Episode 162 - My Stepmother Is An Alien: LIVE!

[Cam Bert 8145]

I could be wrong but I thought Jon Lovitz worked in fashion or at least the clothing industry. When Dan Aykroyd is delivering the clunky exposition about his snap shirt he says it's the "latest invention" of his brother. Given that line plus his care about his jacket, his knowing of attractive people, his wealth, and the fact that he just has women's fashion magazines laying about his place makes me think it's most likely that he works in fashion or clothing.

[CPiz 232]

THEORY: Ron Mills went to Celeste's home planet and took it over, changing his name to Tod Spengo. He left in search on another world to take over, and happened upon the planet that he would conquer and rename Spengo. HE set out to destroy Earth, but upon seeing Teri Garr, was reminded of what started his journey into outerspace, a beautiful women, and kidnapped Teri Garr. What I'm saying is ... Is another Jon Lovitz movie "Mom and Dad Save the World" a sequel to this one?!?

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

I could be wrong but I thought Jon Lovitz worked in fashion or at least the clothing industry. When Dan Aykroyd is delivering the clunky exposition about his snap shirt he says it's the "latest invention" of his brother. Given that line plus his care about his jacket, his knowing of attractive people, his wealth, and the fact that he just has women's fashion magazines laying about his place makes me think it's most likely that he works in fashion or clothing.

 

I assumed that Lovitz was like Randall Peltzer (the dad in Gremlins), inventing all sorts of wacky devices that never seem to work well enough to be actually commercially viable, but keeping on doing so just for the fun of it.

 

And guess who directly addressed the issue of whether rich people who have other jobs should hire chauffeurs?

 

Jimmy Durante!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUOQjxAxUyo&feature=youtu.be&t=1m10s

(1 minute 10 seconds in, if the time stamp doesn't work)

[firsttimecallerlongtimelistenr 3590]

just cause it made me laugh so much

 

[ChunkStyle 1160]

This was a hilarious episode. I hope Whitney becomes a future All-Star.

 

So Dr. Mills, double PhD from MIT, who has devoted his life to science, is able to send a signal faster than the speed of light. In fact he obliterates the speed of light sending his signal to another galaxy in seconds whereas light would take millions of years. It is a discovery that will re-write human understanding of physics.

 

But because his proof got blown up he just shrugs his shoulders and says oh well I'll have to get a teaching job now. WTF?

[JonathanVik 37]

So, what is Celeste exactly? Is she an energy being, a humanoid, or a snake thing like Bag? Is she mortal at the end or not?

 

Also, why did no one notice Celeste's spaceship landing in front of the party? That house had huge glass windows and many people were facing that way when it landed.

[HayMaker 3]

I'm going to say this in defence of Jon Lovitz.

 

Jon Lovitz might not have been funny in this movie, but the guy gets a permanent pass from me to be as hacky and unfunny as he deems fit, because he kicked Andy Dick's ass. Anybody who kicks Andy Dick's ass is alright by me.

 

I created an account for the Earwolf forums just so I could like this.

[HayMaker 3]

Seth was something like the 3rd/4th billed in the opening credits even though he was only in it for a couple of minutes. Was he well known when this came out? I only knew him from Buffy onwards.

 

 

Maybe? I've never seen ANY of the movies he made before this, so I can't say if he was really 'featured' in them or not:

Year Title Role

1984 Billions for Boris Benjamin 'Ape-Face' Andrews

1984 The Hotel New Hampshire "Egg' Berry

1986 Willy/Milly Malcolm

1987 Radio Days Joe

1987 Can't Buy Me Love Chuckie Miller

1988 Big Business Jason

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

Of those, I've only heard of Can't Buy Me Love. While it's not particularly famous in that era's teen-movie cycle, Amanda Peterson is well-remembered as one of the teen idols of the time, and that's one of the few movies she had a big role in. As for Seth Green, I have no idea if I noticed him in it.

 

Oh and the alternate title of it definitely does not pass feminist muster: Boy Rents Girl.

[grudlian. 4725]

BTW, why isn't Lovitz on the poster? He's listed in the credits on the bottom (and Hannigan is not), and was well known from SNL at the time. If anything, he'd better fit the "OMG look at Basinger!" role than Hannigan does.

I would assume Hannigan gets put on the poster purely because the movie is called "My Stepmother Is An Alien" If you leave her off, it looks like Kim Basinger is Jon Lovitz's and Dan Aykroyd's stepmother.

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

This fucking movie gave me a headache. Let's start with the plot device that sets everything in motion: Mills sending some kind of radio signal into the nearest galaxy.

 

Mills correctly notes that it would take forever for a radar transmission to reach the Clouds of Magellan, the neighboring galaxy with which he is trying to communicate (?). The Clouds of Magellan are thousands of light years away. To work past this obstacle, he apparently needs to increase the power of his amplifier (the Klystron) with a lightning strike.

 

Well, there are quite a few problems with this. Obviously, you can’t harness the power of lightning when it strikes a radio transmitter. But even if you could, lightning isn’t particularly powerful, at least not compared to an electrical substation. But most importantly, it doesn’t matter how much power you put into a transmission, the speed of light -- c -- is constant. You could make a transmitter with the entire power of the sun in it, and its signal would travel as fast as, you know, sunlight.

 

But even if you grant all that nonsense, how does Mills know that the signal reached the Clouds of Magellan? Are we to assume that Mills’ faster-than-light transmission bounced off a neighboring galaxy back to his radar dish without hitting any interference along the way? That’s especially impressive considering that the Clouds of Magellan are only visible from the Southern Hemisphere. If we are to assume that Mills lives and works in Los Angeles, his radio transmitter isn’t even pointed in the right direction.

[AdamDriggers 58]

So according to imdb and wikipedia before nine other writers got their hands on it the original writer conceived this script as a dark allegory about child abuse? So what kind of movie did he want to make? Were there jokes in his script? How did it end? This sounds like a good movie. Does she abuse the daughter and reveal her alien nature to her until eventually killing her all the while the Dad never believes that these terrible things are happening? Or does the Dad eventually choose his daughter over his new wife and is forced to kill her to save the child’s life—only then learning that he made the right choice as her human form withers away to reveal a terrible beast? The original writer was credited just as “Jerico” and also was credited for writing the 1993 John Goodman movie ‘Matinee”. Did some research and he/she is Jerico Stone, who sued the Writer’s Guild in 1996 for not getting proper credit for his/her writing of “Matinee”. Seems Hollywood was not quite ready for the ideas of “Jerico”. Here is a link to the court case record: http://law.justia.co...01/1312/596403/

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

Why (in non-lawyer terms) did they leave off a writer's credit for Matinee? That's one of the only Joe Dante movies that was not mucked up by studio interference. Unlike Explorers which doesn't even have a proper ending in what script made it to the screen! (Which also revolves around alien contact prompted by humanity's radio output. And which, as it happens, was one of the only other big roles for... Amanda Peterson!)

[joel_rosenbaum 1269]

So Dr. Mills, double PhD from MIT, who has devoted his life to science, is able to send a signal faster than the speed of light. In fact he obliterates the speed of light sending his signal to another galaxy in seconds whereas light would take millions of years. It is a discovery that will re-write human understanding of physics.

This too! What the fuck indeed. It took the signal a few seconds to get to the nearest galaxy (and bounce back, by definition, since he's sending a radar transmission). That would imply that his signal went somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion times faster than the speed of light.

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

Even in science fiction where faster-than-light travel to other star systems is routine, traveling to another galaxy is usually a big deal, for instance the aliens in the Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name" who hijack the Enterprise to get back to their galaxy are far in advance of Kirk and crew. Heck, not being able to easily travel the distance within a galaxy was the whole premise of the entire Star Trek show Voyager!

 

But as Isaac Asimov noted, treating "from another galaxy" as being the same as "outside the solar system" is just a total lack of understanding of scale, like saying that anyone who isn't from your neighborhood is "from another continent".

 

This fucking movie gave me a headache. Let's start with the plot device that sets everything in motion: Mills sending some kind of radio signal into the nearest galaxy.

 

Mills correctly notes that it would take forever for a radar signal to reach the Clouds of Magellan, the neighboring galaxy with which he is trying to communicate (?). The Clouds of Magellan are thousands of light years away. To work past this obstacle, he apparently needs to increase the power of his amplifier (the Klystron) with a lightning strike.

 

Well, there are quite a few problems with this. Obviously, you can’t harness the power of lightning when it strikes a radio transmitter. But even if you could, lightning isn’t particularly powerful, at least not compared to an electrical substation. But most importantly, it doesn’t matter how much power you put into a transmission, the speed of light -- c -- is constant. You could make a transmitter with the entire power of the sun in it, and its signal would travel as fast as, you know, sunlight.

 

The lightning's 1.21 gigawatts of power enable the signal to travel back in time (which is the same thing as traveling faster than light in Einstein's relativity), thus giving it enough time to travel to the galaxy and back by the present!

 

After all,

was, like this movie's score, by Alan Silvestri. Who also did the score of Carl Sagan's Contact and the new version of Cosmos! As well as Mac and Me, Cop and a Half, Super Mario Bros., Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, The Delta Force, and The Clan of the Cave Bear (also starring Daryl Hannah)!

[Royboy 430]

BTW, why isn't Lovitz on the poster? He's listed in the credits on the bottom (and Hannigan is not), and was well known from SNL at the time. If anything, he'd better fit the "OMG look at Basinger!" role than Hannigan does.

 

True, but as a Buffy fan, it's almost like a portent of the future.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Fantastic episode!

 

So after Aykroyd gets fired, he goes home and tells Willow what happened. Reluctantly, he admits to her that he'll probably have to get a teaching job. He tells her, "You know how that is. One opening for every 16 applicants." Cut to Aykroyd fretting because he can't fit Neptune into a picture he's trying to take of a very basic model of the Solar System, and then freaking out after he breaks Neptune off completely. Willow then steps in and tells him to get dressed for the party. He starts to protest and tells her, "I haven't finished the M.I.T, proposal yet." So, correct me if I'm wrong, but was his proposal to M.I.T going to include a picture of this rinky dink Solar System model taken in his pig sty of a bedroom?

 

Hey, bro, maybe the problem with getting these teaching gigs isn't so much the competition as it is your insistence on including shitty Polaroid pictures of crappy baby toys with your proposals...

[tomspanks 9039]

I liked that Dan Akroyd was more puzzled by the carrot cigar than the whole "faster-than-light" travel. Science.

[Elektra Boogaloo 3371]

Was this going to be included in "This Week In Feminism," Taylor Anne?

 

https://youtu.be/0thpEyEwi80

 

Unrelated to this episode, which I haven't listened to yet. I saw yesterday that June is writing a book about women running for office with Emily's List and I'm so psyched I could die.

[firsttimecallerlongtimelistenr 3590]

2 questions after listening to this ep:

 

1: who's tim?

2: is there a bar at these live shows?

[tomspanks 9039]

Sorry, thought of another light speed related thing about the movie. The spaceship that Kim Basinger and Bag pass Saturn en route to earth. Well, even when Earth and Saturn are closest, Saturn is still 1.2 billion km away, about 8 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Keep in mind that the light from our sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. Yet right after they pass Saturn they show up on Earth in no time. Seems like they already had the "technology" to go faster than light.

 

Also, I liked that they showed the lipstick case "floating" in the spaceship because of the lack of gravity, yet the stocking and Kim Basinger's hair behaved as if there was normal gravity on board the spaceship. Way to keep things consistent guys.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Sorry, thought of another light speed related thing about the movie. The spaceship that Kim Basinger and Bag pass Saturn en route to earth. Well, even when Earth and Saturn are closest, Saturn is still 1.2 billion km away, about 8 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Keep in mind that the light from our sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth. Yet right after they pass Saturn they show up on Earth in no time. Seems like they already had the "technology" to go faster than light.

 

I still don't know exactly what they were trying to do with his radio(?) waves, but I don't think it has anything to do with FTL travel. Handbag Dick creature tells her at the beginning that they made great time when they're passing Saturn. Their planet is over 92 light years away, and I believe this is supposed to be the next day after his signal hit their planet.

 

My guess is his signal did something good with their planet and they need him to do it again to fix it once and for all. ...And then kill him and all of planet Earth so he won't be able to help them ever again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[tomspanks 9039]

I still don't know exactly what they were trying to do with his radio(?) waves, but I don't think it has anything to do with FTL travel. Handbag Dick creature tells her at the beginning that they made great time when they're passing Saturn. Their planet is over 92 light years away, and I believe this is supposed to be the next day after his signal hit their planet.

 

My guess is his signal did something good with their planet and they need him to do it again to fix it once and for all. ...And then kill him and all of planet Earth so he won't be able to help them ever again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

Oh, this brings up another thing. Wouldn't Jon Lovitz be dead even before they got halfway to the worm planet?

[Asbell 19]

2 things--

 

1) for jason--- do you believe that this movie takes place where: Dan Aykroyd, a scientist obsessed with his failing mission to find extraterrestrial life... and stressed from being a single parent... is struck by lightening in the opening scene.. the remainder of the movie is a Jacobs Ladder scenario where he manages to provide a stable home for his daughter, find a worthy replacement for his dead wife, and resolve his quest to find alien life?

 

2) "Bag" seems to be the same creature from Star Wars in the trash compacter.... so i would also argue that this takes place in George Lucas' Start Wars Universe. Maybe even having the signal being sent an early precursor to the death star beam.

 

thank you.

 

Kevin

[JoelSchlosberg 352]

OTOH, if they are traveling fast enough to get from another galaxy to Earth, the distance between Saturn and Earth should be passed in a microscopic amount of time, certainly less time than it takes to utter those lines of dialogue about Saturn. Like that Futurama episode where Fry counts down the launch to the Moon, but he's at the Moon before he can even count to 3.