Even A Redeye Can Provide A Fresh Perspective

 It's a fact of life that with comedy you're not going to love every joke.  And as much as I love watching Rifftrax movies, there are some jokes I don't really like.  There are some jokes that are just downright wrong, like with Jack Frost they keep referring to the off-screen Uncle Henry talking to a very fake off-screen little girl at the beginning of the movie and they keep saying he's narrating the whole story when in fact his narration stopped by the end of the credits when Jack Frost was to be executed.  Or in Firehead they say the titular hero murdered a watchman when he blows up a bomb in a building, but we clearly see the watchman later in a TV interview, so obviously he didn't die.  There are other examples, though not too many.

Now we get to the opening of Oblivion, the 1994 sci-fi Western I actually don't hate and would probably watch without riffing if that were really possible.  In the first scene, the reptilian alien Redeye goes up to the Oblivion population sign where there's this weird chicken-monkey thing kind of like that weird little alien who was hanging out with Jabba in Return of the Jedi.  Redeye kills the chicken-monkey and uses its blood to change the population sign from 539 to 538.  Kevin Murphy blurts out, "That thing was counted?"  Because it seems like Redeye is changing the sign to subtract the weird chicken-monkey thing.

And, no, that's not true.  Aaaaactually it's because Redeye is going to murder the sheriff of Oblivion.  Hence decreasing the population by one.  Buuuuut, while the writer, director, and producers might all know that, there's no actual way for us, the audience, to know that until it happens.  Even then it probably took me fifteen viewings before the explanation hit me.

This is a problem writers can run into.  We are so close to the story because we wrote it, so we know what's going to happen.  If I wrote a scene like with the sign, I'd know Redeye is changing it because he's going to kill the sheriff, not because he killed the chicken-monkey.  But a reader who doesn't know what's going on would not know that.  He/she might actually think Redeye was subtracting the chicken-monkey.

And that's another example of why it's good to get beta readers to check out your story beforehand.  A fresh set of eyes, especially eyes that haven't seen the story before, might help point out things that don't make sense to them even though they make perfect sense to you.  It's also why companies have focus groups and have people test products, to find the flaws before they get to stores.

I thought of a couple of ways to fix the scene so it would make more sense:

1. Take the chicken-monkey out and just have Redeye scratch the number out with a knife and then maybe say something like, "I'm coming for you, Marshal Stone."
2. Again, take the chicken-monkey out and have Redeye blast the sign to pieces to show he's planning to really do some damage.
3. Instead of a population sign, have a sign saying to re-elect Marshal Stone or a sign under the population sign saying, "Home of Marshal Stone" or something like that specifically mentioning the marshal and so when Redeye destroys it, we know who he's pissed at.

The third one I think gets the message across the best, while the other two still might be a little vague.  It's an example of how if you find a similar issue in your writing (or someone else brings it up) you can do just a slight change to make it clearer.