Saturday, August 14, 2004

Greatest Dream Ever: Rick Mercer Cartoon Edition

I don't want to forget this dream and its sheer awesomeness so I'll blog it now because it's a damn good idea for a TV show.

First I dream I'm inside a first-person shooter game, with a visual style of Doom but I can do everything, not just move forward and backwards. I am compelled to get across a set of bridges spanning a toxic waste pit. At the end of the first bridge pops out a kakodemon from Doom, floating in the air, looking like a giant tomato like it always did, shooting fire at me. I think "you know, Doom 3 just came out and I'm pretty sure they made you look scarier." The demon responded by shooting fire at me, which hurt like a bastard and caused me to run away. If he had a clever retort I didn't hear it due to the hurting and the running. While I was poking around the scenery before, now I am compelled even more to get across this structure, and to do it quickly, lest the floating tomatoe catches me again. The next bridge has three of the machine gun guys from doom at the end, aimed squarely at me, thanks to a camera zoom move that left the first-person perspective to establish dramatic flair. I'm glad my dream was more concerned with presentation than it was with the fact that I was going to die. This way I know that wihle I may die horribly some time in the future, I'll have the forethought to make it look cool. So I think “well, this is it, you're going down, but you'll make these punks remember you” and I charge at them shooting. At this point I realize I only have the shotgun, it being the stereotypical weapon of the Doom universe. I try strafing but I'm on a bridge, and my movements get ever more erratic, trying to avoid the streams of machine gun bullets. I curse the fact that while it is my dream, I apparently can't control the shotgun reload time, the game's dastardly check on the best weapon there is. I end up moving one step too far in my harried running and shooting and I jump right off the bridge and into the toxic waste pit. The dream shows me falling into the green, glowing water, collapsing to the floor, and staring upwards as the life is sucked out of me. I am then lying at the bottom of this pit thinking "ok, I'm dead, now what?" being unable to move or do anything. This scene then fades and another dream comes in.

The dream-within-a-dream starts off with Rick Mercer introducing the concept of This Hour Has 22 Minutes to a new American audience (my dream world exists outside of Weekend Update or The Daily Show, apparently). He then brings on the other cast members of This Hour and introduces them. "Now, if you've ever been up north, or had good taste in TV, you'd know these names". Next, however, we don't cut to a re-hash of the usual 22 minutes schtick, but a cartoon of a beaver on the phone with a bear. The bear lives in a tent, and the beaver has a paintbrush dripping with rainbow colours, and there's paint everywhere. The beaver says to the moose in an obvious Newfoundland accent “Well did you want dem odder colours or dem odder odder colours?” I'm pretty sure this is a punchline to a super-hilarious joke, but I can't remember the rest of the joke at the moment. Will have to do a searh. Then we cut back to the bear at his tent. Also a slight Newfie accent but only because Mercer is doing his voice as well. As the beaver rides up towards the tent on a little moped we hear the bear say “well, yeah, I do enjoy walking in the woods, your holiness. Yeah, that is a good joke.” At this point I realize the ‘hook” to my dream (yes I keep track of pithability of my dreams while having them, apparently.) It's a cartoon where the characters act out the jokes that they've appeared in, while semi-aware that that's what they're doing. Meta-humour is a big aspect to the show. The visual style is something along the lines of more-skilled Kevin Spencer look, perhaps early South Park. Not sure why Rick Mercer would get the introduction to his own show wrong like that, but I'm sure he was happy to break out of the role he's so deeply typecast into that it encroaches on my dreams. I wake up and I'm torn between thoughts of how Rick Mercer lied to me but that I'm glad he did and why didn't I just re-load a saved game?

By al - 7:35 a.m. |

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