Attaboy

Every now and then, a story comes along that couldn’t be created as fiction, because no one would believe it. The Spike Lee/Spike TV story was pretty close, but that’s been settled now. Once again, however, the guys over at Spike TV find themselves embroiled in another legal tangle, with a plotline that would make a great comedy special.

One of Spike TV’s new programs is an animated series called Stripperella. The cartoon was created by Stan Lee, the king of the Marvel Comics empire and the creator of Spider Man, among others. (Note: the is the second time someone named Lee is involved in controversy at Spike TV. Hmmm…).

The plot is simple: Erotica Jones, a stripper/pole dancer at the Tender Loin, is also a secret agent/detective who works under the dark of night (after her shift at the club, of course). She responds to calls for help on a vibrating belly button ring. The show also includes characters name Pushy Galore, Catt, and a cop named Chief Stroganoff. There is no actual cartoon nudity in the show, so the attraction, I assume, is the humorous tease of the entire plot and its settings.

Oh, yeah, and the Erotica Jones/Stripperella character is modeled after and features the voice of…Pamela Anderson, who I thought left all this sexual stuff behind and was searching for a more meaningful life. And, just in case you forgot, Pamela Anderson was once Pamela Anderson Lee, while married to Motley Crue drummer Tommy Lee. Another Lee connection…coincidence? Probably.

Okay, now here’s the part that makes this already-incredulous story even more bizarre. Janet Clover of nearby (to me) Palm Coast is demanding that Stripperella be taken off the air because she gave Stan Lee the idea and she doesn’t like how her personal story was turned into something “smutty.”

(For Pam’s reaction to this breaking event, please see the photo here).

There are so many hysterical things in this story, I simply don’t know where to begin.

First of all, nearly every story I’ve seen on this refers to Ms. Clover as “unemployed” in one way or another, such as “an unemployed Palm Coast resident” or “a former adult entertainer who is now unemployed”. Since when did the fact that you were unemployed become one of the defining factors in your lifestyle? I understand mentioning this in passing somewhere in the narrative, but to be routinely described that way seems silly. Perhaps this is a liberal media plot to surreptitiously bash the Bush economic policy…I can just hear Howard Dean now: “President Bush’s tax cuts aren’t stimulating the economy enough…even 37-year-old strippers are on the unemployment line! Enough is enough, Mr. President!”

Then there’s the way this woman allegedly presented the idea to Stan Lee, in which “she claims she asked Lee about the concept of Stripperella a year ago during a private dance session.” Private dance session? I always had this picture of comic book creators, especially a geezer like Lee, as being these geeky guys who spent their entire lives stooped over a drawing table in the dark of night, creating characters and images that can only be dreamed up in a specifically warped kind of imagination. I guess I was wrong on that one. And, I hope that if there’s a Mrs Stan Lee, she’s not going to get too upset about this foray into the Tampa dance club where this…ahem…”private dance session” and entertainment concept consultation was allegedly held. Heh.

Ms. Clover makes an interesting connection to the character on the cartoon show and her own background. She claims in the Orlando story linked above that she has fourteen years of “nursing experience”, though in this version the nursing “experience” has somehow turned into “studying to be a nurse.” Somehow, she makes a somewhat-tenuous relationship between the good works she has done for people over the years through “nursing” and helping the homeless and abused children, and the “crimefighting” performed by the character on the cartoon. Ms. Clover’s claim is that her helpful living spirit is reflected in the helpful spirit of the Erotica character, which means Lee must have taken the idea from her real life. What’s amazing is that this has all been determined from perhaps two episodes of the show, which premiered July 3.

Now, I’m not about to challenge Ms. Clover’s history of helping the disadvantaged, and I’m not even going to challenge whether or not she really is an actual registered or licensed nurse. But, the thought of this woman who’s a nurse by day and a stripper by night just stirs the imagination. Unfortunately, everything I think of when relating those two things is something you might see as a stunt on The Man Show or, better yet, the plot for some kind of mid-80s rock video, perhaps similar to Hot For Teacher by Van Halen. In that video, a bunch of kids are sitting in a classroom, looking bored, when the young, attractive teacher enters, leaps up on her desk, rips off her dress to reveal a tightly-filled bikini, and begins gyrating to the song, much to the pleasure of the young boys in the room. I can picture some guy lying in a hospital bed somewhere, and in walks Nurse Clover/Erotica, dressed in her nurses’ whites and cap. When our sick friend complains about how badly he feels, off comes the dress to reveal tassled pasties and a rhinestone thong, and on goes the music as Nurse Clover/Erotica gives our patient a special kind of medicine.

I won’t even discuss Ms. Clover’s claim of the exploding breast implants. Since I don’t think they did quite the same thing on the cartoon, that one is best left to the individual imagination.

And who among you has ever thought that lawyers were idiots or only in it for the money? There’s actually a lawyer in Orlando who’s either pretty smart, or just overstating the obvious:

“I think it’s a very weak case,” said Steven Fahlgren, an Orlando lawyer who isn’t involved in the case but has experience in intellectual-property law. “In this day and age, sometimes lawsuits are an effort to attract attention, and I can’t rule that out in this case.”

Wow, Steve…do you think? Or perhaps there wasn’t the possibility of enough zeros at the end of a potential settlement for you or any of your boys to take on Ms. Clover’s most critical legal case? Maybe you thought there wouldn’t be much left after the Spike Lee settlement. Or, perhaps this isn’t as good a thing as a smoker suing Phillip Morris for his or her cancer, claiming they never knew that cigarettes were dangerous.

I won’t even guess what the outcome of Ms. Clover’s suit is going to be. But, the whole idea may backfire, because now a few million more people are going to tune into Spike TV for the next installment of Stripperella, just to see what all the fuss is about. For some reason, when I read the woman’s story and her convoluted reasoning for the suit, I have to wonder if that wasn’t the idea all along.