Monkey Woman Is My Hero
Okay, so I've been suckered into lowest-common denominator geek entertainment. But I really am enjoying Stan Lee's "Who Wants To Be A Superhero?" show. It's silly, it's over-the-top, and it knows it. As I've posted before. Somehow, it works for me.

And this recent episode (episode 2) was just as fun as the first.

But I just have to hand it to Mary Votava, AKA Monkey Woman. For those who didn't catch the episode, the heroes are asked to help a little old woman who is locked out of her house by getting in through the back yard. Of course, there are a pair of ATTACK DOGS back there. So the heroes are given protective clothing, and required to cross the yard and touch the back door to succeed in their mission. If at any time they want to give up, they can simply cry the safety word, "Uncle."

Less than half made it. Cell Phone Girl got knocked flat on her (admittedly dainty) posterior and cried uncle within four seconds.

Ty'Veculus made the honorable offer to go first, with the explanation that he might tire out the dogs to make it easier for everyone else. Maybe he was playing to the judge on that one - a trained fire-fighter in "real life", he made the run in the least amount of time as anyone, doing little to tire out the dogs.

The Iron Enforcer, a bouncer in real life, cried uncle about twenty-some-odd seconds in, after getting brought down by the dogs only a few inches from the door! Considering the ending of the episode, I wonder if that part wasn't somehow staged.

But the best performance of all was Monkey Woman. She claimed to be very upset about her failure in the test from the previous episode, and announced that she WOULD NOT QUIT, no matter what.

And she didn't. Everyone else made it to the door or quit in under 60 seconds. Monkey Woman was pretty much a doggie chew toy for nearly ten minutes, dragged all over the yard. She cried "Ouch!" a couple of times as the dogs yanked at her padded suit, but she never cried uncle. Eventually, the dogs must have been more exhausted than she was, because she made it to the door on hands and knees.

She succeeded simply by refusing to allow herself to fail. After all, as long as her suit held together, the dogs couldn't do her any serious harm. All she had to do was to outlast the dogs and consider them to be momentary setbacks. I can imagine it's pretty hard to call getting knocked down and turned into a human tug-of-war game by two snarling, trained attack dogs a "momentary setback." But it paid off - at least for this competition. She didn't end up being on the chopping block this week.

Ya just gotta admire someone who sticks with it like that.

I have yet to talk to anyone who has watched the show who hasn't enjoyed it. But most of my friends are as geeky as me. There are only four episodes of this show left, but based on these two episodes I am giving it a a hearty recommendation for the geek-at-heart.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:08 PM (Permalink)