I’m currently trying to come up with a plot that ties in every single summer movie this year. It’s tricky - there are a LOT of summer movies.
While I’m cooking that up, here’s a similar mashup from last summer. I’m actually pretty proud of this. Maybe prouder than I should be.
CHAPTER 1
It’s Bart Simpson’s eleventh birthday, and the family is driving to New York so he can tour the offices of Mad Magazine. Along the way, the car has been followed by owls trying to drop envelopes in the windows.
On the Brooklyn Bridge, they’re attacked by witches on broomsticks. The Simpsons don’t know it, but this is a group of Death Eaters, led by Bellatrix Lestrange. Spider-man swings in to help, trapping Lestrange in a web, but he’s outnumbered and soon overpowered. Just when it seems that he and the Simpsons are doomed, a gigantic boat rises out of the Hudson River. It’s the legendary Flying Dutchman, and it fires magical cannonballs that chase the witches away. The Simpsons are taken aboard the ship, and its captain introduces himself as Jack Sparrow, Professor for Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts.
Aboard the Dutchman, now safely underwater, Sparrow answers some questions. He explains that he’s hundreds of years old, immortal thanks to the Fountain of Youth. Apparently, a new prophesy says that in the final battle between Voldemort and Harry Potter, the winner will be decided by a first year wizard with yellow skin and spiky hair. Sparrow was sent by Dumbledore to escort Bart and his family safely to the school, before Voldemort could kill him. “I’m afraid you’ll all be living at Hogwarts for a while. Savvy?”
“Mmm,” says Homer. “Hog.”
Movies introduced in this chapter: The Simpsons, Harry Potter, Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean
So last May (that’s May 2007), Matt “Call Me the Webmaster” Wrather and I were taking in The Coast of Utopia, a trilogy of plays by Tom Stoppard. It covers the part of Russian history most people don’t know a lot about — between when Catherine the Great had sex with a horse and when Animal Farm picks up.
So anyway, during one of the intermissions, I was sort of free-associating, as is my wont. And like an apple hitting me on the head (see how I’m referring both to Newton and orchards?) I realized that Tobey Maguire is in both Spider-Man and The Cider House Rules. And that Spider and Cider rhyme. And then I knew I was doomed. I was going to have to do something about it.
So here you go, internet. The Spider House Rules.
I don’t really expect it to get watched that much, since The Cider House Rules isn’t that well-known. But as long as you guys are impressed, I will not have sat through the terrible 1992 Michael Caine thriller Blue Ice in vain (I needed him holding a gun).