Saturday, December 05, 2009

Invasion Iowa


I was about to risk being sent up the river to the Federal Pen for puchasing a bootleg DVD of a TV show not legally available.  It has now been released, so I must overcome my basic cheapskate nature  and buy it or ask someone who has it to make me a copy. That's not  exactly legal, either.  I'm not sure the Feds at our respective  doors would be impressed if I remind them  that everybody does it. 

What's got me into this moral dilemma is Invasion Iowa. I saw it on the Spyke channel back in 2005. There was some  kind of legal stuff that kept it from being available on DVDs until earlier this year.That mini series gets my vote as one of the funniest,  most elaborately orchestrated  and executed pranks of our time.

Riverside already had its share of what you might call future fame as the March 22, 2233 birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk, who revealed in a Star Trek episode that he was from the tall corn state. I don't know if it was William Shatner or someone else who came up with the idea of  playing  a gigantic trick on the Iowans who lived there in the fifth year of century 21.  Whoever conceived it, they did it up right.

Shatner and a crew of super-quirky movie makers blew into Riverside with a script for a sci-fi  film to star local people. It was  a gigantic prank  to see how those Iowans would perform if they thought they were actually making a film. If they did it today I guess it would be called a reality show. I don't want to spoil it by revealing many details, but  the whole thing  is absolutely  hilarious and the finished "product" is  so bad that it's good.  Some of the locals who watched themselves in the movie were mad as a flock of wet hens clucking their way out of a muddy Iowa corn field  when they learned that they had been had. Others found humor in it all  A big cash donation to the town helped to calm the angry ones.

It's ten episodes long..  If you have plenty of time and want to laugh yourself silly, don't miss Invasion Iowa. But be sure your copy is legal, in case the copyright cops are watching.

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