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Season Five
Episode 16
Battle of the Bands
Join Wil and Mikey for what is an exercise in exhausted delirium. After recording for hours the first go around, they came to find out that their recording was unusable, lost to the very nature of time and decay. What follows is their second time recording, and oddly, an entirely (and far better) show than the firs time. Or at least that’s what we think. Did we succeed?
Tune in to find out.
IMPORTANT LINKS OF THE WEEK!
- VOTE FOR THE MVP OF THIS EPISODE ON TV.COM
- EVERYTHING YOU EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT SUSAN RICHARDSON
FUN FACT OF THE WEEK
- The exterior shots of Breaking Point, the venue for Battle of the Bands, were filmed on Santa Monica Boulevard at (what had been) the Starwood club. It hosted many punk/new wave acts in the ’70s and early ’80s, but closed in June 1981 and was torn down soon afterwards.
Link to iTunes subscription: CLICK HERE
Check out Wil’s personal podcast RADIO FREE BURRITO
And here’s the newest episodes of Movies With Mikey: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, The Fountain, and Zodiac
Mikey & Will
Listening to the new episode I was very sad and dejected. As the sole writer of fan fiction for the Hart to Hart episode, it wasn’t hard to guess whose entry you “weren’t impressed” by. With a 500 word limit I gave you a beginning, a middle and an end, and I thought it was funny in keeping with the caliber of the show. Don’t know what you were expecting for Hart to Hart fan fiction……….War and Peace?
I think you’re taking it a little personally (not that I blame you). It was more the lack of entries than the quality of the entries received. Honestly, it isn’t much of a contest if there aren’t enough entries to be truly be one.
We’re just extending the deadline to see if more people enter. You could still win!
8 pocket chain watch
Mikey, Wil: I’m sorry. Normally I would leap at the chance to write Hart to Hart fanfiction, but at this time I’m afraid all of my effort is focused my masterwork: a Top Gun/Atlas Shrugged crossover I’m calling “Highway to the Dagny Zone.”
Submit for a grade, please.
Highway To The Dagny Zone
By: Partial Spectator
Dagny Taggart scowled at a world that had stubbornly refused to die.
Nearing forty, with the timeless good looks of an author’s self-insert ego trip and a stylish, classic skirt suit – the cut and colors said ‘retro’ but the shoulder pads looked surprisingly modern – she was easily the most striking woman in the bar.
The Top Gun Bar, in Top Gun, California.
She glared at the bartender. He refreshed her drink. Gin. In a rocks glass. With olive. It was cheaper than a martini.
These mindless leeches charge too much for cocktails, she groused to herself, and besides, Vermouth is from continental Europe. There are communists there.
Communists, pinkos, mooches, parasites, leeches – whatever you called them. the world was full of them. America was full of them. Even this bar was full of them. She hated them, strutting around in their lily-white uniforms and caps. Government toadies, strutting around as if they were real men. She smiled coldly into her gin.
None of them would last a day as a captain of industry. They would wither and shrink in John’s presence.
John. He’d given his address over the radio and television only days ago. He’d been arrested, of course. Dagny suspected that he had expected his men to rescue him. If so, he’d been quite wrong. Oh, they’d wanted to at first. They had armed themselves to raid the precinct and reclaim their messiah. But John had made one critical error: he’d referred to them as his followers.
There had been such an uproar back at the Gulch.
I am a man unto myself! Just because I choose to lead myself in the same direction that he leads…
It’s a test, I’m telling you! He’s proud of us! If we’d gone in and risked our own lives for his sake, we wouldn’t…
You’re right, he’d have called us a bunch of beta-male cucks if we’d…
The pronouncements and justifications droned on into the night, and Dagny had caught the first Taggart Intercontinental Express for the west coast. She liked it here. In the desert, the weak would die and the strong would scavenge their remains. It felt like home.
But now the desert was home to these statist manchildren, and the ugly, noisy jets they used to lower property values and oppress those brave souls who dared to think. Presently she noticed that a group of four was sneaking glances at her. She sneered at them.
The short one, an impish brunette with too many teeth, broke from the group and swaggered over to her. His compatriots seemed to find it funny. He had on the most insufferable grin she’d ever seen. And she’d been knocking boots with CEOs for the past few months. He grasped the back of the chair opposite her and leaned his boyish face in close.
“Excuse me, miss? I noticed you’re drinking alone. I was, ah, wondering if I could get you a drink?”
Dagny rolled her eyes.
“I may as well pay for it myself. I would be anyway: my taxes pay your salary.”
That ought to send him away.
It didn’t. He crinkled his nose and let out a too-loud laugh.
“This might be the first time anyone’s said that at a Navy bar. C’mon, what are you drinking?”
Dagny set her drink down. She batted her eyes sarcastically at him.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I must have misspoken: what I meant was ‘I make my own way in life, by the sweat of my own brow, and I will not throw myself at you like the bottom-feeding creatures gyrating to the music on the dance floor. Go bother them, and leave me alone, you statist lackey.’ Sometimes I forget that the underclass has no ear for nuance. It’s one of the reasons we left you all behind, you know.”
A look of bemusement crossed his face, followed by a knowing smile.
“So you’re a professor! The last guy I knew who talked like that was a poly-sci teacher. Huge Marxist. You’d like him.”
“How dare you!” she growled, “I am Dagny Taggart! I am a scion of the railroad industry! And I will not be leered at by some two bit, pencil-pushing, lackwitted agent of this increasingly collectivist government! Especially not when I’m paying your salary!”
His cocky grin finally began to falter. He chuckled wryly.
“It’s funny, you know? That’s the second time you’ve said the salary bit. And it isn’t true. Sure, you probably paid some taxes, and ultimately it’s tax dollars that pay your salary, but if you look at my pay as a tiny piece of that whole pie, and your taxes as a tiny speck of all that revenue, the actual amount of your money in my pocket is downright homeopathic.”
“And then you and your buddies leave society behind, go live in your little hideaway somewhere. Stopped paying any taxes at that point, I’ll bet. And society kept on going.”
His gaze hardened, and he continued.
“Do you know what happened to society when you and your ‘great minds’ ran off and left us to rot? Absolutely nothing. The engineers at Rearden kept on making alloys; they called in the Hellfighters and capped ‘Wyatt’s Torch;’ your company panicked for a few days, but then they reached out to Goldman and set up an IPO. It’ll be trading on the NYSE by the end of the year. They say the third generation always runs a family business into the ground, and that’s when they go public. Atlas shrugged and the world found out it really was a great big rock on a stable orbit around the sun, and Atlas was a delusional narcissist standing on his head.”
She stared at him in disbelief.
“I didn’t even mention… how could you-”
“I couldn’t. It doesn’t make any sense why I’d know any of that. I’m just a vehicle for the author’s self-righteous rant right now. But from what I hear, you like that in a man. Incidentally, it’s pretty ironic that you’d call me a communist. I just killed three of them.”
A chill shot up her spine.
“What?”
He smirked.
“Have you not seen the papers lately? My buddies and I just splashed four MiGs over the Med and somehow we didn’t start World War Three. It’s been ‘on the front page of every newspaper in the English-speaking world.’ Oh, but you wouldn’t care about that. After all, I needed the help of my RIO and my wingman, his RIO, my union-built supersonic fighter… honestly, there wasn’t a boardroom or a C-suite executive anywhere in sight.”
He raised his beer to his posse. Their table roared with laughter as they returned his salute.
Dagny’s fingers splayed wide at the revelation. She fought to keep the thrill out of her voice.
“Perhaps I… misjudged you. Please, have a seat? I’m drinking gin.
“Nah. It’s getting late. Honestly I expected to be outta here with an easy lay half-an-hour ago. But hey, if you wanna get tag-teamed by three or four alpha male MiG hunters…?”
Dagny reached over and downed the rest of her gin in one quick pull. She picked up her handbag and shot him a withering glare.
“Of course I do.”
************
So that’s the first scene. I thought it’d be best to end my excerpt here, for now. The next scene, while very tasteful, is quite graphic. It also contains several clever puns around the idea that a railroad executive is uniquely well-suited to “pull a train.” Plus, it’s interrupted by a seventy-page political diatribe.
I hate this, you guys.
I hate it so much.
In fact, I kind of hate myself for writing it.
It isn’t funny, it isn’t clever – it’s just gross. It’s gross, and I’m gross, and everything is terrible.
Can we just pretend this never happened?
Things I’ve learned from these shows:
Arab-ish people = bad
All drugs = bad
Punkers = bad
Pointless T&A shots = necessary
Family = important
Plot = unimportant
Physics = violable
Angela Lansbury’s career = somehow still beloved
$40 Hold Music = in my head forever
Eating at Chipotle will not give you “Foreign Accent Syndrome”
From the wiki: Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is speech disorder that causes a sudden change to speech so that a native speaker is perceived to speak with a “foreign” accent. FAS is most often caused by damage to the brain caused by a stroke or traumatic brain injury.
If eating chicken at Chipotle can give me an Australian accent I will just ask for a bowl of Guac and chicken forever.
Since you asked, here’s a few suggestions for future episodes:
– Air Wolf
– Highway to Heaven
– My 2 Dads
– Blossom
– Mamas Family
OMG My 2 Dads.
Bosom Buddies perhaps? I just watched this with my wife and I felt strange…but also good.
From what I’ve heard, Larry Wilcox was upset about how much more attention Eric Estrada was getting. Perhaps it affected his performance in his episode.
I vaguely remember seeing this episode when it was on the air. Specifically, I remember the singing portion (I’d totally forgotten the plot about the punk rockers) and thinking, “oh, Lord, who told Eric Estrada he could sing?” It was probably some producer’s decision and not Eric Estrada’s.