Lunging to save his girlfriend Sharon L'amore, Jim is batted by the huge hand and lands face first in a vat of lemon meringue custard the the commissary prepared for dessert. Pulling himself out of the gooey dessert, Jim feels a tug at his leg. He finds he has been grabbed by another giant hand -- a female hand. Jim struggles, hitting the hand with a ladel and finally sticking it with a fork. Freed, Jim runs toward the tureen of Pepper Pot soup, only to see the huge hand submerge with Sharon. Jim jumps in after the hand. At this point, one Universal employee announces that he has lost his appetite and will go out to get something. His friend replies, "Lets take my car out to Route 89. Some guy named Maurice McDonald just opened a hamburger drive-in there." Jim swims through the Pennsylvania Dutch potage and emerges from another bowl. Nearby he sees Sharon, soup still dripping from her lace step-ins. Jim looks around. Everything looks larger than normal, as if he had shrunk on was on somebody's desk. Seeing Sharon, Jim's heart was again moved to song, and he sang the lyrics out loud. "Oh, I just can't get enough of that sweet stuff my little lady sends my way. Dmm-dmm dmm-dmm dmm dmm." Jim stops and asks, "Now where have I heard that song before? Who originally sang it?" "Paul McCartney," Sharon replied. "Robert DiNero's character in 'Taxi Driver'?" a nearby giant said. "Never heard of any of them. If only this wasn't 1940," Jim said. He then looked up at the giant. "You're Cuthbert J. Twipseeze, the special effects director at Paramount. How did you get so big?" Jim asked. "Better you should ask how you got so small," Cuthbert chortled. Jim had to agree that he and Sharon looked no bigger than six inches tall. But how? Cuthbert showed them a book on his desked titled "The Compleat Witch's Guide to Spells." Chuckled Cuthbert, "I created a portal to the Universal commissary, where I could put my hand through an grab people. Since the portal narrows, by the time it got to Universal, my hand would appear 12 times its normal size. And whoever I grabbed would end up in my office only 1/12th his original size." But why do this? "I'm working on a new film called 'Dr. Cyclops.' He shrinks people, then torments them. It would have cost a fortune to build oversized sets for the actors. So I thought, why not just created six-inch-tall actors and shoot on normal sets. Big savings!! And by taking the actors from Universal, I delay your next horror films, so Paramount gets the market to itself in early 1941!" "You fiend," Sharon yelled. Jim reached into his pocket and produced $10 and some coins. "I'll give you this if you'll let us go and return us to normal size. I can't offer you more as tomorrow is pay day and I'm a little short right now," Jim said. "You'd be a little short now no matter what your financial situation was," Cuthbert chortled as he reached for the two diminutive people. Jim hated puns and decided to fight Cuthbert. He...
Fri Jan 28 10:17:36 2000