Honolulu Lite
I was idly clicking through the program guide on television when a particular movie caught my attention: "Mr. Mom: Mission to Mars." Program guide pitches
weird new showsWhat a great idea, I thought: Take two crummy movies and make one sequel out of them. A sequel to either movie would have sucked worse than Michael Keaton's vacuuming in the original "Mr. Mom." But put Keaton on the Red Planet keeping house and fighting aliens, and you just might have yourself a thumbs-up movie.
Then I realized that "Mr. Mom: Mission to Mars" was not a movie, it was two movies listed in the program guide, one after the other, in what one can only guess was a special "movies that sucked" retrospective.
These new on-screen program menus are great for the most part. You're able to scan ahead to see what is on an hour or two in advance. After the "Mr. Mom on Mars" incident, I turned watching the program guide into entertainment, seeing what other fanciful new shows and movies presented themselves.
There were a lot of movies that when combined sounded better than the originals, like "Kiss of the Dragon Rat Race," "Jurassic Park III: The Princess Diaries" and "Indiana Jones Eat Your Heart Out."
I have to point out here that there are rules to this exercise. You can't just grab a show title here and a show title there to create "Martha Stewart Cooks Emeril Live," no matter how much fun it would be to watch such a program.
The magic is how the program guide inadvertently melds movie and show titles together. The titles have to either follow each other in the line up or one show has to be exactly underneath the other on the screen. That way it's more amazing when you come across "Coyote Ugly: Better Off Dead" or "Better Off Dead: 102 Dalmatians." Though unintended, the titles have a certain relevancy. Anyone who saw "102 Dalmatians" and didn't want to strangle a puppy or 50 afterward is way too into Walt Disney.
I'd really like to see some of these nonexistent movies and television shows. "Love and Action in Chicago Carpool" sounds hot. "Victoria Swimsuit Secrets: The Queen Mother Remembered" may be in poor taste, but it certainly gets your attention. "Love Hurts Gilligan's Island" and "I Love Lucy Fatal Affair" would seem to combine a certain zany humor and drama that would be fun to watch.
The sports channels offer up their own intriguing combinations. I actually think "College Basketball Sled Dog Racing" would be a great new sport.
Some title combinations seem to make editorial comments, like "Much Ado About Nothing: America At War."
As outlandish as the titles might be, we know that life imitates even inadvertent art and eventually someone will produce "Ed, Edd n Eddy: A Dating Story."
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com