Re: We read two of Harlan Ellison's short stories on-line and...

On Wed, 7 May 2025 4:25:56 +0000, HarryLime wrote:

Will Dockery wrote:
>

NancyGene wrote:

>

>

"A Boy and his Dog"-

>
We just tried to read that on-line.

>

Adapted into a pretty good film starring Don Johnson, as I noted
earlier.

>
>
>
>
It's a mildly amusing, post-apocalyptic black comedy that plays off of
the gimmicky idea that the boy (and the audience) can hear his dog
(Tiger of Brady Bunch fame) talk.  It's R-rated, so the bulk of the
dog's humorous comments are focused on sex (IOW: adolescent "Porky's"
style humor).  Supposedly the bulk of these jokes were taken verbatim
from Ellison's novella.  It also includes a proto-Porky's scene where
the boy watches a gratuitously naked woman dressing in what looks like
it might once have been a high school locker room.  The plot is...
virtually non-existent for the bulk of the film, takes a 20 minute side
trip into an underground small town America (complete with grass and
trees) where everyone wears clown makeup, then finishes off with some
quasi-cannibalism (I say "quasi" because Tiger does most of the
munching, his boy hardly touches the meal).
>
Tiger makes an early meta joke in the film's closing line, regarding bad
taste.
>
The film's low budget is glaringly obvious, and the film quality on the
version I saw was poor.
>
When writer-Director-Actor L.Q. Jones won a Hugo for it, Ellison (who
was present) threw a hissy fit until the found one for him as well...
turns out it was only the base of the Hugo, but it pacified him.

This story might be legitimate but the other one you told yesterday I'm
not so sure about.