Bugs Bunny is falling through the air! Oh, wait. He lands on Daffy’s nose, jumping off to the sound of a spring like the one on the molding that keeps my door from hitting the wall. Somewhere a slide whistle imitates his descent to the earth while holding an umbrella. Up in the sky the stork and the ducks from Duck Hunt fly in fear and sweat as the V-legion of hawks behind them arrive to do their evil.
A mountain with green at its base rises off to the portside of the merchant ship Midterm. It sways portentously on a sea bathed in red sunset. Porky Pig spies through the telescope the hawks off in the distance, jumps up and shrieks, trips and falls backward into the captain’s quarters as the windowed doors clamp shut behind him. There is a scurry on deck as everybody runs to the starboard side, though the birds are portside. It is no longer certain what they are looking at. The lineup: Miss Piggy, the boy from Spy Kids, Kermit the Frog, and Gonzo. Winnie the Pooh wanders off in the background somewhere. The evil comes.
Without warning, the pool boy from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody leaps out of the water as a mermaid with his mermaid henchman, from Atlantis, surrounds Winnie the Pooh and heaves him over the edge!
“What are you doing?” shouts the boy from Spy Kids.
“It’s okay. The king will be safe underwater with us,” replies the pool boy. Winnie the Pooh has confounded us all with his pokey disguise! The king!
“But he can’t breathe!”
“My people are there to help him just under the surface.”
“Why aren’t you taking us?” demands Sigourney Weaver, presumably arriving from below deck, but, considering her work, possibly outer space.
“You must stay here and defend the king’s escape.”
The camera zooms in on Weaver, a knife in her face from the threatening merman. “Do you really think that killing me and my unborn baby will accomplish your goal?” she yells angrily. She is suddenly pregnant. There is a possibility that it is a normal human child, but it could also tear through her torso as an alien at any moment. You never know.
The merman backs off and jumps into the water to slip away just before the attack.
Somewhere on the East Coast, a man sits at his desk in an office of meager furnishing, reading the day’s newspaper with a small color television on in the back right corner of his workspace reporting the news of the weekend.
“The ship was abandoned in the middle of…”
“The Midterm,” he thinks. “That sounds vaguely familiar. Oh, well.” As it turns out, Sigourney Weaver is his wife, though through the power of dramatic irony, he has no clue she was on that vessel.
He folds the paper backward and reaches to turn the radio dial on the right side of the box to change it to a comedy act when the manager bustles in and stabs the top of it with a number two Ticonderoga pencil. The television deflates immediately into a rubber heap on the desk as the man sits and watches dumbfounded at his boss.
“This is the third time I’ve caught you with one of these damn color TVs in your office! No excuses! Why can’t you just watch your Bio-TV like Johnson over there?”
Johnson, a large black man, very much like a real-life Cleveland from Family Guy, walks by in a large yellow suit that looks like a biohazard suit. On the plastic visor that shield the face is the comedy act the man at the desk was watching. He waves and keeps going.
On the desk lies the newspaper, open to an article about the Bio-TV:
The Bio-TV has been very successful in it sales in the last three quarters, supplanting the need for a tabletop television. Their marketing scheme includes the idea of weight loss with the inclusion of a pill that keeps you from needing to eat for months, coming through with many studies showing this to be fairly accurate. However, while the pill keeps the eater from being hungry, it does not provide the loss of weight advertised.
“I ate it, and I wasn’t hungry for three months. Then I pooped a lot. I still weigh 250 pounds,” claims Johnson. “It didn’t do much for me, but I can still watch TV.”
The ink fades gray into the page and grows brighter. There is music in the whiteness that envelops me.
