What does your brain do when your body is on autopilot? That is to say, when you're doing a task so automatic that it requires virtually no higher brain function whatsoever? Mowing the lawn, taking a shower, that sort of thing. My mind wanders all over the place at such times. Often, I compose meaningless lists of trivia. Today in the shower, for example, I was trying to remember the words to the theme from Green Acres. And in that vein, I have a trivia question for you:Who played Oliver and Lisa Douglas in the early-'90s movie version of Green Acres?
This is, in fact, a trick question. Such a movie does not exist. But it feels like it should, doesn't it? There's a strange sort of gap in my mind where I feel like I remember it happening, but it clearly didn't. There were movies made of The Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family, Lost in Space, McHale's Navy, Mission: Impossible, The Mod Squad, The Avengers, The Brady Bunch, My Favorite Martian, as well as more recent stuff like The Dukes of Hazzard, Starsky & Hutch and Miami Vice...it seems like there ought to have been a dreadful big-screen version of Green Acres that nobody saw.
There's this Arnold Ziffel-shaped hole in my brain where there ought to be Tim Allen and Heather Locklear standing in for Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, lots of unfunny manure jokes and a tacked-on plot about unscrupulous bankers or something. It seems like exactly the kind of thing for which I watched twenty promos a day on the in-store screener tape during my circa-'96/'97 career as a Blockbuster Video assistant manager.
And yet it doesn't exist. I find this troubling. I find it even more troubling that I think it ought to exist when I should be tremendously glad that it doesn't.