The Wind In Our Sails

We all heard Obama's speech tonight. Eight is enough, he said. We all heard his reference to the number one movie in the country, "Tropic Thunder". For like the Robert Downey, Jr. character passionately reciting words from the theme song to the TV show, "The Jeffersons," just as if they came from him, but then caught at it, and then defending himself, "Just 'cause it comes from 'The Jeffersons' don't make it not true", so Obama spoke the words, "Eight Is Enough", the name of a TV show, and then laughed. Just 'cause it's the title of a TV show don't make it not true, that was the message I heard.

This brings me to my 1993 screenplay, "Gosk", posted July 3, 2007 on the Internet at http://www.archive.org/details/GoskTheScreenplay (Archive.Org shows right there, that's when I posted it). Go to page 90 of the PDF (indicated as page 88 of the screenplay), Scene 30. Here we find the characters stranded in a rowboat, each grasping a corner of a jacket in order to make a sail. Until they learn that the idea came to one of them, Clerp, from watching the TV show, "Gilligan's Island". They then each let go of their corner of the jacket. Apparently, Clerp had been unaware that the characters on "Gilligan's Island" never escaped from the island, and so had failed to see that the idea was thusly fundamentally flawed.

Another example of evaluating the seriousness of an idea based on whether it comes from a TV show and/or a movie occurs yet again in "Tropic Thunder": the Jack Black character offers as a plan an idea borrowed from a movie he (his character) was in, wherein the panties gained from a panty raid are made into a catapult (Stuart Cornfeld, "Tropic Thunder" producer, who I half-knew in 1975, and who used to read all of my emails and pass them to "SNL", "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report", and who I refer to in my August 13th blog: how could you have missed this opportunity to present a visualization of this?).

Yes, Obama, you have picked a very interesting week to work the name of a TV show into a speech. And yes, you are quite correct: just 'cause it comes from a TV show don't make it not true.