Michael Jackson un-personing – Lister says Wacko Jacko

[By Jove its holmes]

Lister says to Kryten that something is “completely Wacko Jacko”. Now, when that episode was made, that phrase was in common use and derived from MJ.

Sooo, will that episode be edited or redubbed, now that MJ has been exposed?

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

Only if they edit out all the references to Hilter too

[Dave]

That’s not so offensive – it’s more like a 1989 Michael Jackson joke.

The one in Skipper is more like a 2017 Michael Jackson joke.

[Taiwan Tony]

It’s the thing I think about a lot. Stuff in context that was once okay is now completely unacceptable. The Major’s “cricket” speech in Fawlty Towers being the most prominent example. I used to think it was fine to leave it in – as I had a comedy nerd, completist side of me. In the last couple of years I’ve rewatched some early Fools and Horses with my wife, and winced at Del’s references to “birds.” So fuck knows how I’d feel about toxic racial epithets. Having said that, we shouldn’t all live with our woolly liberal heads in the sand. So perhaps it should probably be an option on the DVD. Play with racism, play without racism.

[Taiwan Tony]

>”Perhaps it should probably…”
I’m unflinching, aren’t I.

[Ben Saunders]

Re-writing history is so boring. Fuck off. What happened happened, let everything stand as a cultural artifact. (Within reason)

[clem]

> Play with racism, play without racism.

Always thought this was a good way of addressing this kind of thing: https://youtu.be/HCT1clqci3I

[pi r squared]

I thought that even in the mid-70s, the purpose of the Major’s speech is to demonstrate how out of date his views are rather than to be an hilarious gag. Even the audience response to it at the time is the lukest of warm. As a mixed-race person I do not find the lines offensive but neither particularly funny.

I don’t know if John Cleese has ever made comments about the inclusion of the N-word and whether he stands by its use or would remove them if writing again (a bit like Steve Coogan’s regret at using a particular word in I’m Alan Partridge).

[Plastic Percy]

Nevermind that, there’s still that issue of the Smegazine that proclaims Craig Charles as the Gary Glitter of outer space.

[Taiwan Tony]

The Major’s speech definitely WAS that. But now it’s shocking to hear things like that said aloud outside of a rap record or a Tarantino film.
I watched all of In Sickness and In Health recently and there were words in it I hadn’t heard for twenty years. I’d suggest if you watch IS&IH you’re going to have to expect that type of thing. So it’s fine to leave it in there. With things that are labelled “timeless” it’s probably another matter. Like the bits in the Young Ones that were used to highlight prejudices. (The copper in dark glasses and the Grange Hill nickname.) Then learning that those words that were used ironically in the context of the show were yelled unironically as insults in the playground. It depends, dunnit.

[Dax101]

The Wacko Jacko line is fairly subtle since its not a straight out obvious acknowledgment of MJ.

[Dave]

To be honest I think the whole issue of everyone suddenly remembering Michael Jackson’s misdeeds due to the documentary is a bit strange. It’s similar to the R Kelly thing. It’s not like a lot of incriminating detail hasn’t been in the public domain for years, even decades at this point.

So it would be weird to, say, remove the gag from Skipper just because the documentary has aired in the meantime.

[RamesesNiblickTheThird]

Edit out John Wayne whilst your at it as well.

#Woke.

[Warbodog]

Fawlty Towers is alright I think, the point was always to show the generation gap and changing attitudes, plus the Major’s weirdness generally.

The Young Ones less good, it made its satirical point but it’s very harsh and probably lent itself to playground repetition, so I wouldn’t mind not seeing that again.

The Peep Show where Mark tries out some of the casual racism he’s heard his friend use to see how it goes down is one of my favourites, because some pricks still talk like that and need to be told it isn’t alright. At one of my early jobs, a young woman was telling someone a fascinating anecdote from her day and glanced at the Muslim co-worker sitting next to her before whispering “p*** shop.” She didn’t have other vocabulary for a corner shop, just had to go with that.

[By Jove its holmes]

the modern DW is happy to be revisionist – e.g. Rose barging into 19th century Wales and starting 21st century feminist consciousness raising, with no regard for Gwyneth and Sneed’s different circumstances.

[si]

I just prefer to think of the phrase ‘wacko jacko’ as being used as just a general rhyming slang term for crazy, as opposed to it being attached to any particular person.

[clem]

Wasn’t there a trailer where it’s edited so that Lister says “don’t give me the Star Trek wacko jacko”? Almost sure that’s on one of the DVDs and not just some fan-made thing I’ve seen on YouTube.

[Warbodog]

“Well done, Mr Spock.”

[Ben Saunders]

What a trip that ad is. Constant Star Trek references despite it having nothing to do with the set, Holly’s ears, the way the announcer says “and Red Dwarf” as if that’s actually a negative, and the way Rimmer saying “Mr. Spock” sounds to me nothing like how he says it in where I assume it’s from – “urine should only be green….”

[Dave]

It feels like there’s infinite possibilities for misleading Red Dwarf VHS ad voiceovers that could be constructed by chopping up unrelated lines from the series.

“Marilyn Monroe… What a bastard!”

[clem]

Ah, thanks Warbofrog.

“I’ve never seen one before, no-one has, but I’m guessing it’s a banana.”

[Warbodog]

“D’you think Hitler’s sexy?”

[By Jove its holmes]

“all in all a one hundred percent going to do something sissy now!”

[Dave]

Where do all the calculators HAVE TO GO!

[clem]

“F-I-S-H. That’s how you spell chicken.”

[Taiwan Tony]

“Will you stop saying everything’s crypto-fascist. You make me sound like a racist slag.”

[Dave]

“Everybody’s dead, Dave… April Fool.”

[Ben Saunders]

Look out Earth, the slime’s a drug crazed transvestite

[si]

WAAAA-(The End)-AAAAAAW!!!(Back In The Red part 3)

[Dave]

“You’ll bonk anything, won’t you Gandhi!”

[Nick R]

“Full of goodness. Full of vitamins. Full of singing potatoes.”

[Dave]

“This is an SOS distress call from the mining ship Red Dwarf. The crew are dead. Killed by Felicity Kendal’s bottom.”

[bloodteller]

“Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for Lister’s buttock crevice.”

[Warbodog]

“Seventeen years old and he used to snog his daddy.”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

“She’s not jail bait, she’s twelve. Twelve years old”

[Dave]

“Imagine making love to… a sheep and a cow.”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

Not wanting to turn this into a misheard lines thread, but the way Craig says “breed” I always thought he said three … which made Rimmer’s follow up line a bit confusing.

Once I was older I twigged what it was and it all made sense.

“Now why do you think that happened? What were you thinking of at the time? an ugly, lungless marine animal with galloping senility! A putrid amphibious gillbreather with less brains than a mollusc”

[clem]

“Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is Cliff Richard, isn’t it? You lose your keys – it’s Cliff Richard. A picture falls off the wall – it’s Cliff Richard. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day – you thought that was Cliff Richard as well.”

[Warbodog]

“Well, the thing about a black hole, its main distinguishing feature, is it’s purple. And the thing about space, the colour of space, your basic space colour, is red. So how are you supposed to unicycle?”

“Well, thankfully Holly’s unaffected.”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

“I’m going to be a woman”

taken from “i’m going to be an uncle” and “imagine making love to a woman”

I’m series VIII’ing because it feels more obscure. Sorry, bye.

[Dave]

“I’ve discovered stuff in there that’ll make your hair stand on end.”

“What stuff?”

“Dog’s milk.”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

” Wait! Before you go! There is one question; an important one! The others will have to know! …. what’s an iguana?”

[Warbodog]

“Garbled, confusing and quite frankly duller than Beyond a Joke.”

[Warbodog]

“Yes mother, I’m just packing my satchel… and then, I’m going to have you.”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

“That is why in our society we only believe in salad cream in the fridge”

[q u i n n _ d r u m m e r]

“Yes mother, I’m just packing my satchel… and then, I’m going to have you.”

Hall of Fame

[bloodteller]

“I remember…I remember wishing a couple more people would die so I could squeeze my buttocks together to make one juicy giant peach.”

[si]

We’re on a mining ship, 97 minutes into deep space. Can someone explain to me where the smeg I got this traffic cone?

[Jonsmad]

RIMMER: If we’re talking about famous firsts — my first french kiss. It’s gotta be a killer story. Fourteen years old. We went on holiday with my Uncle Frank and his daughters. Sixteen. Twins.
Blonde. Now I knew that Sarah fancied me (Sniggers from others), but I wasn’t too sure about Alice. Anyway, middle of the night, I wake up with this tongue stuck down my throat. Wide awake now — I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a 1993 Michael Jackson.”

[Jonsmad]

Listers attempt to sing “She’s out of my life” in Marooned by Micheal from the 1979 album Off the wall
Is up for the next chop then, or he sings it so badly that no music identifying software will pick up on it?

[(deleted)]

Jackson didn’t write that, so it’s fine. Mind you, it’s highly probable from basic deduction that the vast majority of songs he did write were 100% ghostwritten anyway. And frankly, from looking into the yawning chasm between him using a soundalike for his Simpsons singing and being weirdly disingenuous about why in 1991, and the estate being caught out making fake posthumous tracks a couple of years ago, you start to wonder if the ghoulish fucker had anything to do with the *majority* of that music in the first place. There’s a weird anecdote in Guy Pratt’s book about the recording of the rhythm track to Earth Song where Jackson was hiding under the desk giggling but not contributing anything whatsoever. There are quite a few puzzle pieces that hint that virtually everything he ‘created’, at the very least during the last two decades of his life, was being secretly subcontracted out under NDAs but refunnelled publically to make him appear more of a Prince figure.

[si]

Listers attempt to sing “She’s out of my life” in Marooned by Micheal from the 1979 album Off the wall
Is up for the next chop then, or he sings it so badly that no music identifying software will pick up on it?

To be honest, I didn’t even know it *was* a Michael Jackson song til a few years ago.

[Dave]

I barely even recognised it as a song.

[Ben Saunders]

I thought it was an in-universe Lister original, honestly. And Jackson definitely wrote Billie Jean, it was brought up in a court case how he came up with all the parts in his car and recorded them acapella into a tape recorder. And that’s the only Jacko song that really matters to me, honestly. I don’t think it’s very helpful or honest to attempt to discredit a man’s musical output just because he’s most likely a massive pedo.

[(deleted)]

Louis Johnson is alleged to be the writer of both Beat It and Billie Jean. Musicologists have pointed to a suspicious amount of similarities with Brothers Johnson compositions and Jackson writing credits on Thriller. Quincy Jones was openly complicit in various other authorship/session credit scams, and the idea of Michael Jackson as overnight hit songwriter happens entirely during his reign. After he goes, the Michael Jackson who suddenly wrote all those hits on his own after relying entirely on contributors again suddenly becomes unable to do so without a massive salad of co-writers and remains that way permanently.

I don’t say this as an extension of the recentness, I am just very interested in the idea of ghosting in music, which is highly prevalent. And I find the idea that Jackson vocals were likely to have been ghosted while he was alive – due to a drug-fucked voice – utterly fascinating.

[Dave]

Did they also ghost-dance for him?

[(deleted)]

For what it’s worth I don’t think any Michael Jackson work should be suppressed, nor that of Gary Glitter, Rolf Harris, Roman Polanski, Jonathan King, Eric Gill, Caravaggio etc etc.

Not just because of art being separate from the creator (obvs), but because withdrawing them actively harms the lived experiences of those that have drawn comfort or pleasure from any of that work, allowing the perpetrators an undeserved veneer of reverse-psych attention and infamy and giving them a ‘taking their ball back in revenge’ moment of power.

[(deleted)]

Also, any grown adult should be allowed the opportunity to forgive or compartmentalise the misdeeds of any other grown adult as they please without further judgment on their characters. The way some media commentators have turned on Jackson’s fanbase you’d think they were the ones that fucked the kids.

[Captain Bollocks]

Am I still allowed to play Sonic the Hedgehog 3?

[clem]

> using a soundalike for his Simpsons singing and being weirdly disingenuous about why

I didn’t know about this. Apparently he wanted to play a joke on his brothers by tricking them into believing the impersonator was him. Yeah great joke, Jacko.

[Captain Bollocks]

Yeah, that’s discussed on the DVD commentary with Matt Groening and the writers/showrunners, etc., and none of them really got the joke either.

And while we’re on a tangent about The Simpsons, DVD commentaries, musicians and people not getting the joke, on one DVD they talk about how in the early days, they had Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Paul McCartney all on the show, and someone in the recording room made a quip about how they were planning to include lines from all three over a backbeat-inspired backing track for the next Simpsons album, and then brag about how The Simpsons was so big and cool and trendy that they’d been the only force powerful enough to reunited The Beatles.

Anyway, the long story short is that it turns out that lawyers have absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever.

[si]

Can we still listen to Jackson 5 stuff? I’ve got an excellent A-B-C Remix on my MP3 player, that I got after Craig once played on his funk & soul show.
And is Janet Jackson going to get any grief at Glastonbury?

[Warbodog]

Never been interested in Michael Jackson in the slightest, so not going to watch whatever this new documentary is, but the concept of him being “a bit dodgy” isn’t exactly a newsflash, is it? All those court settlements and that.

Anyone else extremely suspicious that we can deal with now, while it might have a practical benefit, rather than a decade after they’ve died and gotten away with it, please? I’d share my harrowing celeb anecdotes if I had them. In the 90s, I wouldn’t have saved them up.

[Ben Saunders]

Yeah the Jackson stuff being recent is weird, we all “knew” he was a pedo when he was still alive. And afaik there is no new “evidence” being presented in the new documentary, it’s just a couple dudes telling their stories over dramatic music.

You can keep listening to whatever the fuck you want because even the idea that you’re monetarily supporting abuse by streaming their stuff doesn’t fly when the person is dead. For example if you want to avoid John Lennon stuff because he beat his wife, you’re a bit late. Any money given to “John Lennon” goes to his widow and estranged son, so if anything you’re doing charity work.

[tombow]

for me, I think the way he acted with boys he befriended was emotionally unhealthy enough, even if he never physically abused them. How he would pull one kid into an intense friendship, spend a lot of time with them, then dump them when he met a new interesting kid. (I’ve read a couple of books about MJ). And there’s enough stories about him doing inappropriate stuff to impress kid friends, leaving porn and beer around etc. And all the stories from employees about bizarre stuff he’s done, like the story that after Oprah left his house (after interviewing him in his living room), he unzipped his fly and peed where she had been sitting, to “reclaim his territory”. There’s so much bizarre stuff if you read a lot about MJ.

I remember Quincy Jones saying that MJ can’t read music or contribute much technical stuff, but in the early days he did come up with melodies and lyrics. I always think of MJ as being kind of like Ozzy Osbourne, in that their band/producers come up with the music but it’s just a backdrop for their dancing/stage show/wild behavior.

[Hamish]

Being WAY too young to have known of Micheal Jackson at the peak of his career, my first exposure to him was a Shockwave Flash animation mocking his plastic surgery where his fake nose falls off and lands in his drink.

Growing up all I knew is that people thought he was a creep. Then he died, and was the untouchable king of pop for some reason. Ten years later, and he is a creep again.

[(deleted)]

In the UK at least, Jackson was full-on persona non grata from around the time of the Bashir documentary right up to the announcement of the O2 shows, and was then sanctified in death, though that’s kind of lost to time now. The mainstream stopped taking him seriously around Earth Song time. It was all cumulative, the child abuse allegations were only a small element – the Christ complex, the baby dangling, the surgery, the records themselves turning crap, and the sinister weirdness of his public appearances and interviews were much more instrumental in the wrecking of his image. People had been mocking him ever since the skin colour change but it really came to a head after the Brits/Jarvis incident as it instantly deflated the hypnotic bubble of PR gloss around him and the public mood really changed.

Another thing that’s forgotten – when he died there were a lot of editorials along the lines of ‘hang on, what about the child abuse?’ but there was a wide consensus response to them of ‘not now’. How different the world was ten years ago!

[Warbodog]

Derek Acorah held a televised seance tastefully soon after Jackson’s death and confirmed he was in heaven, so he can’t have been too bad. Comedians at the time mused, “well if he can get in…”

[MANI506]

The first series of AIOTM has some hilarious Jackson Seance stuff and Emma Kennedy’s Jackson impression is peerless.

[Warbodog]

“Now a song from Michael Jackson, in happier times before his mauling from Martin Bashir that led ultimately, and directly, to his death (and to Diana’s)” – Alan Partridge

[By Jove its holmes]

The reason “crap” got bowdlerised to “whacko jacko” in that old BBC promo was so the promo would be suitable for an all-ages audience and wouldn’t raise any hackles from ostrich parents.

[Stephen Abootman]

Sixty Seconds with Craig Charles

Craig comments on Jacko (so this thread seemed liked the best place to put it). They don’t ask about Dwarf though if you fancy a game of ‘spot the quote from it’ then you’re in luck.

[si]

My word, what a flattering photograph.

[By Jove its holmes]

I remember the MJ/Harry Potter parody:

“Hello, Harry!”

“Vulgar Wart?”

“No, Harry. Something. much, much, scarier!”

“Michael Jackson! So, the Secret Chamber of Secrets is really… Neverland!”

[bloodteller]

“Kris found out about the shower thing; she went ballistic. It’s just a little present to say ‘sorry’.”

“A bag of albino mouse droppings?”

“No, two bags.”

Yes, I know the part of the thread where we all make jokes has long since passed but hey, whatever

[Spare Hand One]

By the way, when the VHS finally materialises in that advert, the “Timeslides” and “Backwards” titles appear on the same box.

They must have beamed it in from another universe — one with longer-playing tapes — using the Holly Hop Drive.

[Ridley]

<blockquoute>Yes, I know the part of the thread where we all make jokes has long since passed but hey, whatever

No, that’s the problem:

<blockquoute>Hey, y’know, whatever

You spend your whole life just steady and avoiding irresponsibility. We can’t be in a relationship like that.

[Ridley]

Still a good joke.

[Author]

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