Explore Posterous

Monkeys, skills, training -- fun and baffling

Bogosphere: The Strangest Things Pulled Out of Peat Bogs

OINGO BOINGO - WEIRD SCIENCE (1985)

Weird Science (1985)

Weird Science was an odd one.  It may be the least beloved film John Hughes made during this prime period because of it's far-fetched premise:  A couple of teenage boys create a woman on the computer that comes to life.  Despite the title the science of the film is built on a house of cards.  It makes NO sense.  It's stupid, ridiculous, convenient... yet twenty-four years later it's STILL an awesome movie.

His third directional effort and third with Anthony Michael Hall, the last to catch him in his young, adorable years before actually turning into a man.  (Anyone else remember the shock of seeing him later in Edward Scissorhands?)  With a cast that included a young Robert Downey Jr. in one his first roles and Bill Paxton in an inspired portrayal as bullying older brother Chet, it's a film I can't really stick up for when people dislike it.  Hughes wasn't looking to move you like he did with The Breakfast Club.  Sometimes being just dumb, stupid fun is enough and I loved him for it.  And plus he still gave us the quotable lines: "The name is CHET... and I didn't think it was a whale's dick, honey"

Any reference to the film requires a nod to the Oingo Boingo main theme.  Hughes was a fan of music but at this point only the main title songs were getting the focus.  Plus, it's Elfman's only foray into songwriting with Oingo Boingo before fully launching his scoring career the next year with Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Three films in two years and John Hughes already proved himself someone we could rely on when his name was attached.  And some of his best were yet to come...

Weird Science is available on Oingo Boingo's LP Dead Man's Party.

For more info:
Weird Science:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_Science_(film)
John Hughes:  http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000455/
Oingo Boingo:  http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:gifyxqr5ld6e

Where I was introduced to John Hughes

The Daw Theater in Tappahannock, Virginia. It was the only game in town in my day. Or the surrounding towns for that matter. We often had a painfully long wait to see first-run movies, unless we got lucky and someone's parents drove us to Richmond, but John Hughes movies were highlights of my adolesence. I distinctly remember seeing Sixteen Candles and Weird Science here.  (Had to wait for Breakfast Club on VHS. Either I missed it at the Daw, movie-going priviliges were often the first to go under parental punishment, or maybe it was rated R which was also off limits.)

The Daw was old-school - sticky floors, worn seats, musty as all get-out, my mom wouldn't set foot in the place which was all the more reason for me to love it . And it was pretty big compared to today's multiplexes. But the best part? Balcony seating. The balcony was pretty much mandatory for an adolescent. And off limits for adults. It's where I first made out with a girl. During Breakin' or Beat Street. And it's also where I once made the big mistake of attending an all-night Friday the 13th Marathon. Perhaps the longest night of my life, I've never been a big fan of horror flicks since. 

I left my hometown after high school and never went back to the Daw. I know a multiplex came to town a few years later and effectively closed the old one-screen wonder. I read online where there was a movement to refurbish it the past few years, but don't know what became of it.

View Larger Map

A cool tribute:

2009.25: What have you built lately?

I've always been envious of people who knew how to build houses, a skill that will never go out of fashion. Likewise, those who can repair cars or fix plumbing. When I was a kid, we built things like computers that could count to 111 in binary, which is pretty useless, although it did nurture my love of geeky technology all these years.

My most ambitious project was a vidicon TV camera,constructed from plans in a magazine. I went to the store and bought an aluminum chassis, tube and sockets, resistors, capacitors, coils, wire, solder and lots of screws, nuts and washers. The article was published in three parts so it took at least three months to build the camera, but it actually worked, giving a fuzzy, flickering black and white image. Of course this was yet another way to lure girls over to my mom's house where I lived in the basement.

My friends and I pointed the camera at the girls and and messed around with posing and pretending we were the Tonight Show. That show was hosted by Steve Allen, a guy who was a songwriter and musician as well as being very funny with improvisation. Anyway, all this was a lot of fun but it rarely got us anywhere with the girls. It took being in a band to jump that hurdle, and every one of us was in a band, eventually. Funny how my pals were ostracized something like the guys in "Weird Science" and every one of us went on to play some role for famous artists as important as Prince. We also all went to California to accomplish this, and I'll bet we got more than the atheletes who laughed at us in dodgeball games. Ah, sweet revenge. By the way, what does dodgeball in gym class say about the human race?

I followed electronic technology all these years and continued building projects first with transistors, such as an FM transmitter to be a pretend disc jockey in a 300 meter area, and then integrated circuits. From the day I build that TV camera (there was no VCR technology yet) to today where a Flip Video Mino can record an hour of HD in color, only about 44 years have passed. Not very much time compared to the progress of the first 1900 years on our calendar.

Humanity has made a hockey stick-like curve towards finer and better technologies in every field, particularly computing and video, but also in medicine and biology, yet we have not been able to do anything at all about our violent and warlike nature. I recall a sci-fi story I read years ago where the various nations, seeing what a waste war was, found a "better" way to deal with it: they just ran a permanent war of computer simulated strikes and killed the number of people on each side predicted as the outcome!

We live in an age where mankind has more reach than ever before. Our workplace tools have become toys and entertainment centers. We can broadcast live video from our cellphones, we can buy and sell anything on the Internet. My discovery of the Kiva.org web site was a revelation. It made me see how easy it is to pay forward some of this great potential by investing in human dignity. I have had hundreds of thousands of hours of pleasure via the Internet and now I'm able to make a difference in people's lives from half way across the planet by sending a $25 payment through the Kiva site to a group of hard-working business owners in the third world.

I think the things most valuable that we can build are mutual respect, empathy and human dignity.

Love is: Having a backup file!

Weird Science Episodes