Stan Lee! Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me!

Destiny was on line one... the question is, would I accept the charges?

A few years ago, MTV was developing a new “reality” show called “Who Wants to Be a Superhero”.

A friend of mine heard about it and in an effort to get me to humiliate myself in public worse than the time when I jumped into a 40 degree swimming pool dressed in a Godzilla Costume, sent me the application.

Now, I’m as big a fanboy as the next “Batman-Underoos-wearing, directors-cut-watching, giant Galactus-action-figure-owning” guy so I figured I would fill it out.

I knew there would be a huge group of asshats who would take the thing too seriously and use it as an excuse to wear the costumes they usually ran around their mom’s basement in, so I figured I would just write something funny if only to give the producers something to read that wasn’t cribbed from the Stan Lee Prose Handbook.

I filled out the form, did a quick illustration of my character and then proceeded to write a script for the 5 minute video that was to accompany my application. I use “script” in the sense that if a dozen monkeys flung poop at a sheet of paper, that would have stunk less than what I wrote.

I cant remember the details but it came down to my character Captain Bloomers locked in mortal combat with his vile arch-nemesis Doctor EnormAss, played extremely badly by my gullible brother-in-law. Clearly this was going to be the craft of a cinematic genius. The kind of work that would cause Orson Welles to rise from the grave and (if everyone was lucky) kill me with a sock full of nickels.

Despite their denials, I want to thank my sister for helping handle the camera and my wife for creating the just primo, grade-A costume I'm seen wearing in the video. Thanks guys!

Obviously I didn’t have much of a budget. I set aside money for costumes for us both, bought an action figure that I painted to look like me for the “flying scenes” and then we set to work. Using a camcorder whose resolution was on a par with a 12” Philco TV from 1956, we shot 2 hours of footage.

I figured that would be enough to edit down to just 5 minutes. And if you believe that, you have never used a video camera at a family function. Im not sure what happens there but the second you turn on the camera, everyone turns into a spastic puppet with half their strings cut.

So despite the fact that I wrote directions simple enough to be understood by your average beagle, everything took longer, was more irritating and came out completely shitty.

I’m sure that some of the absolute badness was my fault… but mostly I blame everyone else involved.

So the basic plot was simple. Captain Bloomers is protecting his fair city. Doctor EnormAss shows up and threatens…Im not sure…threatens something… to someone and I step in to be the hero. Somewhere in this nausea-induced fever dream there was also:

1. A flying sequence where I “flew” the action figure in front of the lens during which you could see my hand holding the toy.

2. Some title cards for the credits shot ala Star Wars opening crawl.

3. A scene in which I leap from a (clearly in-frame) ladder, crash to the living room floor and cry out “…I’m Down!”

4. The finale which cleverly makes use of a semi-ripe cucumber, a black rag and some bread flour.

Mercifully, by this time we had run out of film and being that my camcorder was from 1989, there was no way to obtain any more video tapes, so we cleaned up and I threw my brother-in-law out. I sat myself down in front of my Mac and using some extremely low-fidelity equipment, I transferred the poorly lit, poorly budgeted and poor taste video to the computer.

What I found was astonishing. Despite all my worries and nervousness I had actually shot footage even worse than I could have prepared myself for. It was almost as if I had no understanding of scene, plot, timing, character or even the use of a tripod. What I saw looked like it was shot by a small, possibly feral, poorly educated child in the throes of a violent seizure. It looked like it was lit by flashlight, costumed by a blind man and produced for no more than twenty bucks.

Which was pretty close to the truth.

So armed with a bottle of gin, I set to my task. Once I cut out all the footage that was literally unusable (at least 99%... in fact there was a good 15 minute stretch where my brother-in-law filmed his own shoes for some reason). I was left with a smattering of very short scenes that appeared to have been scripted by someone who was so mentally altered, they could only hope to aspire to autism.

Unwilling to spend any more money and because I had no video editing /special effects software, I cut the scenes together and burned a DVD, which if ever found will most likely be used by the prosecution in my eventual sanity hearing.

A few weeks later, I got a message on my answering machine from MTV Networks. Of course I thought it was a joke at first but it turned out they loved the application and the video, said it was hysterical. Which is about as close as I’m going to get to praise on anything I ever churned out.

They said I had advanced to the next round and would have to fly to LA for a screen test and also to compete against some of the other random superidiots in some (and I quote) “feats of strength, agility and mental prowess”.

None of which I possess.

It was not to be. But, of course, you already knew that as there are no copies on YouTube of my insanely bad video where I jump around in a crappy costume and then turn into a cucumber.

A month after the call, I read online that the guys who originally came up with the idea for the show were suing MTV stating that they had pitched the idea and been turned down only to have MTV announce several weeks later that they were developing the same idea. All the entries including yours truly had to be junked and the whole process started over again.

I was certain I could not create a video better than what I had already done unless I fell victim to some sort of violent brain trauma so my dream was gone…

…And a little piece of me died that day.