Legends of the Mall

I missed the first three minutes or so, no thanks to my VCR, which decided to temporarily block out MTV, so I’m not sure what the actual plot was about. Luckily, that didn’t really matter and I enjoyed it all the same.

I came in somewhere in the middle of Stacy’s story. Basically, a late 60s version of Sandi got it in her head that she had fat eyelids because the three J’s called her almost perfect. So, she cut her diet in half and lost just enough weight so that by the time the school dance rolled around, you could see every one of her bones. Everyone though she looked great, but when she tried to dance, her bones rattled. They immediately began laughing at her and she became so embarrassed that she ran away and no one ever saw her again. But, she got her revenge. She tortured the popular girls, “and even some of the medium popular ones”, with her rattling everynight until they were terrified to close their eyes and fell from popularity when their eyes became puffy and bloodshot.

The second act was much better: probably my favorite of the season. Trent tells the tale of Metal Mouth. This one is set in the 80s and stars Mr. DeMartino as a metalshop teacher who grinds his teeth until they’re all but gone. He has them pulled, but the dentist (Mr. O’Neill) won’t replace them because he’s a teacher. So, after being ridiculed relentlessly by Kevin, he creates a pair of hand-forged steel dentures and shows them off the next day in class by biting a huge chunk of the door off. Unfortunately for him, the teeth pick up radio stations, more specifically “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Watching him sing that was probably the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Anyway, he goes totally insane when all of his students laugh at him and leaves the school. But, he exacts his revenge by biting the tires on Kevin’s car “to flatness” and leaving his teeth on the doorhandle while Kevin and Brittany (who resembles Julia’s cousin in The Wedding Singer) are making out at a stop sign.

We return to reality (er, Daria’s reality) for a moment to find Daria, Trent, Jane, and Jake in Trent’s death-trap looking for Quinn. Suddenly, the engine catches on fire, Jake pulls a wonderfully brilliant move by touching the hood, and Trent discusses the car’s steal-ability rate.

Jane then proceeds to tell the story of The House of Bad Grades. Now, we go to the Lawdale of the 1950s and everyone is acting like the cast of Happy Days. Everyone but Daria, of course. Jake decides to put a bomb shelter in the backyard, but it is forgotten along with the worry of being bombed. That is, until Daria needs some peace and quiet to write her college aplication so she can get out of that God-forsaken town. She locks herself down there and falls asleep, only to wake up the next morning to find herself entombed with a wall full of canned peaches and no can opener (leave it to Jake…). You see, Jake had it filled in so that he could build a barbecue pit on the spot. They assumed she ran off to be a beatnic. So, she took her revenge by making all of the poor children who lived in that house from then on fail so that they would have to stay in Lawndale, too.

Daria’s maniacal laugh sounded like Bianca Beaksly and there was too much Fashion Club, but those were about my only complaints about this one. Very fun, and Mr. DeMartino…[begins laughing again]

~Robin

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