Things That Make You Go Hmm

[robotnik2004]

Originally published at Route 96. You can comment here or there.

Somewhere in the hill country between Pickles Gap (”home of barbecue fudge”), Dogpatch (of Li’l Abner “fame”), and St. Joe, we saw a little wooden sign on the side of the road that said “THINGS: Museum of Science Fiction and Movie Memorabilia,” with a bunch of tentacles coming off the word “THINGS.” Weirdness radar pinging, we squealed Jenkin around at the conveniently-located metropolis of Circle Drive (”Population: 3,” according to a helpful marker) and backtracked to check it out. At the end of a dirt driveway were: a trailer home, a little shack house, a satellite dish, a trampoline, and a General Lee-esque late model muscle car. Oh, and a big burly guy in a sweat-stained T-shirt and jeans.

Silently praying we had simply wandered into an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard (the guy did look a little like Crazy Cooter) and not a showing of Deliverance, we asked: “Is the, um, museum open?” Well, the museum, which was actually the trailer, didn’t have “hours” as such. But the guy happily opened it up for us. We were probably the first people to come see it that month.

The guy’s name was Rick, and the museum was in fact his personal collection of posters, autographs, and models from all the sci-fi and horror B-movies and TV shows of the 1950s and 60s: lobby cards from the 1950s War of the Worlds, limited edition models of the Brain Eaters from Planet Arous, a Star Trek uniform autographed by Leonard Nimoy… He virtually never left Arkansas, but he’d been collecting this stuff by mail for years.

Rick was just your basic country-fried geek, really nice, shy but very proud of what was obviously a labor of love. We ended up staying for ages, oohing and aahing at the collection and talking the universal language of fanboys everywhere. I’d like to think I impressed Rick with my Geek Lore knowledge, although I made a humiliating faux pas in saying John Carpenter when I meant to say John Campbell. (Hits forehead: stupid! stupid! stupid!)

Derek, always a good conversation starter, asked Rick who his biggest hero in science fiction was. The answer? Ricardo Montalban. Well, you’ve got to respect the only thespian ever to take on William Shatner in a face-to-face showdown of overacting and emerge alive, twice. But what really won the Ozarkian over to his fiery Castillian namesake was Ricardo’s great courage in the face of adversity. It seems that Montalban was seriously injured while filming the TV series High Chapparal in 1968 and has been “in constant pain” for the last thirty years. [2006 Edit: The IMDB tells me Montalban appeared in the series twice, once as “Padre Sanchez” and once as “El Tigre.” Oh, how I hope Padre Sanchez was actually El Tigre’s secret identity…] If you watch him closely in the original (pre-injury) Star Trek and then in Wrath of Khan, Rick said, you can see the difference the pain makes. And all this time I thought he was just seething with hatred for James Tiberius Kirk.

Comments

[emilytheslayer.livejournal.com]

If you went through Pickles Gap you probably went rhough Conway, which is where jeffwik and I went to college. And now you know. :)

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

I've never been clear on whether Highway 65 (which is what I'm pretty sure you drove up, en route to Eureka Springs from Little Rock) actually counts as being in the Ozarks.

North central Arkansas is, however, about as remote as you can get without being in a Dakota.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

It's quite possible I'm using the term Ozarks incorrectly. But if I did, the tourist-y places we saw were doing the same thing. I'm sure there were places in Eureka Springs (which I remember as surprisingly tony in a kitschy-quaint year-round-Christmas-store kind of way) which advertised Ozark-y goodness on their signs.

But look, what I really want to know is, do you know this guy Rick? I mean, how many Arkansas geeks can there be?

[jeffwik.livejournal.com]

Oh, Eureka Springs definitely is. I'm thinking of the Little Rock to Harrison corridor, since you mentioned St. Joe. I don't think of Searcy County as being in the Ozarks, is what I'm saying, but hell, I don't know. I'm not sure I've ever been in Searcy County (while not moving over 40 mph), so I don't really know.

There's two groups of Arkansas geeks -- our feud is generational, passed down from cousin to cousin. He must be in the other clan.

Bubba: The Ozarkening?

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

There's two groups of Arkansas geeks -- our feud is generational, passed down from cousin to cousin. He must be in the other clan.

I smell a White Wolf game!

[editswlonghair.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much this guy's collection has grown since eBay?

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that too - back in 1996 it kind of blew our minds that this guy could have assembled all this stuff in the back end of nowhere. Today it's easy to connect with people who share your own personal kink whereever you are.