Just as annoying as Jesse but you can understand what he's saying
Those of you who recognize the name Ray Munns realize what exactly this article is about. The rest of you may want to run screaming, because you've stumbled across yet another article about MTV, the cultural black hole of our generation. I've realized that of all the article ideas on post-it notes stuck to my monitor, fully one third of them are about shitty shows on MTV. And so, I better get started with this, else the anti-MTV-articles will just start to pile up like bodies in my basement.
Anyway, Raymond Munns was the grand prize winner of MTV's Wanna Be a VJ 3 contest, which basically took about a dozen people who wanted to be VJ's and had show which included a vote for whichever candidate you liked best. Inexplicably, Raymond won this contest, by a vote of 51% to 49%. He has won a number of votes by that slim margin, but I'm getting ahead of myself...
Ray's platform for election as the prestegious Wanna Be a VJ was solid. He was a raver punk (I know, I should hate him, but wait, it gets better) who was seriously ass-stupid. He promised that if he won, he would have a weekly show called Ravin' with Raymond, where every week he would go to a rave with a camera crew. His plan was to bring hardcore rave music to MTV. Also, he has a really annoying laugh, and is as stupid as a brick of cocaine, which is debatably a common substance for him to abuse.
Anyway, he was in a heated final runoff with some girl who looked like Brittany Spears without the boob job for the coveted VJ position, and his words of wisdom for the audience were "There are enough stereotypical Barbie dolls on TV" and this WORKED. This is the first astounding thing that has happened to him--he somehow won over a woman who resembled to some degree a barbie doll (thus she must have been good looking, I assume (don't remember)). Frickin astounding that a raver somehow beat out someone with over an ounce of charm.
Let's get a little bit straight at this point in the article. Ray does not belong on MTV. In fact he doesn't belong on television at all. He's too stupid. He's a raver for crying out loud. His bio says that his job (before being a VJ) was "laborer." That means he works in a factory (I know that because thats what I do, and thats what I call it). It also says he wants to be known for his laugh, which sounds like the annoying laugh that almost every sitcom has made an episode out of. And finally, it lists one of his favorite VJs ever as Pauly Shore. Imagine Pauly Shore as a raver, with a funny laugh, working in a factory. Now imagine that person was in charge of playing music videos.
Yes, as I realized this, so did the MTV executives..... eventually, and thus they hoped to get rid of him quietly. They can't very well fire the guy who the fans picked as their favorite, after all. So at first they tried to do what they did to Jesse, the last dude that won the same contest who was a total freak, and put him on a show in the middle of the day where no one would watch him and eventually everyone would forget about him. This somehow failed. I don't know how, though, it worked so well with Jesse. Anyway, then they came up with the idea of giving Ray his own show, Wanna Be a VJ For a Day.
Wanna Be a VJ For a Day was a show hosted by Ray, where every day he would take 3 contestants, and put them through a contest similar to the one he had been put through, and the one with the most votes from the audience got to come back the next day. If someone won five days in a row, they went one on one with Ray in the same form of contest. If someone could beat Ray in this one on one match up, they won Ray's job, and Ray had to go back to the factory and living in a box. The logic behind this was that once people realized that "Hey, Ray's an idiot!" they would vote someone new to take his place. Ray, unexplainably, didn't lose. The show went on for months, and every single time he went up against someone one on one (I think it hapened a total of 5 times) he beat them, coincidentally by 51% to 49%, the same exact score that he won his job with.
Month after month, show after show, this dragged on, with me becoming more amused every time that Ray kept his job. You see, for me it was like when the couples on Temptation Island stayed together--I imagined every time it happened another high level television executive lost his job. And that gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, as it is right now as I write this.
Ray, to me at least, became sort of a folk hero showing exactly what an idiot can do. With all the powers of logic, common sense, and every executive at MTV working against him, he kept his job, week after week. He proved that no matter how dumb you are, if you keep appealing to the masses you can become incredibly popular, and yet I still can find great amusement out of you.
Then, he started to change. Maybe it was the pressure of almost losing your job every few weeks. Maybe it was those crazy raver extasy drugs. But whatever it was, Ray became stronger. His VJing skills became better. His crowd appeal went through the roof. I personally must give the man some mad props for holding on to his job as long as he did, he was a tenacious little bastard.
I say as long as he did, because then, they cracked the whip down on him. MTV forced him to retire without losing on his own show. They realized that he was just completely undefeatable. Ray had honed his VJing skills to the point where it was useless to try to dethrone him using popular vote, because the people were behind Ray. Ray frickin proved that one man could stand against a huge faceless corporation like MTV. And then they forced him into retirement.
At present I have no knowledge about the whereabouts of Ray Munns, or if he's still hosting a show on MTV. He's out there somewhere, probably back in a factory, fighting corporate opression in his own convoluted way. Wow, this article has gone from a negative tone to a rather positive one, hasn't it? If you are Ray Munns, or know someone who is, then congratulations on Making MTV look like asses, I salute you.
This hit of the X is for you, Ray.
--Scuba Steve, April 24, 2001