I’m all geared up for the new fall season, aren’t you? It’s not the new shows that are premiering, nor the old shows that have been renewed for another year. No, for me it’s all about the crappy awful shows that aren’t coming back ever again. Bon voyage, suckers!

On the tippy top of my list of shitcanned shows from this past year is On the Lot, the high-profile Steven Spielberg/Mark Burnett project billed as an effort to find Hollywood’s next hot director. Would-be filmmakers from all over the world submitted their shorts for scrutiny, and a whole mess of them were selected to be on the new reality show. Most of them were destined to be cut as quickly and cruelly as possible in the opening rounds, with no time to do lunch between airplane meals on flights to and from L.A. It promised to be The Apprentice by way of the backstabbing film industry.

On the Lot sounded promising, until a couple of episodes in when it took a sharp left turn into American Idol territory. Suddenly, it was no longer about the strife and struggle of competing directors trying to get their shot list done before the sun went down. It was all about showing the end product. Each subsequent week turned into an hour-long short-film fest. And if you’ve ever been to a short-film fest in your life, you know it’s like booking appointments with your dentist and your proctologist back to back. Most short films suck, and you end up sitting there, film after film, hoping at least one of them will have a halfway amusing fart joke to break the pretentious tension.

The assignments should never have been about making films in the first place. Anybody can make a goddamn movie. It won’t necessarily turn out to be good, competent, or even watchable, but a monkey can point a camera and press a button. Browse Youtube if you don’t believe me. No, there’s nothing all that special or challenging about shooting a movie. It’s actually working in the movie business that’s the bitch.

Let me pitch the sort of assignment they should have gone with. One of the regular judges, Garry Marshall or Carrie Fisher, comes out at the top of the show to address the competitors. They’re on location in the middle of nowhere, far from the safety of the studios. And they’re told, “Your male lead is due on set in one hour. He’s just woken up in a Las Vegas motel with a hangover, a dead hooker, and blood everywhere. Your tools for this assignment are a Geo with half a tank of gas, a bottle a bleach, a shovel, and the vast Nevada desert. Go put out the fire.”

Now THAT’S going to prepare them for work in the film industry. I wanted to watch these bright-eyed hopefuls learn valuable life lessons — the kind that would crush their spirits and give them the ruthless, cynical edge they needed to function as a cog in the studio machine. But no. We got stuck watching their stupid, crappy short fiction. News flash for Spielberg and Burnett: there are five hundred more channels of stupid, crappy short fiction to be had on my television, a mere click away. So why should I hang around and watch yours?

The show spiraled out of control almost immediately, becoming a game of “Eliminate the foreigner.” Everyone from a country other than the United States got the boot quickly. Then the competition randomly cannibalized whoever failed to be male and white, whittling the directors down to a modest handful. A lone Canadian survived the axe heading into this final phase, until it was accidentally pointed out to the voting public that Canada is not, in fact, a state. Up until this factoid faux pas by a confused and disoriented Carrie Fisher, most people watching had incorrectly assumed that Canada was another one of the Dakotas, pronounced strangely due to some quirk of the local accent. Once exposed as an unwelcome infiltrator, the Canadian was promptly escorted off the lot and shot, execution style, by a small death squad of teamsters behind the nearest available Denny’s.

I stopped watching by the end and had to read the results online. The guy whose first film was, quite literally, a retarded comedy, came in second. His near-certain victory was edged out by the guy who spent the whole season whining about how this was his one shot at working in the industry and that, if it didn’t pan out, he was going to have to give up, get a real job, and spend the rest of his life feeding and sheltering his children. The pansy. Everyone knows that sacrifices have to be made if you’re going to make it in Hollywood. His unwillingness to pimp out his wife and sell his children to organ harvesters proves he never had the balls to make it in the business. His ultimate success in this fantasy game-show facsimile had to be handed to him by the four viewers left watching the final episode, who text-messaged their pity vote to Fox just so they wouldn’t have to hear him blubber about being a daddy director yet again.

On the Lot is gone and forgotten already. The official website was pulled down as quickly as possible, serving no further purpose than allowing trolls to flood the message base with epitaphs proclaiming just how worthless the show was. If you go there now, a message of congratulation to the winner appears for a few seconds before you get redirected to the Fox homepage. It’s the most acclaim the poor bastard is ever likely to get. He may have wept after winning a million-dollar development deal at Dreamworks, but he’ll really cry when he finds out that will barely cover the first round of lunches in the real world.

The blog entries have slowed down to one a month, and usually appear on the last possible day of that month. What can I say? The cartoon writing schedule has been pretty constant this year. The final tally, for those of you keeping score, is seven more episodes of Pucca for next season, and five Ricky Sprockets.

Still no word when and where Pucca is going to run in Canada, even though the rest of the world is already enjoying it in a million difference languages. But Ricky is on the way right about…NOW!

Teletoon has already premiered an episode online. The lower tech among us, however, can watch the first broadcast episode on one of those oldie-timey television gizmos this afternoon at 4:30. Yeah, I bet you already missed it. That’s what you get for not checking my website for updates every ten minutes.

The regular schedule will begin on September 8th. I expect my episodes will be tucked well back in the run since I only started writing for the show late in the production. The rough cuts looked promising and I eagerly anticipate the DVD they’re going to cut for me later this year.

I’d tell you about the new show I’m working on, but I have to get my ass in front of a TV to watch Ricky in the next few minutes. And hey, shouldn’t you be hurrying off to watch Ricky Sprocket, Showbiz Boy right about now too? Stop reading this crap and get going!

In the midst of Montreal’s notorious Just for Laughs fest, I received an invitation to a barbeque shindig for industry insiders hosted by The Comedy Network at a downtown club. Okay, it was a hand-me-down invitation. My agent wasn’t interested in coming to Montreal for hamburgers and shop talk, so she sent me in her place.

I’ve been to this sort of professional social mixer in the past. They’re all pretty much the same, with only the quality of food and the variety of free booze switching things up between venues. They’re filled with people like me, sniffing around for work or leads on work, having conversations that live only as long as it takes the participants to realize they can do nothing for each other’s careers. Eyes wander throughout the pleasantries, hunting for the next viable person to talk to, always searching for a conversation upgrade. Then with a “I just have to say ‘hello’ to…” they split apart and vanish into the throng, never to acknowledge each other again.

This particular schmooze-a-thon offered up gift baskets for all those on the invite list. Not quite the gift baskets of Academy Awards lore. The “gift” part of the score was meager enough to draw attention to all that empty space in the “basket” part. So much so, I was tempted to round it out with pilfered selections from the social-lubricant Merlot table. Aside from the obligatory promotional t-shirt, the bounty included a Comedy Network nerf football and a rubber-chicken pen.

Comedy festival. Rubber chicken. Get it?

I was hoping to spot a celebrity or two at the event. Famous people like free food. They like free booze even more. This place had both. But despite the large number of familiar faces and notable names that come to town during Just for Laughs, the barbeque was brimming with unfamiliar faces and names I’ve never heard of. In fact, the collection of misfits put me in mind not so much of stand-up comics, but comic books. They all looked like the usual suspects you’d expect to see at a comic-book industry schmooze-a-thon. Only, you know, slightly more attractive and personable.

But then I saw someone genuinely famous had made an appearance after all. That’s right, none other than George Stroumboulopoulos. And yes, I did have to look up the spelling on his name to confirm that it is, in fact, G-E-O-R-G-E. I nearly didn’t recognize him. He was only wearing half the usual piercings.

Who the hell is George Stroumboulollapalooza? I guess you don’t watch much Newsworld. Hmm, how can I describe his career? Well, my American readers won’t remember him at all from his hosting duties on the microscopically short-lived TV talent show, The One –- infamous for being the most ill-advised move by a Canadian into the U.S. television milieu since Alan Thicke vowed to kick Johnny Carson’s ass with a talk show of his own.

That pretty much sums it up. I didn’t actually speak to him, but I was asked to get the hell out of the way by the hot chick who was on her way to speak to him. After such an intimate encounter, I feel like I’ve practically sport-fucked George.

The event went on for three hours. I only lasted one. Although there was little new information to be gleaned from the whole excursion, I did come away with one or two things of value. You can see just how valuable they are once I put them up for sale on eBay. Go make a bid. You know you want a Comedy Network nerf football of your very own. I’ll even have it signed by a real celebrity with a real rubber-chicken pen. Let’s see…how does it go? G-E-O-R…

I’m in the loop. Now how do I get out?

A momentous occasion like the 30th anniversary of Star Wars couldn’t pass without me being inundated by news stories, press clipping and email links to all varieties of Star Wars weirdness. I guess it’s my fault for considering it my duty, in the pre-web access days, to make sure as many bootlegs of the god-fucking-awful Star Wars Holiday Special made it into the hands of fan boys across the city and beyond. Someone had to remind them that not all things Star Wars were necessarily good, or even watchable. But then the prequels came out and Lucas made that fact all too clear himself.

Well unlike the superfans out there, I felt no real desire to celebrate the anniversary by watching any or all of the series. I carefully avoided all talk or suggestions of getting together to revisit fond childhood memories, or initiate some Star Wars virgin who missed the boat back in the late seventies/early eighties (and spent the subsequent years wisely not giving a shit). However…

One web surfing link led me to something I’d only heard mentioned a few times in the last couple of decades. An obscure little movie called The Man Who Saves the World. More commonly, it’s referred to as The Turkish Star Wars, an oddity from 1982. At this time, Turkey was in political turmoil, and American movie distribution in the country dried up. To remedy this, and keep their populace amused, inventive Turkish filmmakers set out to make their own versions of Hollywood blockbusters, openly stealing special effects footage and music cues and cutting them into their incredibly cheap knock offs. This happened to a number of big-name movies, but never more infamously than in the case of the original Star Wars.

I only meant to watch a few minutes of it, but it quickly became obvious I had to sit through the whole thing. Just to be able to say I sat through the whole thing. I must have seen worse movies in my life, but no titles immediately leap to mind. To be sure, The Man Who Saves the World is an endurance test, but sometimes a hilariously rewarding one. I’d already had a beer before I started watching the flick. But when the line “Those coming ones are too sour faced. It’d be nice if some chicks with mini skirts were coming” was uttered during a galactic dog fight, I knew I had to get much much drunker to make it through all ninety minutes.

The fight scenes are awesomely awful, happen about once every five minutes, and go on forever. But hey, when was the last time you saw a couple of Turks springing around on trampolines to fight giant hairy muppets by karate-chopping their arms off and stabbing them with their own claws? I bet it’s been at least a week.

If you want to skip the plot (trust me, you want to skip the plot) and get right to the essence of the movie’s greatness, fast forward to the climactic battle in the last ten minutes. It’s like everything great and horrible in the whole film was recapped for your quick-fix viewing pleasure. Lots of evil muppets and crappy robots to kick and punch, all intercut with Star Wars effects footage for a dramatic denouement that makes absolutely no sense at all. By this time, in an effort to keep my buzz going, I was reduced to drinking siphoned windshield washer fluid fresh out of the car. So maybe that’s why I couldn’t really follow the ending. Yeah, that has to be it.

If you’re too much of a Star Wars traditionalist to sit through this shameless bastardization and copyright infringement of a classic, maybe Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager is more your speed. I know, I know. There are a million Star Wars parodies out there on the net. But none that do such a fine job of impersonating James Earl Jones. Plus it’s a better sitcom than most of what’s out there on real TV. I watched all eight episodes, which is eight episodes more than I ever watched of Friends.

Of all the ironically self-aware movies destined to come out this year, it’s unlikely any of them will top the film geek experience of Grindhouse. What can be said for a film that’s so far up its own celluloid ass, that it runs pictures of random women over the end credits as an inside joke only the nerdiest of the movie nerds will get. Like me.

Despite high expectations, this double-feature concept movie failed to light up the box office. Talk of a franchise has evaporated fast, and a sequel seems unlikely now. The pleasure of watching other notable filmmakers take a tongue-in-cheek stab at trash exploitation has been denied me, and now I’m all sad. Sure, there are virtually endless pieces of reprehensible cinematic filth yet to discover. I’ve seen hundreds of them already, but could probably dig up thousands more without even looking very hard. Still, there was a certain unique fun in watching contemporary directors trying so hard to recreate the look and feel of those abused prints of warped movies. The mock trailers were a highlight, and Edgar Wright and Eli Roth in particular managed to hit the nail on the head. Hard.

It was with great delight that I heard some weeks later that Robert Rodriguez had held a competition for amateur directors to come up with their own grindhouse-style trailers. The competition, much like the film it was meant to promote, fizzled out with the disappointing ticket sales. But a winner and a number of finalists did manage to worm their way into cyberspace immortality where traffickers in this sort of thing will continue to upload and link to them for untold years to come.

It was some crazy kids from Nova Scotia who took the top honors for Hobo with a Shotgun. But there are plenty of others to enjoy if you look around for them. Runners up, Maiden of Death and The Dead Won’t Die illustrate that the key to making a good fake trailer is to convince the audience they want to see a movie that doesn’t even exist.

Well I was convinced, anyway. But then, I’ll sit through damn near anything.