Fantastic! Although I'm sorry to say I didn't recognize it as a crossover. I do, vaguely, remember Airplane!, which I saw back when I watched popular movies on a regular basis. (What I remember by far the best from Airplane! is the automatic pilot Otto who got inflated out of his seat when the regular pilot had fainted, and ever since I saw that movie I get a mental image of Otto every time the expression "automatic pilot" is mentioned...)
![[Linked Image]](http://www.bgu.ac.il/noar/students/interhug967/gil/tv-movie/airplane/otto.jpg)
Anyway, this fic was absolutely hilarious! It was perfect to turn it into a jumbled dream that Jimmy might have had after eating the wrong kind of pizza before going to bed. Jimmy, let this be a lesson to you: Don't eat
anything within two hours of going to bed!
Speaking of references to Airplane!:
When the doors opened, he stepped out and looked at the new and improved news room. All the desks were set in rows of six across with a narrow aisle between the third and fourth desks.
I totally loved that Jimmy's subconscious knew very well that Clark is Superman, even though his "conscious mind" can't fully accept what he knows even in a dream:
The cabbie looked a lot like Clark Kent.
...
The driver’s uniform looked odd, too, with a short red cape and red boots over his denim overalls.
He looked at Clark again. He was fidgeting in his seat, adjusting his tie and red cape – wonder why I didn’t notice that before, thought Jimmy, looks like the one my cabbie was wearing – and squeezing the armrests on his desk chair and leaving finger marks in them.
And Clark is mentally paralyzed and can't do anything at all because of a typo he made several years ago and can't get out of his mind!
This paragraph is about as good as Otto the automatic pilot:
A devastatingly rich and handsome man raised his head and smiled that killer smile at her. “Why, yes, young lady, I am a doctor. How can I help you?”
Lucy dodged the man’s lethal smile, apparently not caring as it ricocheted off the wall and took out two teenaged stringers.
And the wonderful absurdity of this conversation is fantastic:
He tossed the phone onto the cradle. “Lucy, honey, I hope y’all found a doctor.”
“I did, Captain.”
“He any good?”
Lucy smiled at the doctor and reached up to play with his hair. “Well, I should be able to answer that question in about twenty minutes.”
“No! Is he any good as a doctor?”
“Oh! Right. Well, his stethoscope is made of solid gold.”
“Good enough. Doc, you come over here and park it. We need to talk.”
By the way, I love how Jimmy's subconscious acknowledges that he himself is not a real person in the real world, but rather a character in a TV show:
“Hello? Who is this? Bill who? Bill Henderson? I thought you got transferred to a serious drama. Really? I didn’t know they did role-sharing like that. Who, me? I don’t know. I’d have to be pretty desperate to do that.
Jimmy looked up at the banks of computers around the wall, at the multiple clocks showing the current time in Metropolis, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, and the Andromeda galaxy, at the multiple racks of telephones, at the Pony Express riders waiting eagerly for dispatches, and said, “No, sorry. No idea what to do.”
The current time in the Andromeda galaxy and Pony Express riders in the same paragraph!
“Nineteen plurghs to go,” he called out.
Lois – who was by now wearing a conservative dark blue business suit with low heels, much to Jimmy’s disappointment – turned and snapped, “That’s Andromeda time! Give it to us in minutes!”
Yes, I guess it's Clark who writes the Daily Planet edition in the Andromedan language! (I love the fact that everyone in the Andromeda galaxy speaks the same language, but I guess it's the same thing in the Milky Way - I mean, all the aliens that Captain Kirk comes across on every Class M planet in the Star Trek universe speak English, don't they?)
Then he looked into the mirror and shook his head at himself.
“Okay, you were right. No more anchovy, sardine, and pineapple pizza after midnight.”
The fish, the fish! Although pineapple is nice!
Then he glanced at the clock. No! He must have forgotten to set the alarm the night before. He’d overslept! He only had twenty-three plurghs to get to work. He had to hurry.
Twenty-three plurghs. That's brilliant! I wonder if he will be talking about plurghs at work, too?
Terry, this was just hilariously funny.
Ann
What a trip!
Thanks for sharing!
