Vasco da Gama, episode #5 (or, “How Green Was MacSnoopeigh”)

     If you’re Scottish, you might want to give this episode a miss.

     I’m not saying that it will offend you. What I’m saying is that I’m concerned that there’s a chance it could offend you if you’re Scottish, of Scottish heritage, or just happen to like wearing kilts. Apparently (and I didn’t know this until fairly recently) I have some Scottish blood in me. It tends to pool just below my ankles. If I stub my toe, it bruises in a tartan. This probably also explains why I’ve always liked porridge. Or maybe it doesn’t.

     One thing this episode of Vasco does explain is why the producer of the Vasco sitcom, F. Scott MacSnoopeigh, is as feckless as he is. I didn’t have to make MacSnoopeigh’s father Scottish. All I had to make him was loud, violent, abusive, and generally offensive in each and every way. Or, as Rob Vincent puts it, “the time-honoured classic avuncular figure of the unbearable Scottish dad ... no wonder Fleance [MacSnoopeigh] and Prospero [his brother, introduced in Vasco episode #4] messed up”. Ian McKay, who played MacSnoopeigh Junior, remembers MacSnoopeigh Senior as "essentially a vaguely Scottish Vasco". Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...minus Vasco's squid fixation, of course.

     So, if you’re Scottish, and you’re offended—clap your hands!—er, and, um, I apologize. But I’ll also offer an excuse.

     I’m offering an excuse because I’m Canadian, and that’s what we do, and because I grew up when being Canadian meant deferring to anything with an accent from the British Isles. And I do mean anything. Seagulls who’d never been within 1000 miles of Cape Breton, much less Great Britain, knew that all they had to do was screech something that sounded like “I say, I say” near a Canadian, and he’d give them half his lunch. In my day, Canadian public discourse was infested with truculent blowhards who used their greater Britishness as a shield for their ever greater ignorance. Among them were a few real dyed-in-the-plaid-wool Highland loudmouths. The Scots weren’t necessarily the biggest of the dunces, but for sheer volume, you couldn’t match them. So, any resemblance between MacSnoopeigh paterfamilias and any Scots living, dead, or Mary, Queen of, is purely coincidental—unless you happen to know who Jack Webster was, in which case, draw your own conclusions.

     Now that the apology’s over, off with the hair shirt, and on with the rest of the notes. This is the first episode of Vasco that doesn’t open with an “episode” of the Vasco sitcom. Count this as a sign of things to come…as well as a sign of progress. It’s also the episode of Vasco that features the largest amount of unscripted material. I forget whether the two improvised scenes in this show—one where Vasco pitches a not-so-original script idea, and Old Man Mac S’s rambling exploration of socioeconomic theory via the seven-ten split—were in the original plot outline, or whether they were last-minute additions to fill time. I suspect, since it’s just Ian McKay and me in both scenes, that it’s the latter. Ian would have been there for the editing session, and would have shared the joy of finding out that the show was running short.

     I’m running short of things to say, so I’ll let you get on with clicking the link below and listening to…

Vasco da Gama, episode #5

     Sorry again to Scottish folks everywhere. If it’s any consolation, there aren’t any bagpipes in it. Oh, yes—and you now also know the correct spelling of MacSnoopeigh’s family name. It’s pronounced “MacSnoopy” but spelled “MacSnoopeigh”. Things like this are vitally important for your enjoyment of a radio program, aren’t they?

 



 

 

 

 

 

     In case you’re wondering about Sparky’s costume, he was planning to dress up as King Ethelred the Unready, but he couldn’t get it finished in time.

     And with that questionable quip, lo and behold, here it is, almost Halloween again. As usual, the excitement here in Funsville is practically palpable. Or it would be, if Civic Ordinance 27C—the infamous Act to Ban the Public Palpation of Excitement and Other Emotional States—had ever been repealed. (The prudery of the High Victorian Era still casts a long shadow over us all, folks.)

     So, why are you hearing this from me, instead of our resident expert on all things Halloweeny? Well, ordinarily, Milady Madeira M’Dear would take care of this detail, but she’s on special assignment this year. She and two of her witchy friends are scheduled to meet up with some penny-ante ward-heeler named Harper, to tell him that no harm shall befall him ‘til Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, or whatever other shell game gets him to march blithely on to doom and suchlike.

     Anyway, they pulled my name out of the old jack-o’-lantern, so I’ve drawn the awesome responsibility of outfitting you with clever costume ideas, suitable for trick-or-treating and whatever other activities you and your peers deem appropriate for All Hallows’ Eve.

     In these cost-conscious times (there have been other kinds of times recently? or ever?), I thought it apt and prudent to lay before your waiting eyes something I call Five Costumes for Under Five Dollars Apiece. I call them that because, well, that’s what they are, and because I was told I’d been given the honour of writing this thing about five minutes ago. (Short notice is the royal road to truth in titling…if not always to creativity.) Sparky’s well-intentioned but clichéd suggestion of toilet paper mummies didn’t make the cut, but you’re free to try it, if you don’t mind being accused of having a singular lack of imagination.

     With that in mind (will you get that toilet paper off me, Sparky? I’m trying to type), here are the Famous Five for Under Five (costumes and dollars respectively, that is):

-Put on whatever you’d ordinarily wear and say you’re dressed as Doctor Who. When people ask which one, tell them, “the one two actors from now.”

-Using the same costume, you can also say that you’re Edward Snowden or Julian Assange after plastic surgery and a witness protection program.

-If that doesn’t work, just say it’s Miley Cyrus’ new look. If we wait long enough, there’s every chance it will be.

-Get a child’s dress shirt from a thrift store, stick it on a wire hanger, and tell everyone you’re a guy who’s about to sue his drycleaner.

-Why ruin a perfectly good bedsheet by cutting eyeholes in it for a ghost costume? A magic marker, some cardboard, and a length of twine work just as well.

 

     When it comes to ghosts, people believe whatever they want to, anyway. That’s five low-cost costume notions without breaking a sweat, but here’s a bonus idea, in a similar vein to the last one:

-Sheets of store-brand business card stock are pretty cheap—especially if you can borrow them from a friend. Borrow a friend’s printer as well, and you can have a splendid custom-made-for-Halloween identity that won’t set you back one red cent.

 

     Halloween’s not on a full moon this year, so you don’t even have to let your hair grow for this one.

     And with that, I must be going. I heard Sparky muttering something about trying a Satchel Paige costume on me, and here he is now carrying a valise and a sheet of foolscap, so that’s my cue to take to my heels. As Satchel Paige himself might say, I’m not going to look back—something might be gaining on me. In this case, I know exactly what it is, and I’m determined to give him a moving target.

Uncle Fun  

 

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #4 (or, “Occupation: Unemployed”)

     Four episodes into Vasco da Gama, Rob Vincent quit the show. Not Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama cast member—he stayed with the series ‘til the bitter end. Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama character, as played by Rob Vincent the Vasco da Gama cast member, quit the Vasco da Gama part of Vasco da Gama.

     Confused yet? I should hope so.

     It wouldn’t be the last time this happened, either.

     You see, part of the plan for Vasco—and, contrary to popular belief, there was a plan—the apparent lack of a plan was all part of the plan, you see…clever, clever—now, where was I?...oh, yes—part of the plan for Vasco was that Rob the character in the show would quit his job on the show-within-a-show every few episodes. It probably says a lot about me that the show’s basic format was to deviate as often as possible from the show’s basic format. My problem is that I can’t think of what it says, exactly. Maybe I have a short attention—hey—is that lightning? Wow, that was close. Better hit “save” before another one knocks the power out.

     Or maybe it’s just that I have trouble finishing what I

     Anyway…having The Fictional Rob Vincent quit every now and then offered as good an excuse as any for taking the show out its familiar confines, and into other, less familiar, confines. The Actual Rob Vincent remembers that The Fictional Rob Vincent’s search for a new (but not necessarily better) job in this particular episode led him to, and I quote, “The Quinn Martin Employment Agency! Special Guest Star: James Franciscus”. (This would sound better if you could hear the theme from Cannon playing in your head as you read it. If you don’t know what the theme from Cannon sounds like, google it. If nothing else, it’ll give the mental soundtrack of your life something to liven up those duller moments.)

     I don’t know if Ian McKay had the theme from Cannon running through his head while he was thinking about it, but one of his memories of Episode #4 of Vasco involved him “trying to do a convincing Renfield, never having heard him nor having seen the prerequisite amount of old monster movies.” As I recall (and I don’t, really, but this sounds plausible, if nothing else), I think the solution to the dilemma involved telling Ian to do the worst Peter Lorre imitation imaginable, then telling him to make it just a little bit worse than that. If you’ve seen Dwight Frye’s Renfield in the 1931 Bela Lugosi version of Dracula…well, I guess the thing to do is to imagine the theme from Cannon playing under that, and you’ll probably come out ahead in the entertainment department…if not necessarily in the sanity department. You have to give something to get something, is my motto. At least it was, until I gave it away to get something else. I forget what it was, but I’m sure it was important at the time.

     Most of the time, I don’t forget things, though. No—most of the time, my excuse is that I’m naïve and ignorant. Take, for example, the introduction of Science Boy’s original female assistant, which happens in this episode, which is why I’m asking you to take it for an example. She needed an appropriate nom de guerre, and “Annoying Girl” seemed like a perfectly good one. The trouble is, it had already also seemed that way to Bill Watterson, who’d used it for Calvin’s imagining of Susie Derkins as Spaceman Spiff’s arch-nemesis in Calvin and Hobbes. I’d stopped keeping up with the comics section of the newspaper about the same time as Johnny Hart got religion, so I had nary a clue about this until well after the last episode of Vasco went out on the air. This is why Science Boy is now accompanied by Gullible Girl, not Annoying Girl. Someday, I may bring back Annoying Girl, retconning her name and backstory so that she’s known as Copyright Infringement Girl.

     The backstory for the “original” Copyright Infringement Girl Annoying Girl is also courtesy of Ian McKay:

She was the cashier at the Mr. Sub I worked at. She would only work cash. At random times she would take the cart and restock the drinks fridge. To do this she would insist on wearing rubber gloves, as it made her feel like a nurse. She would usually be late coming back from her break […] This was annoying as it threw off everybody else's schedule. When it was pointed out to her that she was 5 minutes late coming back from lunch, she went out to the restaurant, pulled one of the tables over to the wall, climbed up on the table and set the clock back 5 minutes.[…] She was quite fond of her cats. Unfortunately for her, this seemed to be a one-way relationship as her cats kept throwing themselves off her balcony. She eventually was put on long term stress leave.

    This isn’t all he remembers, but it’s all I’m putting up for public view. I’m not keen on facing a character defamation suit on top of copyright infringement action. Unless the theme from Cannon can play in the background while it all happens, that is. Or, failing that…

Vasco da Gama, episode #4

     Hope you like the way I tied the link into that last bit there. I worked a long time on it, to get it just right. Well, as long as I ever feel like working on anything, that is.

     Hey, folks—five seconds is five seconds, no matter how you look at it.

 

 

This post is for the…oh, you know—read it and see…

Hello, bird lovers, wherever you are…I hope your troubles are few.

     But enough of the Rogers and Hammerstein parodies. If you’ve been following the goings-on in this corner of the World Wide Web (and if you have been following them, hurry up and catch them, before they get away from you), you’ll know that folks here in Funsville take a special interest in the discovery of new species of fauna. (The evidence can be found here and here—go ahead and click—we’ll be right here, waiting for you to come back.)

     We in Funsville take a justifiable, yet still somehow excessive, degree of pride in our ability to identify and catalogue the arkload of previously undiscovered forms of animalia which reside in our hometown and environs. It must be something in the water. Or maybe people in Funsville just see things differently. Come to think of it, that’s probably what it is—the nearest optometrist is fifty miles from here.

     The point is that we take this stuff seriously, to the brink of sheer and utter hubris. When we all heard through the zoological grapevine that a new species of owl had been discovered in Oman, we said “so what?”

     That’s exactly what we said, since that’s the name of the owl that was discovered in Funsville a few years back.

     The So What Owl is a distant relative of the saw-whet owl, but one not known for showing up at family reunions or sending thank-you notes for Christmas presents. This wonder of the avian world possesses the unique ability to do note-for-note reproductions of the trumpet solos from Miles Davis records. The most familiar portion of its repertoire of calls leans heavily on selections from the album Kind of Blue—although during the mating season one or two of the more haunting ballads from Sketches of Spain come into prominence.

 

     For years, talk of the So What Owl consisted of nothing more than legends, apocrypha, urban myths, and/or incoherent drunken pick-up lines, all mostly heard at closing time. After considerable bickering and dickering (also mostly at closing time), the new species was finally confirmed by the Funsville chapter of the Autobahn Society (this is not a typo—the organization was founded by a philanthropist who suffered grievous remorse after running over a covey of quail while vacationing in Germany).

    The discovery of the So What Owl has opened the door to legitimate, semi-legitimate, and merely entertaining claims for other jazz-based wildlife in the Funsville area, such as the Getz Weasel, the Bix Beiderbecke Bison, Lucky Thompson’s Gazelle, the Pee Wee Russell Terrier (a feral crossbreed which lives only in abandoned Model A Fords), the Suite Yardbird, and the Djanghart Rhino—but not (thankfully, and for obvious reasons) the Thelonious Monkey.  Without running the risk of making an even worse pun than that (I’m going to make one, but I couldn’t care less how bad it is, so it’s really not much of a risk at all), I’ll  simply close by saying “owl be seeing you”.

Uncle Fun  

 

Vasco da Gama, episode #3 (or, “Tempest-tost”)

EVERY SERIES HAS THAT EPISODE…

     Yes, every series has that episode—the episode that no-one can quite remember…not even the people who made it. And yes, dear reader, even the singular media phenomenon that was Vasco da Gama had that episode.

      This much we all can agree on: we had a guest star for this one. Okay, we agreed on that after I listened to the episode and asked everybody what they could remember about working with a guest star. The sum total of these reminiscences turns out to be a big old round old zero. Sic transit gloria mundi. I suppose I could make up something about our guest star being a joy to work with, or a pain to work with, just to give the proper air of showbiz nostalgia to the whole thing. I could start some rumour involving guest star perks, or parking spaces, or those little fish called ‘tetras’ that they sell in pet stores, for all that it would matter. After twenty years, there are some episodes of Vasco that I don’t remember being there for.

     Another thing that I didn’t remember was that this episode features an origin story for Science Boy. Since I’m the one who wrote it, I can categorically state that it is completely and absolutely 100% apocryphal and untrue. Science Boy deserves a better backstory than the one I made up for him back in 1992. Now I just have to write it…and then spend the next twenty years forgetting that I did.

     Speaking of forgotten science fiction things, I didn’t even remember that the music we used over the closing credits of this episode was the theme from Lost in Space. What comes back to me after hearing this is that our producer Dave Edwards and I went on a hunt for the cheesiest TV-sci-fi music we could find in CKCU’s record library. Lost in Space seemed about as cheesy as you could get—after all, this was the show with the robot that waved its arms and bellowed “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!” every chance it got.

     The problem is that, taken out of context and without visuals to support it, the theme from Lost in Space doesn’t sound like something out of sci-fi. Frankly, it sounds like it should be on a game show…possibly as a contestant.

     Enough already. If I remember any more about this episode, I might not want to give you the link to it, so here it is:

Vasco da Gama, episode #3

     I’ll let whatever you hear speak for itself. After twenty years, it looks like it’ll have to.