Snakes On A Plane 17: The Snakeplane

No doubt many of you are aware of the internet hubbub that preceded Snakes On a Plane. The short of it is, the movie became something of a cult classic while it was in preproduction, based on the simple fact that its working title was Snakes On a Plane and that it starred Samuel L. Jackson. The title might as well have been Premise. Anyway, the movie was originally going to be a straight airplane suspense movie with a normal title (like Flight 190 or something), until the executives realized they had something of an automatic cult hit if they kept the working title and made it a self-aware disaster-movie cheesefest instead. They did and it was, and I suspect that fairly soon the whole SOAP saga will recede gently into the sunset of American pop-culture memory.

Which is why I write this post now, before it is too late. You see, I played a small role in the Snakes On a Plane phenomenon, and if I don't take action, then this contribution will be lost forever. One of the natural tendencies people have when confronted with SOAP is to endlessly riff on possible sequels. The pièce de résistance of this tendency took the form of a legendarily long thread on the SOAP IMDB page, in which people just kept posting possible sequels--sometimes it was just a title, other times it included a little synopsis. The thread was widely heralded, both for its unusually high quality as well as its status as the only worthwhile thing that has ever come out of an IMDB forum. By the end of it, there were literally hundreds of proposed sequels--a monument to the creative zeal of the SOAP community.

Now, I got in fairly early on this thread. Lindsay had tipped me off that something funny was happening over at some IMDB page, and so I registered and left a post:

by -  thedavidmo  (Fri Oct 7 2005 23:56:53 )    
UPDATED Fri Oct 7 2005 23:59:04

Snakes on a Plane 17: The Snakeplane

The latest offering in the venerable Snakes saga contemplates the unthinkable: planes and snakes teaming up against a common enemy, the Snakeplane. A genious billionaire geneticist goes mad and becomes hellbent on 'purifying' the world by creating the Snakeplane, a 'biologically perfect' organism that is so fast 'you won't know whether to scream or to board the damn thing'. Protagonist L. Fishbourne illustrates difficult concept of the Snakeplane by drawing two dots on a piece of paper, and folding that piece of paper so that the dots meet. PG-13.

Meh. I think the obscure reference to Event Horizon misses the mark, but in general, I think, good enough for an IMDB forum. (Lindsay had already posted Snakes On a Plane 12: Snakes Stake Claim--but I'll leave it for her to decide if she wants to repost it on her blog.)

Now, this entry stood proud for many months until, tragically at some point, the whole thread was deleted by the IMDB admin. Why was it all deleted? I suppose we'll never know. Although, I wouldn't be surprised if the thread simply got so long that the page could no longer load in any reasonable amount of time. In any case, my contribution to SOAP lore was lost forever--or was it?

After some moping about the deleted thread, I realized that the internet is nothing if not huge and full of trivial information. There was a good chance that the thread lived on somewhere, somehow.

How right I was. I found several blogs (not all of them in English) that had copy-and-pasted their favorite bits from the thread, many of which contained both mine and Lindsay's offerings. So that was good--at least ours were safe from the IMDB axe. But then I found true salvation: some good soul had saved the entire page before it was deleted and posted it as a zip file.

Which means that you can check it out, if you want.

So, this blog entry serves two purposes: first, it helps preserve a little bit of pop-cultural history. But second, it also helps set straight which are the official fake sequels of SOAP. When you Google "Snakes On a Plane 17:", you unfortunately get a handful of other people's attempts on their own blogs. But the content of the original IMDB thread must be restored to its previous Google dominance. Will this post make that happen? God no. But it's the thought that counts.

Note: the site that I downloaded the IMDB page from was thefucksociety. It seems to be for artists and such, the name notwithstanding. 

I Cannot Understand the Daily Kos

I mean, literally, I can't understand it. It's the blog equivalent of one of those crazy-lady houses where there are hundreds of cats breeding uncontrollably and eating each other. There are "diaries", "open posts" with nothing in them, something called the dKosopedia, a shit-ton of links everywhere you look, and--running right through the middle of it all--about fifty million ads. And half of the comments are in a strange liberal shorthand I'm not familiar with, e.g.,

looks like the lieber-cheney's having it's cake and eating it too--big surprise coming from "all of mouths". <some link>
by riotbaggins  on Fri Aug 16, 2006 at 11:42:23 PM PDT

I'm just saying that, for those new to the site, the Daily Kos is an unruly whirlwind of internet.

Alphabet Soup for the Soul #1

Welcome, readers, to a series I'm calling Alphabet Soup for the Soul. The aim is to deliver to your doorstep excerpts of prose that are, for one reason or another, an abomination to the English language. For the foreseeable future, I will be drawing excerpts from P.N. Dedeaux's dreadful The Prussian Girls. The plot of this (ostensibly) erotic tale centers around some kind of boarding school in Prussia where every two seconds the students get whipped by their headmistresses. Aesthetically, the prose weighs in at somewhere between gargling and a Hitler speech.

 

Without further ado, an excerpt from Dedeaux's classic, The Prussian Girls: 

 Ingeborg Untermacher came in and curtseyed.

That's quite enough for now. Let's all gird ourselves for the next installment, whenever that may be.

From Laverne and Shirley to Thelma and Louise

After skulking out of the Tehachapi Community Theater, Lindsay and I high-tailed it west. We were in a bit of a bind because we wanted nothing more than to leave Tehachapi for good, and yet we had already paid for a motel there. We ended up turning north, driving through Lamont, until we got to the outskirts of Bakersfield and parked ourselves at a greasy spoon called the Scotsman.

The Scotsman was disconcerting for a variety of reasons. For one, the patrons were uncommonly, cartoonishly ugly. I was reminded of Sloth from Goonies. Besides this, there were American flags plastered over every square inch of the place, and just about everyone there was white. Now, ordinarily this wouldn't be cause for concern--we are, after all, in America, where American flags and white people are the predominant flag/ethnicity combo--but it came on the heels of driving through Lamont, which had a large Latino migrant worker population. There was racial tension, it seemed--but, because of the extreme heat and the upward immobility of everyone involved, it felt like the dull, uneventful racial tension that might persist between two groups of cows.

I ordered a french toast and a Budweiser.

After cursing the Tehachapi Community Theater and nearly getting into a huge fight over whose fault it was that we went, Lindsay and I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it: the only way to even the score would be to take from them the only thing they cared about, their precious key to their beloved city. We had stumbled upon it earlier that day while poking around the old abandoned depot in downtown Tehachapi, but left it in peace. Now revenge was ours to be had.

When my french toast arrived, it had a heaping scoop of whipped butter on each slice, with a side of more whipped butter. Finally, I remarked to Lindsay, somebody's gotten it right with butter.

After the meal we drove back to the motel, where I spent an hour drawing up a ridiculous "calling card" that I would leave in the key's place. It contained a message explaining why we had taken the thing, along with a pun to the effect of, "Tehachapi, your community theater performers are out of key--it is only fitting that now your whole city is 'out of key'." It was signed "The Freedom Bandit", with a logo. I woke Lindsay up (she had fallen asleep because I was writing the note in a weird font so that they couldn't trace the handwriting, and it was taking a long time). We drove over to the depot, did the deed, and came back. The next morning we put Tehachapi in our rear-view mirror, none the wiser.

Epilogue

I suppose we will never know if anyone ever stumbles across the note, and, if they do, whether or not they'll know what on earth it is referring to. And though at the time Lindsay and I referred to it as "the key to the city", we didn't have any idea what it was for, or why it was lying around in an old abandoned train depot.

At least some of the mystery has been dissolved, however, thanks to the internet. It turns out that the abandoned depot is a historic site and is being refurbished and converted into a museum. But this is where it gets good: there was a ceremony in which Union Pacific Railroad presented an oversized key to the mayor of Tehachapi, to symbolize the transfer of ownership of the depot from the company to the city:

From the Tehachapi News:

The ceremony concluded with the official passing
of the key from Union Pacific manager Ron Petitt,
a Tehachapi citizen, to Mayor Teel. A cake bearing
a picture of the depot and punch were then served.

So, friends, what I have in my possession is the official key to the historic downtown Tehachapi train depot, entrusted to the mayor of Tehachapi by none other than Union Pacific Railroad. I bet that in 1874, this would have made national headlines.

Final note. Tehachapi, if you're reading this, please understand that I am a reasonable man, willing to negotiate. I will return to you your precious key to your beloved train depot, on the condition that you reimburse me and my girlfriend for the tickets to "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown" and/or issue a formal apology for the pain and suffering caused to us.

Regards,
The Freedom Bandit

The Tehachapi Community Theater Must Perish In Flames: A Review of "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown"

The Tehachapi Community Theater's rendering of "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown" was fucking, fucking awful. How awful? Let's just say that by the first intermission it was driving people out of town. And to crime. And to the brink of insanity.

The theater itself was shabby and rank with the stench of fascism. Clearly there was some overbearing bitch running the whole thing, because there is no way that any reasonable person would have forced this poor group of people--I won't even call them performers, let alone actors or singers--to writhe and contort to the off-tempo synthesiser strains of YAGMCB. They could not sing and, worse, seemed to realize it. A mother's first instinct would have been to rush the stage and coddle the poor creatures. It was, in short, painful to watch. And, being an audience member, I couldn't help but feel that I was contributing to their misery, adding a strong element of guilt and embarrassment into the mix. The experience was about as pleasant as punching some nuns.

Now why, you may be asking yourself, is David tearing this small community theater a new one? Why bother? Aren't the standards at these sorts of places notoriously low? Aren't these people not exactly professionals, and trying their best? What if these people were to stumble across your blog: wouldn't you feel bad trashing them like this?

Ordinarily, dear reader, I would agree with the sentiment behind this line of questioning. However, there is one thing that even the smallest, most obscure and amateurish theater group can do to raise the ire of the audience to the point of literally wanting to draw blood in a fight. And it is this: charging $15 per ticket.

Let me pause for a moment to let that sink in.

Fifteen fucking dollars! For me and Lindsay, that made $30 total. To watch--what? To watch some terrible thirty year old Charlie Brown grotesquely mugging at me while he talked through his lines? To listen to fat Lucy's insufferable lilting output, marred even further by her constant switching of key and octave?  To grimace while undergoing the strain of underdeveloped Linus' "solo number", where he (or she?) listlessly twirled around with a blanket for five minutes? The only one who got out of it with even a grain of dignity was Patty, but only because she seemed to be filled to the brim with pure hatred for everyone around her. I mean, I could empathize with her.

The reason we paid for the tickets in the first place was because we were practically brow-beaten into it. We had passed a sign saying there was a show tonight, and thought it might be charming to see some small community troupe overact a bit. When we got there and saw the price of the tickets, we reconsidered whether or not to go through with it. Then a nice looking lady came out and kept cajoling us to come in--"oh, c'mon, it'll be fun! My daughter is doing the sound and she says it's great! Oh, c'mon! C'mon!"--until we had no choice but to relent.

When we got in to pay, we had trouble coming up with the cash. "Well," I said, "I have 28 dollars. Will that be ok?" I fully expected her to let us through, since the tickets were so expensive and since she had done such a sales job on two perfect strangers. But when I asked her this question, she just stared at us and smiled. "Um, ok, maybe I have some change." We had to scrounge for loose change until we had the full thirty dollars.

So, as you can imagine, expectations were kicked up a notch or two. Or thirty. Clearly these people thought they were good if they were charging these kinds of prices in such a small town venue. I mean, you can go see a semi-professional show for that kind of money. It's certainly more than anyone would ever charge in a college production. So you can imagine the outrage when the curtain lifted (actually, there was no curtain--just a low, asbestos ceiling) and we were greeted with this worse-than-high-school abomination.

We left at the first intermission, skulking out the front entrance, and were mad. I mean really angry. Since it was the city's community theater, we directed our anger at all of Tehachapi, vowing to never spend another penny there, and, later, in an act of revenge, actually ended up stealing the key to the city:

 

...but that will have to wait till next time.