Confused yet? I should hope so.
It wouldn’t be the last time this
happened, either.
You see, part of the plan for Vasco—and, contrary to popular belief,
there was a plan—the apparent lack of a plan was all part of the plan,
you see…clever, clever—now, where was I?...oh, yes—part of the plan for Vasco was that Rob the character in the
show would quit his job on the show-within-a-show every few episodes. It
probably says a lot about me that the show’s basic format was to deviate as
often as possible from the show’s basic format. My problem is that I can’t think
of what it says, exactly. Maybe I
have a short attention—hey—is that lightning? Wow, that was close. Better hit “save”
before another one knocks the power out.
Or maybe it’s just that I have trouble
finishing what I
Anyway…having The Fictional Rob
Vincent quit every now and then offered as good an excuse as any for taking the
show out its familiar confines, and into other, less familiar, confines. The
Actual Rob Vincent remembers that The Fictional Rob Vincent’s search for a new
(but not necessarily better) job in this particular episode led him to, and I
quote, “The Quinn Martin Employment Agency! Special
Guest Star: James Franciscus”. (This would sound better if you could
hear the theme from Cannon playing in
your head as you read it. If you don’t know what the theme from Cannon sounds like, google it. If
nothing else, it’ll give the mental soundtrack of your life something to liven
up those duller moments.)
I don’t
know if Ian McKay had the theme from Cannon
running through his head while he was thinking about it, but one of his
memories of Episode #4 of Vasco involved
him “trying to do a convincing Renfield, never having
heard him nor having seen the prerequisite amount of old monster movies.”
As I recall (and I don’t, really, but this sounds plausible, if nothing else), I
think the solution to the dilemma involved telling Ian to do the worst Peter
Lorre imitation imaginable, then telling him to make it just a little bit worse
than that. If you’ve seen Dwight Frye’s Renfield in the 1931 Bela Lugosi
version of Dracula…well, I guess the
thing to do is to imagine the theme from Cannon
playing under that, and you’ll probably come out ahead in the entertainment
department…if not necessarily in the sanity department. You have to give
something to get something, is my motto. At least it was, until I gave it away
to get something else. I forget what it was, but I’m sure it was important at
the time.
Most of the time, I don’t forget things,
though. No—most of the time, my excuse is that I’m naïve and ignorant. Take,
for example, the introduction of Science Boy’s original female assistant, which
happens in this episode, which is why I’m asking you to take it for an example.
She needed an appropriate nom de guerre,
and “Annoying Girl” seemed like a perfectly good one. The trouble is, it had
already also seemed that way to Bill Watterson, who’d used it for Calvin’s
imagining of Susie Derkins as Spaceman Spiff’s arch-nemesis in Calvin and Hobbes. I’d stopped keeping up
with the comics section of the newspaper about the same time as Johnny Hart got
religion, so I had nary a clue about this until well after the last episode of Vasco went out on the air. This is why Science Boy is
now accompanied by Gullible Girl, not Annoying Girl. Someday, I may bring back
Annoying Girl, retconning her name and backstory so that she’s known as
Copyright Infringement Girl.
The
backstory for the “original” Copyright Infringement Girl Annoying Girl is
also courtesy of Ian McKay:
She was the cashier at the Mr. Sub I worked at. She would only
work cash. At random times she would take the cart and restock the drinks
fridge. To do this she would insist on wearing rubber gloves, as it made her
feel like a nurse. She would usually be late coming back from her break […]
This was annoying as it threw off everybody else's schedule. When it was
pointed out to her that she was 5 minutes late coming back from lunch, she went out
to the restaurant, pulled one of the tables over to the wall, climbed up on the
table and set the clock back 5 minutes.[…] She was quite fond of her cats.
Unfortunately for her, this seemed to be a one-way relationship as her cats
kept throwing themselves off her balcony. She eventually was put on long term
stress leave.
This isn’t all he remembers, but it’s all I’m
putting up for public view. I’m not keen on facing a character defamation suit
on top of copyright infringement action. Unless the theme from Cannon can play in the background while
it all happens, that is. Or, failing that…
Hope you like the way I tied the link into
that last bit there. I worked a long time on it, to get it just right. Well, as
long as I ever feel like working on anything, that is.
Hey, folks—five seconds is five seconds,
no matter how you look at it.
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