Back in the early 1980’s, I discovered the Golden Turkey Awards books and my search for bad movies began. It was also around that time that video stores began popping up. Before the days of Blockbuster Video, it seemed like you could go to these smaller video stores and find many of these Golden Turkey award winners if you were willing to search hard enough. Those stores were looking for any kind of content to fill their shelves and these stinker movies were often just the right thing to pad their number of movies. For someone like me who loved these movies, a film with the title The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living And Became Mixed-Up Zombies was a must find.
Anyone hardcore fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 should be familiar with the film Manos: The Hands of Fate. Manos is considered one of the worst films that ever appeared on the series. The premise of the show is that mad scientists have captured a test case and show him bad movies. The test subject and his robots make fun of the movies. Manos was the only film that was so bad, the scientists apologized to their victim. It is also considered one of the best episodes of the series.
During the early 200’s, my family and I discovered a new group of bad movies. This group of movies was labeled as “so bad they are good” to differentiate them from the films labeled as Golden Turkeys in the past. One of the first of this group was a Film called Troll 2.
While I won’t try to share all the details of Troll 2, I will try and share enough to let you know why this film is so beloved by its fans. First, there are no trolls in Troll 2. There are goblins but no trolls. Next you should know that Troll 2 is not a sequel to the film Troll. Troll 2 was originally titled Goblins, but the distributors wanted to market it as a sequel to Troll. The movie was filmed by an Italian production company in Utah with an Italian-speaking crew, working with an inexperienced English-speaking group of actors. They were working with a script written in Italian and poorly translated into English, making the dialogue of the film one of the sources of humor.
In 1982 the film It Came From Hollywood was released. It is a documentary film with a compilation of clips from “Bad Movies” drawing heavily on the book The Golden Turkey Awards. There is a short clip of a film not covered in the book that I was unfamiliar with that featured a giant ape being attacked by helicopters. The man in the ape suit is slapping around toy helicopters on strings, knocking them into paper mache mountains. This was a low budget version Korean knock-off of what the Japanese had been doing much better for years with the Godzilla series. The highlight from the clip of this battle is when the ape flips the bird at the camera. He’s not flipping off the military, he’s flipping off the audience.
I have lost over 100 pounds. I weigh over 100 pounds less than what I weighed in January of 2022. The weight loss was intentional. A lot of friends have been curious about what I’ve done to lose weight, especially those that are interested in dropping a few pounds. Below I will take you on my weight loss journey, sharing changes to my behaviors and what motivated me to commit to this task.
January of 2022 was a time to consider New Year’s resolutions, which almost always include a weight loss goal. While I wanted to lose some weight, I hadn’t committed to any plan of attack. At that point, my strategy was to weigh myself every morning and hope that my weight was less than the day before. Since I was recording my weight regularly in my phone, I was able to look back and see that my highest recorded weight was 296.5. But I know that there were some days that my weight was higher than this, but I didn’t have the heart to record the actual weight. There could have been some days where I was pushing 300 pounds. My routine then is like it is now where I weigh myself in the morning with no clothes on, right before I take a shower. I do this hoping to catch myself when I am at the lowest weight of the day. I’m sure I was over 300 pounds at this time with clothes on and a full belly when I was asked to step on the scale at the hospital on the evening of January 18, when I broke my arm.
I was about to leave the visitor’s center at Graceland, and I held the door open for a group of four women to exit before me. They all said thank you or said other words of appreciation. The last lady in the group was using one of those walkers with the wheels on the front and a place that can be used as a seat. It took her a little longer than the rest of the women. As she passed by me, she looked me in the face and said, “Elvis would be proud of you.”
This would not be the only interesting thing that I heard during this year’s visit to the Candlelight Vigil. A young woman in the parking lot was having trouble keeping up with her mother as they approached the complex known as Elvis Presley’s Memphis. The mom was encouraging her daughter to pick up the speed to which she replied, “If Elvis was alive, he wouldn’t pick up the speed.”
These two stories show the difference in the types of encounters I have each year at Graceland. Sometimes you get a story by talking to someone, other times you get a story by just listening to others.
When I was in school at Lambuth College, my friends and I enjoyed going to basketball games. The games with our crosstown rival, Union University where always a highlight of the season. Even when either team wasn’t having a good season, both would bring their best games to these matchups making for an exciting contest. My sophomore year, the first meeting of these two teams was at Union. Lambuth was rebuilding their basketball program that year and had a difficult time with Union during the game. One of the standouts for Union was a player named Elmer Smith. Elmer had a good game that night and appeared to be one of Union’s leaders. He did come off as a superstar athlete and appeared to be someone who could have their confidence shaken easily. A plan was coming together to get inside his head during our rematch on our home court.
During my freshman year of college, someone found out about my time as the Alamo Red Devil in high school. It was natural for them to ask me to help with mascot duties in college. I wasn’t very interested in continuing to do this, but I always aim to please, so I agreed to step into the rotation to fill Lambuth Eagle costume occasionally during basketball games. The eagle costume was more elaborate than the one for the red devil in high school. The eagle costume was built on a chicken wire frame for the body. The head was papier-mâché with a relatively small wire screened area to look through. In this costume, I had less ability for my personality to shine. In high school, I was Arthur in a devil costume whereas in college, I was just the eagle. Yelling loud was one thing I brought to being the devil, but I was not about to shout to have the sound echo around inside that eagle head. Other people that took the role of the eagle seemed to have a better feel for how to work inside this costume and I was happy to let them take the role as much as they wanted. I enjoyed other hijinks in the stands with my buddies more than being on the sidelines as the eagle.
During my senior year of high school, someone decided that the basketball team needed someone to dress as the team mascot and join the cheerleaders at courtside during the games. I enjoyed going to basketball games and was known for my antics in the crowd during games. I was open to carrying out my high jinks in a more official capacity. I auditioned for the part and won. I was the Alamo Red Devil.
Many years ago, I worked in the lab of a factory. One day, one of my co-workers came in from the shop floor and asked if I had met the new guy. When I told him I had not, he came up to me and grabbed my hand to shake it, acting like he was the new guy, introducing him in the fashion of our new employee saying, “Hi! I’m Timothy. Timothy Righteous!” He quickly became known as Timothy Timothy Righteous because of his somewhat unique way of introducing himself. Timothy Timothy was a small, young white, kid that I assumed came to work right out of high school because he started with us right after graduation season. He was eager to introduce himself to everyone and I was among the people that got the Timothy Timothy introduction. He was also awkward in some of the social conventions of how to interact with other people, especially in a men’s locker room. He tried to introduce himself to co-workers who were naked, just getting out of the shower. None of these wet, naked men were looking to shake hands with this stranger, especially the big black men living in a community where there was still a lot of racial tension even in the late 1980’s. He was told in no uncertain terms to back off. He was getting a different education.
For the record, Timothy Righteous is not this man’s name but I’m using this one because the cadence of the words are similar to his real name and “Righteous” has spiritual suggestions like his real name.
