The Superpup Effect...

Years ago, I bought a copy of a movie called "Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla." It was dirt cheap, and with a title like that, how could I not? So I brought it home and started to watch it. I got maybe fifteen minutes into it before I had to shut it off. Didn't even get to any scenes of Bela Lugosi. One of the two main characters spent the entire time doing a bad Jerry Lewis impersonation that grated on my nerves like nails on a blackboard. Eventually it got to the point where I just couldn't continue. And so the DVD sat around for years, collecting dust, and I hardly dared to look at it, much less try to watch it again.

Flash forward to a couple of years ago. A friend of mine loaned me a boxed set of Superman DVDs. In addition to all the mainstream Superman movies, it was loaded with special features and obscure stuff that most people had never even heard of, much less seen. Among these things was a failed pilot called "The Adventures of Superpup."

Adventures of Superpup was conceived because George Reeves had killed himself (or possibly died under mysterious circumstances, if you've seen Hollywoodland) while the Superman TV show was at the height of its popularity. And in the wake of this tragedy, the network executives proceeded to ask one question: "Is there any way we can keep making money off of Superman?" There were still a bunch of sets left over from the show. There were still a bunch of kids who wanted to see Superman, and would pay big money for whatever cereal he endorsed. So a pilot was produced, and that pilot was The Adventures of Superpup. It used whatever was left over from the Superman TV show, only instead of people the show was about dogs. Played by little people wearing dog masks, with character names like "Bark Bent" and "Pamela Poodle," who were reporters for the Daily Bugle.

If you're thinking that sounds awful, you don't know the half of it. It's physically painful to sit through. I could drive myself half mad trying to comprehend exactly what any individual person involved in the production of this pilot could possibly have been thinking at the time, but I'd really rather not give it any more thought than I have to. Suffice it to say, this was a terrible TV-watching experience.

So after this abomination was over, I went over to the shelf where my copy of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla was sitting, virtually untouched for a good seven or eight years. I popped it in the DVD player and proceeded to watch it, beginning to end, without so much as a cringe or a flinch. Up until that moment, it had been the worst cinematic monstrosity I had ever seen in my life. But now suddenly, by comparison, it wasn't all that bad.

I call this the Superpup Effect. When you endure something so abysmal that anything else seems fully tolerable, almost easy, by comparison. Frequently accompanied by the assertion, "Yeah, this is bad... But hey, at least it's not as bad as Superpup!"

A Strange Affliction...

There's something that happens to me every once in awhile, that I just can't explain. Honestly, there are a number of things that happen to me that I can't explain, but this one in particular stands out at the moment. It's a very minor issue, not like a disease or terrible hardship. Just an oddity.

Every so often--from a few months to a couple of years apart--I get the overwhelming urge to watch the movie Lucky Number Slevin. Most of the time, I'm only barely aware that the movie exists (I assume this is the natural state in which most people exist with regards to this film), and can go ages without giving it a single thought. But then all of a sudden, I think to myself, "Wow, I really want to watch Lucky Number Slevin!" Which is not such a terrible thing, I guess. There are plenty of much worse movies I could watch. It has Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, and Stanley Tucci in it, after all, not to mention Lucy Liu. But what makes it so strange is that... I was only moderately entertained by the movie the first time I watched it. And it's not one of those movies that gets better and better over time, either. I still find it only moderately entertaining. I'm also not a big fan of Josh Hartnett.

But for some inexplicable reason, every once in awhile, I just feel like I have to watch the movie. And it's not a particularly easy task. I don't own it because, as I've said, it's only an average film at best. It's not available for Instant Viewing on Netflix, it's not a film they show on TV very frequently, and it doesn't appear to be on YouTube in its entirety, like a lot of films are. I always check, just to be sure.

I suppose I could pay to watch it on Amazon Instant, or put it at the top of my Netflix queue and watch it in a day or two... But it never seems worth it, because, much as I want to watch it, I know in my heart it's only a mediocre movie. So I usually end up not watching the movie. I just bear with it, and eventually the feeling passes.

The very odd thing is that this overwhelming, inexplicable urge is how I ended up seeing the movie in the first place. Before the film's release, I saw the trailer and it looked pretty stupid. I promptly forgot all about it. Then, awhile later, a few weeks after the movie came out, I suddenly said to myself, completely out of the blue, "You know, I should totally go see that movie!" And I was really excited about it, too. So I paid to see it in the theater. It was OK. And I promptly forgot about it again, until maybe a year later, when I decided I really wanted to watch it a second time.

It kind of makes me wonder... Did this ever happen to me BEFORE the movie Lucky Number Slevin came out? There have been plenty of times in my life when I've really wanted something, but had no idea what it was. Could these have been early manifestations of Slevin Syndrome, that my brain just didn't know how to interpret, because the movie hadn't yet been made? I think this would be an issue worth considerable pondering, if I were ever to take up getting stoned.

So anyway, the other night, I happened to be flipping through the channels, and I noticed Lucky Number Slevin was about to be on, so I DVR'd it. And now I'm thinking of watching it. And thinking... "Meh. It's not really that great of a movie." Guess I'll just keep it around until the inevitable Slevin Syndrome sets in again...