|
Episode # in order of airing: 37 (aired 11/11/66)
Episode # in order of filming: 40 (pc 6609) Apparent J/A intimacy: *** They have been much more intimate in many more episodes. Compelling plot holes to be spackled: the ending! Boo, thoughtless Jim, hiss! Importance of having this on a pimping tape: * No. H/C & Angst potential: Nope, quite chipper and efficient. Both are the very model of the postbellum homosexual. Jim beauty: ****** Stupid episode, but our boyfriends look fabulous. Artie beauty: ****** See the ‘bove. General bizarreness of episode/bad script writing: Part Elvis movie, part Ian Fleming, mostly junk. Fashion note: Jim’s taupe suit. When I can’t sleep at night, I think about this suit. Where did it come from? Where did it go? Who on earth would pair taupe with a poison-blue tie as they do here? Wouldn’t the suit look much better if Jim wore a pink tie? But maybe Bob refused to wear a pink tie? And besides taupe is Artie’s color anyway. So, since we never see the suit ever again, I guess Jim goes back to the Wanderer only to have Artie cry, “take it off, take it off, goddam you, taupe is MY color.” And Jim bursts into tears. “Oh, Artie, I love you so much, I only wanted to be like you a little,” he says as he grabs Artie’s lapels, “You know I want to be the food you eat, the water you drink, the very air that fills your large moist lungs!” And Artie presses Jim to his spacious bosom and, and, and kisses him to his very toe tips and then Jim says, “Artie dearest, I could never do anything to upset you. Just let me set this stupid suit on fire. Yes, that’s it; I’ll just throw it in the stove!” But by this time Artie is as aroused a shark in heat and he disposes of the whole taupe-Jim-suit issue by shredding it as he gives Jim a sixty-minute love/anger-fueled fuck. “Bruise me, brand me, love me,” Jim moans as he just barely hangs on. Recap: Hey, it’s the ep of WWW that inspired “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”. I mean the coincidences are too many to be mere . . . . coincidence. Okay, it starts off in San Francisco at night, naturally, where Jim is wearing his short-lived taupe suit (it’s so tight and so pale, I wonder if he looked naked on b/w television sets) and he’s cruising about, just looking for rough taupe trade, I suppose. Anyway, he takes out a key and lets himself into what turns out to be Pee-wee’s Post-Modern Saloon! Now where’d he get the key to this exclusive bar? Hmm. At any rate, there are two, count them, two people in this maniacally over-decorated bar. One is the barkeep, and the other is a mermaid combing her hair as part of an odd little tableau vivant behind the bar. She smirks at Jim, and Jim smirks right back. Then he sits at the over-decorated table and gives himself the oddest little smile (he’s all like “I bet ARTIE could tell me how to fuck a mermaid.”) There’s also a lot of glittery blowfish suspended from the ceiling, and one glittery blowfish starts talking to Jim in a madman-taking-over-the-world-way. Then the mermaid blows a poison dart at Jim from a conch shell, and Jim makes faces and collapses. Next thing we know, everything’s completely changed. I mean everything. Jim is on board a gambling ship (the ur-Mr. Lucky!) with a self-described “woman of the evening” (I’m pretty sure it’s the mermaid again) and she powders her nose with a jeweled compact and simultaneously a sort of Chinese-looking dragon comes up out of the briny and blasts the boat to smithereens. Jim barely survives by clutching a mast and the jeweled compact which he has somehow acquired. Credits. (Now, wasn’t that a hell of an opening?) Okay, now Jim is shirtlessly wandering around the Wanderer while the most wooden and least talented actor ever pretends to be a naval officer. The actor is named John Ashley, and I think he’s a friend of RC’s. For one thing, he co-produced AND appeared in RC’s Philippine blaxloitation movie “Sudden Death”. Plus he was a Warner Brother’s contract boy back in the day with RC; John Ashley’s version of “Hawaiian Eye” was 1960-61’s “Straightaway” and he played a character named “Clipper”, which I have to say I like as a name. None of this matters, however, because John Ashley is just the worst actor ever. He ineptly makes heavily ironic remarks about the mermaid and dragon and stuff. Then Artie comes in, and John Ashley looks EVEN MORE inept against Ross’s perfect blend of incredulous patience. (This is what makes RM such a great actor. He really knows how to modulate, to give when he needs to, and to need when he needs to, too. Oh, he’s ravishing.) And Jim’s still shirtless, so they sexily bitch about John Ashley’s incompetence for a while. Then Artie looks at THE clue, which is that jeweled compact. Oh, it’s the CONNECT THE DOTS LALALA CONNECT THE DOTS LALALA part of this preemptive homage to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Artie notices that the jewels on the compact make a dotted pattern which, when connected, turns out to be a dragon, just like the one that blew up the boat before the credits! Our heroes! Jim gets dressed (now, is Jim supposed a preemptive version of the overdressed, over muscled, completely be-chapped Cowboy Curtis in this homage? Well, only if you follow my tortured efforts at parallels). He and Artie then go to a nautically-themed Thrift Village which is owned and operated by (more astounding coincidences) Pee-wee’s Cap’n Carl! Cap’n Carl offers billions of dollars for the compact, but no dice. They ain’t selling. Meanwhile, somebody’s peeking through the wall at them through a dragon-themed glory hole. Cool! Sp Jim takes Artie back to Pee-wee’s Saloon; only now there’s no mermaid, only a barelegged King Neptune in the tableau vivant oh, I get it! The gay theme wasn’t obvious enough!! There’s a big fight, and surely Jim does not actually kill King Neptune, but it appears that he does. There’s more stuff. Jim’s kidnapped (while Artie escapes) and tied spread-eagled to a pink satin bed (in what will turn out to be one of the most heavily screen capped WWW moments ever!) Who did this dastardly deed! Why, it’s an evil Nazi with a retinue of gondoliers! (Love the retinue of gondoliers.) See, the evil Nazi’s plan to take over the world has him claiming ownership of the entire Pacific Ocean! “Dere are countries mate of land, and dere are countries mate of land und vater, but I vill haff the only country mate completely of vater!” Hey, good idea! Except for the fact that his country probably won’t do very well in the 1876 Olympics due to the fact that he has to depend on dolphins in the shot-put competition. And mermaids are lousy at the fifty-yard dash. And the big narrative arc is that the evil Nazi is going to commit evil Nazi acts until President Grant signs the Pacific Ocean over to him. (“Fair enough,” hiccups Ulysses, “you can’t drink sea water.”) The evil Nazi’s current evil focus is on blowing up Admiral Farragut. BLOWING UP ADMIRAL FARRAGUT, everyone says with emotional italics. Yup, that’s the plan, that and deploying the force field he’s invented. It is one superwooper force field which can utterly disintegrate you, but the problem is that the superwooper force field, like cheap packing tape, is a great idea, but, also like cheap packing tape, it can turn against you pretty quickly. Meanwhile, Artie, who is being followed by other members of the gondolier retinue, sweeps down an alleyway in his taupe cloak (taupe is too HIS color, goddammit). Then he comes back out disguised as a blond Danish sailor. Very nice, I must say. The blond bangs and watch cap bring out those soulful black eyes. But listen, are sailors traditionally Danish? Is there some Dane/Sailor thing I don’t know about? See, there’s a significant Danish sailor in Melville’s “Billy Budd” (wow: wouldn’t “Billy Budd” make a great lost episode of WWW, with Artie doing a double role as the evil Claggart and the ambiguous Vere both in love with the always half-naked and Christ-like Billy Budd as played by Jim!). (Knowing what I know about Herman Melville’s nautically inspired love life, I think he would love WWW. I bet Herman Melville would like “Hawaiian Eye” too, except he’d hate Connie Stevens as “Cricket”. I just have that intuition.) (Gee, my degree in English IS useful.) When Artie comes out of the alley as the Danish sailor, he passes the vixen/mermaid in a wagon and she recognizes him as Artie. Oh, this vixen/mermaid that keeps lurching through is played by Jocelyn Lane, which permits me to make up a new drinking rule: Drink whenever you see somebody who was in an Elvis movie! She was the King’s candy in “Tickle Me” and is pretty inconsequential to us, but do you know that in real life Jocelyn Lane married a PRINCE. Honest yeah huh!!! A real prince and then became the mother of a real princess! Now, there’s a career path, girls. (Oh, guess what, the guy who plays the Nazi, John van Dreelen’s mother was a countess. I bet all that royalty made Rob and Ross laugh. “Yeah, well, I’m the count of Chicago,” Bob says, and then Ross adds, “And I’m the archduke of the Lower East Side!” and then they hug and giggle the way they do at the end of “Bottomless Pit”.) Anyways, Jocelyn tells the gondoliers to chase Artie down, which they do, and they take Artie back to where Jim is tied up and tie them up and there we have it. Jim cuts them both free with his boot-knife and then they beat up guards. And then there are cellars and more force fields and more beat-up stunt men and the fake dragon again and bright red barrels of gun powder (like those in Colonel Vautrain’s closet!) and maniacal braggadocio and somehow Jocelyn gets on board John Ashley’s ship to BLOW UP FARRAGUT (and pulls a gun on him, yay!, but doesn’t kill him.) Then she kinda outwits Artie and John Ashley both, which I seriously doubt would happen and activates the torpedo-dragon, but Jim swims over and, using a magic coin Artie gave him, blows up the dragon. Tadah! Hmmm: now I remember why I always forget what happens in the end of this episode. Artie’s half naked, so that’s great, but he’s got a cold and he’s soaking his feet in a hip bath. Which is not so sexy. Guess what: Jim doesn’t care! Jim says he has a date! What a jerk! “Don’t forget to take your pills, Artie”, he smirks and walks off. Then Artie drops one of the pills in the water he’s soaking his feet in and it explodes (well, why?) and they roll the credits. Mean. Mean and senseless, that’s all I can say. Although I will add that stunt man Robert Herron played the bartender here (he played Tigo too) and, according to IMDB, was also in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” Wow! So we can all sleep safe tonight, knowing life does contain a few bits of connective tissue. |