Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…
Thank God it’s the day named after a Norse goddess… yep, it’s Friday everyone! That means The Nest is opening up the request lines again and just allowing any old hack to hijack my blog. It’s time for the latest entry in Prompt the Squirrel Friday, where you have nobody to blame but yourselves for any cyber pollution my dreck causes today. Thankfully there are only three prompts left for me to fulfill, which probably means I can sneak through the remainder of this series before the EPA shows up at my door to shut down this internet wasteland…
Take a good, long whiff of my noxious material!
This week’s prompt comes to us from longtime Nest follower and fellow demented mind Draliman, on whose blog bad things often happen to people in good pictures. Drali inspired one of my better posts from the inaugural PTS season last year… let’s see if he’s up to the task again in 2016…
The gang is marooned on a desert island a la “Lost”. How do they cope? Does a natural leader emerge? Do we see hidden strengths and talents come out? Does Wiki “go native” and eat someone? Did Buster survive in one piece?
What do you mean “go native,” tasty civilian?
The desert island trope has been around for almost as long as the earth’s been covered by land and water rather than it’s original magma and Spam. Long before Tom Hanks was tropically marooned with his BFF volleyball, Robinson Crusoe was hanging out with his good man Friday. William Golding showed us how getting stranded on an island will turn us all into stereotypical, uncivilized natives. Survivor taught us how being stranded along with a TV production crew will turn everyone into douchebags and assholes. Stephen King once even wrote about a man who was so desperate for food on his own, private sandbar in the ocean that he actually ate himself to death.
That sounds so utterly revolting…. wouldn’t you agree, Clarice?
Of course the most famous castaways in America were the seven character actors who made up the short-lived 1960’s series Gilligan’s Island, which achieved cult status through incessant reruns over the past four decades and added a lot of stupid questions that still pervade pop culture today. Why didn’t the crew react to how Gilligan kept screwing up their chances of being rescued by totally killing his retarded ass? How could the Professor build everything from a radio to a vibrator out of nothing but coconuts, yet not figure out how to send out an SOS? Who would you rather be stranded with… the sultry Ginger, or the girl next door Mary Ann?
Even the Professor can’t decide.
What’s ironic about our fascination with people being stranded away from civilization on a desert island is the fact that it so rarely actually happens in real life. Especially these days where short of being on board an Asian airliner, it’s practically impossible to disappear off the face of the earth anymore. We’re all so proud of the GPS locators in our phones that help us find the nearest grocery store or Pikachu, yet it’d also allow the Coast Guard to find your ass if you ever washed up on a desert island after Joe Hazelwood guided your cruise ship into a beached whale. “The missing person” is an overused plotline that died a slow, painful death in the early 21st Century…
Where was all of this fine technology in 1975?
Well, with all that being said… let’s take my gang out for a sea cruise and see what happens when their deranged, omniscient author decides to let a series of unfortunate events happen to them. So we’ve got Evil Squirrel captaining the S.S. Gypsy Moth out onto the high seas along with his first mate Robbie. The passenger list includes MBRS, Angel, Buster, Rainbow Donkey, Hooly, Hottie, Odyssey, Pigladillo, Wiki and the twins. Bon voyage everyone! And watch out for that hurricane up ahead…
This is what you get for neglecting to invite Sandy.
Uh oh, looks like the boat is taking on water. Time to abandon ship! Women and childr… aw hell, it’s every critter for themselves! 1912 this is not. Since the Gypsy Moth is about the size of a regular lifeboat, there is no emergency escape craft on board… better start grabbing for pieces of the ship and hang on tight everyone!
Maybe next time you won’t book your cruise through some third rate travel agency.
Unfortunately, not everyone can survive the initial shipwreck… so Hollywood guidelines dictate that we must start by first eliminating all of the lower tier, non essential characters. Alas, poor Angel never learned how to swim and drowned at sea…
Sniff!
Hottie had a nasty encounter with a shark…
My, what big teeth you have.
And Robbie got stuck in the bathroom with a nasty case of possum trots and was forced to go down with the ship…
Now we know why it was called a water closet…
The rest of the gang was able to make it safely to a nearby deserted island… well, except for Pigladillo who managed to float right into the middle of one of Bumfuckistan’s atomic bomb tests…
Coming in 2017: Piglazilla!
The nine survivors managed to regroup on the island… and once they realized they were all alone and would have to depend on each other for survival they did the only thing they could… split up into rival tribes. Wiki, Sully and Blaze built an awesome bamboo fort on the north side of the island. MBRS, Hooly and Odyssey camped out on the far western side of the island to keep as far as possible away from the rest of the lonely malecritters preverts. Not that these tribal factions exactly got along all that well on their own. Blaze finally realized she had the perfect chance to exact revenge on all of the annoying things her brother had done to her…
Now children…. play nice.
And in a stunning tribal council that shocked the entire imaginary viewing audience, archenemies Hooly and Odyssey formed an alliance to vote MBRS off of the island…
That’ll be sure to drive up the ratings…
After a few days on the island all of the emergency Butt Nugget Bars are gone and hunger starts to set in among the castaway critters. To make things worse, all of the cheap scenery The Nest’s prop department bought for the desert island set is all fake and inedible. With no hope of rescue anytime soon, it becomes inevitable that someone is going to have to be sacrificed for the good of the others. Do you pick the weakest? The most unpopular? The tastiest?
No! You pick the one that’s going to provide the biggest meal, of course!
Don’t knock unicorn chileh until you’ve tried it.
Having cured their hunger problem, there were still many dangers awaiting the survivors as they wished smartphones had been invented in this fictional universe I threw them all into. There were still nasty tropical storms…
1.21 gigawatts of instant death…
Mosquitoes carrying exotic, deadly diseases…
You can’t die in grotesque ways with any of our silly stateside pandemics…
Not to mention the dangerous equatorial rays of the sun…
Looks like the next meal is fully cooked…
One day, several months after the wreck of the S.S. Gypsy Moth, Buster was walking the beach all alone… as he’d been doing for a while now. He looked out into the wide open ocean and saw the same mirage he’d seen every day now since he’d first landed on this dreaded island, a distant ship passing by. Only this one looked so real…. and was coming closer…. yes! It was close enough now to see the seamen on board! Buster ran to the water’s edge and frantically jumped up and down to make sure the crew saw him. He threw out his arms triumphantly as the ship that would bring him back to a land of fast food, cellphones and politics docked. The captain was leaning over the ship waving Buster aboard as his crew lowered the gangplank…
That’s gonna leave a mark…
Well, so much for that misadventure into exploring what happens when my critters get stranded on a desert island. I guess now that I managed to kill everyone off, I’ll just have to find myself a new batch of critters to subject to my bad comics and even worse drawing skills. Oh well, I still must give thanks to Draliman for inspiring this case of mass crittercide, and I’ll be back next Friday to beach my blog on another jagged prompt that will no doubt turn out very badly for everyone involved…
Fast forward: 10 years later…..
Just how many new critters are you needing, mate?
Poor Buster. Even his good luck is bad luck. At least a couple of critters survived. All their wee baby descendants grew up … and lacking any alternative, married each other. Eventually, inbreeding took its toll. They became brainless moron critters — in other words, Republicans. A sad end to any tale
And so history repeats itself…. as always.
Wilson!!!
LOL, everyone dies and all you’re concerned about is the volleyball? 😛
Dude, that was so sad, I cried!!
I enjoyed your tale of death to critters…you so morbid.
Fictional characters were made to be killed… and subsequently brought back to be killed again.
It would have been awesome if they had killed off Gilligan every week and brought the dumb ass back…fired squad with coconuts, getting the clap from Ginger…
The clap is deadly!?!? Damn, I’m putting that thing away then!
It sure is without the luxury of antibiotics…just stick with Mary Ann, you’ll be fine.
Well, that was crittergeddon if ever I saw it………and a mighty fine way to pare down the cast I might say. Too bad they didn’t do that on Gilligan – Mary Ann was so wide-eyed and sweet I kept wishing for a lightning strike……
Pam
Had Herbert T. Gillis taken care of Bob Denver on a previous show as he so often promised to do, they may not have ended up stranded on that island to begin with!
This is a tragic story. I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me. As they say.
I think the illustrations would go well in a children’s book… good family entertainment.
Ha, ha. I got to the part about Buster walking alone and thought you’d pulled a Chuck Cunningham on Wiki. I should have known you’d be more detail oriented than that. Ha!
Meanwhile I must have seen that charter sign the Skipper is leaning on 5850568033 times, yet I’d never noticed the free lunches…..
I didn’t think I’d fool anyone who was actually paying attention. I wouldn’t have gotten the Chuck Cunningham reference before this past January when I spent about half of my vacation hooked on reading stuff over at TV Tropes…
I never noticed the free lunches on the sign when watching the show (Not that I’ve seen it probably since I was a kid anyway… I don’t even like it), but spotted it the first time I uploaded that photo…
It always comes down to the survival of the cutest! I mean fittest. LOL! GREAT. YUGE, ENTERTAINING, story. 😀
I just hope Wiki remembers what she did to her brother…. he better watch his back!
What have I done? WHAT HAVE I DONE? They’re almost all dead 😦
Great stuff 🙂
I have too much fun working on your prompts. When I do this again next year, I’m sure someone in the gang will see to it that your next idea gets deleted…
If there was still anyone left in the gang heh heh 🙂
I expect you had fun killing them off though. I always think that the writers of series which feature a time travel/alternate reality episode have fun as they get to wipe out the regular characters.
It’s funny that a story with so much death could be funny but this one is. My favorite parts were Robbie on the toilet with the possum trots and Buster getting smashed by the gangplank. So funny. Thank you, I needed a good laugh!
I think what made me like this macabre story I came up with so much was when it occurred to me that I should have everyone die around Buster… then just when it looks like he might be the ONLY survivor….. WHAM! I didn’t even think of the happy epilogue until I took a break for lunch halfway through typing it up…
Just wanted to throw in, since you mentioned liking the Robbie scene….. did you notice the Squatty Potty?