PrettyFakes

. . . and, we have a winner for our first-ever Pretty Fakes Cartoon Contest!

I asked y’all to come up with the name for the Robotic Significant Other for a pair of Levi 501 Jeans. There is no sense at all in that question, and the competition was fierce. I’m talking, Carrie v. Bo fierce. We had many, many entries, and nearly none of them made a damn bit of sense. Which? Is the way I like it.

Some of my favorites, in no particular order, were “Misha,” by the Diplomat; “F0-47,” by Pinky; “Rob(ot) Liefeld,” by Professor Fury (not disqualified for being a Pretty Fakes writer! Disqualified for terrible punning!); and “Fritz,” by Ms. Comrade (“because he looks like an old man to me”).

I liked a lot of the more fantastically crazed names—like Randy H.’s “JudoSabotage,” RD’s “Buckshot Apertif,” and Lucy’s “Romance Sans Pants.” “Denise,” submitted by Sally, is a whole lot less bizarre than most of my favorites, but she won points by being one of the folx that submitted a story alongside her name. She explained that the tortured love affair between 501 and [it’s] pal was especially forbidden by their parents because “[n]ot only is it cross-species love, it’s lesbian cross-species love.”

Well, that made me laff. A lot. Still, the name didn’t seem to fit the character, who, while having hard metal edges, obviously burns for the coarse-denim touch of her lover. Jaysus mailed in “Dagmar” today, and that name—meaning “joyous day”!—was closer to the idea I had in my head. I like the idea of a robot in love with a pair of blue jeans, you know? It’s just sweet. V. v. All-American, in a way. And, I like that they’re going to run-off together and have adventures—solve a mystery, befriend a stray dog, maybe steal a cooling pie off a windowsill. I mean, I needed to find out what a lovestruck teenaged robot that does that kinda stuff to impress her girlfriend would be called.

Then, literally the minute before I was about to hit “publish” on this post . . . Dr. Wagner chimes in. With the backstory—nay, the lives—of our starcrossed lovers:

Her name is S.G.R. Garcia—“Sugar” to her friends.

She’s kind of boxy, because she was originally designed to be an appliance droid, but at the last minute her designer, Dr. Crosby, got the idea to add some more complex AI-type experimental chips in her. She’s a Steam Grill Robot, built to cook for humans, and will often shoot jets of excess steam from the sides of her head. This particular S.G.R. ‘bot was the Garcia model—named, of course, for the famous geologist.

Now denim, as we all know, messes with the magnetic field caused by AI chips . . . and in a way, apparently, that mimics the human emotion of love! So Sugar met 501 one day . . . and they fell for each other, immediately.

Her family would have nothing of it. Her parents—Gene and Jean—pitched a fit, and Dr. Crosby reluctantly forced Sugar away from her girlfriend, keeping her on cooking duty on the opposite side of the lab from the armoire where 501 resided.

Finally, after long and lonely weeks of separation, Sugar and 501 made their escape from Dr. Crosby’s undersea lab to nearby Papua New Guinea, where they spend their days lazing about in a hammock, enjoying Mai-Tai’s and the sweet taste of tropical love. Sugar works at a tiki lounge to make rent and 501 has faded gently to a nice azure.

Um. All I can say to that? Is WOW. I mean, WOW. That . . . that’s it, my friend. That’s the story. I mean, that’s a really good story. Wow.

So: Congratulations to Dr. Wagner, the winner of our first cartoon contest!! I’ll send the picture of Sugar & 501 off to Framewerks tomorrow, and I hope that you will display it proudly in yr home and/or office.

Thanks so much to all of you who entered! I started this contest as kind of a lark and have just been floored by the entries and how fantastic they’ve been and how much they’ve made me laff. We’ll definitely do this again.

Seacrest OUT.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Gorjus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.