The AV Club

Prologue

Excerpt from the documentary American Hag-bred, Powell Pictures, 1968:

Fade in: Animated intro sequence set to a vintage theremin-heavy sci-fi score. An old-school Claymation rendering of the solar system hovers in space. The planets all have peaceful sleeping faces. A comet with a witch’s hat and an impishly grinning green face flies into view. A glittering cone of silvery-white hair trails behind her. She flies past the outer planets, leaving their slumber undisturbed. The perspective follows as she passes Saturn and Jupiter. The snoring face of Jupiter has a monocle.

Narrator (She sounds British, mid-twenties, well-educated): Comet Seahag was discovered and named by the astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1935. Experts calculated its trajectory would take it past Earth, missing us by roughly three million kilometers. That’s one-point-eight-six million miles. More than eight times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Animation shows Comet Seahag clearing Mars and approaching Earth. A cluster of molded foam rubber rocks drift into her path and hit her in the face. She scowls and wrenches herself to one side.

Narrator: In fact, it passed much closer—approximately five hundred thousand kilometers from Earth, nearly inside the moon’s orbit. Astronomers today theorize it was diverted by an asteroid field or other interplanetary debris. It bent closer to Earth’s gravitational field than anticipated. This led to some very unexpected consequences.

Animation shows the comet swooping in close to Earth, narrowly missing the moon. She cackles. Sparkling particles detach themselves from the comet’s trail and shower the sleeping Earth. Its eyes open and its face assumes a surprised expression.

Narrator: The near miss happened in 1938. The first incidents of Seahag Syndrome, or Acquired Xenogenic Andromorphism, appeared the next year.

Opening credits begin rolling to the Dick Dale and the Del-Tones recording of Riders in the Sky. The animation continues through the credits. The perspective moves closer to the startled Earth, passing by satellites and orbiting astronauts. It enters Earth’s atmosphere. We descend through clouds above the central continental United States. We pass by carrier pigeons and flocks of Canada Geese. The surface becomes more and more detailed as we approach it. The view descends to a small town in Kansas (the ground is labeled) and enters the upper window of a clapboard house. A teenage Claymation girl is lying in bed, staring under her covers with a look of surprise that matches that of the Earth. Music and credits end. Fade to black.

Excerpt ends.

End of Prologue

Chapter One: The Ecstasy of Splooge

(futa-female, futa-male, futa-futa, male-male)

The Grant High AV Club always met on Sunday afternoons at our de facto president Jack Porter’s house. We met there because his place afforded the most privacy. It was an old out-of-the-way farmhouse hiding behind a copse of trees at the end of a long dirt drive. Jack was an only child in a single-parent household (a rarity for small-town Ohio in 1967) and his mother worked second shift Sundays. We had the place to ourselves until eight at night. It didn’t hurt that his basement rec room was huge. It offered more than enough space to set up a projector and hang up a queen-size bed sheet as a screen for our makeshift movie theater.

We would fold up the ping-pong table, roll it to one side and drag out the two couches to face the sheet. As the club’s Film-and-Photography Specialist, it was my job to maintain, prepare and operate the projector.

I didn’t mind being the projectionist. I liked anything mechanical. I’d always found machines a lot easier than people, and I suppose we all felt like that in the AVC. Apart from our own little group, we wer

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