X-Men lost and found

[fajrdrako]

Several years ago, before the first X-Men movie was made, there was a half-hour special on Fox TV to introduce it. It was called "Mutant Watch" and purported to be a documentary about the Mutant Menace, and Senator Kelley's crusade against the mutants among us.

It was great.

This year, before X2 came out, there was a similar documentary called "X-Pose", about how Senator Kelly has reversed his stand, featuring (among many other things) an interview with young Bobby Drake, who had just 'come out' as a mutant, and an examination of how Nightcrawler's tail worked. That's gotta be the best tail in the history of cinema.

Now, I taped both these specials on the same tape. And loved it. Cherished it mightily. I told a lot of people about it and promised at least two friends to make copies for them. When my friends were over for our weekly Smallville party last week, they wanted to see it.

Could I find it? No.

Instead I found a pile of unlabelled tapes. Urk. How embarrassing. I am the one who, for most of the last year, has been carefully copying and religiously labelling every tape I make - mostly Smallville - with carefully typed labels.

So tonight I went painstaking through them, one by one. Found lots and lots of Smallville, a couple of tapes that had nothing worth watching on them at all - what, were they accidents? - and at last, the two X-Men documentaries on the same tape as my second copy of the Smallville episode "Visitor".

What a relief.

I don't know if that tape would be replaceable. I'm just glad now I don't have to worry about replacing it. Now in the next few days I can copy it as promised - I have too many unfulfilled promises outstanding as it is.

And tomorrow, for our Tuesday Smallville party, I can show it to everyone.