Plan 9 From
Planet Hollywood
by Ken Rand
Eliot
Hollingsworth looked into the dresser mirror and did not
see Bugs Bunny. Instead, he saw Elmer Fudd.
Fudd.
Elmer Doggone Fudd.
He tried to say, “Eh, what’s up, doc?” to complete his
daily morning ritual, but it came out, “Gwacious, dat’s a
dweadful woad of cawwots.”
He tried a laugh. “Huh-uh-uh-uh.”
Wrong laugh.
“Dis will wiwwy wuin my day.” Annoyance made his weak Fuddy
voice squeak even more.
A glance down at his roly-poly body sent bile to his throat
and he looked away. The smell of fresh carrots in the bowl
on the dresser amplified his nausea—Fudd’s reaction, not
his. Eliot liked carrots. Fudd hated them.
Deep inside, where he was Eliot Hollingsworth, he
still felt
like Bugs
Bunny. He’d morphed into his favorite Warner Bros. cartoon
character six thousand years ago, moved here to Planet
Hollywood, and had never had a problem.
Until now.
Services started in half an hour and Bugs Bunny looked like
Elmer Fudd. What if he’d gone On The Air without checking
his image? What if, for some reason, this particular day,
he’d skipped his morning ritual, a lifelong habit, hadn’t
seen the offensive image, and gone in front of billions of
faithful, worshipful viewers all over the galaxy?
His too-round shoulders shuddered. He couldn’t continue the
blasphemous thought.
Spontaneous
morphing.
It had never happened to him before. Never in six thousand
years. He’d risen slowly but steadily from a common acolyte
among billions of common acolytes to his current lofty
position as Fourth Assistant Associate UnderHigh Priest in
Charge of Saturday Morning Worship Services, rotating
vacation relief shift, and never in all that time had he
ever experienced a spontaneous morphing. If anybody
discovered the lapse, Eliot could kiss goodbye his dream of
one day becoming First Assistant UnderHigh.
Why today
of all days? Today the First
Assistant was at the dentist and Eliot was on call. He was
to administer the Services rituals as Saturday morning
cartoon show host for the galaxy. Spontaneous morphing was
morally reprehensible, but spontaneously morphing into
Elmer Fudd was, was—
The word “blasphemy” came out in his thoughts as
“bwasphemy.”
He shuddered again, concerned that the mirrored image
reflected his true, inner self. He pinched his button nose
in disgust. “How atwotous.”
Eliot screwed up his face and grunted in concentration,
willing himself to morph back into his beloved Bugs.
Nothing happened.
Eliot’s failure didn’t particularly surprise or annoyhim.
He hadn’t needed to consciously morph from one image to
another in six millennia, since he took his Oath of Fealty.
He tried again, harder, grunting aloud and mentally
straining.
Elmer Fudd still looked back at him in the mirror.
Eliot tried again, harder.
Fudd.
The finger-in-the-light-socket trick didn’t work either.
The stage manager knocked on the door and called out,
“Twenty minutes, Mr. Bunny.”
“I’ll be weady—” Eliot stopped. “Okay,” he said.
The door was still closed. “Are you all right, Mr. Bunny?”
Eliot quickly grabbed the water glass, tipped it to his
mouth, and started gargling. “Unh-hunh,” he gargled, “I’ng
ogay.”
The stage manager went away.
Desperately, Eliot tried one more time to morph into Bugs
and failed.
Long, long ago, Eliot remembered, he’dsuffered from stage
fright. Besides boredom, it was one reason he morphed into
Bugs. The Rabbit feared nothing, so neither had Eliot
Hollingsworth. Until now.
Had his long-forgotten stage fright been this intense?
He checked and confirmed he hadn’t pissed his pants.
Fifteen minutes to showtime and Bugs Bunny was Elmer
Fudd. What to do,
what to do?
“What would dat
waskewwy wabbit do?”
Desperation and fear prompted an experiment: he tried to
morph into Daffy Duck. No good.
“Dwat the wuck.” He moaned and paced, mincing little steps
on big feet, trying to think.
A light went on over his head.
At least that still works, he thought.
In his closet, he found some old socks and a bag of cotton,
some thread, and a needle. He set to work making a Bugs
Bunny costume, the way prehistoric, premorphing humans
might have done it. Poor old humans, living their miserable
lives in the bodies they were born in. Mayfly lives, short,
brutish, and unimaginative.
“But they did make pwetty good cartoons.” He laughed.
“Huh-uh-uh-uh.”
He cut and sewed and sewed and cut, his swiftness fed by
panic. He waddled to the mirror to see the result.
Grim.
The stitches looked like something from a Frankenstein
cartoon and the costume fit like Tweety Bird might fit in a
Sylvester the Cat suit. It looked—comic.
“Oh, gowwy, gowwy, gowwy.”And only ten minutes to showtime.
He began stuffing clothes, towels, bedding, and his pillow
into the make-do costume to puff it out, shape it up. Not
enough.
“Five minutes, Mr. Bunny.”
With a cry in his throat, Eliot wadded up pages from his
priceless collection of antique real-paper comic books and
finished stuffing the costume.
He stood before the mirror.
The costume was good enough, he decided at last; he looked
like Bugs Bunny. “But I don’t sound wike dat wabbit for
diddwy.”
“One minute, Mr. Bunny.”
Thinkthinkthinkthink...
The light over his head went on again.
Eliot yanked out one of the costume’s two front teethand
tossed it aside. One-toothed, he went out to face the
cameras.
***
Things did not
go as planned. Thirty seconds into Services, the producer
called for a commercial break and Eliot was hauled off.
The Warner Bros. Most High Inquisitor had traded in his
original cartoon name for one he liked better, now that he
was in charge: Major Rooster.
“Siddown, son,” the rooster said, nodding his floppy red
topknot toward a chair in front of his desk, “make
yourself—I say make yourself home. I don’t stand on
ceremony here, no sir. Keep it casual, the way I like it,
like in the old days, back on the farm. You ever been to a
farm, boy? You’ll have to talk louder, son.”
“Weww, actuawwy—”
“Get to the point—the point, I say.” The rooster’s beak
turned down and his eyes narrowed. “Boy, did anybody ever
tell you you look like—” he looked at a paper on his desk,
and reading glasses appeared on his beak as he read,
muttering.
Eliot fidgeted. His feeble try to morph out of Fudd failed
as he expected and he shrugged, resigned.
“Say, wait just a doggone minute here,” Rooster said,
“ain’t you the one, I say, ain’t you the Assistant
Blah-de-blah that spontaneously—that’s what it says right
here, and you know I wouldn’t make such a thing up, no
sir—”
Eliot nodded vigorously, hoping to speed the official
inquiry along, take his punishment, and be done with it.
“Speak up, son, I can’t hear you.”
“Huh-uh-uh-uh—”
“Don’t give me that doggone Fudd jabber. Gives me a
headache. I know what you’re going to say...”
Rooster kept talking and talking. Maybe this was part of
the punishment? Eliot’s awareness faded in and out.
“...tell you why, son, if you’ll just be quiet and listen
for a second—”
“Weww—”
“—so we keep our shapes so the great unwashed out there in
videoland, whether they be Warner Bros fans, or whether
they favor our colleagues at the Disney Studios—why
heckfire, boy, even Walter Lantz fans—all of them need
guidance to know what the Sam Hill to look like when they
get bored looking like their own selves and want to be
whatever plonks their twanger—”
“Weww—”
“—and if spontaneous morphing ain’t bad enough, you got to
go and get yourself stuck—stuck
is
what you are, take a look at yourself, go on ahead and
look.”
“Weww—”
“You keep interrupting me, son. But you’re right. Good
thing we got to edit that broadcast. Be a doggone shame if
it went On The Air, you in that ridiculous get-up, all
moth-eaten and droopy. What made you think you could get
away with it?
“Now you’re wondering whether I’m going to make you clean
the henhouse with a toothbrush for a thousand years or such
deviltry. Well, I ain’t. If you’ll just stop your doggone
yammering, I’ll tell you want I’m gonna do...”
***
It took Eliot
Hollingsworth a thousand years after he was excommunicated
to leave Bugs Bunny behind and adjust to never being able
to morph out of Elmer Fudd. Still, it took another thousand
years before he stopped trying to say, “Eh, what’s up,
doc?”
In another thousand years, he began to stop missing Planet
Hollywood, and a thousand years after that, he started to
like the desert planet to which he’d been exiled. Planet
Wyoming, they called it.
A thousand years later, he met another Fudd, wandering
around lost and lonely, exiled just like him. A thousand
years later, he met another. Then another and another.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands.
Millions.
They called themselves “Stuckies.”
All the Elmer Fudd Stuckies exiled to Planet Wyoming milled
around aimlessly, passing endless days in boring
pursuits—Trivial Pursuits as often as not—without coherent
goals, aspirations, ambitions.
Leaderless.
Eliot
Hollingsworth passed the millennia with such thoughts among
his brothers, his fellow-fallen.
On Planet Hollywood, among his peers there, his highest
aspiration reached only to First UnderPriest. Here, among
his fellow Fudd Stuckies, he more than aspired. He
achieved.
In time (a long, long time), the former Assistant Associate
UnderWhatever (he’d managed to forget the exact title)
promoted himself to the rank of the OverPriest, First and
Only, His Fuddness.
In time (a long, long time), His Fuddness, the former Eliot
Hollingsworth, stood alone on the edge of a high, flat mesa
on his desert planet and gazed out. He looked down to his
devoted armies of Fudds in the valley below, marching to
and fro in clompy hunting boots, stubby shotguns bobbing on
their shoulders, in tidy little rows.
He looked up at the garish pink lights of distant Planet
Hollywood, “The Planet That Never Sleeps,” and thought how
unfortunate were those on that planet, and in the galaxy in
general, those who didn’t know the blessings of Stuckness,
of Fuddness.
He looked up, and made plans.
Copyright 2007 by Ken Rand