Terry Echoes' Bat Cave

You know that Doctor Who episode, "The Idiot's Lantern"? Series 2, episode 7? Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, Rose Tyler, Billie Piper? The TV keeps eating people's faces, and Ten decides to annoy one specific family who bought one of the cursed Magpie TVs?

So Eddie Connolly, the obnoxious father who shouts a lot. Fought in the war "against tyranny" as his son says (may be paraphrasing). What if the reason he finds faceless Gran so "filthy" and "disgusting" is because he's seen people in the war with their faces blown off by weapons and explosives and such? Like you ever seen the picture of Emmett Till? Don't look it up if you haven't; it's traumatizing. But maybe Eddie's a bit shellshocked and that's why he gets so riled up and his fumbling attempts at over-protection when he knows you can't protect everyone in a world with war in it just boils over into oppressive rage and domestic emotional abuse?

I just wanted to share some screenshots from The Simpsons, if that's alright.

I'm lonely and want to talk about something, anything.

So when I was a young kid, my family watched Soap, a very funny sitcom from the late 70s that unfortunately never saw its fifth season. But it had one of the gay characters of all time, Jodie Dallas (played by Billy Crystal), who, well, had his ups and downs. He kept being pushed into relationships with women, he was transgender in the first season, so there was this balancing act of avoidance and stereotyping and meaning well, but where he flourished was when he was trolling the heteros. "Are you a practicing homosexual?" some lawyer asks him.

"I don't have to practice; I'm very good at it," comes his immortal reply.

But let me ramble on about my first experience with "gay". It was the arc where Jodie Dallas, living in an apartment, gets a roommate named Annie who's a Jewish lesbian. Nice woman, very fun, I hope those fictional characters stayed friends. But in another "hide the gays" moment, the two end up dating each other.

This led me to believe that gay men only dated gay women and vice versa. And that was what gay meant. That and I had some kind of vague notion that people who were gay faced some kind of difficulty, and you gotta respect people for that. Not sure where that came from.

I just wish it stuck with me and crushed all the fear and anxiety I felt growing up, surrounded by the homophobia of my peers. Funny, my family was Roman Catholic, but they were never homophobic or anti-science or anything like that. Everything I gleaned from Catholicism taught me to accept people for who they were and to welcome them and treat them with respect and camaraderie. Until the day the priest, looking extremely embarrassed and not looking at us, read that marriage was between a man and a woman, and that was the last time I ever went to church. That and I was being bullied in school for being Catholic. And crowds give me anxiety.

The Hungry Hot Dog?

The Displaced Accountant?

The Frothy Buccaneer?

The Cloves of Atlantis?

The Yellow Squirrel?

The Artichoke Tibet?

The Hip?

The Phoenician Live Theater?

The Atomic Waistline?

The Rescued Beverage?

The Carnatum Syndicate?

Filthy's Gregorian Waterloo?

Restitution von Petrie Dish?

Placemats to the Editor?

The Fracas on the Beach?

The wounded soldier crosses the battlefield; what is the price of a purple heart? His soul crusts over bitterly, and I've got baking down to an art!

[Scene opens on a dusty desert, the wind blowing. A figure steps into frame, wearing denim overalls. We see hints of a red sleeve and a white-gloved hand clenched into a fist.]

VOICEOVER: Nice of the princess to invite us over for a picnic, eh Luigi?

[Fade to black. We see a sped-up close up of some ordinary mushrooms blooming in the wild.]

VOICEOVER: I hope she made lotsa spaghetti!

[Fade to black. Open on a castle interior, showing us a high 3/4 overhead view. BOWSER sits hunched over a desk with a quill and parchment. We see a fire in a fireplace behind him. Outside a window, we see a volcano and a sea of lava.]

VOICEOVER: "Dear pesky plumbers..."

[Close-up on LUIGI's face from the brim of his hat to the top of his mustache. He is glaring angrily at the screen in a dramatic sort of movie trailer fashion.]

VOICEOVER: [That weird Luigi noise when he gets hit by a red shell in Mario Kart 64.]

[Cut to a science lab full of science. A WOMAN with BREASTS walks into view, wearing a lab coat and wielding brass knuckles. This is PRINCESS PEACH.]

VOICEOVER: [some bollocks about what you think is the first plot point of the movie but is, regrettably, a spoiler for the disappointing last act.]

[Various scenes of cartoon violence flash by too fast for anything to be made out unless you download the video from Youtube and try to freeze frame it, and even then it looks just like blurs of blue, red, and green.]

[A half-second clip of a CGI KOOPA TROOPA leaps down from the top of the frame.]

[Music swells, then stops. We see MARIO patting the shoulder of an off-screen LUIGI.]

MARIO: "Luigi...all toasters toast toast."

[Cut to preliminary title graphic, followed by a bunch of that gibberish tiny text nobody ever reads so why do they bother, also the rating is shown on-screen and is PG even though there's at least two gratuitous swears in the film and references to memes that no child should know.]