BUZZKILL

A TOOBWORLD THEORY OF RELATEEVEETY

In a Bacardi commercial, two flies are sitting in the park; human-sized insects with human faces. The older of the two laments that he has nothing to show for his long life (24 hours), and he wants the younger one to go for the gusto before it's too late.

The old fly kicks the bucket and the Young Buzz flies off to sow his wild oats. He parties at a rooftop disco; he plays blackjack at a casino; he gets chased around a kitchen and swatted on the rump by a seductive temptress wearing a skimpy French maid's uniform; and then he picks up two party girls and flies them off to a hotel suite.

While hanging from the ceiling to watch them have a pillow fight in their negligees, the fly finally expires.

The moral of the story? "Live Life like you mean it."

It's a funny blipvert, utilizing "quantoon physics" for its 30-second storyline. But as outlandish as it may look, that man-fly is firmly rooted in the TV Landscape.

At some point before September 1990, slightly mad scientist Fred Edison transformed his brother-in-law Harry Orkin into a humanoid fly. Harry made the best of his situation, but it was especially troubling for his wife Idella. The hausfrau couldn't... "hug" her housefly hubbie without squashing him like the bug that he was.

Eventually, the lack of conjugal comforts would have afflicted Flyboy as well. And since he couldn't get no satisfaction from a human female because of his diminutive size, Harry must have turned to the only logical alternative - a female fly.

And, inevitably, there would have been a bunch of flybabies.

Although his genetic spunk would have been tainted by elements of Musca domestica, it was still human DNA. Being more advanced on the evolutionary scale, it would have probably been dominant over the fly genomes when producing progeny.

(Hey, don't quibble with the technobabble unless you've been able to transform a human into a fly!)

Therefore, it's possible that the progeny from the union of man-fly and fly would look for the most part like a fly, but with the TV-traditional human face and human intelligence. And perhaps even the size of human once fully grown.

Unfortunately, it would have been fully grown in the space of a few hours, cursed with the fly's 24 hour lifespan. And so it would be, down through the countless generations of descendants, perhaps even crossbreeding with that Spanish man-fly I've seen in some Telemundo comedy show.

But it looks as though the next generation has taken steps to reverse that trend and to bring a fresh influx of human DNA into the sap of the family tree. We may not have seen it actually transpire during that Bacardi blipvert, but my guess is that Flyboy fu-# boinked each of his bosomy buddies.

If there are children (and don't it always seem to go?), they would begin the evolutionary march back to a more humanoid appearance. But they would also possess mutant abilities unforeseen.

We'll just have to wait and see what kind of Eugenic super-kids we'll get in TV Land in about ten years.....

LOU GRANT: You know what? You've got spunk.
MARY RICHARDS: Well.....
LOU GRANT: I HATE SPUNK!
('The Mary Tyler Moore Show')

BCnU!
Tele-Toby