Welcome to another edition of You’ve Got To Be Kidding. This column is parody. Allow yourself a chuckle or two.
We often hear the debate. Which is better – Disney animation or live action movies? Recently, while sitting in a little, hole-in-the-wall, adult beverage establishment, I overheard a very bizarre spin on the debate. Two police officers with extremely different beats were comparing notes. I whipped out my smart phone and recorded the conversation. Following is the transcript of that recording.
“I had to go out to that stupid duck’s place again.”
“Same problem?’
“Yep. Indecent exposure. He keeps running around like that and the neighbors keep complaining. This time I tell him I’m gonna have to run him in and he starts screeching and squawking and…really…who can understand what he says half the time? I finally figure out he’s saying something about his coat and I shout back, ‘Pants! Get yourself some pants!’”
“Yeah, everyone knows about the duck.”
“Sure, but it’s not just him. There’s the girlfriend, the B&B couple, those rangers…and don’t even get me started about that pooh bear.”
“Him, too?”
“Same and then more. Not only indecent exposure, but an addiction that’s turning into the weirdest breaking and entering cases I’ve ever seen. Let’s just say it took the fire department a good three hours to get him out of that window.”
“Well, we ain’t got it much better on our side. You talk about breaking and entering. We caught this character red-handed breaking into homes and what does he say? That he’s Santa Clause. Claims he accidently killed the real Santa and now he has to take his place. I mean, we got breaking and entering, as well as a murder confession. And you know he’s gonna walk on an insanity plea.”
“You ‘live action’ guys aren’t the only ones putting up with psychos. We get a warrant to search this girl’s storage locker. It’s crammed full of loot, but the weirdest collection you ever saw. It doesn’t make any sense the kind of things she has: clocks, candlesticks, pocket watches, books, eyeglasses, forks, corkscrews, empty bottles, a lute…I mean, where does a girl get a lute? Then she starts pulling ‘em off the shelves and calling them whozits and whatzits and thingamabobs and dinglehoppers and snarfblats and…you just know she’s gonna get an insanity plea, too.”
“Talking about insane…didn’t ‘animation’ wind up with the nanny caper? We had it when it looked like it was a missing persons case. But the kids showed up and the Chief took it away from us. What happened?”
”Oh, man. That got weird and ugly quick. When the kids showed up, they were telling a story about jumping into chalk drawings and watching penguins. No big deal. Typical for our jurisdiction. But then they started talking about horse racing. Before we could get a chance to start asking questions about minors and gambling, they started talking about a fox hunt. Horses galloping at full speed, dogs chasing with intent to kill, and guns being fired every which way. I just gets me going when I hear about people letting kids loose in that kind of environment.”
”I hear you. We got more than our share of gun problems. First there was that character with the coonskin cap. Let’s just say we finally figured out why the zoo was missing some raccoons. But the big one last month was this guy who thought he was a superhero. Typical get up. Looks all metal and retro. But he straps a jet pack to his back and starts taking off, blasting off in the middle of city streets. Well, once we got done with him…let’s just say I don’t think he’ll be setting anything off for quite a while. Got him for illegal possession of explosives and now he’s on more terrorist watch lists than I even knew existed.
”At least that had a happy ending. I had this one big guy. We had him on aiding and abetting a thief – some little runt who was stealing from street vendors. The big guy whisks him away and the next thing you know the thief shows up with all these jewels and gold and stuff. Well, we can’t prove it, but it had to have come from the big guy. We go to talk to him and the next thing you know he’s running this whole routine on us – voices, shtick, multiple personalities – swear he’s going for an insanity plea. We lock him up, come back the next day, and he’s gone. Nothing in the cell but a bottle. We throw that in the evidence room and lock it up. Five minutes later – no more than five minutes – we go back and everything’s gone. We got no idea what happened. But about that same time I notice that the princess’s new guy is carrying around a bunch of stuff that looks awful familiar.”
“It seems like we’re getting involved in more regulatory stuff, too. Like that child labor thing we had with the newspaper delivery boys. Or that Swiss family that refused to follow any of the home schooling or building regulations.”
”Shoot, we wound up with an OSHA investigation. Over in the spinning factory some gal got hurt and has been out of it for a long time. And the company has really walled the place up. No one can get in or out to find out what really happened.
“Let’s face it, we both got our share of problems. That O’Gill character we hauled in for drunk and disorderly claimed he was working for the little people. At first we thought it was a Robin Hood complex. But then we figured out which ‘little people’ he was talking about”
“We had that space pilot we tried to arrest for not having a pilot’s license, only to find out he wasn’t flying, he was just falling with style.”
“No pilot’s license? How about the guy we caught flying a car?”
“And there was that dentist who was involved in an illegal fish trapping syndicate. Had to track him all the way down to Australia.”
”And then we had a huge drug investigation over that Alice kid.”
”You did?! So did we!!”
“Well, at least you don’t have any trouble with the mouse, do you?”
“You don’t know about the underground helium market, do you? You think that’s his natural voice”
”Sheesh. It is everywhere. And, while we’re at it, someone should have been arrested for ‘Oz the Great and Powerful’.”
”Wow. Look at the time. I gotta get out of here. I’m supposed to be meeting up with forensics at the pigs’ house. No one believes a wolf would fit down a chimney, so there’s lots of questions about how he wound up in that pot.
“Well, I gotta get out of here, too. There’s this maniac sea captain who claims someone stole his organ and, get this, he says it was ghosts – 999 of ‘em.”
“Good luck with it. Same time next week?
“You bet. And remember what our captain always told us in training. Just make sure they wind up in the right cel.”
“Yeah…I still don’t think that’s funny.”