Reflecting Day: Seven Months of Hot Dog

It’s been 7 months since we started this website– an oasis of fun designed so two incredible men could produce short bits of daily hilarity. But we are not men of short bits. Our mighty hands type jokes by the thousands. Our strong backs hunch over to Photoshop by the hectares. So it has become this: more comedy than any world deserves. The people have told us things like, “This is good, thanks,” or “You should cover my fetish of shrunken women trapped in fart balloons one of these Fucking Days, because you see, ever since I was baby, I kn–” but most commonly they say, “This impossible. I sorry for English but you men incredible are make too many laughters.”

Well, here we are, seven months after we started writing far too many jokes, and the real joke is on you, cowards– all it has done is made us stronger. We are now among the top 1% of Patreon pages, putting us in the prestigious company of “Podcast About The Show Cop Rock, But Not The Main One” and “Drawings of Tiny Ladies Trapped in Toot Balloons (Fantasy, NSFW).” Look upon all the joy we have created from the trash media of grifters, lunatics, and the horny. And speaking of looking upon things, that’s what I want to talk about. We commissioned an artist to help you do that!

To celebrate seven months of hot dogging, we hired game designer and pixel artist, Julia Minamata, to hide references to us in this CGA masterpiece. Through her brilliance, you can now relive your favorite 25 moments of early 2020 in one image! If you can’t find them all, head over to the brand new Archives Page on 1900hotdog.com for a quick refresher. Maybe you can also help solve a fun puzzle!

Other Breaking Pixel Art News: Lydia Bugg has her own 1-900-HOTDOG Play Instructions banner since she’s signed on to write bi-weekly articles for us! As you probably know from the several things she’s done here, she’s funny, likeable, and fluent in Wrong Universe. Visit her Twitter to congratulate her before she’s driven mad by article research and sending me Slack messages like, “need help: too drunk to decide if transformers fuck as robots or cars, AND FUCK YOU if you think it’s robots NO FUCK YOU EITHER WAY” the way Brockway does. He and I, no bullshit, spent the month’s talent budget on a German version of our podcast theme song and neither one of us has a bit planned for it! We just both thought it was a funny thing to do! We’re really counting on Liddy being any kind of a voice of reason in our lives!

I’ve told you before during our intimate Reflecting Days how fun it is to be doing this website, but I actually thought of a way I can show you. First, I’m going to need a picture of Mel Gibson jumping into a pair of pantyhose.

That’s from the already rebooted 2000 film, What Women Want. It’s a movie about a man who can hear the thoughts of women like when Helen Hunt thinks, “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH!” and then “OH I JUST LOOKED AT HIS CROTCH AGAIN!” which I’m not making up. It’s one of many movies about a very dumb, magical concept which means the writer(s) had to explain how the main character suddenly had fantastic powers. In this one, Mel Gibson is trying to “get inside the female psyche” to be a better advertising executive, and his idea is to go home and try every female product. And I don’t mean only lipstick and exfoliating strips. He waxes his legs. He tries out pregnancy tests. They put that in the movie– the main character pees on pregnancy tests to help figure out what ladies need to hear to buy nail polish.

So, of course, the next scene is not him going back to work armed with the insider lady knowledge that it sucks to pee on your own hands or be the one taking the tombstone piledriver when someone screws up their end of a standing 69. He doesn’t sit a client down and say, “Ladies, shut the fuck up for a second. I’m not like the other guys. I know balls are smelly and pantyhose are hard. I know the heartbreak of peeing on a stick only to have it say you missed another chance; you’ll never be a mother.” Instead, Mel Gibson(‘s less hairy stuntman) slips on bath beads and falls into the tub with a blow dryer and at least five used pregnancy tests– so many more than a 44-year-old man should need.

When he wakes up from his head trauma, he can hear lady thoughts! So, okay, what does this have to do with anything? I’ll tell you! I sometimes remember this movie exists where the main character gets woman telepathy because he was electrocuted while touching too many female products. And it’s so goddamn stupid to me. It’s an idea you’d float to a room full of cats and then ask, “So unless anyone can top it, we’re going with the electric pregnancy test accident?” This is worse than not explaining it at all. It’s absurd to imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking, “How is this guy magic all of a sud– oh yeah, he was touching pantyhose when he almost died. Of course.”

I spent many years at Cracked, so when something like this sparks inspiration, the rest of my brain reflexively starts playing Trivial Pursuit to build it into a List. You don’t need to be an SEO genius like Jason Pargin to know The X Dumbest Explanations for Fantastic Movie Powers is going to be a fucking hit. In fact, I’d probably Google that title 25 different ways to make sure no one else had already written it. And assuming no one had, yay, now 85% of my article is about shit similar to but not the thing that inspired me to start it.

So let’s imagine what that would look like. I’d probably consider including Big, where Tom Hanks grows up by wishing on a carnival machine. It’s dumb, but it’s also cute and everyone liked it. I went into this so pumped to write jokes about Mel Gibson dying from every ’90s gender stereotype at once and now I’m going to spend an equal amount of time explaining the conceit of the movie Big to you? Fuck you; you’ve seen Big.

Now I’m thinking, “What else, what else… in Black Knight, Martin Lawrence traveled through time by finding a magic amulet at his work.” That’s dumb as shit, but dumb as shit in the good way, right? Like, that’s the writer’s equivalent of saying, “You guys saw the back of the box or the Netflix thumbnail or whatever. We don’t need to waste a bunch of time with an electric bathtub thing.” So now I realize I need to focus my thesis. Am I doing “fucking lame” stupid origin stories or “fucking awesome” stupid origin stories? I only want to make fun of Mel Gibson dying in ladies panties!

Jesus, remember Mannequin? The Mannequin got her powers in ancient Egypt when she asked the gods for help avoiding an arranged marriage and then, unrelated to the first half of this sentence, she is a mannequin who comes to life when only Andrew McCarthy is looking. So that’s in, for sure, but hold on. All these amazing abilities led her to being some guy’s, I guess literal, sex doll. Could I be writing about feminist tropes where supernatural powers are used almost exclusively for fucking ladies? This was another side effect of Cracked growing so big– there was an unspoken pressure to make articles “important.” So I might have spent a few hours of research filling out a “X Movie Characters Who Got Amazing Powers and Used Them To Problematically Fuck” list. Maybe there’s something there? And, of course, there is. Flubber, Spider-Man 3, Next, Hollow Ma- no wait, that’s unfunny dark… Aladdin maybe… ha ha Shallow Hal, kind of? Okay, this is getting nuts. I think I’m plotting out an Anita Sarkeesian video, not a me article. Which I think would go something like this:

The point is, a few years ago I would have taken that dumbshit decision made by the writers of What Women Want and turned it into two weeks of research, then struggled for 30 hours to figure out how to make Rob Schneider’s ancient, magical body-swapping earrings from The Hot Chick funny. I’d figure it out– I’m that good, but I’d push that deadline at least ten times. For a month I’d wake up with “take screenshots of Rob Schneider in a bra” on my calendar and decide a day off would be healthier. So now you see why I love this place. Writing an entire article about just three ridiculous minutes of a twenty-year-old romantic comedy is refreshing as fuck. And I can tell fellow Cracked legends, Robert Brockway and Jason Pargin, feel the same way because they’ve written articles here about the time The Dirt Bike Kid gave a handjob to his dirt bike and nothing else, and the time when Cobra ate frozen pizza with scissors and that’s all, respectively. 

So you see, with your help, we’ve created a comedy writer’s utopia from the ruins of this many-times-destroyed Internet. Bye!