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Experiment 0412 - Hercules And The Captive Women


 


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Movie Summary


 Movie: Hercules And The Captive Women: 

If you're sick of hearing how confusing these foreign movies are, please skip the next sentence. This is a very confusing foreign movie. Basically, a guy called Hercules—the most uninteresting version we've seen—gets shipwrecked with some friends on fog-shrouded Atlantis. Atlantis is ruled by an evil queen and her blonde-bearded soldiers, who keep sacrificing children to appease some god. Herc's son Hymus saves the queen's waifish daughter, and Herc jump-starts a volcano and destroys Atlantis. "Captive Women" makes no sense because there's captive everybody. (I guess we need to face it: "Captive Women" gets us moviegoers excited.) The only saving grace is an actual line of dialogue, delivered to Herc: "Today is dedicated to Uranus."

— Paul Chaplin

Host Segments


 Prologue: 

Gypsy pleads to be allowed to watch the movies with everybody. Crow and Servo have doubts, but Joel relents.

 Invention: 

Forrester has been on retreat ("learning to trust"), so he lets Frank do the invention. Frank produces the Lawn Baby, a lawn mower with a rotating baby seat on top. Forrester is horrified: "You could have hurt baby Melvin!" On the SOL, Joel wears the Womb-Mate, headphones on his pregnant belly that play motivational tapes to unborn baby.

 Segment 2: 

Joel, Crow, and Tom dive into a little good-natured brawling, just like the movie portrays.

 Segment 3: 

Crow reads a fanciful bio of Hercules, from A History of the Gods. It's mostly about Herc's disappointing son Hymus: "Every so often, Hercules would see his son's yellow '72 Charger in the driveway and wish Hymus was home to ask for money."

 Segment 4: 

Crow and Servo make a Hercules Action Figure that sleeps and says "I'm so sleepy I can barely keep my eyes open." (That's all it says.)

 Segment 5: 

The SOL has a funeral for the final Hercules movie. Then they have a party and read a letter. Frank is chased and maimed by his lawn mower.

 Stinger: 

Androcles shouts "Hercules!" Hercules looks stunned.


Reflections

Gypsy sits in on the first few minutes of the movie, and then leaves when she realizes how bad it is. Part of our motivation for including Gypsy was the letters we get asking why she doesn't join the others in the theater. She's very busy, and in this show she realizes that's just as well.

When we wrote the host segments, Trace, Kevin, Joel, and Jim were in Los Angeles on some pretext. That left Mike, Bridget, Frank, Mary Jo, and myself to write—the first time we'd been left unsupervised. We had to fax a draft out to the them at their luxurious hotel, and they were concerned about brutalizing a baby in the Lawn-Baby segment. As written, we planned to put the (fake) baby in the seat and have it rotate rapidly; as taped, Forrester holds it back at the last minute. We writers were never convinced the original version was a problem. It wasn't like we were using a real baby. (Which we could have done.) To this day it makes me happy to think about the line "Today is dedicated to Uranus." It's so innocent.

— Paul Chaplin


 
       
 
 
  
 
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