St. Remedius Radio: “When The Tube’s Enough”

What to Watch When Downtime Is Inevitable

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

It’s Friday night. Homework is done. Those students assigned to check on experiments or feed lab animals have a few hours before the tardigrades rip through the cage bars and run amok. The students at St. Remedius Medical College were no different from any other college student in the state of Texas after a long week of classes: pick up a bucket from Norman Cookler’s Widely Celebrated Deep-Fried Tarantula and a case of Nertz Soda, find the biggest screen on campus, and go to town on an all-night orgy of sex and violence. Or, as they called it, “Dallas television.”

To its eternal credit, the St. Remedius student body wasn’t just about watching goofy movies and television shows: live outdoor audience participation showings of WGON in Philadelphia, with participants acting out some of the classics (the assembled cries of “As God as my witness, I didn’t know an ammo dump could go up like that” were often loud enough to be heard over the road noise on Dallas’s Central Expressway) and the latest episodes of Monster Island and reruns of What We Do In The Cosmos were stalwarts, but YouTube Roulette (where the projectionist took single-word suggestions from the audience, picked the most ridiculous, entered the term into YouTube’s search field, and ran every politics-free entry on that term until the assembled audience begged for the sweet release of zombification) was something that crossed student/faculty barriers.

An especial favorite among students were all-night marathons of reruns of Fae Queen of the Wasteland, a Dallas-made syndicated series released in the 1990s involving the albino gaurin war queen Keeamand, accidentally summoned to a time in “the near future” where she and her talking sword Nemesis fought mutants and warlords in a radioactive postapocalyptic desolation that amazingly looked like portions of the Dallas suburbs of Lewisville and Plano. (Popular rumor at the time had it that locals appeared as extras without the need for makeup: what most didn’t learn until the turn of the century was that not only did Lewisville city leaders buy cameos on the series to offset its tiny budget, but many played the banjo version of the series theme music in the end credits in exchange for Screen Actor Guild credit.) The St. Remedius campus even hosted KeeamanCon, a convention for dedicated fans who both cosplayed their favorite characters and offered bus tours of Corinth and Krum to view the cattle fields used for mass battle scenes, with Fae Queen star Ashley Thumper regaling audiences with tales of attempting sword duels in thigh-high boots amid surprise explosions and passersby and occasional feral pigs wandering into the shots.

One of the toughest Friday night watches, though, was endurance bouts of the Creative Onanism-sponsored show Benjamin Willard: Movie Critic, a public-access series hate-watched by Dallas film enthusiasts for ten years and subsequently immortalized by movie buffs who found Rex Reed and Jane Horowitz to be insufficiently vapid and self-absorbed. The show mostly consisted of the star showing off his complete mint-on-card autographed Space Precinct action figure collection, mostly while waiting for call-in interview subjects to call, and the episode where actor and critic James Lipton actually picked up the phone to ask “Who is this, and do I need to call the cops?” and Willard’s subsequent crushed expression became a regular meme on social media. The list of “when to take a drink” catchphrases became more and more elaborate (the more common catchphrases, particularly “Do you know I met all of the original cast members of Space Precinct?”, threatened alcohol poisoning two segments in), with the nightmare mode replacing beer or vodka with perinool. With the subsequent popularity of his anti-St. Remedius newsletter, Willard was regularly invited to attend viewings, but between the viewers laughing at his Dallas mayoral campaign slogan “Hands up: who likes me?” and the smell of perinool vomit, he rarely stayed for more than six hours or so.

And while you’re at it, the request lines are now open, complete with playlist.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Benjamin Willard Creative Onanism Fae Queen of the Wasteland perinool reality television St. Remedius Radio television