So I was reading the latest Twilight snark thread, and was thinking about how sparkly vampires are possibly the stupidest idea ever. Sorry, make that sparkly faux-vegetarian vampires. Let us repeated that again. Sparkly. Vampires. Holds up a cross to ward off the stupid
I was wondering what other dumb concepts are floating around out there. Is there anything that can top the sheer WTFness of SPARKLY VAMPIRES? I personally doubt it, but give it your best shot.
Note: I’m not asking about bad writing, or weird ideas. I am talking about mind-bogglingly dumb ones. Also, please rate your nominations with the Smacky Guy Scale, with :smack: being “mildly dumb” and :smack::smack::smack: being “nearly as bad as the Sparklepires”.
Sailing a wooden ship to the North Pole 1n the 1790s? (Frankenstein)
Flying to Mars on a magic carpet? (Lt. Gullivar Jones)
Flying to Mars with even less? (A Princess of Mars)
See, I have my own hypothesis on that. I think that John Carter wasn’t just of Mars, but was literally Mars, as in the Greco-Roman god. Think about it: He’s apparently immortal, he’s immune to and adept in telepathy beyond the abilities of Earthlings or Barsoomians, he’s the Solar System’s absolute top master of every form of combat known, he can travel through space through nothing more than his own willpower… Clearly, the dude isn’t human.
While I’ve never read the books myself ( they didn’t sound appealing ), there’s the Libertarian near utopia in by Michael Z. Williamson’s Freehold books ( which realistically would disintegrate into a Social Darwinian hellhole almost immediately ), and his outright silly Earth government. The tyrannical Earth government is a logically inconsistent mishmash of everything the author dislikes; a society that tracks everyone via implants yet can’t track down criminals; a society that ruthlessly mass murders people, but that issues nonlethal ammo to it’s troops as a default because they are soft compared to the he-man Freeholders. An impoverished society where everyone is fat. A society with massive taxation that appears to do little with that money, including train and equip it’s military. A society that can repair such things as spine damage and missing limbs, but is hampered by sending disabled people into combat out of political correctness.
As far as sparkly vampires go, I wouldn’t call that “stupid” at all. Stylistically appropriate for vampires, but not stupid.
See, at least this makes a sort of sense. John Carter looks at Mars and wishes to go to Mars, and somehow he is transported to Mars. No pseudoscience, no experimental science-y mishaps, no rattletrap spaceships. Just pure wish-fulfillment. Don’t bother explaining it, the author merely waves his hand and John Carter arrives on Mars.
I think MST3K would disagree with you on that, Skald. Overwhelming badness attracts mockery like flies.
I think maybe what you’re trying to say is that overwhelmingly bad movies that you expected to be good are too heart-breaking to mock.
It’s a thought-provoking piece, but some of his examples were poorly chosen. He read a story where Tigra was humiliated by a C-list villain, the Hood; I read a longer storyline where a C-list villain shot up the super-villain ladder by beating Tigra, Wolverine and Dr. Strange, and became an A-list villain in the process. He says the Tigra story looked like a rape scene in some respects; did he even notice that Wolverine, king badass of the Marvel superheroes, was literally (though temporarily) emasculated by his fight with Hood? Say what you will about Parker Robbins, he doesn’t pick harmless targets.
As for the statue of Mary Jane: She’s provocatively posed, and she’s doing Spider-Man’s laundry. To the first: So what? She’s a professional lingerie model. Provocative poses are her bread and butter. As for the second, no, she’s not doing her husband’s laundry in this scene (although I can’t imagine why that would be a problem). This is re-creating a scene much earlier in their relationship where she finds his costume and discovers once and for all that he is Spider-Man. It depicts arguably the third most famous drawing of the character (after her introduction and the cover of the wedding issue).
Power Girl good, Ms. Marvel bad? They’re the same character. Both were created in 1976 by Gerry Conway as shirttail female versions of a more famous male character. Both had troubled initial tenures on the big team, ending with a mysterious accelerated pregnancy. Both have acceleratedly fetishistic costumes. I’m at a loss to think of one substantial difference between the two.
Watched “Red Dawn” the other night. Ripping yarn, interesting premise, EXCEPT. A daughter asked, “The kids in the school were not in Duck’n’Cover mode, though the East and West coasts have been nuked and the Soviets and Cubans are parachuting troops into BFE, Colorado? A town with no strategic potential? Why did they do that? How did their transports not get blown out of the sky by militiamen with Stingers who’ve been praying for this day all their lives?”
OK, she didn’t express her strategic and tactical misgivings quite like that. What she did say was, “Are they crazy? Everybody out there has guns and wants to kill Commies.” And yet, they are making a sequel.
Actually, the ship wasn’t going to the North Pole – it was exploring the Arctic, and going as far north as it could. The trip was in the summer, so it is a very good representation of how Arctic explorers would go about it (considering the fact it was written in 1818, it clearly was written based upon actual polar expeditions of the time).
The dumbest I can think of is in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Not only does it strain disbelief that a solar eclipse occurs at precisely the right time to save Hank Morgan from being burned at the stake, but he somehow remembers the date of the eclipse, evidently memorizing it just in case something like this happened.
Well, to be fair, they used it in King Solomon’s Mines, too, which was written at about the same time. And fifty years later in TinTin.
It would all be totally absurd, except for the fact that Columbus actually did use this ploy to save his life, convincing the local Caribbean natives that he had godlike power, and could summon the eclipse. That’s not historical myth – it really did happen. He was in the right place at the right time to capitalize on his knowledge of the eclipse.
So the only part of the thing in Connecticut Yankee was that Hank Morgan happened to know exactly when a sixth century eclipse would take place (the guys in King Solomon’s Mines had an almanac, as did Columbus). But I can accept that if Morgan’s the kind who dockets odd facts, which he seems to have been.
I wrote an article on this for Teemings, which I’d have linked to, except that it’s no longer on-line.
“Magic Realism.” May not be the worst, but when you hear how wonderful Gabriel Garcia Marquez is, and on the third or forth page you have blood running uphill I lose interest.
But I’m disqualified because I’m a baseball fan and about the same time I put down “Field of Dreams” when I first read “build it and they will come.” Never finished it.
But I still wouldn’t, I think. JR Rowling’s works obviously allow me to suspend the laws of the natural world. But I’m not prepared to if I’m not warned first.
I think it’s mentioned somewhere in the movie that the objective of invading rural Colorado was to secure passes across the Rockies. Which makes sense if you can swallow the idea of an all-out invasion of the continental US in the first place.
I’m not sure that they referenced any widespread nuking of the coasts, though. I recall some reference to someplace like St. Louis being nuked in some sort of show of force, but otherwise the premise was that the invaders didn’t especially want to nuke what they were trying to conquer, and the US was hesitant to use such weapons on its own soil (some sort of Soviet “Star Wars” defense making strategic retaliation unfeasible).
I was looking desperately through Capt. Walton’s journal for something that would imply that he was looking for a northwest passage or a northernmost journey or anything at all along those lines, but it explicitly stated that his goal was to sail to the North Pole. This is from the first edition, not the more popular third edition, if that makes a difference.
