Years ago, before I started driving The Wife crazy with plot ideas, I plied at her sanity with a briefly popular game called Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. At the time, Bacon (star of the very XF-ish film A Stir of Echoes and Michael Jordan’s chump in the Hanes underwear commercials) was appearing in an average of, oh say, 2,134 movies a year. I exaggerate, but the man was prolific. This gave rise to the theorem, propounded by Pennsylvania college students, that any reasonably well-known actor or actress could be linked to Kevin Bacon within six moves.
To wit: Bela Lugosi -- the screen’s greatest Dracula -- appeared in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) with Vincent Price. Vincent Price was in The Raven (1963) with Jack Nicholson. And Jack Nicholson starred in A Few Good Men (1992) with -- who else? -- Kevin Bacon. Believe it or don’t, I am separated from the Baconman by only two moves: I was a crowd extra when they filmed Eight Men Out in Indianapolis. David Straithairn co-starred in both EMO and The River Wild, the Meryl Streep outdoor horror flick with, of course, Kevin Bacon. Impressed?
Well, The Boy was, with both my Baconly status and my prowess at Six Degrees. In my time, I have linked Benji the Dog, King Kong, and W.C. Fields with the omnipresent Kevin. During Saturday lunches out, T.B. and I would play endless rounds of Six Degrees, to the inevitably eventual consternation of T.W. (“Why don’t just we sit quietly with our fajitas for a few minutes, OK?”). T.B. moved out, Kevin B. found film work more difficult to obtain, and I found other distractions known chiefly to our guests at the Virtual Season.
But as the VS14 Crossover Special pulls once again into the way station of the unknown, I find myself feeling a bit Bacony (could be the thick layers of fat laced throughout my muscular structure, or merely my profound relationship with pork. Therefore, let’s play a bracing round of X Degrees of Kevin Bacon.
First, I must note, The X-Files occupies a unique place in the universe -- specifically, the Televerse, a parallel region of space and time charted most brilliantly by Toby, blogger extraordinaire at the Inner Toob. It bridged three networks: FOX, NBC (Det. John Munch of Law and Order: SVU encountered Mulder and the Gunmen in 1997), and CBS (Picket Fence’s Sheriff Jimmy Brock once referenced the mysterious Affair of the Red Museum and the even more mysterious fed who investigated it). It bridged universes (Mulder and Scully traversed dimensions to grill Homer Simpson in the Tooniverse, pursued big-screen aliens in the Cineverse, and joined the COPS of our own universe).
We therefore know certain things about the Televerse of The X-Files. For instance, it occupies roughly our own geo-temporal space: Unlike 24 or The West Wing, the XF-linked Law and Order has repeatedly referenced the Bush White House, the late Pope John Paul II was featured (and in fact witnessed a murder) on Picket Fences, and actors Garry Shandling, Tea Leoni, Minnie Driver, and David Alan Grier share the Hollywood spotlight in both Mulder and Scully’s universe and our own. They are, therefore, very real to us, as any animated conversation on the Forums would demonstrate.
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