Harry Potter Versus Bulwer-Lytton and Sam Spade
By Scott Warner
It was an unfathomably dark and tempestuously stormy night. Private eye Harry Potter tugged his fedora down at a rakish angle, not because of the inclement weather but because he figured it lent a shred of manliness to his naively insipid mug. For the thousandth time, Harry wished he needed a shave. Casing out the haunted laundromat, Harry guessed that the front door was the most surreptitious method of entry given that it was the only one. Unbuttoning his double-breasted, wide lapel pinstriped jacket, he drew his Bruno and Crowley 9mm snub-nose wand from its holster and checked the ammunition. Then he threw his shoulder against the laundromat’s automatic door which obediently swung inwards. Harry was so completely caught off guard by such a devious trap that he fell flat on his face, rolling across the filthy scarred linoleum until he fetched up against one of the big dryers. A terribly ominous thumping noise emanated from the lurching gargantuan Muggle monstrosity. Harry was afraid to look but with myopic spectacles askew, he stretched up to peer into the dryer’s window. The horridly gray visage of Hermione stared back, tumbling over and over before Harry’s pie pan eyes. “Should have used more bleach,” he muttered incantorially.
1950s B Movie
As the unstoppable horde of purple polka dot killer androids from Pluto leisurely tottered towards them through the murky dripping tunnel brainlessly raving about assimilating everything in sight, supremely photogenic but unbelievably vacant astrophysicist Dirk Masterson manfully adjusted his fedora and uncoiled his bullwhip while the squad of fresh faced, wisecracking Space Troopers readied their atomic neuroblasters and expertly targeted their mates up front. Meanwhile portly Professor Quagmire bumbled about without his broken eyeglasses, ineffectively trying to repair the experimental odium-powered Z-ray emitter and Ultrina, Queen of Uranus, stood naively immobile to one side attractively batting her two-inch nylon eyelashes and titillatingly exposing her alluring thigh through the slit of her low-cut turquoise sequin gown while the entire audience howled derisively. Nevertheless, their resistance was puerile: this movie was a pure bred sci-fi dog, so arf it up!