Citizens across the United States have reported receiving random unsolicited seed shipments from China. The seeds appear to be part of an online scam where sellers ship items that nobody asked for in the first place. Officials are warning people to not plant the seeds and instead forward them to local agriculture or environmental officials…
It looks like Chris Evans’s dreams of being in a musical might just be coming true. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Avengers superstar is in talks to star as Orin Scrivello, the devilishly evil dentist—made famous by Steve Martin—in Greg Berlanti’s upcoming big screen adaptation of Little Shop of Horrors. Disney If you’ve never…
(Nope, da-doo) So I was just about to, ya know, walk on by (Good for you) When suddenly,
and without warning, there was this total eclipse of the sun. It got very dark and then I heard a strange
humming sound, like something from another world! (Da-doo) And when the light came back this weird plant was just sitting there (whoop-see-doo) Just, you know, stuck in, among the zinnias (Audrey Two) I coulda sworn it hadn’t been there before,
but the old Chinese man sold it to me anyways,
for a dollar ninety-five. (Sha la la, la la la, la la la, doo-doo-doo-doo!)”
Rick Moranis and chorus in the Warner Bros./Frank Oz musical comedy Little Shop of Horrors, 1986. Other movies featuring eclipse scenes include Walt Disney’s Fantasia, 1940,
the Columbia Pictures biblical epic Barabbas, 1961
(the crucifixion scene was filmed during an actual solar eclipse on February 15th, 1961), and the Stanley Kubrick sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968 (click on the underlined links in the titles to view the scenes on YouTube).
“ And when the light came back, this weird plant was just sitting there… Just, y’know, stuck in, among the zinnias. I could’ve sworn it hadn’t been there before… ”
That post about the LSOH focus-group ending made literally everyone in my friend circle rewatch or listen to it and now we’re all talking about it. I’ve read a lot about it – everyone seems to have strong feelings about which ending is the right ending and has written an essay on the topic. Predictably I have Opinions.
When your cute pulp scifi musical is explicitly about how the desperate, good-hearted poor have no shot at social mobility and are slowly being crushed under the status quo of capitalism, it’s really smug to say that the moralistic ending is required of the story. And you can’t convince me that classist assumptions about the inherent immorality of the working class poor aren’t a factor in people’s judgmental attitudes here because I’ve read too many comments in the last day about how Audrey ~isn’t so innocent herself because she wants to live in a nice fucking house. And I had no idea people felt so strongly about the moral necessity of saving domestic abusers when they accidentally overdose on their own drugs.
It’s worth noting that Seymour’s speciality in life is plants. He clearly devotes a lot of his time to studying them. Being able to succeed at the things you invest your time and work into is ~The American Dream~. It’s the promise of capitalism that keeps people exploited in a system where you have to exploit others to succeed or be the person who is exploited, and that’s what the story is allegorical for from start to finish. Even as the story develops, starting with feeding the plant his own blood but being forced to sacrifice other people, or to sacrifice himself.
So I mean, maybe it’s fair to say that even if you very reluctantly let people die to appease an extra-terrestrial Venus flytrap, you deserve to die, but this is a fantasy and it’s not Seymour’s fault he was being exploited in the first place so I think after learning his lesson about exploitation that’s enough knowledge and he doesn’t have to die to complete the journey. Seymour’s not less moral than other people are. He just has fewer options.
