Review: Space Shuttle, ep. 1
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 18, 2014
I love parodies.  I love self-referential humor.  What I don’t like are distractions.  When you hear a “Weird Al” parody, you know in the first 5 seconds what he’s parodying and you can just sit back and enjoy.  When you watch a SCARY MOVIE installment, you get the visual cues and know immediately what’s going on.  This kind of thing doesn’t work so well in a written form, especially when copyright issues keep the authors from being straightforward about what particular pop culture icon is being parodied.  This was my problem with Platt and Truant’s SPACE SHUTTLE episode 1.The story is very simple, 1 part THE LAST STARFIGHTER to 9 parts “Taxi”…IN SPACE.  Sloan is an earthling who, after beating a video game, is taken into space with the promise of adventure.  Only he’s abandoned in a pretty dangerous section of space, one where humans are food, and left to fend for himself.  Luckily, he meets an alien named Winston who looks a lot like those aliens in the Schwarzenegger movie, who gets him a job working at a shuttle company for a boss named Frank who looks a lot like those aliens in the Spielberg movie with Dee Wallace Stone and Drew Barrymore.  His fellow drivers include a woman who looks like a hot female version of the alien played by Leonard Nimoy, an alien who looks a lot like the alien voiced by James Earl Jones in that pretty famous trilogy from George Lucas, an alien with blue skin who looks a lot like those aliens in that James Cameron movie that somehow everyone went gaga over a few years back, plus an alien that, I think, sounds like it looks a lot like those aliens in that Tim Burton movie with Jack Nicholson, the one that didn’t do too well a decade or so back.Sloan is learning about how the business works, learning that the company is about to go under because their only competition in the area, which is priced much higher, is also doing much better because their drivers actually work, whereas the ones in this particular establishment refuse most of the jobs given to them.  The boss, Frank, says the next person to turn down a fare is fired.  Wouldn’t you know it, the next fare in the door looks an awful lot like those big black double-mouthed aliens in that Ridley Scott movie with Sigourney Weaver.  And the job is given to the race’s sworn enemy, the Schwarzenegger alien.Typical sitcom hijinks.The only problem was, I spent more time trying to picture the aliens from their descriptions, then pinpoint which pop culture icon they were referencing, and not nearly enough time getting to enjoy the story.  Which I think I would have really liked if I’d been able to stop accessing my vault of useless movie trivia and just focus.I understand the authors’ intention here, and how that’s supposed to translate to funny, but really, for me, the laughs came NOT from trying to picture these movie villains of my youth in such mundane circumstances, but from picturing ANY non-human race going through such  typical, simple problems.  I couldn’t have cared less about whether the Predator covers his ears and refuses to listen when Sloan attempts to refer to him as a Predator.  It’s cute, but it’s not laugh out loud funny.  Or when E.T. is lying drunk on the floor, scooping Reece’s Pieces into his mouth.  Sure, cute image, but I wouldn’t call it humor.“Friends” was never funny because the characters were based on other famous figures in TV or movie history.  We didn’t laugh at Joey carrying a fork in his pocket and eating cheesecake off the floor because of his resemblance to another famous figure.  We laughed at it because it was such a uniquely JOEY thing to do.  And that’s where I think SPACE SHUTTLE episode 1 falls a little flat.  Because I wasn’t able to enjoy the funny situations Winston or Darth Fury or T’Marie get themselves into, instead I was trying to picture the Predator or Darth Vader or T’Pol.  And it just kept throwing me out of the story.I was very intrigued by the authors’ idea of writing sitcom pilots as prose stories and I think, don’t right, it’s a concept that has WIN written all over it.  I just don’t think this particular concept falls into that category.  For me, that is.  I can see where the humor is coming from, and a lot of it is humor that under other circumstance I probably would have laughed at.  But I keep coming back to that distraction factor and I can’t get past it.On a positive note, the episode ended on a great cliffhanger, one that’s sure to make a good 90% of the people who read it have to know what happened next.  So for that, I applaud their work.  I will recommend SPACE SHUTTLE episode 1 with the caveat that if you really love this genre and are very familiar with it, the parody aspect will, most likely, work as a distraction.  But if you can look past that and focus on the story, then you’re in for a treat.