If you know anything at all about the Sci Fi Channel’s series, Who Wants to be a Superhero, you know that the prize for winning is a comic book featuring the winning character, and an appearance in a Sci Fi Channel original movie.  Last year’s winner was the pretty nifty Feedback (pictured here), and I know that I wasn’t the only one looking forward to a Feedback movie.  Of course, it was going to be a Sci Fi Channel original movie, so there was never any doubt that it would be an awful movie, but we were expecting something.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the Sci Fi Channel aired Megasnake, about a giant snake that goes around and eats people; it was a plot that could have come straight from my Sci Fi Channel Original Movie Generator, and it was predictably awful.  It was advertised, though, as featuring Feedback, so I was at least a little excited.  "Yay!" I thought.  "Here’s the Feedback movie!  Feedback fights a giant snake!"

What happened?  He got a two minute cameo toward the end of the movie.  And he wasn’t even Feedback; he was Matthew Atherton playing Feedback, and instead of fighting a giant snake, he was giving a lecture on electrical safety to a crowd of children.

For this I sat through two hours of a horrid movie?  (Well, only ninety minutes; to be honest, we remembered the movie was on about half an hour in, and didn’t stress missing anything; these movies are nothing if not predictable).

There are a lot of people who are annoyed about this.  Feedback himself has expressed some disappointment that this was the movie appearance that had been promised to him and to his fans.  The forums on the Sci Fi Channel’s website are aflame with annoyed fans (not to mention the people calling for the immediate cancellation of Flash Gordon).  And there’s even an online petition dedicated to convincing the Sci Fi Channel to follow through with a bit more.  I don’t personally believe that such a petition will do any good, but I don’t believe that the executives at the Sci Fi Channel actually pay any attention to what their viewers say.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with: that they just don’t listen.  How else can you call yourself a "science fiction channel" and not be aware that you’re a laughing stock within the genre community?