TV is weird. Specifically TV news. If somebody asked you to cover a special interest story at a nudist camp you might think of several different ways to do it. You could interview people about why they enjoy that lifestyle. You could report the details about the location in order to give information to your viewers. Or, you could recreate the volleyball scene from Top Gun. No risk of winning a Peabody Award here. While the entire video is pretty silly, skip to around the 4:06 mark to get into the Top Gun goodies.
The first part of the WGN story occurs exactly as you might expect a news story on a nudist camp to begin: interviews, awkwardness, and a lot of pixelated private parts. Then, randomly, the Kenny Loggins soundtrack kicks in. While Playing With the Boys is the lesser known of the Loggins tracks from the Top Gun soundtrack, it’s unmistakable, and you know what’s coming next. Four minutes in we get a reenactment of the volleyball game between naval aviators (or are they navel aviators now?) complete with the head of the appropriate actor covering the junk of the naked man taking the part. It’s an odd place to see Rick Rossovich because, let’s face it, when was the last time you saw Rick Rossovich?
But if you’re going to do, let’s do it right. I mean it starts out just fine. The ball twirl on the finger, "Maverick" (due to illness played by WGN’s own Pat Tomasulo) checking his watch and telling everybody it’s time. But from there the whole thing falls apart. They have the major dig in the game performed by Iceman when it was totally Slider. The hell? They add in the high fives, but what’s up with the chest bump, there was no chest bump in the movie. They do have the bit where Iceman and Slider huddle to talk strategy, but it’s the wrong angle, the really wrong angle. Look and see what I’m talking about.
With so many people getting their news on the internet you get the distinct impression that news desk’s are putting these things together in an attempt to go viral and get noticed. It’s not that it isn’t funny. It just doesn’t have the fresh randomness that discovering a Hulk statue does. Maybe if they’d gotten a nudist to do the weather that would have worked better.
