Why not? Because I said so, damn it. Will you just listen to me once? No, Marvin, no. We’re far to … uh … well-done for that. Too crispy. If “The Colonel” saw us, he’d try to put us in a bucket with some nice pre-fab buttermilk biscuits. Mmmmm boy.
Oh, hello. Funny that you always seem to show up when we’re having a little disagreement over here. Nothing serious, you understand – just a difference of opinion. Between me and a robot. Not just any robot, of course – I mean Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I should keep him off Facebook, frankly. That’s where he saw that article that’s been driving him frantic ever since. It was probably planted on Facebook by the IRA – the Internet Robotics Agency – as a black ops effort against gullible automatons.
What’s the story about? Glad you asked. It was a piece about how filmmaker Peter Jackson is going to make a documentary out of hours of archived film footage of the Beatles originally gathered for the movie Let It Be. That got Marvin thinking … maybe WE could do something like that. First, find a director (preferably a famous, gullible one), then send him all of our home movies from the past thirty or thirty-five years. Make it forty. After that, they could shoot interviews of all of us while we talk about the content on the footage and make pithy comments while the Director checks his phone. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?
Of course it bloody doesn’t! What, point hi-def video cameras at our superannuated faces? Nothing doing. And as far as the archival footage goes, what we have is so rough and so primitive I doubt anyone would be able to interpret the hazy dark shapes on the screen in a way that would suggest real human activity. What director is going to take a bunch of VHS tapes and make a documentary? The idea is ludicrous, and yet Marvin is married to it, much like that time he married that stamp vending machine over at the corner drug store. The only thing that worked about that marriage was when it came to putting postage on the wedding invitations. In that respect, it was a match made in heaven.
So, short story, we’re not doing it … no matter what the black ops people say.
Other gems from the junk pile? Well, there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s favorite: Rainbow Bridge! A “concert” movie that features about 15 or 20 minutes of Jimi Hendrix playing a set interspersed with about an hour-long montage of stoned hippies running up and down hillsides, being totally free. Why Marvin likes this so much I can only guess, though you can tell he’s been watching it when you see him rolling pointlessly around the mill with his claws up in the air. I might get him a headband for Christmas this year … or maybe some feathers and bells, and a book of Indian lore. (Apologies to Zappa.)
I guess there’s a renewed interest in the red planet since NASA recently determined that there’s evidence of flowing water on the surface – mostly ice melt in the mountains. Hell, we could have told them that. I can’t remember which interstellar tour it was, but one time we played a ski chalet on Mount Olympus. The dry ice was up to our ankles, but there was some water ice as well – mostly in our cocktails, though. Pretty cushy arrangement, but again … not our audience. And dry, very dry.