Author: Robert Brockway

Some ideas are so good you dare not speak them aloud before filing every possible copyright and trademark. You only get one billion dollar idea in your lifetime, and that’s if you’re lucky. When it comes, you need to be ready to drop everything and devote your whole life to it. Robert J. Gold was ready. He was ready for CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos.

It’s generally not great if people have notes on your story from the legal filings stage, but CyberKnight, Hand Puppet Commandos & GrayLord and the Metalicans sounds like too many things. That’s the complete failed lineup of UPN Kids. I’m not being fair, CKHPC&GL&TM is intended for a visual medium. Maybe it all gels once you see it in action.

We’ve added five racial stereotypes, a touch of pornography, and the Fermi Paradox. We’re still on page 0. This image has bad vibes. That huge blonde lady is definitely porn DLC for Poser. It feels like the inverse of the White Couch Girl meme. I think those puppets are in trouble.

Visuals aren’t helping. Let’s go back to the text.

I’ve been to a lot of con functions, if you notice the whole room avoiding the snack table except for one wild-eyed dude, don’t go in for cheese. He’ll open his mouth and this will spill out. You’ll be trapped for the next hour listening to his escalator pitch for the story of triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler, who discovered a solution – hold on, it’s important you know her adoptive Asian parents were big fans of Yogi Bear – she’s always had this theory about alien communication that – wait, she’s not actually called that, call her Dax – actually let’s talk about some scientists having lunch first. Hold on, Dax is actually called CyberKnight, the scientists got hot dogs but Dr. Iverson refused to eat his because the others made fun of the way he suckled the tip-

Why refine a premise into a satisfying story that suits both characters and theme, when you could just open up with both barrels of the idea shotgun and blow your reader’s attention span to shit in the buckshot of a thousand terrible concepts? Robert J. Gold never had an idea that didn’t have three sub-ideas of its own. His brain is a bullet list that nests to infinity. His dirty talk comes with footnotes. Since we spoke last, triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight also became a master puppeteer and used her community theater puppet skills to put herself through three doctorates. Since I wrote that sentence she invented the solution to contacting alien life. It was so simple! It was synthetic telepathy!

Triple-Doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight and now Paradox Puppeteer’s synthetic telepathy machine exploded, but not before downloading the World Protector Kit into her brain, which didn’t do anything on its own, but let her invent the Personifier, which didn’t do anything on its own, but could be used to give life to her racist community theater hand puppets! I didn’t mention it before, because we had to explain why Dax knows Yogi Bear’s catchphrase, but her puppets are racist.

Every puppet team needs a blademaster, just look at Puppet Master, Thunderbolt Fantasy, or Bert. This one’s name is Wasabi, he’s both a Samurai and a Ninja, but just because he’s three kinds of racist against the Japanese doesn’t mean he’s Japanese.

He’s from all Asian countries at once, except only Japan, inspired by Taiwan. I’m sorry! Inspired by a hot blonde girl’s childhood memories of her parents’ memories of Taiwan.

You’re already exhausted. You need to rally. Drink some electrolytes, we’re here for longer than you think.

Sam is every tough cop who ever lived, but once again filtered through the crowded brain of a tri-genius puppet wrangler.

Don’t worry! She has beams! They have many functions. I’m glad we covered the important part, her beams, because Sam is already dead. She dies early in the origin story. What kills her? I’m glad you asked: Tuberculosis.

No, it’s MORE BEAMS.

Iron Ghost is the team’s problem.

He’s the problem character on a team of nothing but problems. If you want to prove you’re not racist, just give a racial caricature one thing that breaks type. Then when people accuse you of stereotyping, you can say “yeah, he’s an American Indian with a supernatural connection to nature, yes, he comes equipped with an electric tomahawk, but he’s actually a chemist. Don’t you feel the fool? What’s that, say his catchphrase out loud? Oh, I… I don’t want to, is all. But I totally would, if I wanted to.”

Decker is sort of Deckard from Blade Runner, but actually wait! No, he’s Indiana Jones. He’s both, and that makes him just Harrison Ford. He carries a .45 caliber pistol, which is actually a stun gun that does a lot of things and one of them is Ion Beam. I didn’t know “stun” was measured in calibers, but I did know the best fists are measured in wetness.

“BRAINS” is … well, the Brains of the team!

Capitalization matters. Saying Brains is the Brains of the team means all teams have a black woman named Brains, and this one fulfills that role. There’s a word for that, I forget it. I’ll ask my one smart black friend what it is.

Brains’ superpower is her intelligence, which is actually triple-doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight’s power. It’s weird, huh. It’s weird that Dax’s intelligence was a simple combination of innate gifts and education, but the black woman needed it bestowed on her by alien telepathy and she’s still not smarter than Dax.

Let’s meet Swami! It’s too late to say no, he’s already here.

Let’s not talk about Swami’s “Short Rope.” Let’s not talk about Swami at all.

Lupe is the “Tactical” one. Like all the best writers, Robert J. Gold has no idea what quotation marks might be, but “god damn” if that’s going to stop him.

She’s hot-blooded, but not in any stereotypical Latina way – she’s all kinds of Mexican at once, inspired by an ignorant child’s memory of a friend’s big sister’s quinceanera. I shouldn’t joke like that, it’s indistinguishable from Robert J. Gold’s actual writing. Lupe is both a Ripley and a “Laura Croft,” you know, from Tomb Marauder? But there’s one important difference: beams! She comes with an Ion Blaster, “stun” functions, and grenades of many flavors.

Already you can see Robert J. Gold is obsessed with beams, stunning, and grenades. Mentally bookmark that. You’ll need it later.

Our main villain is, don’t laugh, GrayLord. It’s fine that you laughed before. Don’t laugh at this one, though. His tag line is “Obey the will of GrayLord.”

He received the evil version of Triple-Doc Dr. Daryl Daxler Dax the CyberKnight’s powers. Where she used them to bring her extremely racial childhood hand puppets to life, Dr. GrayLord just opened a can of life in his garage and let destiny take the wheel.

GrayLord’s pretty lucky his garage was filled with toxic waste, knives, and assault rifles. If I set off a life bomb in my garage I’d get a supervillain squad made of a sassy neglected exercise bike and six old furnace filters clogged with dog hair. I actually do have a barbecue grill in there, but mine never shot white hot plasma. It mostly just clicks when you turn the knob.

Here’s how the epic tale of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos begins:

It’s like lighting a scented candle while drowning in a septic tank, but I have a note on the prose: Robert J. Gold, this is a level of uncertainty I don’t love to see in a first paragraph. Before we even learn Dax’s name, we learn she isn’t sure what things are called, and doesn’t like that they’re called that. I’m being unfair. That’s actually a motif in Robert J. Gold’s writing.

Commitment is a surprising problem for the guy who dedicated his life to the first idea a bored child at a Jiffy Lube has. It’s not enough to apologize in text for the terrible name – the whole comic pauses for a full-on flashback to the moment somebody called the commandos that happened to be hand puppets the Hand Puppet Commandos. I’m sorry, that felt too committed. I meant to say they’re some sort of hand puppet commandos.

It’s been a while since we’ve had some beams. Let’s check in on the beams.

What a ransom letter of an image. That’s what the inside of a dog’s brain looks like at a Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular. Just totally disparate objects devoid of context, mashed together from a dozen different sources, all fighting with bright visual gibberish.

A zoomed out view might help.

From this angle it’s more like a scam game made of stolen Newgrounds assets for Huawei phones only. What are we even looking at there? Beams! Mostly beams. Is that guy flying in a cargo container? I’m sorry, I meant some sort of cargo container?

GrayLord and the Metalicans fly in a shipping container? Why? Is that commentary on the tyranny of international consumerism, or is it because the Spaceship DLC in Beat Beat Garage Slaughter: The 23 Obscurers costs 2000 KWD and installs ransomware on your camera?

Anyway, they were being pounded.

By what? By beams!

BEAMS!

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That’s all from the first few pages of the comic. Just an unceasing, breathless description of beams, the direction of beams, the countering of beams – with what? More beams! Robert J. Gold wrote the novelization of a Hanna-Berbera cartoon, but somehow less rad than that sounds. If this text was 67 pages shorter, it would be perfectly fine on the cardstock of a dollar store action figure in 1989. But the problem with obsessing over a bad idea is your subconscious knows it’s not working, and if you’re unwilling to confront that, you wind up remaking that bad idea in every possible medium, forever, sure that the right format will finally fix it.

Robert J. Gold wrote 70 pages of comic book (that’s too long for a comic book), a 136 page screenplay (that’s too long for a screenplay), and a 70,000 word novel (that’s not long enough for a novel) about hand puppets fighting barbecue grills. Let’s check out the first page of that book-

Beams! First page. Right to the beams. Just hours upon hours of meaningless beams and rays. I’d make a joke about Marvel Studios hiring Robert J. Gold, but that implies a reality in which screenwriters are being hired. Hey, speaking of the total collapse of human art as a career: A friend of mine does short films he calls “in the margins of a movie,” where he removes every shot with a character in it, leaving behind a haunting liminal exploration of atmosphere.

Let’s try the same thing in CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, but with removing beams.

This is a far more interesting story about a young woman’s mental breakdown following a series of loveless puppet threeways in seedy motels. Driven completely mad from the guilt and lack of emotional connection, she tears her house apart and starts building bombs. While she lay dying in the ensuing explosion, her mind comforts her the only way it can: with sexual puppets.

Robert J. Gold, that’s the story! You’ve been obsessing over the beams, when the beams are the problem. This is how you get whatever an Academy Award is for puppet pornography. A Felty?

Hold on, zoom in, enhance, hornify.

Is that the exact same scene, but rendered semi-professionally instead of copy/pasting jerkoff models and Half Life assets? That’s not from the comic book…

That’s from the video trailer!

Yes, Robert J. Gold found yet another way to explore the nature of-

I think the comic book came first, then the screenplay, then the novelization. This video trailer seems like it was last. That means Robert J. Gold is thousands of hours and three formats away from his original idea. If you know any artist working in any medium, you know that means they’ve done nothing but obsess over all the flaws in that time.

Surely the puppet gangbang isn’t still in here-

You can almost forgive Robert J. Gold for using porn assets to build his comic magnum opus. When your wife checks the credit card bill and sees a $69.99 charge for Virtual Misty Melons, you have to get creative. But to pay a Chinese vanity animation studio to re-render the whole thing and still keep the porn asset – that means you were never just doing the best with what you had. You meant for it to be this way.

I don’t know what you call a fetish this repressed. It feels like more than simple puppet fucking, and yet less than advanced perversions like toy cuck macrophilia. Robert J. Gold must be working through some really bizarre shit in his past he refuses to confront. Something involving explosions and beams, no doubt.

Here’s where a normal comedy article would end. But here at 1900HOTDOG, we pride ourselves on always finding the secret crimes behind puppetry. So I’ll see you next week for Part 2 of CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos, where I successfully track down the explosion and beam-based tragedy that poisoned Robert J. Gold’s brain. I’m not joking: It’s a true story about mad inventors, fringe weapon manufacturing, terrorism, grenade cults, karate maniacs, decapitation, CIA conspiracies, political assassination, the militarization of the American police force, actual war crimes, maybe an exploded baby, and definitely-

This article was thanks to a Hot Dog Tip from Peter S. who had no fucking idea what box he was opening when he sent this along.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpaceJamFan, a small puppet climbing a large woman in search of purpose, only to find beams.