Every Four Years' Indulgence

[bloodyrosemccoy]

VARIOUS COMMENTATORS: Everyone is trembling in their skates with the return of Yevgeny Pluschenko, the badass Russian skater who will kick the ass of everyone in the world.

ME: So he’s like the Masked Menace of skating?

MY SISTER: He’s be great as a supervillain.

DICK BUTTON: Too bad the cold war is over! Plushenko would be a great Bond villain.

MY SISTER and ME: SEE?!

This precipitated a long discussion through the program about the secret supervillain cabal of men’s figure skating, which made us all the more excited to see Lysacek show up with slicked-back hair and what appeared to be fluffy black armor.

ME: Okay, he’s TOTALLY the evil assassin Plushenko sends out after those who have displeased him.

MY SISTER: He needs an eyepatch.

ME: True. And he’ll wind up turning on Plushenko and at the last minute heroically saving the hero, and Plushenko dumps him into a pit of piranhas or lava or something.

MY SISTER: Lava. I mean, he’s even playing the Firebird Suite! It’s like evil and redemption in a short and heavily edited piece of music!

Granted, the hyperbolic comparisons broke down right around the last few skaters, when it became Silly Costume Time. In rapid succession we had Hick In Overalls, pink tassels,* Skeleton,** Sailor, and some sort of gloomy Bizarro Joker.

MY SISTER: Next it’ll be the Indian, then the Cop, then the Construction Worker …

ME: I’m still not sure that the Hick dude wasn’t an extremely elaborate, lifetime achievement troll.

MOM: No. If he were, the music he’d be skating to—

MY SISTER and ME: DON’T EVEN SAY IT.

In conclusion: Let's never use the Firebird Suite for a short program again. Two different programs used it, and it's impossible to edit it without killing its awesome.


*This was Johnny Weir, though, so it gets a pass.

**Today we also learned that no matter how valiantly the audience tries, you cannot clap along to Night on Bald Mountain.

Comments

[wendyzski.livejournal.com]

Pink and tassles is actually pretty tame for Johnny Weir. I always half expect him to skate in electrical tape, some airbrush tattoos, and on fire.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

True. I was surprised that it was so ... normal.

Not to say I didn't love the pink, though.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I did a mental double take when Button introduced Oda. "The 17th descendant of the warlord Nobunaga Oda, who ruled during the period of Japan's civil war and was the inspiration for the Super Nintendo video game 'Nobunaga's Ambition'." There is much that is bizarre about that utterance.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Verily, it was surreal as hell.

(For the record, he became the rival supervillain; perhaps the one who rises to power in the sequel.)

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

1) Thinking that an old video game named after him is a particularly relevant fact about Nobunaga Oda.
2) Thinking that an old video game is particularly relevant to much of anybody in the audience.
3) Dick freakin' Button namedropped freakin' Super Nintendo on live TV*?!?!?

*Sort of live. Stupid tape delay...

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Also, apropos of nothing, if you haven't seen The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, you need to.

[shadesofmauve]

What's that watermelon for?

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you later.

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

Meh, Plushenko didn't wow me this time around. His free skate at the Euros had more oomph in it, and that didn't have as much as his Olympic free skate in '06 (which I got to witness in person, btw.) And looking back, he had more oomph in the free skate at the '06 Euros, too - if you can find a good quality vid on youtube, check out his eyes at the end of the programme. That's oomph!

Actually, despite having been a skating fan for years, the men at these Olympics didn't do much for me. Schultheiss of Sweden's free skate was awesome*, but that's about it. The rest failed to keep me interested.


*First Swedish man to make a quad jump in competition, first Swedish man to reach scores over 200, and doing it with a generally cool programme with quirky, fun music. Also, a costume made to look like a sparkly straightjacket. :D

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*grins* My comments were pretty much limited to... "Ooh... shiny. And why can't men dress like this every day?"