Nerding Day: Seth Green’s Stolen NFT Show🌭

Seth Green once made a TV show so bad that it ruined the growth of an industry, and we should all thank him for that. People have called the recently surfaced trailer for White Horse Tavern “cringy” and “the most embarrassing shit I’ve ever seen,” but in reality, it’s way more cringy and embarrassing than anyone knows, except for me. I know, and now I’m going to tell you.

The story of White Horse Tavern begins where all great art does, with commerce! Specifically with Bored Ape Yacht Club #8398. For those of you unfamiliar, Bored Ape Yacht Club was basically like Beanie Babies for boys. Anyone who thought that Princess Diana Bear was going to pay for her college education can sympathize with the men who bought Bored Apes. When Seth Green purchased his in 2019, he took his bad choice a step further than most and decided to develop a TV show with Bored Ape #8398 as the main character. I’m sorry, he gave his Beanie Baby a cool name, it’s Fred Simian. Fred even has an Instagram account with 97 followers!

Fred was going to be a bartender at The White Horse Tavern, which is a real place in New York. In the show it’s made to look like a dive bar, but the actual place sells Croque Madames for $22 instead of ham and cheese sandwiches for “technically we don’t sell food here if anyone asks.” The bar would be staffed with various other NFTs and real people mingling together. However, this was sadly not meant to be due to the ape heist.

Apparently, Seth Green fell for a simple phishing scam and lost not only Fred, but two mutant apes, and one Doodle NFT, if you can even believe it. This happened right before he was set to appear at VeeCon, an event run by Gary Vee, owner of an MLM for boys. He’s a fifty-year-old CEO who posts like a midwestern aunt and got 11.2 million Instagram followers from that. His main message seems to be that you should love yourself and purchase some of his many fine products.

During Seth’s talk at VeeCon on bringing NFTs to the creative space, he revealed that there were some problems with his NFT show, mainly that he no longer owned any NFTs. You can see him struggling with this during the talk. He says the NFT space needs “not regulations but controls, safeguards, and protections.” Controls, safeguards, and protections are all synonyms for regulations, but sure. He went to the wild west and was surprised to find so many cowboys there, and then the cowboys mugged him.

Naturally, his next move was to try to emotionally appeal to the thief via Twitter. The good news is he knew exactly where the crypto criminal would be hanging out, so it was easy to get in touch with them. The advantage of NFTs is that they are extremely traceable, so he even knew the username of the person who stole the NFT from him and the name of the user they sold it to for 200K. It was a very civilized ape mugging.

That’s the nicest threat to sue someone I’ve ever seen. It makes Seth Green look like the most down to earth celebrity who will sue your ass into oblivion if you don’t give that ape back and it worked! He only had to pay 300K to recover his personal property, but that didn’t really matter. Hollywood took one look at this mess and said, “Do I want to risk having an easily kidnappable main character on my hit TV show?” Nope! And White Horse Tavern was dead, but let me reassure you all, it was a merciful death.

At VeeCon, he also debuted a trailer for White Horse Tavern, which Gary Vee described as having “scaled Roger Rabbit like vibes,” which I agree with. It looks like someone said, ” What if we made Who Framed Roger Rabbit with shitty art and then did that because they turned off the switch in their brain that tells them, this is a bad idea, something that Seth Green said he did and encouraged the audience at Veecon to do. Incredibly funny thing to say before making a mistake so big you tank an industry’s future growth. I would like to encourage him to pop that bad boy right back on because the audience at Veecon filmed the trailer, and here’s what it’s like.

We open with Fred Simian on his daily subway ride to work at the White Horse Tavern. It appears to be Valentine’s Day. There’s generic, peppy whistling music in the background that gives the whole thing the vibe of an ExxonMobil commercial, reminding us they love people and are sorry for that horrible thing they did. Fred and another bartender greet customers, including Connor Ratliff, and oh my God, is that NFT celebrity and not at all a con artist, Gary Vee!? This trailer has everyone!

Fred and a fellow snarky bartender make fun of two cute old people for dating. “I’m just saying ’til death do they part may be tonight!” is the punchline, and after it the monkey shows its teeth, which is a sign of aggression in primates, and I get scared that he’s going to attack the old people. The actress has no chemistry with the tennis ball she’s talking to, which probably adds to the creepy factor of the interaction.

A stitched together zombie girl NFT and Constance Shulman, the voice of Patti Mayonnaise, have a brief conversation that makes the viewer say, “What is Constance Shulman doing here? And why isn’t any NFT art good?” Fred announces he’s taking his break, and we get a few more clips of NFT art that I guess is supposed to make people who know NFT’s go, “Oh wow, they got the Fart Boy Energy Crew on this show! I know that NFT!” If you don’t know the NFT, it’s just sort of random nonsense, some of which might be voiced by Ron Funches.

I should point out that it’s impossible to confirm who is in this show’s blurry trailer because it’s not on IMDB. This shaky iPhone recording and Seth Green’s public confession are the only evidence that it ever existed, and I think steps have been taken to keep it that way. Maybe he did briefly turn the bad idea switch back on.

We cut to a different scene where a male waiter says, “Want me to rough him up? I’m the only gay guy in my ballet class who can make a fist?” Is that a gay men have limp wrists joke? Wow, vintage. What is the vibe of this show supposed to be? Because it seems mean and snarky, but the Imagine Dragons song from 2012 they’ve put over it, and the cutaway to various groups of people silently laughing seems upbeat and way too sincere.

In the interview before its presentation, Seth Green said the show imagines a universe where “it doesn’t matter what you look like; what only matters is your attitude.” A groundbreaking premise we’ve never seen before, but also, it seems like everyone’s attitude kind of sucks. Is that part of the joke?

It’s painfully millennial, and I say that as a millennial. It’s all the worst parts of our generation. A desperate attempt at folksy authenticity steeped in capitalism. Someone trying to sell you a community at a luxury price. NFTs are bad for the environment, and bad for art, the only people truly excited for their potential were thieves, con artists, and morons, so to base a twee millennial show around them feels like someone Weekend At Berniesing the looooong decayed corpse of Cheers.

I actually really like Seth Green’s work. Robot Chicken is funny. He was probably my favorite character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only nice boyfriend. I’d like to think he got duped into being excited about NFTs, but if that’s the case, he’s sure remained duped longer than I would expect. After the stolen ape fiasco of 2022, he was involved with an NFT project called Nouns appearing in the Rose Parade. But no crimes were committed on that project as far as I can tell.

He demonstrated to Hollywood why making NFTs into a larger IP is a bad idea, and then he tried to make it happen again. He really has turned off the part of his brain that informs him when an idea is bad. I think it might be a serious medical condition. Someone help this man, or at least leave his apes alone.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alex Knollenberg, who is here to slurp apes and funge tokens, and he’s all outta apes.