Anyone else catch this show?

At its most basic level, it's a show about people who are obsessed with something. Last night's show featured four people. There was a couple who loved the Munsters so much they had an exact replica of the house built and live in it, there was a girl who's obsessed with GAINING weight (she's 350+ now, shooting for 600lbs) and the third guy was the rather infamous Peter Pan guy.

The FOURTH person on the show was Tim "Shoebox" Crist, who was on for being totally obsessed with Pac-Man. For those who have never run across it before, Shoebox runs the "First Church of Pac-Man" website, and has declared himself the Reverend of said Church.

Imagine a fat guy with ADD on speed with a greasy, 3 foot mullet, and you'll have a good image of the guy (not that I'm knocking being fat and/or mullets). Anyway, instead of pimping Pac-Man, it seemed like the guy dedicated his segment to just showing how weird he is. For example, he drives around in his car with a megaphone and shouts at people, "SAY PAC-MAN" at the mall. Who does that?

During the program, VH1 said, "Pac-Man was made for 20 different game systems, and Tim owns them all so he can play Pac-Man in every room of his house." Take that fact as a challenge -- anyone want to actually count how many systems Pac-Man has been released for? My guess would be, "all of them".

Then they showed him playing Pac-Man in his living room with his wife, being a complete ass to her. Just basically being sarcastic, "you know, the goal is to stay AWAY from the ghosts," that sort of thing.

In the final part he goes to this local pizza place and sees a Pac-Man machine and runs and hugs it and almost acts like he's humping it or something. He hits the machine so hard it either leaned or moved and hit the wall behind it. Then, still acting like a hyper-goof, he goes to get quarters at the register (where two large guys warn him about attacking their machine) and then he goes and plays Pac-Man and shows how much he sucks at it. Then of course there's big drama when he dies, "Oh WHY Pac-Man WHY!"

Three things struck me while watching this program.

One, I'm sure this guy isn't really this goofy. Who knows, maybe he is. If so, I'm sure he's very lonely. What seems more likely is that VH1 was egging him on, "hey, do something crazy," either that or he was just doing crazy stuff to get on television. Either way, he came off looking, well, crazy.

Two, shouldn't the Reverend of the Church of Pac-Man have a Pac-Man cabinet in his house? On the show they said he plays Pac-Man every day for lunch a few times. $2 day x 365 days = Pac-Man cab.

Three, I've already had two people mention this show to me at work. You wonder why collectors are treated like we're nuts ... well, because that's the way we're presented on television? When you tell someone, "I collect Nintendo stuff" and then instantly in their head they think of this 300lb guy humping a pac-man cabinet in a pizza parlor ... not good.

I've got nothing against Tim Crist personally ... in fact, I'd love to see more pictures of his collection (hey, maybe we can get them added to the Room of Doom section!). It just seemed to me like they really had him ham it up and it DIDN'T work (at least not for me).

Links:

VH1: Totally Obsessed
http://www.vh1.com/shows/dyn/totally.../episode.jhtml

Shoebox's First Church of Pac-Man
http://www.flamingmayo.com/firstchurchofpacman/