...nobody knows anything about this except for five people I know.

So instead, I’ll focus on other TV shows that made the leap to the big screen with the original cast (or at least most of it) in tact.  This is not about the remakes.  Here are some TV Shows That Tried To Find New Life In Film.  Some did; some didn’t.  Awesome Battle, begin!

WE’RE GONNA STICK WITH THIS MOVIE THING FOR AWHILE

These were the TV shows that had either finished their run (Star Trek: The Original Series), were about to finish their run (The Muppets Show, Star Trek: The Next Generation), or barely had a run at all (the short-lived Naked Gun), but went on to produce more motion pictures than thought possible.  These are the successes.  These are the ones that the cinema kept alive… even up to now.

The Muppet Show - Star Trek: TOS & TNG - Naked Gun

WE’RE GONNA GO BACK TO TV A LITTLE WHILE LONGER

It’s weird that this group mostly consists of cartoons.  These are the TV shows that decided to release a movie to capitalize on the boob tube success, and in many ways, they did.

• Transformers: The Movie was released in 1986 to reboot the toy line and cartoon series, and how did it do that?  It killed most of the original cast.  It’s officially time to throw out Optimus Prime to buy Rodimus Prime.
• Beavis and Butt-Head Do America extended the show one more season, but it must have also entered it into the nostalgia lexicon.  It returned to MTV with a new season late last year.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut came out somewhere around season 3 or 4.  The show just finished its fifteenth season.  Oh, my god!  They didn’t kill this show!
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters should have killed ATHF, but it didn’t.  I saw this at the show.  It was horrible!  This happened in 2007.  The show is still on the air.
• The X-Files: Fight the Future got me to watch the season before the film was to be released.  I wasn’t a fan of the show prior to that, but I knew a fair amount of its mythology.  (I’d only watch it here and there for the random, spooky episodes.)  The show went on for four more years.  Somehow.  The revelations in the movie were boring.  And I think they changed all the mysteries anyway.  Long story short, I stopped watching the show; others didn’t.

Transformers - Beavis and Butt-Head - South Park - The X-Files - Aqua Teen Hunger Force

WE’RE JUST LUCKY TO HAVE ONE MOVIE

These shows probably shouldn’t have had movies, but because of the fans, they did.

Kids in the Hall begat Brain Candy; Twin Peaks begat Fire Walk With Me; Firefly begat Serenity; Strangers with Candy begat Strangers with Candy; and for some reason… when no one was asking, The X-Files begat I Want to Believe.  They were trying to pull an ol’ Star Trek: TOS on us.  You’ll have to do better than pedo-priest and severed heads, Chris Carter.  Mulder needs his Khan.

Kids in the Hall - Twin Peaks - Firefly - Strangers with Candy - The X-Files

WE’RE NOT GOING TO COUNT THESE

Any film based on Saturday Night Live skits is not up for discussion at this time.

And I didn’t include Monty Python because they’re British.

Now, I know that Kids in the Hall are Canadian, and I added them up above.  And they, too, were produced by SNL’s Lorne Michaels.  But they’re already in the Photoshopped image, so nyah.

These are just the tip of the fishbowl.

As you can see, the latest incarnation of the mascot is fond of sunglasses.  He’s also fond of having a name: Finn.  In fact, there are many characters in the commercials, which is weird, since it’s mostly geared at kids (I presume), and the kids eat them.  Hrm.

What’s weird is I don’t eat Goldfish Crackers of any variety.  And I’ve never seen any commercials.  But last night I had a dream in which Finn changed his look to this:

(Fairly Accurate) Artistic Representation

DREAM INGREDIENTS: Five tall Coors Light drafts, one turkey and cheese Lunchable (can Lunchables be singular?), and a peanut butter-covered bagel.

To having your voice over dubbed (or playing a voice actor’s body) in this TurboTax commercial:

Just Shitty, I’d imagine.  But compared to these other shittier commercials, this one is The Shit.

DUMB AS SHIT

Airborne Effervescent Tablets not only rip-off an old special effect from a 1992 movie, it contains one of the dumbest looking and sounding animated spokescharacters I’ve ever seen.  Mix that with the lawsuit Airborne faced a couple years ago regarding misleading advertising, and it wins being Dumb as Shit.  (I was going to make an inappropriate comment about the tablets not giving the woman her boobs back, but I opted not to.)

ANNOYING AS SHIT

I like the J. Geils Band, and I’m sure that Energizer Lithium Batteries work great, but the version of the music used in this ad drives me up the wall.  It butchers the hook, and keeps going and going and going…

CRAPPY AS SHIT

Happy’s Pizza is a local pizzeria (natch), and this is the commercial they ran around Halloween last year.  I’ve written about how poor their ad department is before, but this one takes the cake pizza pie.

The HeartMark™ is trademarked?!

Trends.

They’re always stupid.  Pet rocks, sequenced gloves, pogs… and now this.  The inescapable heart hand gesture.  It’s everywhere.

Aeroswift™

But would you believe some lady “claims” to have the trademark on it?

This lady looks like she makes many "claims"...

She even licenses it out allegedly (although it just looks like she just made a list of places she’s seen it used and retroactively authorized it).

(SIDENOTE: Did she donate the gesture to Show Your Hearts?  It could be a tax write-off.)

My hope is that it actually is trademarked, and that she’s making bank on its pervasiveness.

I mean, what she claims is not impossible.  She could figured it out during a round of This is the church and this is the steeple gone bad.  I haven’t seen it in use until recent years, and it seems like a simple gesture to devise.

But was she the one who told Taylor Swift about it?  Because Swift claims she invented it, and her fans claim that Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, et. al. stole it from her.

All that matters is did this woman really trademark what she calls The HeartMark™?  Because I have an idea of my own:

My trademark... Deez Nuts™.

Seriously.

You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.

Click this picture to read the Amazon reviews.

I’m not about to jump on the bandwagon of slamming some misguided, self-righteous kid, but boy… do I want to.  This is one of those situations best illustrated by illustrations I made to defend Justin Bieber:

By hating on McKay Hatch and his No Cussing Club, you only make his message stronger.  But then he goes and makes videos like this, and it takes you somewhere completely different:

The only reason I know about him and his fruitless endeavor is because he came out against an episode of Modern Family in which the toddler Lily says:

Fudge.

That’s really what she said in real life.  Fudge.  They just bleeped it out like Jimmy Kimmel does in his Unnecessary Censorship:

And he wonders why he’s “the most cyberbullied kid in the world”?

Here are rational reasons why; here’s the irrational; and here’s one more.

Flashing Lights, Grids, and Guns = Science Fiction

Millennium (1989)

This is the first of the films in which characters about to die are sucked from their impending doom and thrust into a surreal reality, or surreality™.  As you can see from the poster above, this one involves a plane.  Well, two planes.  And they’re about to crash into each other.  But all the passengers are already dead.  Because they were see the first sentence. It’s not the greatest film in the world, but if you enjoy Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson looking like this…

...then this pic's for you. Well, not this picture. I mean the motion picture. But I guess you could have this pic, too.

Freejack (1992)

The second film featuring a surreality™ doesn’t give away as much in the poster, other than its odd cast.  You might think the flick has to do something with virtual reality, which is strictly The Lawnmower Man’s territory (no it’s not), when in fact it deals with a man (Emilio Estevez) being pulled into the future before his race car crashes.  The reason why?  Sir Anthony Hopkins wants his body.  Seriously.  Estevez escapes and becomes a Freejack (aha!), and is chased by Mick Jagger looking like this:

He's got the goons like Jagger.

Gantz (2011)

If you enjoy subtitles and odd sci-fi action spread out over two movies, then these Japanese films are for you.  I haven’t seen the sequel yet (Gantz: Perfect Answer), so I don’t have any answers, perfect or otherwise, as to what the Gantz is.  Well, it’s a dude inside a giant black ball that pulls the almost deceased into a surreality™ where they dress up in rubber power suits and set out to kill a vast array of strange aliens.  Here’s a taste:

Natsuna Watanabe is easy on the Gantz.

This is a badge of honor.

We finally had out holiday work party and… well, let me give you a quick back story first.

At my office, which is an IT firm based within another larger company, we guys always had a sad little game we played.  For all my years there, we ranked the women in the office on their level of attractiveness.  I know; I already mentioned it was a sad little game.

The thing is, we always placed one woman we worked with at #5 on the list of five, no matter how many attractive women we had working with us at any time.  If there were three – she was #5.  If there were six – the same.  (At least we were consistent.)

One thing that was also consistent about her was she enjoyed to drink.  Like me.  At company parties.  So long as we were both at company parties, neither of us felt particular embarrassed by our levels of intoxication.  In fact, sometimes we used to be able to bring others to our depths.

But she was let go last year.  This holiday party was the first one I attended at which she was not present.  I fear I am now the company drunk.  I would have added lone company drunk, but the the implies that.

Here's to you #5.

F This

Some alternates:

• Don’t Like
• Face Bunk
• Poke Me

(via)

And the Masters of the Microwave

I watched the original version in Italian on their website, and it confounded me.  I hoped the subtitled version would help… and… well… check it out for yourself:

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