Saturday Six – Things That Make You Cry, Volume 2

Welcome to the Saturday Six, where each week I let you get to know me a bit better with the help of a list. Any idiot can do a Top 5 list, which is why I kicked it up a notch to a Top 6. This week’s topic: Things that make you cry (again).

Now I don’t know if you follow me over on the Facebook, but a while ago I did a bit of a thing. I made a post about getting some transphobe so upset on a comment in a Star Trek group about Jesse James Kietel that he flew off the handle and deleted his entire post then got banned from the group. Keitel was the guest Trans actress on an episode of Strange New Worlds a few weeks ago, and someone in the group uploaded a photo of her and asked if they should post more content about her, and someone else just responded with “Ummm. . . No thank you”. I responded simply with “This is Star Trek. Do Better.” and he took it as a personal attack. He went all Proud Boys about how I didn’t have all the facts about him or his opinions, and he was allowed to be contrarian because that’s what Star Trek is all about, and everyone is allowed to have whatever opinion they want, and that his daughter’s friend was trans so how can he hate them. You know, standard boomer incel shit and missing the point of my comment, and Star Trek in general, entirely. He didn’t want to hear anything about him being a transphobe, he just kept retorting “I was nothing but polite. I only said four words!” but I was like “Yeah, but the implication behind those four words is ‘Ew, no. Trans people are gross and weird me out’. It’s really the ‘Um’ part that makes it so much worse”.

Said Picture of Jesse James Keitel, for reference

As we were discussing that, someone mentioned that it’s a shame people still think like that, to which I replied “All the dinosaurs will die out eventually”. That got responded to with the header image above, of Littlefoot and his friends from The Land Before Time. It reminded me about how sad and fucked up that scene of his mom just dying and leaving him alone after fighting that T-Rex was, that I couldn’t believe it was targeted at kids. And that’s the very long winded story of how I got to thinking about things that make me cry.

So, we’re gonna revisit this again, as it’s been over nine years since the last time, and I’ve thought of some new ones (enough for two lists even!), and there are some glaring omissions from last time. There’s still the same ground rules of The Iron Giant and “Jurassic Bark” are always assumed unless you are some sort of inhuman robot. As you can see, I still cry like a bitch whenever a soundtrack swells, or pretty much when the protagonist does his thing, whatever, shut up! So here we go, in no particular order.

1. One Big Unicorn as read by Gru – Dispicable Me – Really it’s Gru reading Sleepy Kittens that starts me going, but then One Big Unicorn comes along and sends me right over the edge. The puppets in Sleepy Kittens are just so adorable, and all their interactions with the book, the milk drinking, the fur brushing, are too much. But when Gru goes and writes One Big Unicorn, it shows how much his time with the girls has softened him, and just how much his heart is embiggened by them, which always gets me, even if it is clichéd and sappy.

 


2. T-800 thumbs up as he lowers into the steel – Terminator 2: Judgement Day (Director’s Edition) – “I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.” The Director’s Cut really goes out of it’s way and makes it a point to show that the T-800 and the Connors had to make an active choice to learn. In the standard version of the film, there’s a weird cut as the T-800 describes that his “CPU is a neural net processor, a learning computer, but the more time (he) spends with humans, the more (he) learns”. In the Director’s cut, he says much the same, but instead of learning as he’s around humans, that “Skynet sets the switch to read only when Terminators are sent out alone.” He then instructs the Connors on how to open up his skull and access the chip and flip the switch. It really adds an extra nuance to the rest of the scenes afterwards where the T-800 learns stuff like how to smile and where people stash their keys in the sun visor. The Terminator turned out to be a better father figure to John than any of the myriad of adult men in his life, and he wasn’t even a person, technically. That’s why it’s so devastating that he needs to die in order to prevent Judgement Day (which he doesn’t, but that’s a whole other thing) and leave John all alone again. But the most important thing he learns is of course that “If a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

 




3. Macho Man Randy Savage Reunites with Miss Elizabeth – WrestleMania VII – I’ve talked about how I made my parents get cable to rent this Pay Per View before on the site. I was only 9 at the time, but I was the prime target and living the gimmick and believed wholeheartedly in kayfabe. Though it all happened when I was very young, I had seen enough Coliseum Home Videos at that point to be up on the story. Elizabeth was instrumental in both the rise and fall of the Mega Powers team of Hogan and Savage. After the Mega Powers imploded following WrestleMania V when Hogan beat Savage for the title, Savage replaced Elizabeth with Sensational Sherri and turned heel. After that, Elizabeth only showed up sporadically, managing Hogan and Brutus The Barber Beefcake at SummerSlam ’89 and managing Dusty Rhodes and Sapphire in a mixed tag against Savage and Sherri at WrestleMania VI. She then disappeared from TV for about a year before Bobby The Brian Heenan noticed her at ringside during the Ultimate Warrior vs. Randy Savage retirement match at WrestleMania VII. The match itself by today’s standards is kinda slow and plodding, but like every two minutes they cut back to Elizabeth. Even after taking 5 elbow drops, Warrior just gets up. He gives Savage 3 shoulder tackles, and then steps on his chest and the match just sort of ends. There’s no setup, no signature moves, no finishers. The match just. . . stops. At this point Sherri goes ballistic, as now that Savage is forced to retire, she’s lost her meal ticket. She kicks off her shoes and starts kicking the shit out of Savage. At this point, Elizabeth has had enough of this shit, and jumps the barrier to save her man. She runs down the aisle, jumps in the ring, grabs Sherri by the hair and throws her ass over teakettle out of the ring. Every time I watch her shimmy over that railing, I’m nine years old again and I just can’t help myself.

 

4. Kermit and Miss Piggy sing “The Rainbow Connection” – The Muppets – Either version of “The Rainbow Connection” will get me going, but the added subtext of the rest of the the 2011 The Muppets really put it over the top. I’ve mentioned my love of The Muppets Take Manhatten, so it was nice to see that this pretty much picks up on all the strings that movie laid down. The movie itself is so meta about the state of the Muppets in our society at the time and was clearly written by fans with deep affection for them, much like myself. So put all that together, a basic reboot of the Muppets, a retread of much of The Muppets Take Manhatten, the general sheen of nostalgia, throw in a little bad guy comeuppance and add an 80’s robot, and yeah, I cry like a blubbering baby. It’s such a shame Disney hasn’t been able to really capture the energy from this and make a really good Muppets project since. I loved the 2015 sitcom, I just don’t think they gave it enough time to breathe. You’d think with Disney+ they could really make use of them, but that hasn’t been the case yet. Muppets Now was close, but was only six episodes and has all those weird trappings of a show produced over Zoom during the pandemic. And the less said about Muppets Haunted Mansion the better. I have high hopes for Adam F. Goldberg and his Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem show.

 



5. Spider-Man: Blue – Back when I was making art prints, I got commissioned to make a print of Gwen Stacy from Spider-Man: Blue. Up to that point, I hadn’t read the story. It’s very melancholy, as in keeping with the name. It’s a modern day retelling of Amazing Spider-Man #40-49. It’s basically all told in flashback as Pete sits in the attic of his house recording a message to his dearly departed Gwen on Valentine’s Day, focused on how for Spider Man, it’s always “Bad before Good”. The basic conceit is that Pete could never have had his happiness with MJ without all the sadness that was losing Gwen. The whole thing is just incredibly sweet and the artwork by Tim Sale is beautiful. Or at least it was at the time, before One More Day came along and retconned MJ and Pete’s marriage away, which is stupid. At this point, I don’t even know what’s going on with them anymore. I think MJ works for Tony Stark and is a mutant now maybe? I heard she may have just been killed my Moira MacTaggart on Krakatoa or some such. I dunno. Much like wrestling, comics are weird sometimes. I haven’t kept up with anything since Secret Wars or the First Spider-Verse in the comics. At the very least, a major chunk of the plot for Spider Man: No Way Home came from twisting One More Day slightly, so that is good I suppose.

 

6. Your Name – I was introduced to the world of Makoto Shinkai through Weathering With You. I bought the full pass to Ghiblifest 2019, and the trailer for it was played before every film in the series for like an entire year. Though I saw it first, and they both share similar themes of doing anything for love, I think most people would agree that Your Name is objectively better. I won’t spoil the twist (as it’s pretty telegraphed if you pay attention to all the clues), but it’s a gut punch. The entire film is pretty downbeat, but it is beautifully animated and the music by RADWIMPS is on point. One piece of advice if you do seek this out. Make sure you watch it with descriptive subtitles. The first time I saw it I just watched a straight up dub and missed what exactly Taki wrote on Mitsuha’s arm at the end of Magic Hour. I was able to get the gist from the context clues, but it loses a lot of it’s power if you don’t actually know what he wrote. It really only makes you openly weep that first time through, but each successive time it still hurts. Like finding out that Taki and Mitsuha make it only to end up in the world of Weathering With You where Hodoka and Hina selfishly put their love first and end up nearly destroying Tokyo, where as Taki and Mitsuha do all they can to save an entire town. Like I said, Your Name is a better story than Weathering With You. But Alison Brie is in Weathering with You. Either is great, but Your Name is certainly the one more likely to make you cry.

 

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook