Wednesday, September 14, 2005

RE: CAPODICE, CAPICE?

A MULTIVERSE O'BSERVATION
ABOUT 'EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS'


Entertainment Weekly had a free DVD in its issue this past week, of the pilot episode for 'Everybody Hates Chris' - commercial free!

(My copy of the mag never arrived, by the way. I found this one at work and swiped it once it looked like mine was never going to arrive.

Yeah. I'm going to Heck.)

I wasn't really bowled over by the episode and I'm not sure the series will ever become "appointment television". But it did provide me with an interesting cross-dimensional theory, connecting this TV show to a movie found in the Cineverse.

The show takes place in 1982, when Chris Rock was thirteen years old and living in Bed-Stuy... but going to school in Brooklyn. And John Capodice, a great character actor with one of those "Hey, I know him!" kind of face, plays the bus driver who may become a recurring character and possibly a persistent thorn in Chris' side as he tries to escape school each day in once piece. (In the pilot, Capodice's character slammed the bus doors shut on the kid's hand.)

You know what? I think that bus driver's name is Bob. I have no idea what may have happened to Bob here in the TV Universe during the last twenty-three years, but over in the Cineverse Bob the Bus Driver got blowed up real good in 1994.

See, John Capodice played another bus driver in the movie "Speed", and I think we all know what happened to him when he stopped for coffee along his route.

So here's my theory. In the great scheme of things regarding the shared uinverse of Man's creative energies, the two bus drivers played by John Capodice shared a common history. But then Movie Bob decided to move out to California (probably retired?). And to make some extra money, he took a job out there in La-La Land doing what he knew best - driving a bus.

However, when 1994 rolled along, the lives of these two Bus Driver Bobs took another divergence. And the one for Movie Bob came to the end of the road.

As for Bus Driver Bob of Toobworld?

I don't think he ever left New York City. By 1990, he might have retired from the MTA as a bus driver and opened his own store. ('Law & Order' - "Poison Ivy" [episode # 1.8] 20 November 1990)

And then in 1994, when his cinematic doppelganger was going "ka-BOOM!", he might have also made a few bucks under the table moonlighting as a bartender. ('Dream On' - "Blame It on Reo" [episode # 4.20] 2 March 1994)

None of this can be proven, of course. Is that great, or what?

BCnU!
Tele-Toby

Oh.

By the way, thanks SO much for throwing away that copy of the DVD, Ryan Prem.

Putz.

No comments: