CAIRO – The world was rocked today as the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities unveiled the discovery of 13 completely sealed DVDs of the late 1990s TV show Shasta McNasty.
Rumors surrounding the UPN show have persisted throughout history with scholars continuously debating the merits and even the very existence of the project.
“The idea of making a UPN sitcom starring Jake Busey about a rap rock group named Shasta McNasty will always hold a dangerous allure for people,” said Mick Courtland, noted McNastyologist. “For so long all we’ve had to rely on were scattered oral histories and red carpet photos of the 1999 Blockbuster Movie Awards to try and understand how a society allowed this to happen. So it’s very exciting to have some real hard evidence.”
Everyone originally involved with the creation of the show mysteriously disappeared during The CW purges. Then came a series of ill-fated expeditions into the fabled Heart of McNasty. This has led to a widely held theory that it was all an elaborate hoax by parent company Viacom to boost interest in their programming slate.
“Just look at the name!” said Trevor Easterbrook, a leading McNasty denier. “There’s no possible way that was a real TV show that people were going to watch. And as to these so-called DVDs, I don’t buy their authenticity. What’s more likely: that a UPN executive buried a bunch of fake DVDs in an Egyptian tomb; or that they made a real tv show about a Jake Busey-led rap rock group advertised with the tagline ‘Why Women Become Lesbians?’”
But others believe this denialism is harmful and avoids hard questions about recent history.
“This show is real,” said Caroline Hanover, a professor of media studies at Oxford. “They used that tagline, they previewed the show after WWE Smackdown, this happened. And just because society narrowly avoided total collapse then doesn’t mean we can forget how close we came. Especially now, there’s such a demand for content, and the teens who listened to Limp Bizkit and “got McNasty” back then are executives now. We need to learn all we can from these DVDs, before it’s too late.”
At press time every member of the discovery team who gazed upon the pilot episode immediately dissolved into a puddle of Mountain Dew Code Red.
