BBTV: Xeni interviews Buzz Aldrin
It's a fine line: what do you do when you have a three minute interview with the second man on the moon, Colonel Buzz Aldrin... an interview in which the space hero and futurist answers none of your questions, instead choosing to reply to them with random non sequiturs in a dialect that sounds remarkably like Google Translated moon man? Your deadline looms. The interview is nonsensical, completely unusable without opening your own publication up to ridicule. Yet professionalism demands that you not openly mock an American hero. What do you do?
Most of us would panic. But not Boing Boing TV's Ms. Xeni Jardin. A seasoned pro, Xeni confronted the dilemma by going meta, recruiting the ranting, rampaging id of the archetypical anonymous Boing Boing commenter to riff on the obvious: Buzz isn't making a lick of sense. Absolutely genius. Bear in mind this is not the official Boing Boing party line: I'm simply commenting as a viewer here. My interpretation may not be what was intended. But either way, this is my favorite BBTV episode ever.
Look, Buzz Aldrin rocks, no question. Additionally, he could hit me so hard my whole family would die.* I'm loathe to criticize him. He deserves our respect and admiration. But I don't even know what's going on with him here. He answers Xeni's questions like Grampa Simpson: "Back in my day, we flew Apollo 11 to the moon on a thimbleful of corn oil, and NASA stuffed our pockets with moon money, which was what they called Gouda at the time..."
Xeni Interviews Buzz Aldrin [Boing Boing TV]
* - Missed opportunity: given Buzz's history of knocking out flippant journalist punks, BBTV should have gotten Buzz to throw a punch at the camera, much like in the opening credits of He-Man.
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Haha...Definitely the best Boing-Boing interview yet!
Congratulations to all the actors, Xeni, Rob and that weird guy pretending to be an astral-naught. He kinda looked like Buzz, too.
"...we should do... what we shoulda done for 10 years, and that's drill drill drill. If we hadda done that, we wouldn't be in the pickle we're in today. Now we gotta launch, launch, launch to get ahead of the game..."
Wow, great lines! Who writes this stuff?
sounds like someone in that interview has spent too much time in zero gravity...
Buzz was completely unprepared and clearly going senile -- what's so funny there?
Unprepared for questions like "Why should we go to space?"
What I'm not getting is how so many of you are reacting. What's not to understand? He spoke clearly.
I just lost a little bit of respect for BoingBoing :(