right. Not in the least. The show is really good.

I think I was going into it expecting something aimed at today's audience and the two Martins were going to try and be hip... and my mind was thinking like.... "Oh no... is Jiminy Glick going to be on this trying to hang with the youth of today in order to linger on in showbiz for a few more seconds... and Steve Martin is going to be a party, part n' parcel, to this utter foolery?"

...but that simply was not the case, at all.

It is a really fun show that is very well written... very well acted... and doesn't try to do too much... it doesn't try to be hip to today's soup-de-jours or to bite off more than it can chew. Only Murders is a fun, simple show that gets you hooked from the get-go. It's really really good.

Again, like Planes n' Trains... I won't go into depth or anything... as it's only been out since last October, I think. So, I just recommend people go watch it if they are interested in what it is about.

Like, it seems, with all of Steve Martin's stuff over the last fifty or more years... it is a very whacky little patch-work of a narrative yet with some very very touching moments woven into it. It belongs in the A-list of the Steve Martin Universe. One hundred percent.

....Oh and Nathan Lane is really good in this too. Really good.


Conclusion

So, what is my favorite Steve Martin moment?

I'd have to go with Planes n' Trains still. To me it's a masterpiece and it helps that I'm a big John Candy fan too. Steve Martin and John Candy in the same film? Oh yes, count me in!

So if any Steve Martin fans have come about in the younger generation from Only Murders.. please check out Planes, Trains, and Automobiles which is considered as the greatest piece of the Steve Martin universe.

Mario 3

I have to say, I have Mario 3 on my mind.

I was watching this big Mario 3 Battle Royale thing done by twitch streamer Mitchflowerpower the other week or so which really got me thinking about being a really young kid. As I get older I think nostalgia articles are gonna become more common on here. I'm honestly feeling this total branching-out brain-stimulation and memory-stimulating nostalgia all down-my-spine for Mario 3 right now.

That Mario 3 Battle Royale was many players playing Mario 3 and the fastest players to beat the game would then advance to the next round until many rounds later out of the 100+ Mario 3 players only four would remain to battle it out for the 2022 Mario 3 Championship...

...and watching it, I really thought, if this happened in 1989 when Mario 3 was really out and the Wizard movie (starring Fred "Kevin Arnold" Savage) was in theaters... kids my age back then would have been FAINTING watching something like a Mario 3 Battle Royale. They wouldn't even have been asking but sugar-crazed harassing their poor parents to let them be in something like this.

Now a days, video games are so common but I truly remember when the video game craze totally started. I really do. I remember the time when they went from almost nobody having them to every kid having them... and it happened almost over night.

Atari and stuff was already out but only geeks n' weirdos really had it. It was not common (my grandpa gave me one but my grandpa was cool) for kids to have Ataris ....but at some point in the mid 80s it just went from nobody having video games to EVERYONE having them in like a snap of a finger.

I remember getting the first Nintendo, the NES, the Nintendo Entertainment System. Me and my family (Mother, Father, Sister, and Brother (Me)) were on a road trip down in beautiful Massachusetts and, I remember this as plain as Yesterday, even though this happened almost 35 years ago... we were in the mall and my dad was crouched near the bottom shelf of an aisle, I was short back then and didn't need to crouch, and we were looking at Nintendos! My eyes were glazed over and my mind stopped working! I asked if after we bought it we can hook it up in the motel... and I wouldn't take no for an answer... I had to start playing it as soon as possible... and I just would not accept waiting 'til we got back home to Canada to play it. I needed to play it there, that minute, that second, in the beautiful US of A where they had cheap Nintendos in their malls for kids to buy and play in great abundance. I loved being in that country, this USA, where these cheap Nintendos were just waiting to be bought...I wanted to stay there... hook it up in the motel...and play Mario...in the USA all day...

....yet alas, I had pushed my luck and we didn't buy it that day....

...when we got home a kid on my street got one before I did and I told to him my tragic tale that I would've got one last week but I pushed my luck wanting to play it in the American motel room... but he didn't believe me...

...I sat at home regretting asking to hook it up in the United States, to play Nintendo then-and-there in that amazing country, for what seemed like an eternity... until one day, not much later, I got a Nintendo... and my life finally was wonderful. My life became wonderful, that day...

....the day that I got a Nintendo.

A few years later, in 1989, a movie came out that had kids losing their minds. Now, I read a lot of reviews and people's opinions or memories of this film as it being a "a big commercial for Nintendo" and it being bad...

...but, friend, let me tell you something.......

....you not know of what you speaketh. You don't. You knoweth not of anything of which you speaketh, at all. You really don't. You don't know whateth of you speak.

I'm talking about The Wizard (1989, run time 100 minutes)... and if you have seen this film and did not like it... all I can say is... you were NOT a kid in 1989. No way. Because if you were a kid (not pre-teen or teen... but a real kid kid like under twelve) you regard this film as a true masterpiece of cinema. A true and complete Masterpiece of Art.

I mean, to think, we could have something like this. This amazing thing they go to in this film. The mere thought of a "Video Championship" was uncomprehensible to us. On top of it all its an adventure movie... these three kids had to run away from home to play in the Video Championship! Oh, wait, you think that's all it had going for it? Nay, nay, I say...for it also....culminated at the climax of the film.... with the game that had to be played to win the Video Championship... being a game no one had yet SEEN outside of the fairy-tale land of Japan yet.

Yes, Kevin Arnold's very shy and broken-hearted-over-divorced-parents little brother... had to play MARIO 3!!!

We lost it. All of kids as a whole in 1989. LOST IT. We lost it. Our minds, that is. We all fully lost our minds over this. A third Mario was coming out!

To underscore how big this was in 1989 to a kid... I cannot find words that exist to describe how the entirety of kid-hood the whole body of kid-dom ... the Society of Kids of 1989... I mean, every kid on EARTH, all of us, were losing our minds!!!!

This commercial is not an exaggeration of reality. This Mario 3 commercial was not even accurately portraying how all of children around North America and Beyond were out of their skulls to get their hands on this game! Portraying the fervor as a band of kids joined together to turn America into a giant Mario head is an understatement of reality....it was BIGGER than this. Much much bigger than this.

This commercial is true. Nintendo was empowering our generation like nothing before. We truly believed in Mario.... he was easy to believe in... because we played Mario 1 and Mario 2 like they were more important than any Super Bowl every day of our lives! We believed in ourselves too!

We, as kids, were an unstoppable force! We as a whole under the symbol of Mario would meet any challenge! We could face any obstacle! We could play video games ALL DAY and EAT JUNK FOOD and STAY UP ALL NIGHT and not even nobody could STOP US not even with a battalion of tanks and wild horses could ANYONE even DREAM of stopping us from playing MARIO THREE!

It was that big a deal, guys. It was.

Anyways....

I don't really think Mario 3 is a great game for speed running because of the side-scrollin' camera-pan stuff. Like, you get on one of Bowser's dumb boats and all of a sudden your grandma's holding a VHS camera recording you playing and you can only advance the screen when she decides to pan to the right.... that's what it feels like... and that's not conducive for speed running....but...

...as a 100+ contestant free-for-all speed run? Like in 1989's the Wizard? Where people gather from all over America to play Mario 3? Where the "hands"* come into play and put an element of chaos into the event that even mediocre players might advance to the finals? Guys....why isn't this an Olympic Event!?

Why isn't this in the Olympics? I don't really understand things like this. What are they doing at the Winter Olympics now out there in the cold? Falling down some ice or tumbling down a snowy hill?

Guys...let's play Mario 3 at the Winter Olympics! It can be outdoors if you want, even... like in a big igloo with a World Six ice-world themed decor. Guys....

Guys. Guys, guys, guys.......guys.

Why? Why can't we do cool stuff? Japan played all this video game music at the last Olympics (snubbing the Mother series, mind you, shoulda had a coupla songs from Earthbound at the Olympics, Japan).... it whetted our whistles...

...it whetted our whistles for Video Games at the Olympics!





(* The "Hands" are in World 8 where Mario has a random-generated chance of being dragged into a level by evil hands three times. Some people have to play three more levels, some only two, some one, and some very very lucky players have none.)

Expos!

Time to finally turn the page on the last short story, which felt like I was writing that for so long. I really like it. I don't know how a reader would like that last story though. I mean, you'd need to be a fan of 70s TV detective shows to really wig for the nostalgia ... and even then ... without that ... it's so confusing. I re-read it for spelling errors the other day and, yes, it's confusing on purpose ... I did that on purpose. I mean, to me, the fact that a good chunk of the dialogue was going to be Kojak talking to Kolchak... was really the initial reason I thought it would be fun to write... but... it's confusing.

I like it though. I remember when the channel A&E first came out in the 90s, it was supposed to be about Arts and Entertainment.... just like TLC was supposed to be the learning channel when it started... A&E was going to be about operas and plays and smart people stuff... but it only had so many operas and plays to air so a good 60% of its roster of programming back then was 70s Detective shows! I watched them all, I really liked them, I leaned towards Columbo as my favorite... though the theme from Rockford I considered as being the greatest theme of any of them.

I did a bit of research, watching some Cannons and stuff, that was never on re-runs I watched back then... I like William Conrad... he's the narrator on Rocky and Bullwinkle too... so his voice is familiar to me.

Anyways, I have a feeling that story is considered craptastic by the literary world but it was soooo fun for me to write that thing. I loved doing it. I loved every second of writing it.

But, now its time to turn the page on that....


Any new readers to this blog who weren't on board in the past might not know that I am a gigantic Montreal Expos fan. Searching "Montreal Expos" in my blog will likely bring up dozens of articles. I've been on board with the Re-Rise of the Great Expos since... honestly... maybe even before anyone. I've been a die-hard not-switching-to-another-team Expos fan since they left in 2004 still. I never gave up being an Expos fan.

Every spring, I usually start a Baseball Mogul video game campaign, and by campaign I really mean it, I start as the Expos in the game in 1969 and play until 2004. I play with some caveats... any player who enters my roster at any point from 1969 to 2004 MUST HAVE played at least one game in an Expos uniform in real life to be allowed on my roster.... it keeps it historically much-more accurate and keeps the world feeling far-more real for me. Far more realer than if Tony Gwynn was signed as a free agent one year or I drafted Ken Griffey Jr. or Matt Williams one year.... doing stuff like that would take me out of the world I am creating in the game if Griffey was an Expo...it would no longer feel real to me.

I manage everything and tend to win many World Serieses... things often happen like in True History like trading Randy Johnson (Even though I know he will become a Cy Young caliber pitcher) because it makes it feel ever-more realer to me when I do that... but then again... many things don't happen as in History because this campaign really only exists in my computer... so obviously there's no 1994 play stoppage and the Expos get to finish the year and things like that. Since there's no Japan league simulations... I usually tend to keep Warren Cromartie as a life-long Expo since he can't leave for Japan anyhow in this game.

For me, its odd that this simulation, which thanks to my historical-based caveats for who is traded-for or signed onto my team over the course of 1969 to 2004.... can feel very real at times. Very much so.

I've seen Steve Rogers pitch a no-hitter in the World Series, I've seen Tim Raines hit a game winning inside-the-park homerun at Tiger Stadium to win a World Series... I've seen things that have made me lose-my-mind and I know they are not even real.

I have truly created a video game world in this game that is totally self-hypnotically believable to me. I really recommend to any baseball fan who hasn't played Baseball Mogul to try it...I've had it since I ordered the 1999 version more than 20 years ago! I've been playing this game for more than 20 years.

The Expos are very much being talked about in media, mostly Montreal region media, this week. We have gained a lot of ground on one day getting the franchise to return to MLB over the last decade... yes, this Return of the Expos is now over 10 years old. I have articles from 2011 about Cromartie's five-tool plan from his old "Expo Manifesto" on his old website. I've been emotionally-invested in this for over a decade....

...but, I know its a marathon and not a race. Many people in Montreal media have now given up Hope on the Return of the Expos... but not me. Just like Cro was saying on the radio today... people who chose to never stop believing in the Expos were always lauged-at and called crazy for a decade now.

If I haven't given up on the Expos as being my baseball team since 2004....I really doubt I ever will. I've been a supporter of the Return since the day they left... and that will never change.

You can bruise my insides... and I'll still be an Expos fan.
You can laugh at me for my silly dreams.... and I will still be an Expos fan.
You can say I'm out-of-touch with reality... well, yeah, that's true but.... I'm still an Expos fan.
You can tempt me with Blue Jays baseball but.... I'll still be an Expos fan.
You can pour the salt on the earth of Expos History and try to bury it but I'm STILL an Expos fan.

....and I will be an Expos fan... forever.

There's some things in a person's body that are too powerful to ever be removed. I don't know how it happened... but the Red n' White n' the Blue of that Expos team is too powerful a force to ever be removed from the inside of me. It's just how it is.

I remember having tickets to the Yankees spring training game in March 2020 at the Big O, me and my mom were gonna go.... and that's when the lockdowns hit for the pandemic. There was gonna be 40,000+ fans at Olympic Stadium again for baseball. It's strange to think that was two years ago now. It feels like nothing but only just Yesterday....

Just like other moments I witnessed at the Big O.... they feel like they happened only yesterday... they're still inside of me as powerful memories. I think that's why when I play Baseball Mogul sometimes and its game seven of the NLCS and my computerized Expos come from behind to win and advance to the World Series... it feels very real. I feel like I'm back at the Big O and Curtis Pride just doubled to center and almost 50,000 people are standing and cheering... because its a very powerful memory that is still inside of me.

Expos fans, we've seen hard roads before. If you're like me and still an Expos fan after almost 20 years of them being gone.... I don't think this latest development will finally be the moment you switch over the the Jays or another team. If you've made it this far with the Expos fires still burning inside of you... I doubt anything will ever quench them.

We're rounding third now, heading home.....but we're in a run-down with the catcher and the thirdbaseman. Both sides like crab pincers... clamping down on us from both sides... home is right in front of us... but the catcher now has the ball and wants to tag us out.

We've been here before... so close to the end......is this really the Final Chapter on the Return of The Expos? I don't know... all I know is...

....I'm Still an Expos Fan.