I’m sure some of you would rather discuss Proust, or who liked Michael Chabon first, before he was cool, but none of that for me! I would like to talk about a YouTube video I saw last week co-starring a naked orange. I originally encountered this as a photo composite of still frames, and then I noticed at the bottom of the photo, it stated this was part of a film. Unsure of whether or not there was an accompanying film, or if someone on the internets was just dumb, I consulted YouTube, and lo, there was indeed a video.
I am prepared to say the photo and the film are among the cutest things I have ever seen on the internet (and I have a sub-folder in the My Photos album of Google-searched pictures of the polar bear Knut when he was a baby!), but my concern is not about their cuteness. The photo and film seem to tell different stories. This is what we shall discuss, if you will be so kind.
So here is what I would like you wonderful people to do: Please view this photo, and then watch this [short video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqQQrLPdyws\) --in this order!-- and tell me what you think. For those of you at work, or otherwise concerned about volume, feel free to mute. There is no dialogue. There is a song in the background which is fitting of the video, but is not needed.
Now then, please tell me three adjectives you would use to describe each.
Here’s my reaction:
[spoiler]Photo:
Cute
Sad
Funny
Film:
Cute
Happy(?)
That-orange-is-still-a-whore![/spoiler]
Okay, so I cheated a bit. My point isn’t really to force you to state your opinion in three adjectives, no more, no less. I’d like your opinion of the first, with no context of the second, then the second with context of the first, and then your opinion of the whole damn shebang. Please feel free to cheat in your answers.
The photos reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode where the people characters don’t realize they’re really oranges in a refrigerator, though we find out that fact at the end. But the audience doesn’t actually get to see their people forms. It is all very sad. They have to drink because of all the existential misery.
The movie: Two oranges are hitting it off famously until the spectral Arm & Hammer Baking Soda made that damned banana come over and wreck everything. Bananaman’s eyes told Orangelina, “Honey, you have a lovely body, and you are sweeter than an orange milkshake!” Sure enough, Orangelina was soon caught in flagrante delicto with Bananaman. Well, Orangelo went through a pretty rough patch, and would have ended it all, but Orangelina revealed to him that she was pregnant with twin tangerines and a kumquat, proving they were his. They got married, and they all lived happily ever after on the top rack of the fridge, except for Bananaman, who was turned into a loaf of banana bread offscreen.
When I click the link for the video, I get this: The URL contained a malformed video ID. Then it goes to a Travolta movie trailer.
The pics are cute, tho.
Well my opinion is that the photos make Orangelina look like a skank. She runs off with a big banana who just wants be grafted with her (“Hey that’s not my navel! Yeah well, that’s not my stem”). And Orangelina leaves Orange to cry in his booze.
They also make Orange look like a pansy. He’s whining and crying about her, boo fucking hoo. He probably even made a post to the SDOB, (Your direct line to thousands of the smartest, hippest fruits on the planet, plus a few total vegetables) about how women are attracted to bad bananas and how nice guys finish last.
Now the video shows Orangelina in a little better light. Yeah sure, she get’s down and dirty with the first banana to juice her up, but she also saves Orange from becoming a Screwdriver.
Someone else said they all lived happily ever after, but there’s no way. She squeezes out a few tangerines and her looks go to hell. She ends up another Kate. Crabby and bitchy because the plantains don’t give her another look.
Orange turns into a John and goes chasing a couple of cherries around and spreading seeds everywhere.
The little clementines eventually . . . well we all know what happened to those little “darlings”.
Another citrus family gone to the pits.
But then again, I could be wrong. Sometimes a fruit is just a fruit.
See now, when I first saw the photo, I thought I’d seen just about the cutest thing on the internets, even if there was a sad ending. The story to me was Orange finds his gal, Orangelina, boning Bananaman. Orange is sad, then drinks himself to sleep. I suppose this may have been a little dark for something so utterly adorable, but that was the story.
The film story is essentially the same, except with a happy ending. Orange meets a gal, takes to her, then gal starts boning someone else. Orange because distraught to the point of being suicidal, but everyone kisses and makes up, and they get back together and have one big happy family. I had a bit of a hard time seeing that as a happy story. “So he had a bunch of babies with the whore? And that made him happy?” I thought. Now I reckon in real life relationships people make mistakes, are forgiven by their partners, then both parties go on to be happy, but since we’re making up stories, I say a better happy ending would have been for him to find sweet, different lady orange, Orangette perhaps, and settle down with her. Then my response would have been “Yay!”
