More word zeppelins in today’s strip… Not as bad as yesterday, but still, get your bookmarks out, folks!
You know, this is actually one of TB’s tidiest retcons, probably because it is one of the very few intentional ones he’s ever undertaken. It takes the original scene and changes its context (slightly) by depicting a previously unseen scene. Tidy. The pieces actually fit together. There are no loose ends, deleted original context, or unresolved conflict with the originals scene. See? That’s not so hard.
Heck, as a bonus it even (unnecessarily but adeptly) explains a silly detail from the original scene, why Les has a camcorder and this Hari Seldon story readily at hand as if he was waiting for Lisa to lament about all the things Summer she will never get to experience. Turns out, he pretty much was just waiting on the chance to whip that camera on out.
Tidy as it is, this retcon was no more entertaining or less irritating because of it. In fact, it makes the origin story of the Lisa tapes tremendously off-putting. The focus shifts away from the impending reality of Summer growing up without a mother seen in the original scene to the needs of Summer’s nogoodnik parents… First, Lisa wants to record the tapes so she can live vicariously through Summer’s adolescence in her imagination. Then, Crazy and Lisa hatch this cockamamie plan to let Les take credit for the idea to record the infamous tapes, which only soothes his ego and bolsters his hero complex. These people are awful and I hope I never wind up sitting next to any of them on an airplane.
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Tagged as Act II, Act II tragedies, bad ideas, cancer, cancer films, character death, Crazy, Crazy Harry, death, enraging facial expressions, flashback, flashback thought bubbles, hatchet face, horrible ideas, ideas, impending doom, Isaac Asimov, Les, Lisa, non-pizza foodstuffs, obsolete video technologies, pop-culture references, porch swing, raging egoism, references no one gets, retcon, retcons of retcons, seldom-seen characters wearing hats, sepia-tone, sepia-toned flashback, Star Trek, Taj Moore-hal, terrible ideas, the lisa, the Lisa tapes, tiny hands, tiny trees, trees, unnatural hand gestures, welcoming death, word zeppelins, wry banter, wry self-deprecation, wry weary snideness, wryness
Son of Stuck Funky 
