Reflecting Day: Let’s Ruin Paul Dano! 🌭

1-900-​​🌭 is a special place. It’s the last holdout in text-based internet comedy, an art that died years ago and was rightfully damned to hell. Outside of these walls, text-based internet comedy means writing 300 word summaries of trending Twitter topics capped by an NFT scam. You, our patrons, are the only thing keeping us from that. You fend off the siege. Your patronage mans our bulwarks and keeps our catapults full of only the most diseased sheep corpses. 

You, the community. 

And the amazing things you do. 

That are entirely outside of our control. I’m talking about those wonderful actions you take of your own volition that have never been legally endorsed by 1-900-​​🌭 in any way.

Like that time you ruined Paul Dano’s life.

Let me explain. 

Like many vendettas, this all begins with 1984’s “Karate Rap.” It was a novelty song and subpar rap from the era when every white person said “rap? That’s just like talking, watch this: WEEEELL my name is-” 

Karate enthusiasts Sensei Dave and Holly made a low budget hip-hop video about how much karate rules, and it seems weird to condemn them for that when I celebrate Partners in Kryme for the same thing. Perhaps Sensei Dave stacked one more brick than he could break, but my livelihood literally depends on wrongheaded karate masters making mistakes. I thank them for their sacrifice.

It should have been a wonderful abomination for all to enjoy, yet something terrible happened: Sensei Dave and Holly both suffered horrific simultaneous frontal lobe damage that froze them in that moment of time forever.

I like to think that if a time traveler were to jump out of a portal and warn them that, from this point on, their entire lives would be devoted to “Karate Rap,” they would’ve done something else. Maybe figured out that Kung Fu rhymes with Love You and spent the next forty years teaching couples to make love Tiger-Style.

Clearly I wasn’t content just making fun of “Karate Rap.” I mercilessly tracked the Seegers down like Lance Henriksen might hunt a Van Damme. And when I found them, god bless them, god bless their souls – I realized that karate rap success had driven them completely insane. 

It’s important to note here that “Karate Rap” was not successful.

It would eventually go minorly viral in 2012, but before that it was nothing. They chased ironic success for thirty years and it took their entire lives away. 

I discovered that Sensei Dave was from a long and storied line of pop culture garbage architects. Dave Seeger’s father made hilarious garbage in the ‘60s, Dave himself carried on the tradition in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and then he married “Karate Girl” Holly and had children who make hilarious garbage to this day. The Seeger dynasty has given us novelty songs, attempted viral videos, shot pilots for shows nobody would ever see – they even made a movie!

It fucking ruled. Go watch Sister Sensei. Sensei Dave dies right at the start and becomes a Ghost Dad trying to bang his sister with karate spirit magic from beyond the grave. If there’s a better logline than that, it must surely add a speedboat. Of course “Karate Rap” played throughout Sister Sensei. Of course they reused footage from the video, even though it didn’t fit at all. Sensei Dave’s whole life is just one long remix of a novelty rap video he made forty years ago and I both envy and pity him for it. You know The Simpsons episode where Marge finds a fancy dress and just remakes it over and over until it’s physical nonsense? That’s the Seegers and “Karate Rap.” They had one idea to share between two lives. 

But to understand why we had to hurt Paul Dano for this, we have to talk about Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids.

Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids was a pilot for a children’s show based on karate. More specifically, singing and karate. If you guessed that “Karate Rap” would make its way into this show retooled for the kids, you get no points. You’re right, but it’s just worth nothing.

Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids was so bonkers that it might have actually been a coded message to activate sleeper agents. It was about teaching kids the magic of karate, and by that I don’t mean using martial arts to instill shy children with confidence. I mean there was an extended section where Sensei Dave healed wounds and made butterflies with karate and then told the kids they could do it, too. The show featured rampant delusion, nightmarish claymation dragons, custom gis for the kids in Cult Saffron, the ghost of “Karate Rap,” plenty of trademark Seeger desperation… and Paul Dano. 

I didn’t even spot the celebrity cameo in the article! For some reason one of our patrons, Javo, was rewatching Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids. We are living through the long slow end of western society. Do not judge how people find their comfort. Anyway Javo brought this revelation to the Hot Dog Discord and with a reasoned perspective and a measured heart, we decided we must use this to destroy Paul Dano. 

You see, Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids wasn’t on IMDB. Why would it be? It was barely on film. Before I highlighted it, the YouTube video had less than two hundred views. Now it has two thousand. That’s not… that’s still not a lot, but we did that! So nobody knew that Paul Dano has always been a Dojo Kid. What’s more: We looked at the release dates and realized this would have been Paul Dano’s first role… by years. 

Our most twisted Riddler! This is his origin story!

We knew we had to get Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids on Paul Dano’s IMDB profile. The first credit is the most important on any actor’s page. The most recent credit, no matter how high profile, will move every time they take another job. The top is always waiting to become the middle. But the first role? That’s the anchor. People scroll to the bottom first thing to see where an actor “got their start.” 

Is it fair to say that Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids is responsible for the talents of Paul Dano? No! It might be a crime! But if we’re successful, one day Mario Lopez will open Access Hollywood by saying the words “Paul Dano, from Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids-” and my entire life will fold in on itself like a paper crane. This must happen. We had to do this. We all agreed. Only one problem: It sounded hard.

So we didn’t!

Well, most of us didn’t. Two loose cannons risked their badges to go on a rogue mission of justice. Javo and fellow 🌭er DeltaFoxTrot went after IMDB. They endured weeks of bureaucracy and pedantics, rejection after rejection, form after form, request after request. They had to tackle it in stages: First, get IMDB to recognize Dave Seeger, which anybody who’s made eye contact with him at a party could have told you is a terrible mistake. Then get IMDB to acknowledge Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids as a show, which it barely is, and finally to affiliate the two. This sounds like a lot, but it was actually the easy part. “Who gives a shit?” Some IMDB drone muttered, and clicked approve so he could get back to working on his screenplay about a Ghost Dad trying to bang his sister with karate spirit magic from beyond the grave on a speedboat.

They didn’t know. They didn’t know the storm was coming.

The next request came in, and alarms went off. The entire IMDB office went dark, a klaxon sounded, the higher-ups pulled their glasses off and stared out the window to whisper “my god…” 

They really, really didn’t want some fucking Hot Dog goofballs to edit Paul Dano’s profile. 

To change a major star’s IMDB page? Nearly impossible. To do it during the release of his biggest role yet? Completely impossible. To change his very first credit? To something called Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids? That means war. IMDB wouldn’t let it happen. They couldn’t. They fought it tooth and nail. But they don’t know how far the 1-900-🌭 community will go for a joke. We’ll kill ourselves and all of you if it means landing the perfect punchline, and those plans are in motion.  

In the meantime, we beat IMDB.

Paul Dano’s very first acting role is now Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids. It’s already working to poison the zeitgeist. This all went down just a couple months ago and you can see people on Twitter losing their minds as they stumble on it. Anybody that sees The Batman and thinks “I’d like to know more about this Paul Dano guy” will now utter this sentence: 

“What the fuck is Sensei Rainbow and the Dojo Kids?”

This is how we do it. 

This is how we ruin Paul Dano’s life. 

I don’t know why we want that, but we’re doing it now and it’s too late to stop. 

Heroes aren’t born, they’re made. DeltaFoxTrot? Javo? You have built a legacy for yourselves. Your fellow 🌭s don’t know how to show our gratitude. We don’t know what gift says “thank you, thank you so much for attacking this man for reasons we’re not 100% clear on.”

Oh wait, yes we do. 

This astounding movie poster by M.V. Bramley is for the inevitable gritty reboot, Sensei Rainbow Vs. The Dojo Kid – the one where Sensei Dave grows corrupt with power and pursues a now-grown Paul Dano to the ends of the Earth for no apparent reason. Surely that’s not a metaphor for something. Javo and DeltaFoxTrot get Easter Eggs in the poster, producer credits in the text, and of course copies have already been sent to the both of them. But you? You reading this right now? You get the ultimate honor. You get to pay for it!

It’s up right now in the PoxCo store, and it won’t be there for long because we’re not entirely sure why you want it. The art is amazing, and like all the best jokes it requires eight layers of increasingly obscure nested knowledge just to land a medium laugh, but why does it speak to you? We just don’t understand. 

Regardless, the art rules, this moment rules, this community rules – you! All of you! If you’re here, if you’re contributing to keep this 🌭 thing going – you’re giving Javo and Delta a community to interface with and a place to hatch their dire plans. And you’re paying us to foster wild grudges against karate rappers and major celebrities based on nothing! Absolutely nothing! We couldn’t do that without sponsors like you! And we make each and every one of you this promise: If you destroy a major celebrity for us, we will commission a poster for you, too.