Two Great Tastes

Today on the boards, we were having fun with "impossible collaborations" -- basically mashups of artistic works by two disparate creators. I had some fun by suggesting things like The Oldest Living Confederate Widow in King Arthur's Court (by Mark Twain and Allan Gurganus) and Se7en and the Ragged Tiger (by David Fincher and Duran Duran), and even a toy like Mike Mignola and Children Television Workshop's Tickle Me Hellboy. But where I really had fun was thinking about how other people's suggestions would play out.

For instance, LimeCoke's notion of the Legion of City Slickers inspired this exchange:

CURLY: "You know what the secret of life is?" (He holds up one finger.) "This."
MITCH: "Is that a flight ring?"

He also suggested John Hughes and John Ostrander's The Breakfast Suicide Squad:

"Dear Mrs. Waller, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in Belle Reve for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you're crazy to send us on covert ops on enemy soil. You see us as you want to see us... In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions, according to our various sentences. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain...
...and an athlete...
...and a basket case...
...a princess...
...and a guy who throws trick boomerangs.

Does that answer your question?

Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Suicide Squad."

But so far I've had the most fun riffing on Mike Parnell's proposed collaboration between Garrison Keillor and James Ellroy: Lake Wobegon Confidential.

"It's Christmas time in Lake Wobegon, and Edna Biddle would be spritzing the last few ounces of brandy on her signature fruitcakes, if she hadn't be cut down in a brutal murder at the cozy little diner she ran with her husband Carl. Carl made the best apple cobbler in town, and was a heck of a good poker player, even if he did chase an inside straight more often than was good for him... Last night Carl was found in a pile of corpses in the back of the Biddle's diner, so I guess Phyllis Wylie now makes the best apple cobbler in town."

Style-wise, Keillor's laconic prose is the polar opposite of Ellroy's staccato jabs of words, so there's really no good way of merging their styles. But when you get down to subject matter, small towns and multiple homicide go together like peanut butter and ice cream.

Rob