[via Topless Robot]

Created by Nick Murphy, this is a pitch-perfect blob of weirdness, a slo-mo romance montage featuring the Monarchs frolicking in a sunset field, drinking wine, and contemplating how they are masters of all they survey. The costumes are great, and the final FX scene with their evil lair is just plain cool. After a minute or two of this, you start to think of how poignant the love affair between The Monarch and Dr. Mrs. Monarch really is.

Recently, I conducted back-to-back readings of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and the Harvard Lampoon's Nightlight. I was curious: Would the parody deconstruct the original with biting wit, until all that was left was emperor-style nudity? Or would Meyer's kajillion-selling novel brush away the satirists like horseflies, and stand on its own merits?

Below, some findings. The uninitiated should know that spoilers for both novels lie ahead. (In the interest of transparency, I ought to note that I know one of the authors on the Harvard Lampoon staff, though I have no idea which parts of Nightlight she had a hand in writing.)

Plot-Per-Page Ratio

Twilight is 498 pages long and contains approximately three events. There's a car crash that almost happens, and an exposition-heavy showdown in a dance studio. Also, some vampires play baseball. Reading Twilight with an eye for plot markers is a bit like driving through rural flatland with the radio on: every now and then you'll hear a snatch of something interesting, but for the most part it's just static.

Nightlight is only 154 pages, and manages to squeeze in a cockeyed version of almost everything that happens in Twilight, plus a blood-soaked prom and a scene where a vampire menaces a young couple in a graveyard. Advantage: Nightlight.

Characters

After spending five hundred pages in the company of Twilight protagonists Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, here's what I know about them: Bella is clumsy and prefers bookstores to dress shopping. Edward is handsome, and attractive. Lest you think he's one-dimensional, though, Meyer is careful to note that he's very easy on the eyes.

Nightlight offers parody counterparts Belle Goose and Edwart Mullen. Written less as characters than joke-clotheslines, these two are nevertheless more memorable than Meyer's swoony couple. Belle may be delusional, but she's also headstrong and sure of her own personal magnetism, a distinct improvement over passive, self-doubting Bella. And Edwart Mullen isn't actually a vampire — he's an undersocialized gamer with pronounced hypochondria. But he's not prone to inscrutable smirking or blink-and-you'll-miss-it mood shifts, like some immortals we could name.

Prose Style

Only you will know whether you want to read 498 pages of Stephenie Meyer's dialogue-attribution verbs. Lines are "said" and "asked," but they're also "encouraged," "warned," "admitted," "breathed," "nodded," "urged," "gasped" and "coaxed." This isn't the only thing that matters about a work of fiction, of course, but it's such a basic point that it's worrisome when an author can't get it right.

Not every joke in Nightlight hits its mark, but the dialogue tags are knocked down early and brilliantly. From page 11:

"So what's Phoenix like?" he beseeched.

With one word, the authors of Nightlight show they're paying more attention to what they're writing than Stephenie Meyer does in the course of a novel.

Twilight of the Midnight Sons: Twi Harder may just be the latest episode of Marvel's What The?! online comedy videos, but admit it; that's a better ending than New Moon managed.

[YouTube]

Note: Clip above contains the sort of work-inappropriate language you'd expect from South Park.

Granted, Dances with Smurfs isn't exactly the most original parody of Avatar, but it gets better when Wendy notes that Cartman is the true villain of the Smurf holocaust (because he gave them the will to fight back). And Cartman — for someone who combined two other stories to make his own — is pretty incensed when he learns James Cameron bought the movie rights (because, "You don't just take one person's story and add a few things and call it your own!"). Is the South Park team mocking Avatar's blue aliens, or just commenting on the multiple influences in all storytelling?

You can watch the entire episode at South Park Studios.

Nightlight, which has just been released, is the Harvard Lampoon's first foray into parody novel-writing since its 1969 spoof Bored of the Rings. But this volume appears to be an obsessive, scene-for-scene parody of Meyer's books, lampooning not only Meyer's writing and characters, but also the vampire craze itself. Belle Goose is the new girl in the dreary town of Switchblade (some of the jokes appear to have been written via Mad Libs), where she spies her handsome classmate Edwart Mullen. She immediately decides that Edwart is both her soulmate and a vampire (thanks in part to his aversion to tater tots and his rescuing her from a snowball), and that she must convince him to make her his undead wife. But there are plenty of parodies of Meyer's writing style, such as when Belle describes being "unconditionally, irrevocably, impenetrably, heterogeneously, gynecologically, and disreputably" kissed by Edwart, and the scene when we first meet the supposed vampire boy:

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all? Even odder, he hadn't noticed me, Belle Goose, future Academy Award winner.

A computer sat before him on the table. He stared intently at the screen, narrowing his eyes into slits and concentrating those slits on the screen as if the only thing that mattered to him was physically dominating that screen. He was muscular, like a man who could pin you up against the wall as easily as a poster, yet lean, like a man who would rather cradle you in his arms. He had reddish, blonde-brown hair that was groomed heterosexually. He looked older than the other boys in the room - maybe not as old as God or my father, but certainly a viable replacement. Imagine if you took every woman's idea of a hot guy and averaged it out into one man. This was that man.

A preview of the entire first chapter is available at Entertainment Weekly.

[Nightlight]

This comes from the wonderful mind of cartoonist Lucy Knisley, who imagines what Harry Potter might have looked like when she was younger:

[Lucy Knisley]

[via Superhero Hype!]

[G4 via Metafilter]

[via Topless Robot]

Paramount released The Invasion of Cobra Island as viral ad for film. It features the high-tech battles fans have always reenacted with their own toys, with added special effects, and lightly mocks some of the cartoon's conventions, such Snake Eyes' awkward silence and Cobra Commander's costume changes:

[via Screen Rant]

Thanks, Seth Mutchler!

Harvesting creative juices is delicate work, they say: "Being creative people, it's important that they get a lot of praise and massage their egos — especially before the harvest."

Creative Juices has been used on many prominent companies. Check out their website for more information and details on how to get a home presser so you can grow and slaughter your own brains.

[via Core 77]

ANTZI is the brainchild of 51 Minds, the company that gave us such highbrow entertainment as The Surreal Life, Flavor of Love, and America’s Most Smartest Model. Here, they round up eight Zombie-Americans from different backgrounds (including “rage zombie,” “slow-moving zombie,” and “recently deceased vegan”) and challenge them to be the best reanimated corpses they can be. And when things start to get homicidal, the contestants are kept in line by host Carrie Keagan, who got a taste of the zombie life herself in Dance of the Dead.

[VH1 via ShockTillYouDrop]

What's so sad about this is that it looks like these guys really had some terrific, original ideas for Fridge that later got shoehorned into this whole "fringe science" box. Imagine the possibilities if they'd just gone with this original concept! Everybody can relate to fridges and how otherworldly their contents can be. Plus, the idea of putting Pacey from Dawson's Creek into cryogenic sleep and then waking him up so he could get busy with an older woman Agent? Brilliant! It's got that pop-reference thing that Juno made so hip, without all the gross pregnancy stuff.

Instead of gross pregnancies, we would have had the mystery crisper that churns out freaky fruit leftovers that our investigators Pacey and Agent trace back to its source in the "wormhole backdoors" installed by an Illuminatus-style group within Whirlpool when the refrigerators were being manufactured. Basically these backdoors were going to leave humans open to alien surveillance and impregnation. Can you imagine how cool that would have been?

Plus, the mad scientist character was going to have the superpower of scent prescience — he would have been able to smell things 10 hours before they happened. So sometimes he'd smell something, and that would launch a whole investigation. On the show as it aired, his only superpower is peeing in his pants.

I'm just disgusted that the entire premise of this early, great show — Fridge — got destroyed by Fox. Now all we've got is Fringe, which is just testimony to the way Hollywood tries to homogenize everything.

Image spiffing by Stephanie Fox!

The over-the-top Starve Trek appeared in the British socialist magazine New Internationalist in the early 1990s. This was roughly the same era as Tintin: Breaking Free, the crazy anarchist comic where our intrepid reporter has a political awakening. Captain Jerk and the crew of the Starship Appetize go around bringing free-market economics to poor planets and fighting the commie Klingonists. Further sign of sledgehammery unsubtlety: Dr. "McCoil" wears a Ku Klux Klan hood.Every episode of Starve Trek deals with another threat to free-market economies. In "Plague of the Mind," the Starship Appetize encounters "a life-form that causes the mind to ask questions." It makes Dr. McCoil start to wonder if free trade is a rip-off, and Mr. Squat starts selling a Socialist Vulcan newspaper. In "The Trigellion Factor," a poor third-world planet overthrows its Starfleet-approved dictator and starts trying to eliminate poverty and hunger within a decade. It's up to Captain Jerk to put a stop to this Klingonist-engineered subversion. And then there's "The Abundance Machine," which sucks the natural resources out of planets and creates endless consumer goods. Can our heroes escape its clutches and figure out a way to exploit it?I hated these comics back when they came out, but now I find them hilarious. They come from a moment when the Cold War had ended and people could dissect narratives like the original Star Trek for their Cold War paranoid overtones. And Starve Trek's critique of globalization presages the 1990s WTO protests. But mostly, I just like it for the kitschy sight gags, like the fact that the Appetize's saucer section is a trash-can lid, or a scale, or a big metal donut. That never gets old. Unfortunately, the Internationalist's site has gotten buggy since I last looked a few months ago, and the comics are displaying weirdly. [Starve Trek]