Notes From the Narrator: Top 3: Fictional Works of Fictional I Wish Were Real

It looks like its going to be a Top 3 kind of week.

I keep perusing around the avclub.com and they have a lot of interesting subjects but not many interesting responses. They have their writer's respond to reader questions, but none of their writer's seem to get real creative with their answers. Or other times they try and be two clever. I find it hard to believe the people writing for that website could be so dull.

The most recent Q&A I read dealt with which fictional work of fiction did the writer's wish actually existed. If that's confusing let's take a moment to go through an example. The easiest example is of course, fake movie trailers. There are two prominent examples, we will go through both of them. First 2008's comedy blockbuster, Tropic Thunder. Tropic Thunder began with a whole host of fake movie trailers. There was Robert Downey Jr. playing the method actor role in his forbidden priest love-fest Satan's Alley. Jack Black's Mike Meyers/Eddie Murphy skewing comedy The Fatties: Fart 2. And Ben Stiller's worn out action hero franchise Scorcher VI. Now imagine you'd like to see one of those made into a real film, that's the idea. Unfortunately, none of the above mentioned trailers are YouTube. So let;s try again.

The other example of fake (or apparently faux is the more appropriate term) trailers is the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature Grindhouse. The film included fake trailers before the film as well as after the intermission. The fun thing about these trailers was that they were directed by some pretty well know directors, and featured some pretty big name stars. The other fun aspect about these trailers is that not one, but two of them were actually made into feature films. The first you may be familiar with, it goes by the name, Machete.

The other is a little more obscure. To promote the film in Canada the film distributor there held a contest for amateur film maker's to submit their own trailers, with the winner appearing along with the other "real" fake trailers. The winner was a trailer for a film called Hobo with a Shotgun. This was made into an actual film that premiered at the beginning of this summer in a very limited release.

So that's the general idea? Get it? Probably not, I did a pretty poor job of explaining it, but anyway here are my top three fictional works of fiction I wish were real.

1. Thanksgiving (film directed by Eli Roth)
As long as we're talking about Grindhouse, I might as well thrown in my favorite trailer I would like to see be made into a real movie.

I'm not a huge horror fan, but I do like Eli Roth, even though he hasn't really done a whole lot in his career. There is so much to love about this trailer, from the croaky bored voice giving the narration, to the absolutely ridiculous plot line. Of all the holidays that are in need of a good horror film, Thanksgiving is probably at the top of the list. Plus I can appreciate any film that can come up with creative new ways of killing people. As a comedian I recently saw on Comedy Central once said (and I'm paraphrasing): A gun is a tool with one purpose, if you point a gun at me, I know you want to kill me. A knife however, a knife is versatile. If a pull out a knife, I could stab you, I could open letter, I could frost a cake.

2. George Stark Novel's

Who is George Stark, you say? I respond, a character in a Stephen King novel? You ask, who is Stephen King? I tell you to get the hell off my blog.
Follow me if you will down the twisted path of one of my favorite King tales, The Dark Half.
The Dark Half was published in 1989 (year I was born, coincidence? probably) and is in a small way a partial autobiography of King himself. At this time King had recently retired the pseudonym Richard Bachman, under which he had published a handful of novels. The plot of The Dark Half, similarly, revolves around an author named Thaddeus Beaumont who kills off his psuedonym George Stark. The parallel continues as King's Bachman books (as they have come to be known) were known to be darker in a more psychological sense than in King's more traditional supernatural style. The same was true of Beaumont's George Stark novel's. However the differences begin to arise when George Stark actually comes to life and starts killing those close to Thad Beaumont.
George Stark wrote a series of roughly four novels focused on the psychotic killer named Alexis Machine. The prose is delightfully simple, dark, plain, and violent. There are some fantastic tease's of these books that King uses to divide the chapters of The Dark Half, and I would love to see King flesh one of them out into a full-length novel, or maybe write a few novella's that were collected into one work.

3. Expose (Fake TV from Lost)
Lost's third season was riddled with difficulties and triumphs. One of the biggest failures of Lost was an experiment that needed that needed to be tested. Between the second and third season's fans were beginning to wonder what the rest of the castaways were up to while our heroes were off fighting smoke monsters and discovering buried hatches. So Lost tried to integrate some of the background players into the main story. These players went by Nikki and Paulo and were universally despised by fans the moment they stepped onto the screen. The third season of Lost was also home to another experiment where the execs at ABC tried to string as many new episodes together as possible by airing a short six episode run in the fall, with the rest of the season running uninterrupted in the spring. The break in the season was also despised by fans but offered the writer's to course correct themselves. In their one and only back-story episode, Nikki was found to be an actress on a syndicated television program called Expose. The show was about secret agent stripper who had to go up against none other, than Billy Dee Williams.

Hello Readers, welcome to the cool side of the blog

This was maybe the one redeeming factor of the Nikki/Paulo story line, and it was a great one. And hey if it's good enough for Hurley, it's good enough for me.

There you go, but wait! There's more!
In a first time ever move, I offer my Top 3 Honorable Mentions

1. Gumbel to Gumbel (TV show from Family Guy)
Family Guy's commentary on fan-favorite shows being cancelled by networks took the form of this fake TV Show starring Greg and Bryant Gumbel as beach cops.

2. Kickpuncher (Movie from Community)
One of Troy and Abed's favorite movie's, they liked it so much they made their own version:

3. Any of the Lucas Lee films (From Scott Pilgrim vs. The World)
One of the many highlights of this film was Chris Evan's playing one of Romano's evil exes. Once a pro skateboarder, now a big time action movie, Lucas Lee is the star of some of the most wonderfully idiotic action films of our time. If only we could a full length version. Just check out the taglines to some of these posters: