Little Green Man vs. the Man in Black

I don’t get into dream analysis too much, but this one’s funny. I had an utterly bizarre dream last night in which I was with a band that happened to be playing on an overpass to a reasonably large crowd below. Why there was no traffic trying to get across the overpass (or plowing through the reasonably large crowd below), I will never know. When I say I was with the band, I don’t mean I was playing in it – I was just…there. For some reason I was invited to step up to the microphone and sing one little verse of something, and for whatever reason made sense within the internal logic of this strange dream, I chose to sing like Johnny Cash (not something I can do on command, by the way), and sang something like “And now I’m standing on this bridge with some little guy named Earl.” That was my whole contribution to this shindig of the subconscious, from what I can tell. I actually woke up laughing, because even asleep, I thought it was funny as hell. What any of it means on some deeper level, I do not know and cannot even begin to speculate.

This week’s big project is to get the furniture that used to comprise my bedroom out of the baby room – cedar chest, bookshelf, and lots of boxes. To my amazement, my wife has given the thumbs up for me to move the chest into the game room, put a seat cushion on top of it, and wrap 0ne of my Pac-Man bedsheets around it to completely cover it and protect the wood from being damaged. And it’ll be guest perfect seating for playing games or what have you, facing the TV or facing the Avid. There’ll be a bookcase swap with the one that’s been right outside the bathroom since we moved into the house; the smaller one that’s been there for three years will go into the game room. And then the work can begin on painting the baby room, pulling up the carpet and putting some flooring down; originally the plan was to do this throughout the house, but at this rate I’ll be surprised if that gets any further than the baby room, the little hallway-ette outside the baby room/game room area, and at most the living room. We’re just running out of time and out of money.

With this past weekend’s episode of Doctor Who having shown us real live Time Lords (in a flashback), decked out in old-school, Tom-Baker-era Time Lord robes and headgear, I’m itching to get back to an idea that I’ve had since last year, which is basically to assemble the equivalent of these “catch-up specials” shown for Lost, Stargate or Galactica that lay out The Mythology So Far. Except that this would have to be structured a bit differently, since you’re dealing not with a couple of seasons, not with 10 seasons, but with a grand total of about 30 years of story (with the new series liberally grabbing storylines from the vaults of Virgin Publishing, Big Finish and whatnot, I’m not sure it even pays to try to include anything but the TV series there). Clips galore and music stretching from Tristram Cary to Murray Gold, all in brief segments outlining the history of such concepts as the TARDIS, the Time Lords, the Doctor’s refugee status, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, regeneration, UNIT, companions, and so forth, letting the clips speak for themselves and not leaning on a narrator to tell the story, just tying it all together.

And what would I do with this monster? I have no idea. Put it on the site? Maybe, but I might hear the BBC calling “Exterminate!” if I did that. Put it on YouTube? I’d rather not if I could help it, as I’m just not that crazy about YouTube, and we’re talking about something that would more or less be designed to be as long as an episode of the current series (~42 minutes). Try to see if Sci-Fi or BBC America or the BBC itself would want this as a video for their site(s)? Hey, that might not be a bad idea – and then they could do the heavy lifting on clearances for clips, music rights, and so on. (Ha! Good luck!) Why spend the time on it? Why, just to see if I can pull it off, and to keep myself in practice too. Why not? And maybe, just maybe, I might just convince my wife at some vague unspecified future juncture that it’s worth it to watch the original series. But the Time Lords’ appearance, in their vintage ’60s and ’70s duds, convinced me that this is something that can be done, and it can all be tied together. By some little guy named Earl.