HULUCINATIONS

Jean Claude Van Damme is dead.

It's more than likely Alec Baldwin is dead as well.

And I think we can count Elisha Dushku of 'Dollhouse' and Seth MacFarlane, the mastermind of 'Family Guy', among the deceased as well.

And yet Dennis Rodman lives.

Of course, I'm talking about the televersions of these actors, their fictional selves as seen on TV. The incredible simulations, not the real things.

Gee, I'd hate to think that I caused mass panic in the streets, or - in the case of Alec Baldwin - joyous celebrations among the conservative groups.

OOGA BOOGA!

This all begins with an episode of 'Las Vegas' from its first season, "Die Fast, Die Furious". (Has a nice Quinn Martin feel to it, don't you think?) Van Damme was at the Montecito to film a movie and he decided to do his own stunt in which it would look as though he rode a motorcycle off the roof. However, something went wrong and he ended up sailing off the roof to his death. (Sailing off the Montecito roof wasn't all that uncommon, as we'd later see....)

My blog buddy and fellow crossoverist* Thom Holbrook has run with this in his Crossovers And Spinoffs site (top o' the links to the left, folks!). He's started his own Westphallian-like subset of shows that are connected because of mentions of Van Damme and/or his movies or - in the case of 'Friends' - appearances by Van Damme as himself. Thom says that within this mini TV universe, Van Damme must be considered dead.

For the longest time, I wanted to think there had to be another splainin, that Van Damme had to still be alive and that somebody - or something - died in his place in Vegas. So I rounded up the usual suspects - aliens, cyborgs (aka Skinjobs), magical creatures, evil twins - but there was always the sticking point caused by another TV series - 'CSI'. If anybody but Van Damme died in that fall, the forensic scientists working for the Las Vegas Police Department would surely have noticed during the autopsy.

So I accepted at least that part of the premise - that in Toobworld, the real Jean Claude Van Damme is dead.

But I don't hold that he's dead in all those other shows that mention him. I think that he's still alive and making movies. (The latest of which - "JCVD" - has a song performed by my friend Marie Mazziotti playing over the end credits!)

Okay, what I mean is that someone is impersonating him and keeping his career going.

And I'm turning to a series of ads for Hulu.com to back up my claim. They kicked off during the Super Bowl (Not sorry about that, Chief!) with a blipvert featuring Alec Baldwin performing serlinguistic duties as he took the audience on a tour of Hulu's secret headquarters. And he revealed to the real world that he was in fact an alien - using the TV content providing online service to prepare our brains for alien consumption.

This has been followed by ads starring Ms. Dushku and MacFarlane. They too are revealed to be aliens (although all three are of different species, but maintain human guises.) So I'm thinking the Muscles from Brussels - if he's seen in Toobworld or if his films are mentioned - is an alien as well. Whether or not he belongs to one of those races or of yet another one, I don't know.

As to how this can be if he supposedly died in Vegas, well.... Okay, the alien version could simply tell the media that it was somebody (O'Bviously human) who went to great pains to pass himself off as Van Damme. As for Dennis Rodman, we know he's an alien because of an episode of '3rd Rock From The Sun'. But the inference there is that he's always been an alien; I don't think he replaced the original (unless it was in childhood).

Might have to do a McCarthy-style witch hunt and look through the League of Themselves rolls to see if anybody else playing themselves on TV could actually be an alien.

I'm looking at you, Carol Channing. How else can it be splained that she showed up in Stalag 13 with 'Hogan's Heroes' looking exactly the same age as she was back in the mid to late 1960's (as seen in a Jell-O commercial)? BCnU!
Toby O'B

* I no longer use the term "crossoverian". It sounds disturbing.....