Don't Call him Shirley

Woke up a little later this morning, after having to deal with a puzzle in my dream that I was having trouble solving. I was in a Metroid-like environment, and in order to get past the first door, I had to destroy three canisters. Problem was, they were suspended in mid-air, like some sort of anti-gravity spaceship. There were two missle cases a floor below one carrying 4x missles, the other 6x, which seemed odd, since all the missles in the Metroid franchise were in the 5x category. I kept firing weapons at the cases, but everything kept bouncing off the coating. After fidling with the cases for awhile, I figured out that the trick was to open the spray a bit from all three canisters and then fire.

Problem was, for some reason, I decided to use my lighter around that time to set them off. Not only was I putting myself under unnecessary risk to light them, I also couldn't get the lighter to work properly. I kept clicking and clicking the thing, and the canisters were floating further away from each other, which would mean I'd have to start all over again...

...And then I woke up. What's really aggravating is that I originally woke up an hour ago, but promptly fell back to sleep, thinking I'd only need another five minutes or so. I could've stayed in bed longer to solve the puzzle properly, but had to get up because I was late.

Shortly after that, I went downstairs to check the latest headliners, which are usually less interesting than the rest of the paper, when an obituary in the lower left hand corner caught my eye:

"Leslie Neilson dies at age of 84"

I was just as shocked as everybody else. Like many humourists, I based much of my personality on his dry straight-man speech which was quite up my alley. The interesting thing is, even though he started out doing serious roles and only entered comedy for the later third of his life, you can't take his earlier roles seriously anymore. Since they're done in such a deadpan manner, you keep expecting him to come up with a witticism when there isn't one. A little tip - if you want to respect the man's works, don't look for pre-Airplaine! movies with him in the cast - you'll only be setting yourself up for disappointment.

After the decline that was the third Naked Gun movie, he wasn't able to obtain the heights he'd grown to. He was being continuously cast for less and less sophisicated parodical roles that demanded only the barest strands of his talents. The scripts couldn't match up the the genius of the early Naked Gun movies, and relied too much on visual cues that became less funny the more they were used.

However, because I woke up late, I missed the boat, and other bloggers were more eloquent, insightful and informative than I was. Not to mention that many of the commentors beat me to the punch in potential one-liners.

One thing that I never understood was why when the DVDs of the Naked Gun movies were released, did they never show the outtakes that were shown on TV, such as when Frank accidentally turned off Nordberg's life support system. Or the fight with the football fans before exposing the fake Meinheimer. Or Frank's continuous exploits at the sperm hospital getting him penile surgery. Hopefully now we'll get a chance to see these exploits that originally showed up on TV get a proper release.