DR. BENDETTO & THE ECHOVILLE BANK HOLDUP
by DanKitti and KC
Dr. Bendetto and Strangely Strange were on their way to Echoville to get the Strangemobile repaired. It seemed the brakes locked whenever Dr. Bendetto exceeded 278 miles per hour.
Dr. Bendetto and Strangely Strange had just pulled into town when the Seven Seeds of Chivalry, who live in Echoville, came running up to the Strangemobile.
“The Echoville Bank has just been held up! The Echoville Bank has just been held up!” the Seven Seeds of Chivalry all cried at once.
“You don’t have to tell me twice!” said Bendetto in his usual super hero type overly histrionic falsetto.
Strangely Strange said, “What dastardly criminal would have the unmitigated gall to take money from poor folks such as these, who slave and work every day...” He continued talking for about 45 minutes.
“No, you don’t understand,” said the Seven Seeds of Chivalry, in unison. “When we said the ban was held up, we didn’t mean that it was robbed, we mean it was held up! The Seven Seeds of Chivalry then pointed into the air.
The Echoville Bank was, indeed, seventy five feet in the air. Beneath the bank was a huge arm. It came out of the ground, and was wearing a watch that was 20 minutes too slow. The bank began to rise even higher as the body connected to the arm began to rise out of the ground. Soon the head was revealed, and it was none other than Walter Cronkite!
The citizens of Echoville (which included the Seven Seeds of Chivalry) were much alarmed by the sight. But Dr. Bendetto and Strangely Strange remained calm. Strangely Strange remained calm because he didn’t know who Walter Cronkite was, and had seen similar sights on cartoons on TV. Dr. Bendetto was calm because he understood the situation.
He had known all along that the reason Walter Cronkite had given up newscasting, was because he had contracted the mysterious “expanding disease” caused by an electronic virus that grows on the energy given off by TV broadcasts covering manned rocket launches. A side effect of this disease was that time is 20 minutes behind normal, and Walter realized that he would always be the the last to announce fast-breaking news.
So Walter had “gone underground” but had finally grown bored of the limitations of that lifestyle. So now he was emerging once again, with Echoville as his new base of operations. His first project was to promote an advertising campaign for the Echoville Bank, with the slogan “Above and Beyond any other Bank!”.
What Dr. Bendetto didn’t realize was the he and Strangely Strange had walked in front of the cameras that were filming all this, and now it would have to be re-shot. Walter Cronkite glared at them as he sunk back into the ground, so the filming could begin again.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration hit El Diabolico, another of Dr. Bendetto’s arch-enemies and really bad guys. El Diabolico had been watching the incident and immediately saw an opportunity to steal the money in the bank, right from under Dr. Bendetto’s nose, without Dr. Bendetto lifting a finger to stop him.
El Diabolico realize that whatever Dr. Bendetto saw that afternoon concerning the Echoville Bank, would be construed as being simply part of the filming of the commercial with Walter Cronkite.
“Isn’t it wonderful how our capitalist society functions so perfectly...” Dr Bendetto talked for about a half hour in a dry, super-heroish overly histrionic speech, “...life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and wealth...”, Dr. Bendetto continued, while Strangely Strange did summersaults and the Seven Seeds of Chivalry did acrobatic leaps all around him.
A strange looking spaceship appeared over the bank, which pointed a mysterious green ray at the bank, and all the money floated into the spaceship.
“...in a land where an honest wage... honest day’s labor... time and a half...” Dr. Bendetto continued.
Finally, the director of the commercial looked puzzled. “Hmmm... that’s not in the script”, he said about the spaceship. Then he gasped and screamed, “We’re being robbed for REAL!”
“Oh no!” shrieked the Seven Seeds of Chivalry.
“Golly Gosh, whatever shall we do, Dr. Bendetto?” asked Strangely Strange, waving his super-hero cape for emphasis.
Dr. Bendetto marched back and forth, making super-hero-type grimaces while super-hero-type music blared out of Strangely Strange’s boom box.
“Fear not, good citizens,” Dr. Bendetto said to the crowd, “I have an ingenious plan...”
With that, he leapt back into the Strangemobile in pursuit of the spaceship. He then remembered that the owners manual of the Strangemobile didn’t say that it could fly. Dr. Bendetto, in his ignorance, had discovered one of its secret uses, that had been built into it by its genius inventor, Wizardo the Braniac.
But the Strangemobile was about to exceed 275 miles per hour. Walter Cronkite, Strangely Strange, the 7 Seeds of Chivalry, the film crew, and the citizens of Echoville all gasped as the Strangemobile blew up into eleventy million billion trillion pieces, and even those pieces blew up into eleventy million billion trillion pieces. El Diabolico laughed as he turned his spaceship around and hovered it over the crowd.
“Ha!” said the evil El Diabolico, grimacing evilly. “No one can stop me, as snakes fester in underground caverns, doom of night, dark, evil, scary things, the end of the world, and all like that there...”
Gloomy and evil music played from giant speakers in the spaceship, while lights flickered on and off, and thick smoke from the spaceship descended onto the crowd.
El Diabolico’s diabolical laughter quickly stopped, however, as the giant ray surrounded El Diabolico’s spaceship. It was Dr. Bendetto, who had not been injured when the Strangemobile blew up. As it turns out, the image of the Strangemobile was just a 3D holographic image projected from a projector, which had originally aired last week, as part of the “Dr. Bendetto Super-Hero Crime-Fighting Adventures” TV show.
“Gosh, I thought that looked familiar,” said Walter Cronkite, now back to his normal size, after being given the Super Hero Super Formula Super Cure-All by Wizardo the Brainiac.
The super-ray which surrounded El Diabolico transported him to the Super-security ultra-maximum Super-Bad-Guy Prison in the middle of a giant lake filled with pirañas, dragons, crocodiles, and other things, so escape would be impossible.
“Let that be a lesson to all who disobey,” Dr. Bendetto said, in a very histrionic super-hero monologue, “The wheels of justice, truth, righteousness, all who obey, statues in the park, peace, happiness, prosperity, all good citizens, and the world would be a nicer place.”
Strangely Strange threw confetti over the crowd, while the Seven Seeds of Chivalry took out ceremonial swords and did some precision sword-type choreography.
(the end)
