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Dick Dangerous To AshesJun 02 '08 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line My mother says to get things done, you'd better not mess with Dick Dangerous. Three years of the Double D on Epinions.
“Do you remember a guy that’s been In such an early song? I’ve heard a rumour from ground control Oh no, don’t say its true.” I wish I could claim I invented Dick Dangerous, but that was Paul Lawston. Now that dude was inspired because without him Dick would never have gotten marooned on that mysterious island, and there’s no way on Earth he’d have gone back to 1993 and had that crazy time. Life just wouldn’t be the same without Dick, M. and Bruce cussing each other’s Moms or even Roger to come up with another useless scheme to thwart Dick and take over the world. How’d you feel if you’d never got to walk the Mean Streets of Finchley with the Danger crew? It all came about when Paul and I were working in a Museum in London - we’d set fire to things for the amusement of children. We were sat in the staff restroom drinking tea when Paul mentioned he’d created this character: Dick Dangerous, an all-American superhero who lived in Finchley, and that he wanted to bring his creation to Epinions. Of course he’d had the character kicking around for years, ever since he’d used the name on student radio to present a show which was designed to be confrontational and edgy but ended up just sounding silly because he never managed to get further than the name when it came to character development! He hadn’t even thought up the name; it comes from an old Amstrad platform game called Rick Dangerous, with that added entendre to appeal to Paul’s slightly juvenile sense of humour. Dick had been mentioned on Epinions in a review called, “Divine_Cheese and Alawston: Shock and Awe,” where two more of Paul’s fictional creations are defeated by Dick Dangerous in an airplane. If you search around you’re sure to find it on there. Divine_Cheese was the handle Paul used when he started on Epinions back in 2000, and he still posts as Divine_Cheese from time to time. I’d never even heard of Epinions before Paul mentioned Dick Dangerous, but the idea of p*ssing off a load of anally retentive conservative Americans appealed to me, although we never originally intended for the stuff to go out on Epinions. We started off with a review Paul had written of Kill Bill for the Ciao website where Dick, M. and Ern were in a pub discussing the movie. Yeah, I know, we recycled that one later, several times! I had the bright idea of having the three characters discuss the film with the least likely person to be in Finchley, and we hit on 50 Cent, although Paul said we should make him a dumb-a*s. So I rewrote the review, spiced it up, made it edgy and we posted it up on Ciao. Of course we British are harder to offend than Conservative Middle America, and that’s when we considered posting on Epinions. So I opened up an account and we set to work on the very first Dick Dangerous review proper, of Revenge of the Sith. Paul wrote the actual review text, but I then re-wrote it to make it more “Dangerous.” It was funny, profane and also reviewed the film properly, and we were surprised to see that people at first took to the character. But I had a bigger vision than reviewing things with a slight American accent - I wanted to create a cult. Impersonating an American wasn’t too difficult for us. We worked with several brash Americans at the museum, and Paul lived with a guy from Portland while he was studying a teaching course, so we had tonnes of material and access to American slang (Although I guess Dick sounds like a mixture of dialects). Take that, crank it up to 11 and cram it full of smut, and thus Dick Dangerous became this superhero character who thinks he’s a pimp-gangsta and yet lives in Finchley. Of course Dick’s nothing without the rest of the crew. M. Ravioli’s there from the start in the much-hated Dick Dangerous Code, the straight man to Dick, the character who always points out the absurdities. I loved that line in Being Dick Dangerous (One of the few Paul came up with) when Dick asks him if he’s gay, and he points out they don’t seem to know any women. Quality. I always had a soft-spot for M. although Paul’s brother thought the character was superfluous (Alawston’s and Divine_Cheese have often collaborated on Epinions, although Andrew’s only creative input into Dick Dangerous was when he challenged us to go worse than we’d ever been before. The result of that dare was the Picture of Dick Dangerous when we retold Dorian Grey at Roger Foxby’s civil partnership, and Dick walks in on a bizarre sexual encounter between Foxby and his Mom). Of course M’s always been Dick’s housemate, and I sure hope he’s nothing to do with me, after me and Paul shared a house in Golder’s Green which is what a lot of those home sequences are based on. Mr Patel was based on our landlord who once phoned Paul while he was on holiday in Lofoten, Norway, to find out if he could let the gas-man in. When he told me the story I thought it was brilliant and put it into the reviews. We also worked with a half-Maltese grime rapper at the museum, but M was always supposed to look like Big Boi, and Paul got the name back when he was working in a pub - it was on a tub of Mushroom Ravioli and he thought it sounded street. Ha! The other big character who was always there was Roger Foxby. He’s based on a friend of Paul’s called Richard Stork who claimed a whole load of crazy stuff. I’ve only got this second-hand but he really did have a Land Rover with a horn he called, “The Peasant Scatterer.” This dude was obsessed with guns and fishing and Paul had a theory he was gay and kept a Gimp at home - so we ended up with an arch-enemy whose Gimp was constantly frustrated because Foxby never actually has sex with him. The closest they get is that game of Hunt the Watch in Ground Control to Dick Dangerous, which is something we stole off Torchwood. Of course Foxby is nothing without the Gimp, and he just completes the whole character in my opinion. Having the arch-enemy, M. and Dick fully formed meant I could really kick out with the Dick Dangerous Code - that’s all mine. Paul said that the Epinions-massive would never get it, and you know what he was right. There never was and never will be again a review so bitingly insightful of that book as the one I wrote. We came up with a raft of other characters to populate our world. Bruce Fearless was a name Paul had kicking around since the radio days but had never used, so I turned him into the Australian flat-mate from hell, and we eventually had him accusing Dick of raping different animals each time. Being a Zoologist, Paul came up with all those Australian critters, and even the ones in I’m Dick Dangerous Get Me Out Of Here, which Dick reckons aren’t real, are. We loved Bruce so eventually made him a regular character, but some characters went the other way - Ern was an early casualty because he was a one joke character, while Dick’s sister Penelope (Based on Paul’s own sister) never really worked as well as we hoped it would. I think Paul just wanted a female character to balance out all that testosterone. Skittles was a surprise for us and we had to bring him back by popular demand several time and even give him his own story arc in the post-DC reviews. But my personal favourite is Dai Hard, the Welsh terrorist but maybe that’s because he was my invention - I just love the idea of this Welsh guy who wants to make Wales independent from the UK. And I always thought the Other One should have done more. Of course a lot of the time Dick Dangerous is referencing something else. That’s where the biggest joke is on the naysayers and “Danger haters,” as we dubbed them. Superficially it’s just as profane as you read, but beneath that veneer there’s something more going on, which is something I personally love about Dick Dangerous, and something the reactionaries here never quite got used to. Check The Picture Of Dick Dangerous, reviled by the Advisors, but hell it was referencing The Picture of Dorian Grey. And there was that intricately clever League of Dick Dangerous where Paul and I thought of our favourite book characters and then made them absurd. How many other comedies have you seen with Miss Haversham jokes? Sometimes we had to tone it down a lot though - the Talking Horses in Everywhere You Go… were going to be called Hounhymns like in Gulliver’s Travels but I decided to make that one easier. We became really pretentious at times with the post-modernism. Apart from the obvious like I, Dick Dangerous and Being Dick Dangerous, there’s the whole idea that the character discovers he’s a character. I mean it’s a wonder we didn’t vanish up our backsides. So there’s also references to pop culture, most of it British. Rap culture is lampooned a lot, which is why 50 Cent appears in it. And there’s loads of geek references to Doctor Who (Those early Dalek-based reviews), Torchwood (Find The Watch), Lost (I‘m Dick Dangerous, Get Me Out Of Here), Heroes (Ginge’s messages in Ground Control To Dick Dangerous) and all our favourite Sci-Fi shows. With our characters complete, all I had to do was get an idea and then stick the characters in and let them get on with it. Dick Dangerous became remarkably easy to write, and as we went along we came up with more and more sophisticated stories: rap battles in Estonia, a Christmas Carol, Dick forming his own League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The we added to that the post-modern idea of DC (Being a cypher for Paul) coming along and controlling the reality of Dick Dangerous, leading up to our first climactic story arc when Dick finally discovers that he’s not real and hunts down Paul in the real world. There were various reasons for doing that: we didn’t think Dick should last for too long, so we aimed for a conclusion, and Paul was planning to leave and go travelling, so we aimed to make Dick Dangerous: Final Strike the conclusion to the saga. Trouble is, it didn’t feel like a satisfying ending, even though we’d made the connection with DC, but I realised that meant we could go anywhere with the format, so we had the Skittles stories and that side story with the Grimp. I don’t know how well it held up, and it wasn’t nearly so popular as the original stories, but it was fun and I was beginning to work through some heavy writer’s block. Plus, Paul was living back in the New Forest with his folks when he got home and I was in London. 50 seemed like a natural conclusion so we colluded to kill Dick with The Last Stand, riffing on X-men. But you can’t keep a good Dick down, as the master himself might say, so I received an e-mail from Paul, who was working at a Zoo, suggesting we once again bought back Dick Dangerous, this time in 1993 a la Life on Mars. I gave it a fair stab, but after three reviews we realised it wasn’t working; aside from Ginge who is based on a psychotic flatmate of Paul’s from Bristol, the characters were rubbish, but through the block, I liked the idea of Roger Foxby finding his past self who turns out to actually be a competent villain. So we bought Dick back to the real world, but now we left it open, so we could have that whole story arc when he wakes up and finds out that Roger’s evil self is now in the world and taking it over. And now we reach this point right here, Dick Dangerous to Ashes. Is this the last we’ll ever hear from Dick Dangerous? I hope not - never say never. But there aren’t any plans to bring any more Dick Dangerous to Epinions at the moment, and as you can see we’ve deleted most of the reviews. Why? Because most of the folks on this site don’t deserve Dick Dangerous! Why should we bother writing Dick Dangerous Epinions when people are just going to bury them so no-one ever sees them? We’re still busy though - we’re looking for a new forum to bring Dick Dangerous to, and we’re working on new material like The Foxby Files, charting the early years of Roger Foxby. There’s a whole multimedia empire being planned and we hope that one day Danger fans from Epinions are gonna be able to tell people they were there at the start. If you’re worried about Dick, well we already thought about that. Paul reckons that in the next episode, Dick gets a girlfriend, but then we decided a boyfriend would be more fun. Then we decided he should marry M. Ravioli until I pointed out that it was too close to The Picture of Dick Dangerous plot-wise. So I suggested that evil Roger Foxby had hidden his soul in a watch like on Doctor Who, and that he possessed the useless Roger Foxby. Paul suggested that instead of a watch it should be a porno, and that as a side-story, Dai Hard runs for Mayor of Llundain. So that’s it from Dick Dangerous for now folks. If we run into dead ends elsewhere then maybe there’ll be some more Dick for everyone. And who am I? Now that would be telling… Thanks, I’m Dick Dangerous - I’m happy, hope you’re happy too.  |
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