www.bbtmagazine.com
Because Life's too Short Not to Laugh at it

At a recent conference there was a panel on growing your geek. It was basically an examination (or celebration) of everything that’s gone into making some of us the massive nerds we are. It made me look back at of all the elements that made me come to love science fiction, fantasy, horror and humor the way I do. 

You’ll be shocked to know that I enjoyed comics at an early age. Star Wars was my gateway book, followed by the Battlestar Galactica series. Other than that, I was fairly indiscriminant about my comics, occasionally reading the big three: Superman, Spiderman and Batman. Later, there I mixed in The Avengers and the X-Men. 

I remember going to the store with my parents and my friend Mike. He wasn’t really a comic fan, but he browsed the racks with me. In the end, I can’t recall what comic I chose, but I remember the one they bought for Mike: The Unexpected. It wasn’t that I read that book and it changed my life, I’m not really sure I even read it. The reason I remember it so vividly is that Mike kept calling it The Expected. Every time he said it, I was pretty sure something wasn’t right, but he was a little older than I was, so I figured he knew better than I did about matters of language and such.  

The more I thought about it, I wondered exactly what kind of tales The Expected would feature. Not really thrill-a-minute, I guessed.  

What will happen when Jerry foolishly goes to the grocery on a Saturday with a long list of items? He finds everything on his list and waits in a fairly long line – exactly as he anticipated!   

Or… 

Lisa boards a plane for her vacation in Maine and lands at her destination several hours later... as scheduled!  

The Unexpected was one of DC Comics’ versions of The Vault of Horror and the Haunt of Fear that EC Comics published for years. Many writers have cited EC as a source of inspiration in their youth, though none of them were ever treated to Mike’s stories of the mundane. 

To supplement my serious comics, I turned to the Holy Trinity of Satire at the time: Cracked, Crazy and Mad Magazine. All of them made relentless fun of pop culture, occasionally shredding my favorite movies. Crazy made it into the mix mainly because they went ahead and made fun of the X-Men and other comics long before they made it to the big or small screen. 

When my friends got around to introducing me to Monty Python and the Holy Grail in high school, I have to admit I didn’t get all of it. British humor was new to me, and Python was British and beyond. It transcended all attempts at categorization, and was seven or eight kinds of crazy wrapped in a super crunchy crust of nuts. I was heavily into Dungeons and Dragons (A comic book reader AND into D&D? Get out!) right about then, so seeing a knight get all his limbs chopped off yet still coming back for more made me very happy. 

I understood the Holy Hand Grenade, loved the fact that they had coconuts to make horse sounds and quickly memorized the whole witch sequence. What else floats? Small pebbles? But all of the characters turning into cartoons half way through and being chased by an animated dragon, just didn’t make sense. “I fart in your general direction!” almost became a mantra, but “Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelled of Elderberries.” What the hell did that mean? 

I had much to learn, but dozens of repeated viewings helped it all sink in. 

The Twilight Zone was a good source of humor in a speculative vein back then. In the 1980’s you could still occasionally find some of the old episodes on television, there was a brief run of new shows and the magazine was on the newsstand. All three had their fair share of extremely memorable stories that combined science fiction or horror with humor. The writers on the original show, most notably Charles Beaumont, Rod Serling and Richard Matheson had a knack for telling simple stories with that odd little twist that could make it poignant, startling and funny all at the same time. The eighties revival featured great programs written by Stephen King, George R.R. Martin and Harlan Ellison. 

Tales from the Crypt and the Steven Speilberg-produced Amazing Stories were a couple of other anthology-type television series around that time as well; both played up the humor more than Twilight Zone.  I still remember Amazing’s man trapped in a mummy costume episode as one of the funnier installations. 

I don’t think I could make a list of what turned me into the geek that I am without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. This is another show that came along while I was in college and became a staple of my television diet. I preferred the early days of Joel over the later years with Mike, but it was generally a wonderful show no matter who was the frontman. It took everything pop culture had to offer and turned it into a weapon for skewering the worst speculative movies (and some genre flicks) ever. The idea of sitting in a room making fun of bad movies was so simple and struck a chord with me because my friends and I were already doing it (that’s right, I thought up MST3k!), as was everyone else.  

One of my college roommates and I would go to this little video store and take advantage of their rental special which was five movies for five dollars or something crazy like that. And then we’d watch them all in one night. We’d be up until three in the morning, trying to plow through them. We used this special to rent all the movies we could, but ran out of good stuff pretty quickly. So, we started renting films we heard were bad. It was a great set up for our intro to MST3k, especially since we mostly rented science fiction and action movies. 

While Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Manos: The Hands of Fate are considered two of the classics of MST3k, I preferred Catalina Caper, the Godzilla flicks they took on and Prince of Space. 

Another favorite from about that time was (and still is) Bruce Campbell. Army of Darkness is one of the greatest meldings of fantasy and funny ever. A store clerk travels back in time to fight a legion of the undead? With a chainsaw and a shotgun? Come on. Like Holy Grail, repeated viewings have burned the dialogue into my brain. Would you like to hear some? Sure you do. Come on, say it with me: Give me some sugar baby! 

So there you have it, the highlights of what made one speculative fiction fan the big ‘ole fun-loving geek that he is. As I look at my own son, just two years old and wearing his ‘Zombies are the new bunnies’ shirt, I wonder whether he’ll like the same stuff or just roll his eyes every time I pop in MST3k’s lambasting of Puma Man.  

When you’re growing a plant, you drop a seed in the ground and water it. With geeks, do you just add Waterworld? 

Ugh. No. How about Dark Water, that was an alright flick, right? Open Water! Even better. Yeah. Just add Open Water and watch your geek flourish.

By Matt Betts

Matt Betts is a former radio personality whose fiction and poetry appears in various publications, including Kaleidotrope, A Thousand Faces, Ethereal Tales and the Triangulation: Taking Flight anthology. Eventually his robot army will be complete, but for now it’s just the Roomba and a homemade Twiki. Matt can be found blogging on BBT.com and his home site, mattbetts.com.

More Featured Articles