This Rambo post has nothing to do with the ridiculous sequel numbering as exposed in The Rambonacci Sequence.
Okay, so last night while flipping channels I caught a glimpse of the final five minutes of one of the earlier films starring Sylvester Stallone in the role of a guy named John Rambo. Anyways, it was really sexually gay because he’s … Click Here to Read On! …
The duty of a blogger is to take all of his or her petty, insignificant frustrations and to communicate them to his or her reader. Often, this is literally one reader. And so, I would like to communicate to my reader, a man I call Josephine, my petty, insignificant frustration with the way the Rambo film series was numbered. It’s totally on drugs!
The first movie in the series was called First Blood. It was a story about a Vietnam vet named John Rambo who, while hiding in an American forest, goes back in time in his mind to kill Vietnam. The premise was so good that they brought the guy back for a second movie.
The second movie in the series was called Rambo: First Blood Part II. This film cast Sylvester Stallone again in the role of Rambo, only this time he didn’t go back in time in his mind, he flew to Vietnam in a spaceship and killed it again. I understand why it was subtitled First Blood Part II, because it was the second movie in the First Blood series. But really it doesn’t make any sense because it’s the second First Blood, and I don’t think that you can have two First Bloods. Either something IS the First Blood or it isn’t. Maybe it would have been silly to call it Rambo: Two Bloods Tied for First Place, but then they should have dropped the whole First Blood thing entirely and just gone with Rambo.
The third movie in the series was called Rambo III. Where the hell did Rambo II go? They just fucking skipped right over it as though nobody would notice! They could have called it First Blood Part III and we probably would have gotten the message, because it was the third movie in the First Blood series. But they didn’t name it that, they named it after their main guy. I’m guessing that by the third movie they figured out how stupid it was to have three First Bloods. So instead they called it Rambo III when in fact it was Rambo II. The first Rambo was Rambo and there was no Rambo II, they just jumped to Rambo III. Not sure what this movie was about but I think I remember from the trailer that he uses an explosive bow and arrow that he stole from the Duke Boys. So by reverse-engineering my memory of the trailer, I guess he teleports to Hazzard County, Georgia because that’s where Vietnam is hiding, so that he can kill them a third time.
The fourth movie in the series, inexplicably, is called Rambo again. No numbers, no sub-titles, just plain Rambo. Dude, you can’t name a movie in a series the same name as another movie in the series. You can’t have two Wrath Of Khans or two Die Hard With A Vengeances. Okay? Anyway, I’m fucking lost. This second Rambo bears no resemblance to the original Rambo because now the character is like 60, although it’s still raining, which is really important when you’re killing Vietnam. This time though he doesn’t kill Vietnam, he kills Myanmar, or maybe it’s Burma, I always forget. So by now I’m totally confused about the film titles. It should either be Rambo V (based on the number-skipping precedent set when we jumped from Rambo to Rambo III, or on the proven history of only have odd-numbered Rambos.** Or it should have been called First Blood Part IV, or possibly even Fourth Blood Part One if they had any integrity to get the fucking numbering right. But no, not only did they skip two numerals, they SUBTRACTED two numerals. This time around John Fourth Blood is living in southeast Asia as though he’d never been fighting crime in Hazzard County. Weird, inconsistent premise, but whatever, the violence was exquisite.
Since I’ve probably lost you with all of my colorful language and editorializing, here’s the conflict in a nutshell with cold hard facts, and then some more editorializing:
Somebody was in charge of naming these movies and that person totally fucked up. Can you imagine what would have happened if this person had been in charge of naming the Star Wars movies? It would have been a six-car pile-up clusterfuck!
[c] 2009 Russ of America
** I did some research and I know that the Rambo numbering sequence was neither based on primes nor on the Fibonacci sequence. JS has dubbed this system the Rambonacci sequence.
