I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

"I'LL SUE YOU IN ENGLAND!"

Tom Cruise gets Paramount to cancel plans on showing the anti-Scientology episode of South Park in Britian, thereby ensuring that absolutely everyone in Britain who wanted to see it, and others who probably wouldn't have watched it if he hadn't had a hissy fit about it, will now download it to see what the fuss is about.

From Lester Haines of the Register.co.uk:

"UK TV viewers will not get to see an episode of South Park which shows Nicole Kidman and fellow Scientologist John Travolta attempting to coax a fictional Tom Cruise character out of a closet, with Kidman saying: "Don't you think this has gone on long enough? It's time for you to come out of the closet. You're not fooling anyone."

Naturally, the robustly heterosexual Top Gun star took exception to this when Trapped in the Closet aired in the US. The episode also showed Stan - believed by the Cruise character to be the reincarnation of Scientology founder L Ron Hubbard - having a pop at Cruise's acting abilities, and Cruise reportedly waved the legal big stick at Paramount and threatened to sue if the offending programme was ever shown again.

An insider said: "Tom is famously very litigious and will go to great lengths to protect his reputation. Tom was said not to like the episode and Paramount just didn't dare risk showing it again. It's a shame that UK audiences will never see it because it's very funny." ®

In all honesty, I really don't give a flying fuck one way or the other whether or not Tom Cruise secretly "likes the cock". Wouldn't bother me if he does, and I'm sure a lot of other people share my absolute total indifference there. I think he's just using the episode's rumor-mongering over his personal life as a smokescreen for the real reason he doesn't want the episode to air, because it shows the real (albeit abridged) truth about Scientology, as I discussed when this episode first aired in November, and I have a rather well-founded suspicion here that he's really just acting as a pawn of the Church of Scientology with these legal threats.

So, Brits, if you haven't downloaded this episode already and you wish to get around Tom Cruise and Scientology's little embargo against the bad cartoon nine-year olds who say mean things about their nutty galactic-overlord-space-DC8-airplanes-nuclear-volcano-alien-ghosts religious beliefs, "Operation Clambake" (Xenu.net) has the South Park "Trapped in the Closet" episode in both .AVI and Real Video format, or you can watch it streaming at YouTube.com. It was also streaming at ScienTOMogy.info, but that site appears to be down (I wonder why, hmmm? Excessive bandwidth usage?), though the ScienTOMogy blog is still up.

Also, to send Paramount a message against capitulating to Scientologists, I suggest joining the Mission: Impossible 3 boycott. I'd boycott it myself, but I was already boycotting the Mission: Impossible series for pissing all over the legacy of the 1960s Mission: Impossible TV series (and the underrated 1980s incarnation), which was all about co-operation and teamwork, not about the team members double-crossing each other like the films.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 11:14 PM