If you’ve ever listened to any of the Major Spoilers podcasts in which I appear, you’ve probably realized that I love to futz about with language, even ones that I barely speak. (My Spanish and Yiddish-speaking friends tend to just sigh and nod a lot. That’s good advice.) But there’s something special about a spectacularly awkward turn of phrase to me, especially when it comes to old Silver Age comics. Maybe it’s just the fun of hearing things like “A flock of tiny Supermen!” or “These fire-trolls are trying to give us an underwater hotfoot!” in the voice of the Narrator from ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space,’ or maybe it’s the peculiar chemical fumes of aging comics, but you gotta love the gleeful illogic of Superman sternly telling Jimmy, “I’m sorry I adopted you as my son!” In the movies, you get the wonder that was Ed Wood’s stilted conversations or Star Wars’ occasionally tone-deaf, just-get-the-job-done terrible dialogue. As someone who often speaks in out-of-context references, I have but one thing to tell you: Nobody ever lends money to a man with a sense of humor, which leads us to today’s conversationtional query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) realizes that we are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives, asking: What’s your favorite bit of terrible dialogue?
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“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.” I’d secretly like to do it in bad imitation voice to irritate people.
I remember an old episode of the real, actual and only McGyver series in which the titular protagonist is knocked unconscious. Upon waking up, his inner narration states “they say sleep is supposed to be relaxing.” This has always stuck with me as a particularly ridiculous bit of writing.
Intentionally bad, but there’s a line from Hot Shots Part Deux that has always stuck with me for some reason. “Now I will kill you until you die from it.”