he members of The Eltingville Comic Book, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror and Role-Playing Club aren't the only geeks in Eltingville, but they seem to be the four geeks most suited for each other. All of them are arrogant, combative, obsessive and misanthropic in a superior sort of way. In "Bring Me the Head of Boba Fett," the pilot episode of a possible Welcome to Eltingville series, the action begins with the club members embroiled in a Dungeons & Dragons-type fantasy game that quickly erupts in violence after the players' inability to cooperate gets their characters killed.
Several fights later, the club members are ejected from the home of club president Bill Dickey, whose mother is sick of all the noise. Bill proclaims that he never wants to see club secretary Josh Levy again. But the next day, they've patched things up and the whole group is off to the movies together. ("OK, so the plan is, we watch the Jaws rip-off first, then sneak into the Alien rip-off, and then sneak into the Halloween rip-off. Eltingville Club, go!")
Two hours later, after being unceremoniously kicked out of the theater, they instead decide to "make the most of the day in the mighty Eltingville manner," which involves toy stores, video games, fast food, a sci-fi-themed lingerie display and eventually the local comic-book store. ("Ah, Battle
Broad was better when she had the Battle Broad Brigade. More battles, more broads.") There, they discover the Holy Grail of nerd-dom: A mint-condition Kenner Boba Fett action figure, never removed from the box. Bill and Josh both fall over themselves and each other in their eagerness to buy it, which quickly leads to a fight over which of them gets it. Finally, Josh challenges Bill to a "trivia-off," which has them screaming questions like "What rock star played on the Star Wars Christmas album?" and "How many brains does a Cylon commander have?" at each other in front of a rapt
audience. Of course, the Eltingville Club doesn't have much to do with playing fair or accepting defeat gracefully.
Faithfully mocking the fan in the mirror
Independent comic artist Evan Dorkin produces notoriously funny, dark and twisted comics (the Dork anthologies, Milk And Cheese: Dairy Products Gone Bad); it's no surprise that he had to tone down the language of his original strips to meet the Cartoon Network's standards. And Marvel and DC Comics both refused him the right to use images of their characters and products on the potential Eltingville Club TV show. So the show's pilot doesn't entirely resemble the foul-mouthed, pop-culture-referencing, Eisner Award-winning "Boba Fett" episode of Dorkin's original Eltingville Club comic. (Luckily, Dorkin got permission to use Boba Fett, or, as he notes on his Web site, "the pilot would have been called 'Bring Me the Head of Some Made-Up Character,' which
would have sucked big-time.")
But even a toned-down version of Welcome to Eltingville is a lot of fun for science-fiction/comics/gaming fans who don't take themselves too seriously. There are plenty of little in-jokes for the attentive, from the pop-culture quotes that are a casual part of the club members' vocabulary to the colorful Star Trek fantasy sequence to the show's little background details. And the Eltingville Clubbers themselves are the kind of broadly drawn stereotypes that might give fans a bad name, but certainly aren't all wrong. As Josh leers over a bootleg tape that supposedly pictures
Denise Crosby naked, or club member Jerry Stokes riffs on Twiki lines from Buck Rogers, they seem to be channeling the worst (and most unintentionally hilarious) aspects of fandom. (Picture a high-energy, rage-filled version of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, and multiply him by four. Then add in a lot more of him as subsidiary characters.)
Welcome to Eltingville's visual style is fairly familiar for Cartoon Network shows—it's an iconic, boxy, cartoony sort of animation that looks a bit like a softened version of Samurai Jack or Clerks: The Animated Series. It's neither exciting nor distracting, though the little details are admirable. Really, the dialogue and the humor is the point of Welcome to Eltingville, which offers science-fiction-et.-al. fans the chance to both recognize and chuckle over themselves.
