736. Please Send Help (June 18, 2024)
Added 2024-06-18 14:00:10 +0000 UTCMichael has been locked in a garage by a mysterious editor and forced to watch and respond to last week's movie trailers. He's been eating sawdust exclusively, poor guy. Welp, there doesn't seem like there's anything we can do here. Enjoy the show!
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Comments
Both your presentation of the trailer, and also DMSpock's comment here, remind me of a science-fiction story I read a long time ago. I wish I could remember the title, because it was one of the most memorable short stories I ever read, and I used to read a TON of sci-fi, so that's saying something. Anyway, the protagonist is a gas station attendant single loser. Real Phillip J. Fry kind of guy. Filling out an open application on a whim, the protagonist (I'm going to call him Fry) gets picked to be the astronaut in the first manned mission to Mars. This isn't presented as an absurdist comedy, mind you. The whole short story is written seriously and realistically, a bit like Heinlein or Crichton. NASA announces that they chose Fry (out of millions of applicants, with all kinds of different qualifications) because he has some unnamed set of personality characteristics. They don't reveal their selection criteria, they just say with a straight face that Fry is the best man for the job. Fry goes to space, and his mission is life broadcast like a reality TV show. The mission is mostly financed by add revenue. Things go wrong. He deals with emergencies, and struggles to figure out how to handle them, and almost dies. In the end, in exasperation, he says to the leadership "Why did you pick me? I'm incompetent, and you had to know it!" The leadership comes clean and says that it wasn't a random choice, and it wasn't a stupid choice either: They picked him because he is marginally competent. Not incompetent, but marginally competent. Like the protagonist in "Idiocracy," straight down the middle. And why was he the perfect man for the job? They didn't want someone TOO competent, because this whole mission is being funded by viewers. Which Apollo movie was the most popular? Which one made the most money? It wasn't "Apollo 11," The one where they successfully landed on the moon. Nor was it "Apollo 1," the one where everyone died, nor was it "Apollo 15," the one where they drove a car. No, the most popular Apollo movie, the only one anyone has ever heard of, was Apollo 13. So yeah, that's what I am reminded of when I see this trailer about the basic girl becoming an astronaut. Also, never forget, they could have made a movie about the ACTUAL first woman in space, who was a factory worker with only 10 parachute jumps as training before she flew a solo mission. So, that's the movie they could have made. A real story about a real woman who was really amazing.
stephen
2024-07-09 23:08:39 +0000 UTCThat last one... Legally Blond meets Rocketman meets white privilege. When is she going to learn that NASA is a demonetized shell of it's former self and that we've made very little progress in human space exploration? She's gonna die up there. Also, wearing a lab coat and mixing green food coloring in a beaker does not make you a scientist... any more than wearing pink and doing your nails makes you a "girly girl". It's just a bunch of heteronormative jingoism.
DrMrSpock
2024-06-20 12:04:16 +0000 UTCHey, Mike, our relationship if parasocial at most, but those last few lines seemed tried and pained. If that's just the character, great job! Otherwise, please take care of yourself and know that your efforts do produce joy.
Boyd Stephen Smith
2024-06-18 17:10:46 +0000 UTC
