Sometimes, I really search for things to share in this weekly feature. Is that worth sharing? Do I want to reveal that? This week, I do not have to do that at all. Because Gymkata. So, a couple years ago I did a signing at Christy Blanch’s excellent Aw Yeah Comics shop. And one of her friends/co-workers, Kyle, asked if I’d seen Gymkata. “Gymkata?” I foolishly said. “What’s that?”
Kyle is a Gymkata evangelist. He would go door-to-door if he could. Scratch that. He may have already done that until a restraining order stopped him and I just don’t know. I think he’d have a bandolier of Gymkata discs if he could. So, when I told him that I hadn’t seen it, he fixed that. The Amazon shipment may have beat me home that weekend.
So, armed with a bottle of wine (or, as I called it, Gymkata Juice), I live-tweeted the experience of watching Gymkata. It is very much an Eighties film, combining the grace of gymnastics with the deadliness of karate. It is ridiculous and crazy and cheesy and it is a ton of fun.
Whip ahead to a couple months ago when I was writing the chapter breakdowns for Warning Label and I came up with the Mystery Science Theatre style night at Jeff’s movie theatre. My scripting uses brackets when I need to use a pastiche version of something. So, not Disney World but [Disney World] letting me know to come up with something close enough to the real thing so people get what it is, and not enough to get sued. In my script for this chapter, I of course wrote…
[Sleepwalkers].
Sleepwalkers is a terrible, terrible film that came out during my tenure at the Kubert School. Some friends and I watched it and did I mention it was terrible? It shows Indiana with mountains. Neuman from Seinfeld gets killed with a charcoal pencil that travels so fast that it continues to pass through his head and come out the other side. And I hated that movie, which was Stephen King’s first original screenplay, up until the second reel. At that point, I realized he was trying to write a USA Up All Night movie. At least I hope so. But once I let go, it was a gloriously ridiculous experience.
So, the movie Jeff and the gang was going to watch was Sleepwalkers. But this was also the hardest thing I’ve written in this story so far.
Why? Okay, you write a fake movie which is earnest and yet amusingly horrible, do it in eight panels, and then write jokes about your own jokey movie. This is not easy. And I was trying to think how to make it work. And I kept hitting a wall. Until Gymkata saved me.
Combining disco and an action movie (which I’m pretty sure was done in a TV pilot called Young Guy Christian but I can’t find any tracks to that show on the internet aside from it’s IMDB entry, but I know I saw it) was funny in and of itself. Action tropes are pretty universal. And, as opposed to creating absurd situations, I could write a standard action film and then make the execution absurd. I wrote a quick little movie, and then the gang’s jokes just came.
There are cut scenes, of course. The focus of the story is Danielle and her bonding or not with Jeff’s friends, not Discottack! So I had to clip the scene of him teaching the local kid how to disco dance, or using his Discottack to stop a mugger in the first scene. But I think the world will continue to rotate anyway.
