Eagleheart – The power of homeless imagination

Sometimes you watch this show, and you realize that they’re trying to make a point. But other times, you realize they just want to make you laugh at the absurdity of it all. Yeah.

So we start off in a train, with a bunch of hobos bemoaning their lack of good. But then Otis, the King of the hobos, uses imagination to turn five beans into a feast (in their minds, or so it seems). Before they can chow down, King Otis gets kidnapped by a bunch of soldiers, who seem to plan on tapping his imaginative powers.

One of the hobos, Spoons, tries to convince the marshals to help — but fails, at first. Chris is visited with a mysterious dream from King Otis, after a can of Sterno (which is fuel made of alcohol, totally makes sense here) using terrible special effects (drink!) floats into the room, complete with the classic Jetsons flying car sound effect. You see, the “government” wants to steal the king’s imagination — tramps’ imagination is the most powerful thing in the world, didn’t you know. So the marshals are in. There’s a small running gag where vomit is used to tell messages (disgusting of course, it’s required in an episode of Eagleheart).

Can you believe it? The king’s thoughts are being used to make weapons, including a hilarious reference to a cartoon fish. That’s not the only twist, though — Spoons reveals tramps are aliens — from distant planet Arania, filled with magical fluid that allows tramps to imagine anything. So it’s clear at this point that the episode is merely about being stupid and magnificently such. See, King Otis beams back visions to the planet of the tramps, they’ll die without him. After a quick and overly bloody (drink!) shootout, the team escapes in a magic dumpster. There’s an odd detail about a hobo requiring their names, but then I saw how the “planet” of the tramps looked a lot like something I’d seen before. And suddenly, I could see that astonishingly stupid and amazingly funny ending coming — it was all a theme park ride.

That is some grade A metacommentary nonsense.

Some funny out of context quotes:

• “Wait a minute there, Mister Stink — who are you?” — Chris
  “My father was Mister Stink — you can call me Spoons.” — Spoons
• “Hey guys, I think that filthy, stinky idiot was onto something.” — Chris
  “Thanks, Chris, about what?” — Brett
• “We call this the Heathcliff — or the homeless Garfield.” — Soldier (that’s totally the difference between them)
• “I hope they have bathrooms inside — I gotta dip my snake in boy’s room lake.” — Brett

Clacked by Jeremy Fogelman
on Jun 15, 2012 @ 02:16 EST5EDT