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But last night’s finale of The Colbert Report—sweet. Now, ever since Bill Clinton played the sax on The Arsenio Hall Show and some people thought it looked cool, the fine line between rock star, politician, and big ol’ dork has been terminally blurry. Nobody realizes this better than Colbert, who started a fake feud with the Decemberists over the idea of the “green screen challenge,” which Colbert started early this year to get fans to put snazzy backgrounds on footage of him throwing himself around with a light saber. (In the final grand prize contest, one “George L. of Marin County, CA” came in second.) The Decemberists’ version managed to look dorkier, and this was clearly a matter of pride for them.
The Revenge of the Nerds is an ongoing process of course, and maybe the makers of the Heavy Metal animated flick (the 1981 version of course) had it right all along, and maybe the next big candidate to announce for the ’08 race will do so via an animated version of him or herself in the middle of one of Colbert’s Tek Jansen adventures, preferably while shredding on a giant shrieking axe that’s also a death ray.
