Mind If I Fuck Around In Your Attic?

As recently told in cartoon form on Futurismic's Does Not Equal webcomic, my friends and I used to get together intermittently and do this thing where we'd cue up a random episode of Star Trek: Voyager, play it with the sound off and record ourselves improv-ing (and/or "improving") all the dialogue. My own habitual character was Captain "Hepburn", who I made into an insane, rapacious Mirrorverse sort of harridan with a plastique skeleton and an unshakable belief in her own overwhelming "mental powers" (did you ever notice that if the sound is off, whenever Kate Mulgrew interacts with anybody, she basically looks like she wants to eat them alive? Well, I did).

In my grantedly biased opinion, many of our Voyageur plots--demented though they might be--made far more sense than the originals; the one where Neelix tries to make cheese and it travels through the air-ducts infecting people, for example, which we ret-conned to be about "Spaft" (Tuvok, ie half-Spock, half-Shaft, ALL bad-ass) taking a bunch of Maquis infiltrators on a secret mission to sabotage the ship's heating system, leading everyone on board to try and take over command in increasingly less effective turn (Lt. "Friend", ie Paris: "Say, you mind if I take over the ship? Just once? While you're asleep, maybe?"). Or the one where we all got marooned on a seismic planet full of dinosaurs while aliens took off with our ship--"Hepburn"'s solution to that one was to rent out Ensign "Friend", ie Kim, to a bunch of other aliens in return for a new ship that happened to look exactly like it ("Just send him back when you're done!" "Uh...how will we find you?"). And who could forget our brief visit to the fabled planet of Breastia, complete with tour of their capital city, Nippleopolis? Good times.;)

Yeah, anyhow: This is TEN times funnier than those ever were. Behold the wonder that is “Happy in Paraguay”, a sampling of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes with the sound removed and random dialogue inserted--apparently dictated by whatever it looks like the characters are saying--by the lovely boys at Dayjob Orchestra.

...eh? Eh?

In other news, now it can be told: "Hell Friend" will appear in Clockwork Phoenix 3. Grandmother Yau Yan-er, for the Dragon-boned Lady win!

Once Again...

...Does Not Equal plunders my life for punchlines, here (http://futurismic.com/2009/12/06/the-adventures-of-phil-wade/#comments).

For those who are interested in expansion: My father, Gary Files, is an Australian-born actor whose near-fifty year career spans the likes of Captain Scarlet (he voiced Captain Magenta), Neighbours (he was the nosy git next door, which is how he met Kylie Minogue, Guy Pearce and Natalie Imbruglia long before they were internationally famous) and various theatrical shenanigans, including Australia: The Musical. He also appeared opposite Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark, where he played the New York forensics expert who tries to debunk her claim that dingoes ate her baby.

And he rocked a stint on the CBC kids' show Polka Dot Door, too--as "the guy" part of the host couple, which means he did time inside the suit playing their Snuffleupagus-style mascot, "Polkaroo" (who, coincidentally, was somehow never around for anybody but "the girl"). Hate to ruin anybody's dreams, but he told me it smelled like vomit in there. Ha!

Oh, yes: It's a hard-knock life, being brought up on the outskirts of showbiz.;)