Last night on Awesome  Talk I read these words. Please hum the theme from E.T. as you read it, but switch to the theme from Jurassic Park when I start talking about dinosaurs. Then switch back to the theme from E.T. They’re all in the key of John Williams, it’ll be a nice mashup.
IT BELONGS IN A LANDFILL
Sometimes the best solution is to bury all of your problems in a New Mexico landfill. The creators of the Atari 2600 E.T. video game knew this, as the game was so shitty and sold so poorly that the only way to fix the problem was to dig a very large hole in the desert, chuck the unsold games into the hole, then figure out a way to light the hole on fire.
Documentary filmmakers excavated the cartridges last week to confirm that yes, this thing that happened? This thing that Atari workers in the 80’s said they did? They sure did it, it happened, and here’s the garbage covered proof.
For some reason, I owned E.T. as a child. And it was barely a game – you would move him from one shitty green screen to the next shitty green screen, and he would fall into holes looking for parts to his… thing that he needed parts for. Repeat until he has all the parts, wait for some indecipherable rune to appear at the top of the screen, press the button on the joystick, and win, I guess. My older sister, the owner of the Atari, was determined to beat this piece of shit game. And one night, on the 13 inch black and white tv in my bedroom, she did it. She woke me up in the middle of the night so I could see E.T.’s spaceship buzz and fart around the screen and watch a pixelated Elliot run in circles, I’m guessing out of joy. The game was sold at a garage sale a few years later, and I’m sure it’s also rotting away in a landfill somewhere as we speak.
FuncoLand OF THE FUTURE
Apparently there were more E.T. cartridges in existence than there were Ataris to play them on. And throwing them in a hole was the easiest, most cost effective way to get rid of them. Now, throwing shitty shit into a landfill, doesn’t this sound familiar? It should, because history often repeats itself. Millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the earth. They had a pretty good run, but god threw them in a landfill because he couldn’t figure out a way to market them to his next creation – humans. Humans would be like, we already have cars, these things are slow as hell, and there’s not enough leather on earth to make comfortable dino saddles. So into the landfills they went with all of god’s other failed creations. Interesting postscript to that parable – eventually the dinosaurs turned into oil and god saved the day and became employee of the month.
I think everyone deserves a chance to landfill something. Everyone has their own E.T.-like debacle that they need to disappear… have yourself one of those peyote-fueled vision quests in the New Mexico desert and figure it out. Bills piling up? Landfill. Car won’t start? Landfill. Economy’s in the toilet? Throw the economy and the toilet in a landfill. Eventually we’ll have so many problems buried in so many landfills that we’ll have to bury the landfills in bigger landfills. Waterways choked with huge barges schlepping away our pianos that we never learned how to play, our decks that we never finished building, our 3-D printed monstrosities. Away with you, 3-D printed prosthetic arm with tiny swords for fingers! What the hell was I thinking?
It doesn’t matter. It’s buried in the ground and it never happened. Until documentary filmmakers dig it up 30 years later. Will the prosthetic arm with tiny swords for fingers light up like E.T.’s heart? Probably not. But I can guarantee you’ll say “ouuuuuch” when you touch it.