Dial M For Moron!

Tonight, I bring you a spine-snapping look into the horrors of war, the terror of time-travel, and the mesmerizing and hypnotic glasses of Dr. Millenium for the white-knuckled action of:

Birdman vs. The Time Machine of Dr. Millenium!

Now, before you get on my case about my inability to spell millennium, I should let you know that this is how they spelled things in Hanna-Barbera Land in 1970 whatever. So, just thought I'd throw that out there.

Anyway, there's evil afoot, and that evil is so damn evil that his skin is green! Green, I tell you! You don't get more evil than green skin. We're talking Ming the Merciless green. We're talking Mandarin from Iron Man green. We're talking Jolly Green Giant green. I know, I know. Pure evil. And, he spells his name wrong. And, and this part is the key, he has glasses the size of a Honda. Millenium has a time machine, but it's not a normal time machine. It's a time machine tht reanimates the bones of long-dead creatures, gives them flesh and blood, and then allows them to run amok on the international weapons community. So, Millenium animates a Cro-Magnon man and a wooly mammoth, gives them complicated instructions, and here's the wacky part, they actually execute them.

So, what's the complicated part, you ask? How complicated a task could you give to a mammoth? Let's see, I know I put a checklist in here somewhere...oh, yeah. Here it is.

1. Cro-Magnon Man: Go into a top-secret facility, bust down the door through a grip of armed guards, knock over a table and a two-star general, and steal the plans for a missile so dangerous and so guarded that there's only one copy of the plans. Wacky military.

2. Wooly Mammoth: Break down the fortified and electrified fence at the same installation, grab a missile(!), pick it up off the launch pad and smash it to the ground. Did I mention that the missile is not a dud, but actively has a warhead on it? I didn't? Well, yeah. It does. And, as a bonus task, Cro and Mammoth team up Tucker and Chan style to run off to the Museum of Crazy-Ass Scientists with Time Machines. Oh, and of course, they do this without a hitch. You can't even get this kind of organization on the Oscars.

Now, picture in your mind that all this happened in the span of two minutes. Yeah. The fact that it took you longer to read what happened in a summary than it did for me to watch and try to process the mess should let you know what I'm sacrificing so you don't have to. You're welcome.

Enter the Birdman. Harv--um, Birdman is sitting in his volcano lair, doing whatever a man and his blue-feathered eagle do while in a volcano with plentiful sunlight access. Suddenly, the Birdtron 1200 scrambles to life, and Falcon Seven--that's Phil Ken Sebben to you and me, Russ--comes on the screen to tell Birdman what's just transpired. Birdman declares that he'll take the case and flies off out of the volcano.

Birdman comes to the rescue, to find a giant mammoth with a Cro-Magnon man ridingon his back. Taking it all in stride, he proceeds to point the Solar Finger of Doom at the mammoth to get the big bastard to slow the hell down. After three or four shots, the mammoth goes down. Which is awesome. But not nearly as awesome as Cro sneaking up on Birdman and clocking him on the Bird-Crest with a 45,000 year old stone hammer. Modern weapons ain't got nuthin' on the Hammer of the Pre-Gods. After Birdman and the military bigwigs finally get together and start rubbing their brain cells until a thought squeezes out. Just wait until you find out what it is.

Back at the museum, we come to find out that the nefarious Dr. Millenium is altruistic in his evil. He is doing all this to end war on the planet. And to make himself the despotic overlord. So, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other. You just can't please some people. He turns the mammoth back into the set of bones that it'd been for the last 80,000 years because even the craziest mad scientist knows that you just don't let the mammoth have full reign over the palace. That's Crazy-Ass Scientist Rule #5, right after putting a drawbridge over a moat full of aligators. Look it up. It's right there on page 32.

Millenium decides to gloat over his victory over the forces of the military-industrial complex and listens into the short band radio broadcast of the nearby fort to hear them cry and admit that they were beaten by a myopic green-skinned hunchback of a mad scientist when he hears them say that they have another missile! Did I mention that they only made one missile? Yeah, totally only made one missile. Because that makes as much sense as anything else that came out of Hanna-Barbera during the drug days of the '70s. Well, the existence of another missile makes Millenium just furious in his little boots. He reanimates a pterodactyl and sends it off to grab the new missile.

Flash over to the military base where Birdman, the general from the first two minutes of the show, and a missile(!!) all await whatever the hell it is that's coming their way this time. So, when a winged harbinger of the Cretacious Period brings down leathery death from above, everyone pretty much takes it in stride. What more could faze you when you're standing next to a man who derives super powers from the sun, has feathery wings, and shoots radiation out of his hands? Exactly. So, the pterodactyl grabs the missile, Birdman follows, and finds out that everything is coming from the museum. So, the pterodactyl heads toward the museum, Birdman shoots the flying lizard, and as the unconscious dinosaur falls toward the glass ceiling of the museum, Millenium turns it back into a skeleton. But because it's written in stone, something has to crash through a glass ceiling and Birdman drew the winning ticket.

I could try and make the end of this make more sense, but as it's pretty much impossible, I'll summarize. Millenium, a mummy and Cro all run into a crypt where Millenium turns on the time machine and sets it to self destruct and they all run in, leaving the plans to the missile(!!!) and a pile of dust. Let me rephrase this. They could have saved a lot of time and money by just spooking the crazy man into killing himself in minute three if they'd only known his intense fear of glass ceilings. Total run time of this adventure? 5 minutes. Sanity lost? 20%. The things I do for you guys...