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Author: Robert Brockway
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Punching Day: Gil vs. Galerito 🌭
I wrote a book called I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200, it’s sort of about a man fighting puppets, but it’s actually hiding a darker story about how capitalism destroys our brains and lives. The second part sounds like a bummer, so let’s focus on the first: Here’s my favorite puppet fight. It took place on the Brazilian show Canal Livre back in the mid-2000s, and became a minor meme down there. One of my favorite bands even did a music video homage to it. You don’t have to click any of those links except the first one, I’m obviously about to analyze this puppet fight like a presidential assassination.
It takes place at the very end of the program, when the announcer brings out a singer to close the show. His name is Nunes Filho, and he’s got kind of a Wayne Newton guest starring on a very special episode of Miami Vice vibe going on.
Nunes is not going to fight the puppet. I know, I know you want that. I want it, too. I want him to rip that necklace off and hurl it at a puppet’s face like Burt Reynolds in Heat.
Wait, I retract my earlier description. Nunes Filho looks like Burt Reynolds in Heat. He looks like no other thing. His outfit might actually be a Heat reference, now that I think about it. If it is, he never gathers the nerve to put a motherfucker on credit like Burt. Nunes just walks out and begins his lovely song and strange little dance… all while a voice offscreen mocks him relentlessly.
“He’s killing cockroaches!” The voice says, “he’s doing the cockroach killing dance!” Nunes spares a quick glance offscreen, as though checking to make sure security is beating the hell out of that heckler. They are not. The heckling will continue the whole time he sings his beautiful song about love and longing.
We switch to a different camera angle, and reason abandons us to drown in chaos. The heckler is a madly flailing puppet in a cardboard jail cell. It pauses its wild gyrations only briefly, to point out how dumb Nunes’ voice sounds, or how he’s doing a weird thing with his feet. If I were writing a children’s show for victims of premature derangement, this is how I would show them that a negative inner monologue can destroy any fun activity.
Again, somehow Nunes is not the one who fights this puppet. I know, I also can’t believe it. I think if you told Nunes in this exact moment that somebody would be fighting that puppet today and it wasn’t him, he wouldn’t believe you either.
Here’s a better look at that puppet. You won’t thank me for it.
His name is Galerito, and he looks like a Long Beach sex parasite. Something Bugs Bunny would kill in a cartoon that now comes with a trigger warning about its historical significance. Galerito is a rare example of a racial caricature made by people of that same race. Like a Mammy puppet on the hand of Whoopi Goldberg. I’m sorry if that’s a dated reference but she’s my go-to black puppetmonger. I don’t think society has a replacement for that role yet, and when she passes, I fear we never will.
The crowd holds up a banner of what might be somebody’s daughter gone too soon, or the eastside’s best realtor. I have no way of knowing. I don’t speak Portuguese, I have bad eyes, and I’m way too distracted by the frowning man and his enormous bowl of bread.
The unhappy baker is Gil Da Esfirra, and he’s a local snack vendor and puppet fighter. He is actually here to sell that bread, he is actually here to fight that puppet.
Suddenly Galerito leans out of his cell to bash at Gil in way that makes it clear this is not an in-character performance by a puppet, but a desperate attack by a puppeteer using the only weapon God gave him.
Gil loses his mind. Maybe that’s not fair, I’m not trying to backseat puppet fight here, I don’t actually know what the appropriate response to being hair-whipped by a racist muppet is. I know that Gil immediately attacks the entire set, throwing inflexible middle-aged kicks at a cardboard police station while a stage hand tries to drag him away.
I wish David Lynch was still alive so you could say the following words to him and watch his eyes as he falls in love: The crooner picks, of all times, the start of a puppet fight to plug his new album. Somewhere, a baby begins to cry. It drowns out his plug.
For just a moment, the stage hand relaxes his grip on Gil. An instant mistake. This is not the kind of puppet fury that ends in talking. It ends when a puppet is full of blood or a man is full of stuffing.
Gil sets down his enormous bowl of bread in the same way that an ancient Kung Fu master sweeps his hair over his shoulder. It’s visual shorthand letting the audience know that the budget of this fight scene is about to skyrocket. Gil slips his wrangler and runs behind the divider, disappearing into what I assume is the part of every set called Puppet Town.
More crew pile on Gil like the restaurant staff in Possession, desperately trying to restrain a man who has abandoned his humanity to become a puppet berserker. I’m sorry, that phrase makes it sound like he is a puppet who has gone berserk. I tried “berserker of puppets” but it just gets Metallica stuck in my head.
Galerito’s puppeteer throws Puppet Code to the wind and leaps out the window to eat shit right at Nunes’ feet, who is still singing. Nunes Filho does not falter, he does not stutter, he simply takes a few steps back. This is a man who knows the exact range of a puppet battle, and will retreat from it, but only just.
Looking into this show, it seems there were other incidents between Galerito and Gil. So maybe this was all planned, just one part of a wonderful recurring skit. But if that’s the case then Gil gets credit as the best comedic performer of his generation, because even when totally removed from all context this expression can mean no other thing than “I’m going to murder that fucking puppet.”
Also, it sounds like Gil was eventually kicked off the show for fighting the puppet too much, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing you’d do if you hired the guy to be your Chief Puppet Fighter.
Once again things seem to settle, but it’s merely another Gil ruse. He leaps out of the crew’s grasp and throws a karate kick straight into the black heart of Puppet Town, which is a great way to come back with a puppet for a foot.
The puppet screams. The singer croons. The baby is inconsolable.
The stage hands grab Gil. Once more Nunes Filho gently dances out of the Puppet Splash Zone to sing of his lost love and the secrets she keeps, as peace slowly returns to the set…
Until the puppeteer ekes from his little window to try one more ineffectual slap at Gil, like a bloody-nosed schoolboy yelling insults from behind the safety of the yard duty.
Galerito stoked the fire, but was not prepared to burn. Gil sends another flying sidekick into Puppet Town. Nunes wraps up the song and speaks directly to his fans, telling them where he’ll be performing next. He gives no indication that eight feet away two stage hands are giving their lives to stop a middle-aged man from eating a puppet.
When you get this lost in madness, you start to question things. Reality. Safety. The tensile strength of felt. Whether or not those people are actually stage hands, or simply members of the audience foolishly defending a puppet like a mother bird might feed a cuckoo chick.
Every storm passes. Every inferno becomes ashes. Gil has been contained.
There’s so much emotion and symbolism in this single screengrab. It speaks of man’s fury, and its ridiculousness, and the ultimate futility of intent in a frivolous universe. This is art. This is the shit Yeats would write about if he was alive today, and Brazilian, and being attacked by a puppet.
Gil has slipped his bonds again. He begins to rip and tear.
Watch there, at the end, just as the credits begin to roll. One of the cameramen simply flees. I hope he never returned. I hope he found a life somewhere free from the directionless violence of puppets and the men who hate them.
Gil is restrained, for real this time. It doesn’t stop him throwing impotent kicks at the taunting puppet. He shouts something to Nunes – apologies? Pleas for help? Profanities? Threats? Maybe that’s why the puppet is really here. It’s the rodeo clown. The tank of the show, here to protect the bard and draw aggro from drunk snack vendors.
I watched this gif loop long enough to see one of the cameramen is named Mario Albuquerque. I hope he’s the one who ran. He’ll have to change his name; nobody will believe that one.
The credits roll as Nunes Filho takes a spotless bow, his soul and Burt Reynolds suit free from both blood and felt. This was considered a successful episode. They put a production card on it.
And that’s it, my favorite puppet fight. I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is sort of about fighting puppets like this, because I think it’s an incredibly funny thing to watch a grown man do. But the book is also about horror, murder, and the many ways our lives are being destroyed by class warfare. Which is a fun coincidence, because so is this puppet fight.
Let’s talk about the five murders that followed.
First, you have to understand what Canal Livre was actually about. A show where racist puppets mock local singers and randomly attack the audience seems like plenty to me, I would only watch up to 12 seasons and a movie of that. But Canal Livre was actually a crime news variety program hosted by a celebrity police officer. Like if Entertainment Tonight was hosted by Joe Arpaio and a cruel soulless puppet of Mario Lopez, but instead of celebrity gossip they threw to random clips of police brutality. It seems like I’m not explaining it well, but no, that’s exactly it.
The host of Canal Livre was a man named Wallace Souza, and the show became so popular it got him elected as a legislator three times. A minor miracle considering how often the political endorsements of puppets backfire, and also that Wallace was fired as a police officer for rampant theft and fraud. He was fired for that. In Brazil.
For its first few years, Canal Livre was more straight-laced and focused on sensationalist video clips. It was only after Wallace added the singing, the puppets, and the furious bread-vendors that it really took off. So Wallace understood that the success of the show was the reason for his political power, and the puppets were the reason for the show’s success. I want you to picture that: A small man in a position of big influence, who knows it can all come tumbling down on the whims of a puppet. What ego could withstand that? Not a Brazilian cop’s, is the only answer I know.
Wallace Souza needed something more. Puppets might make a man rich, but they will never give him security. He expanded Canal Livre from just showing news clips to doing their own reporting. Wallace himself went on the frontlines as the show’s lead investigator. He had a knack for it. On several occasions he beat the cops to homicide scenes, filming brutal murders and broadcasting actual corpses in between the crooners and puppet skits. It sounds like madness, but it’s basically just Fox News when Jeff Dunham is plugging a new special.
Eventually people started to wonder: Why is the puppet guy so fucking good at this? How is he first on the scene for so many horrific murders?
You probably guessed it. But then, you’re cheating. You already know my motto: “Where there are puppets, there is crime.”
Over the span of two years Wallace Souza contracted with three hitmen, one of them his own son, to commit five vigilante murders of suspected criminals so he could be the first to film their dead bodies for his puppet show.
Maybe it seems unfair to keep dismissing Canal Livre as a “puppet show” when it’s more of an atrocity-based Hee Haw. But my theory is that if you have a puppet on your show more than once, you have a puppet show. Puppets stain whatever they touch. As evidence I present this actual screengrab from a later episode of Canal Livre, where they go behind the scenes in the control room.
Wallace Souza was eventually caught and charged with multiple counts of murder. Hopefully some of them puppet-related, as those carry a stiffer sentence. He tried to flee and authorities blockaded the entire city of Manaus to stop him. An entire city under siege because of puppet murders. Look, I call them “puppet murders” because at no point do the crime reports say the puppet wasn’t involved, so I have to assume it was. I have to assume the hitmen pulled each trigger through a felt mouth. I have to do that.
Souza’s son, Rafael, was sentenced to 9 years for murder, which seems light to me but it is Brazil. You should be surprised they didn’t give him a small but shockingly sexual parade. Wallace Souza himself died of a heart attack before ever seeing trial. Galerito is still at large.
I thought this was all a good tie-in to I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 because it’s a bizarre, violent, funny veneer that hides deep tragedy and social criticism, just like the book. So I guess buy my book if you liked these puppet murders? I’m not good at this. Don’t tell my publisher I did this.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Elliot Watson, a puppet made of sinew and bone. Also really loves the film Dunston Checks In.
It’s release week for my new book, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. You know this. I’ve been threatening you in legally actionable ways for the last year. I will continue to threaten you in legally actionable ways for months to come. If anybody tells me “oh, I didn’t know you had a new book out” I will physically attack them with all of my might.
What you might not know – because my plugs focus entirely on blackmail and harassment – is what the book is about. I probably should have told you that, but if I was good at marketing, I wouldn’t be going to prison for not selling enough books. And I am. I am going to prison for not selling enough books. And I’m going to make it a problem for all of you, but that’s for later. I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about Maksim Ivanov, a broke lowlife who can see imaginary friends because he killed his own as a child. If they discover he can see them, they immediately know why, and will attack him in a berserk frenzy no matter how whimsical or harmless they seem. It’s ruined Ivan’s life and made him unemployable, so he starts taking out Craigslist ads offering to kill imaginary friends for- you get it, we’ve arrived at the title. He said the thing.
The book is also about Kay Washington, an only child, and a latchkey kid suffering from undiagnosed mental disorders. Her imaginary friend, Eddie Video, worms his way into every aspect of her life where he begins to isolate, control, and terrorize her. Ivan is the only one equipped to help, so basically they’re both royally fucked.
I bring all this up for two reasons: First, to sell you a fucking book, dipshit. Good lord, what does it take?! Second, because parts of this setup might sound familiar. All authors write from life, and my entire life for the last five years has been 1-900-HOTDOG. Eddie Video, the temperamental rascal who slowly becomes more real as he turns on his host? Directly inspired by Buster Sales.
The 1990s Blockbuster Video training mascot I wrote about for the site way back in the early days. Buster Sales is kind of a Max Headroom character. A guy stuck in a TV screen who teaches new Blockbuster employees to keep the store clean, make recommendations, and not openly whack it when that scene in Career Opportunities comes on. What made Buster Sales cursed was entirely in the execution: As the training video went on, Buster slowly transitioned from a helper to a menace, becoming more antagonistic and more able to influence the real world as his trainee made mistakes, got in trouble, and generally fell apart. It felt like the production knew it, too. Buster’s actor played him like Joe Pesci about to stab a guy in the neck, the trainee played it like Jennifer Connelly after you tell her Career Opportunities is your favorite movie, and the director framed Buster Sales in every shot like Jason Voorhees standing outside a cabin window in a thunderstorm.
I talk a lot about how horror and comedy are different sides of the same coin, and which one you end up with depends on how you flip it. Buster Sales is exactly what I mean by that: it’s funny to watch this beleaguered training video writer botch Buster’s zany antics so badly they accidentally create a minor video store demon in the process.
But take the same idea, the exact same progression, replace the bumbling employee with a lonely child and the Blockbuster Video with predatory internet culture, now you’ve got a compelling horror hook. Just like the one Buster Sales uses if you don’t upsell snacks.
Like most kids, Kay doesn’t invent her imaginary friend out of whole cloth. Children pull imaginary friends from the world around them in an attempt to make sense of their surroundings. (Side note: My favorite real example of an imaginary friend is from writer and Dogg Zzone veteran Django Wexler’s daughter.)
In my book, the real Eddie Video is a VTuber avatar from a South African children’s slop streaming collective. Try reading that sentence to your grandpa; he’ll hold you down and put your wallet in your mouth. The collective’s Twitch channel records their streams as VODs which Kay watches later on YouTube. (Sorry, stop reading this to your grandpa, he’s getting overstimulated and he’s going to bite you.) Kay likes how the interactive parts make her feel less alone, even though she’s not allowed on Twitch to watch the stream live, and only sees empty silences on the VOD as the actors wait for prompts from an audience she’s not part of. It’s a uniquely modern way to be lonely. The “show” means the world to her, but it’s really just foreign-based VTubers capitalizing on media algorithms to deliver inexplicable, dangerous nonsense. Kay never fully understands the show or what it’s doing to her brain, but she becomes enamored with it anyway.
Of course I’m really talking about Troom Troom.
I may be the world’s leading expert on Troom Troom. I’ve done hours upon hours of research simply trying to figure out one thing: What the fuck am I looking at? I, like all of their fans, have come to no satisfying answer. I only know that it’s a Ukrainian YouTube channel aimed at English-speaking children, full of bright colors, crazy voices, broken language, and tongue-eating insanity. I wrote about their weird obsession with smuggling food and ruinous crafts, both of which show up in my book. I really tried to do it justice. But Troom Troom has its own very specific madness which maps to no human brain in history, like this video about how to decorate a house if you’re a mermaid, ladybug, or dracula.
Actual line from the video, by the way. It’s all positioned to the viewer as a challenge, so the idea is that kids follow along, turn into a mermaid, and decorate a small house to spite Dracula. Try it at home! It’s easy, simply destroy your mother’s CD collection to make the perfect mermaid roof!
Sometimes the videos are timely. One of the malfunctioning flight computers that runs Troom Troom logs trending YouTube search terms in a misguided attempt to land the long-crashed plane it once belonged to, then the computer dictates content suggestions to a dying octopus so it can flail a script onto the broken Garfield keyboard that crushed it. The plane was carrying Garfield keyboards. It’s my best theory.
Here’s another video, this time to help little girls turn themselves into the robot from Squid Game – you know, the one that dictates whether or not dozens of people get murdered with machine guns. Graphically, as they scream for mercy that will never come. That robot.
How does the Troom Troom version manage to look more disturbing than the actual horror show?
The alt text on this image could be for a Babylon Bee political cartoon: “black cloaked masked figure in front of foreign flags opens door labeled SQUID GAME for young girl who has been turned into soulless murder robot.” What kid is this for, Troom Troom? How the fuck are they supposed to do any of this at home, why do you want them to do it, what are you doing, what do you get out of this, what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing-
Sorry, I was in a Troom hole.
Obviously Troom Troom had to capitalize on K-Pop Demon Hunters, just saying the title is a Snow Crash brain hack that makes parents of little girls throw money at televisions. I only watched half of it, somebody tell me if you remember the scene where meth cookie monster harasses a French housepainter with a poster of a hot cop.
Did the K-Pop boy band demon ever wind up partnering with the bird detective to make fun of Rumi’s crotch? I feel like that was foreshadowed some, but I wasn’t sure they’d ever get to it.
Troom Troom is the perfect example of something that is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying to me. When you try to comprehend it, it slips out of your brain with a homemade lubricant called Zoey K-Pop’s Ramyeon Bubblegum Fart Oil Specifically for Mind Wrestling. The true horror comes when you see the viewcount, usually in the tens of millions, and you’re forced to reflect on a future where we let all of our children’s brains be shaped by this.
I guess I’m not one to talk. 1-900-HOTDOG is its own kind of brain poison. Show one of Dennard’s articles to the average CBS viewer and they’ll have you thrown in a hotel room to be deconditioned by private detectives. And I’ve been marinating in this hot dog water for five years. That’s why my new book – which I want to reiterate has received prestigious reviews and been called a challenging meditation on how trauma and neglect shapes children into adulthood – stars the Hot Dog Crew. Your Hot Dog crew. As adorable children. Adorable children that nothing bad will happen to, certainly. They’re not minor cameos, little winks for those in the know. Without getting into spoilers, the writers of this site play a major role in my book.
Here’s Seanbaby as a little boy dreaming up a Flash Gordon-style serial where he knows devastating space karate.
Jason Pargin is an overly serious child who chooses the company of obnoxious flitting birds. It’s a metaphor for our work Slack.
Lydia Bugg is our youngest, most upbeat wiener, so she plays the role of a precocious girl lost in a children’s book she wrote herself.
Dennard Dayle with his skateboard and abs is Hot Dog’s resident cool kid, so in the book he’s an aspiring musician with an imaginary friend who’s equal parts rock star and older brother.
Merritt K knows absolutely everything about Saturday Morning Cartoons, even the ones that don’t completely kick ass.
Alex Schmidt is a brilliant kid obsessed with science, his pet rat Proton, and Beakman’s World. The only thing he wants is to find a way to combine them all.
And of course I put myself in the book. Not as a character, the whole book is kind of me. It’s about growing up the latchkey only child of a single, working parent. About raising yourself on unsupervized media, internalizing loneliness way too early, and struggling for the rest of your life to connect with other human beings in a way that seems so easy for everyone else, but you can never quite get a hold on. I wanted to connect my experiences with kids today still facing essentially the same problems, but now with countless corporations, content creators, and expertly designed algorithms all competing to milk their isolation for engagement. At its heart, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about growing up with mental illness, letting go of childhood trauma, the inherent injustice of the modern class system, and punching a racist ostrich puppet right in the fucking beak until he dies from it. And 1-900-HOTDOG is an intrinsic part of it all. I wrote it for you, and because of you.
Please buy it, read it, leave it a review wherever you do that, and tell your friends. It truly does mean a lot to me, but I’m uncomfortable with earnestness for reasons well covered by my book, so I will be returning to blackmail and harassment. Buy it or I’ll kill your cat.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sam Koepnick, who bought seven copies of the book and it still wasn’t enough. Way to go Sam, why didn’t you buy eight?
Just like we do every year, 1-900-HOTDOG is taking the very best articles by the very best people and making them free. Just like every year, this is our holiday gift to you and the world. And just like every year, you and the world got us jack fucking shit. So make it up to us by spreading some of these free articles around, or sharing the entire free category of the site to your friends, family, and enemies you still kind of want to bang.
Brockway decided to focus on longform Hot Dog journalism this year, and spent most of his time digging through the garbage of obscure fanfiction writers and aspiring animators to prove what lunatics they were. Yet somehow when they caught him in their backyards, pinned in the beam of a flashlight, his beard full of trash like a hungry raccoon, they insisted he was the actual lunatic. The fucking gall.
Street Fighter: Dream Never Ends, Part 1 🌭 & Part 2 🌭 & Part 3 🌭
Talyn Rahman-Figueroa makes her living grifting aspiring diplomats on social media, but her true passion is and will always be inserting herself into Street Fighter* fanfiction about fucking**. Her other, even more true passion is defrauding Capcom to make it seem official.
*There will be no Street Fighting.
**There will also be no fucking.
An anti-drug sock puppet musical parody of Miami Vice starring Curt-Hiss the Beatboxing Snake. Well, we say “starring,” but the only real star here is Mr. Crack.
CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos Part 1 🌭 & Part 2 🌭
In CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos Part 1, you’ll laugh at the flailing creative efforts of a horny old racist puppet weirdo. In CyberKnight and the Hand Puppet Commandos Part 2, you’ll learn about a real life hand-grenade based karate death cult and their explosive decapitations. It’s a ride.
Krull is a movie about many things: Oppression, rebellion, cyclopses, krulls. But mostly, it’s a story about love. And the sweet fucking flamethrower love gives you.
Hey you remember the animatronic Chuck E. Cheese band, right? Those forever-broken animal robots that wished you a musical happy birthday before shorting out half the arcade? They were the direct inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy’s. You knew that. Maybe you didn’t know their creator went insane trying to invent a new kind of energy and blew up a chunk of Florida with a homemade bomb. But you’ll know that after reading this, so it’s cool.
It’s your birthday. You’re eight years old. You just got done crawling on your hands and knees through a labyrinth of sticky tunnels that have never, ever been cleaned. You jump in the ballpit that was briefly closed because a kid threw up in there. It’s open now, a stoned teenager pretended to wipe it down. You find the filthiest balls and throw them at your best friend, before adjourning to eat the world’s worst pizza with your unwashed hands. Suddenly one wall explodes in multicolored lights, a broken loudspeaker buzzing an announcement nobody can decipher. Terrifying, unexplained automatons jerk into broken-limbed motion, singing a Beach Boys song they don’t have the rights to. This is the happiest you’ve ever been. You’re at ShowBiz Pizza Place, and you’re watching The Rock-afire Explosion Band.
Yes, later they’d be rebranded for Chuck E. Cheese, Mitzi Mozzarella would lose her rockin’ tits, and the fancy gorilla would be replaced by a trashy mouse, ruining the dignity of the franchise. But for a time The Rock-afire Explosion Band were on top of the world. Created in 1980 by Aaron Fechter of Orlando, Florida, the Rock-afire Explosion would become the sum of his life’s work. He actually didn’t want that. He did not want to be the guy who made Pizza Robots. He wanted to save the world. He wanted to invent the electric car.
Let’s throw back further, to the 1970s: America was in the middle of a gas crisis, and electricity wasn’t yet for liberal pussies. Aaron Fechter wanted to be the solution, but changing the world takes money. So he started a Science Business, which at the time meant going door-to-door asking if people needed any science. That seems like a joke, but that’s what actually happened. The joke is you hiding recruiter-friendly phrases in white text at the bottom of the four-hundredth resume you send a malfunctioning robot who sorts it right into the trash because it thinks your street name is too ethnic.
For Aaron Fechter, life wasn’t on Easy Mode. It was the Tutorial. He simply knocked on people’s doors, asked if they wanted any inventions, and that worked. He pressed left stick to move and celebrated his well-earned QUEST COMPLETE pop-up. Behind one of those doors was a carnival grifter who asked if designing rigged shooting games was science, to which Fechter replied “YUP!” With just that chance meeting, and plenty of seed money from daddy, Aaron Fechter was able to start his first animatronic game company and grift his way into history. It’s the Platonic ideal of the Boomer success story.
Aaron Fechter also claims he invented the original Whac-A-Mole game, but there are some problems with his story. Let’s see if you can spot them! Keep track of your guesses, there’s an answer key at the end.
According to Fechter, he was at a gaming expo when a carnie named Denny Denton brought him over to a broken Whac-A-Mole game, and asked if Fechter could whip up a working version. Fechter did, but when it came time to sell the game, Denny started loading a .45 Magnum in front of him while explaining “there are two kinds of people in the world, carnies and suckers, and you ain’t a carnie.” Denton cut him out of the deal and sold his Whac-A-Mole to Bob’s Space Racers, a Florida arcade company, who would license it across the world. None of this can be verified, because Fechter says Denton disappeared into the seedy criminal underworld of Gibsonton, a special magical town just for carnies and beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement.
Okay, let’s add up your points. Here are the problems with Aaron Fechter’s story, in no particular order.
- Denny Denton doesn’t exist.
- Carnies are a blade people. Ammunition costs money, but stabs are free.
- The magical town just for carnies is somehow a real place, but by all accounts it is subject to human law.
- In the story Fechter tells, he admits he didn’t invent Whac-A-Mole. He went to a booth where somebody else had invented Whac-A-Mole, and Fechter thought there was a malfunction loophole for fast inventors.
- There is no malfunction loophole.
The story that Bob’s Space Racers tells is a little different. They own the patent to Whac-A-Mole, which they claim was sold to them by two guys at a gaming expo whose machine was temporarily broken, but they fixed it. Huh, that’s… pretty much how Fechter tells it too, just with the concept of ownership intact. The two names on the patent: Donny Anderson, and Gerald Denton.
It’s basically the same story from two different points of view – one rooted in our reality, and one from the carnival-themed Shutter Island where Aaron Fechter’s decaying mind is trapped forever.
Sorry, that’s a spoiler. Maybe for Shutter Island, definitely for Aaron Fechter’s descent into madness. ShowBiz Pizza eventually merged with Chuck E. Cheese, rebranded the Rock-afire Explosion to Munch’s Make Believe Band, and the show went on. Without Fechter. In the early 1990s he split with ShowBiz entirely, fired all of his employees, and tried to go it alone. For reasons nobody could explain, modern children seemed to prefer video games to the bespoke choreography of mostly-broken musical terrorbots. Children’s animatronics was a dying industry, and while Fechter’s others creations did manage to take on a life of their own, I don’t mean that in the financial sense.
Fechter fell into his backup career: Mad science via IP theft. In 1991 he invented the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine, which sounds rad as fuck. Tell me what you picture when you read those words. I’ll wait.
You guessed jetpack. Of course you guessed jetpack. There’s no way that can be anything but a jetpack that shoots fireworks.
Nope, email. Fechter tried to invent email in 1991, only his version was years too late and named like Evel Knievel’s motorcycle. When the Anti-Gravity Freedom Machine didn’t take off, because it was not filled with enough majestic fireworks, Fechter threw everything he had into a new animatronic machine. I’ll let him explain it: “It’s smart. It’s something I think adults will enjoy. It’s a robotic brain, mechanical, not a computer. And it’s going to be relevant to the post-apocalyptic challenges I think we’re all expecting.”
Go ahead, guess.
You guessed Road Warrior-style animatronic death bus. Obviously. That’s the clearest way I know to say “Road Warrior-style animatronic death bus” without tipping off the Feds before it’s fully online and unstoppable.
Wrong again!
In this game, the player tries to bash an animatronic cockroach with a big flip-flop. I guess the roach is what makes it “relevant to all the post-apocalyptic challenges we’re expecting?” Damn dude, really putting some English on the concept of stealing Whac-A-Mole. It was called Bashy Bug and you may recognize it from nowhere. Nobody bought it, because it suffered a malfunction at the gaming fair where it debuted. Hopefully while he was trying to fix it Fechter locked eyes with a younger, faster inventor and instantly knew that time is a flat circle.
That should be the end of the Platonic Boomer success story: A man of great privilege born at the perfect time dipshits into massive success, goes insane when he realizes he doesn’t have a second idea.
But then YouTube came along. A couple of dudes got a hold of his old Rock-afire Explosion robots, made them lip-sync modern pop songs, and created a viral hit. Fechter saw his path back…
And immediately tried to sue it.
“I hated it,” Fechter says. “That was my first reaction. Absolutely hated it. Those were adult songs. That’s not the Rock-afire audience.” He went on to say those YouTube guys were his “new Whac-A-Mole” enemies, because the man has self-inflicted mole poisoning and he’ll never escape Carnival Island.
I don’t know how Fechter’s lawsuit ended. I’m assuming he successfully sued the hell out of those shitty punks trying to exploit the purity of childhood nostalgia by forcing a beloved robot band to perform adult pop songs. Good riddance, may they rot in hell.
Oh hey, it looks like Aaron Fechter has his own YouTube channel for the Rock-afire Explosion Band now. Let’s check in on that.
It was actually Aaron’s idea the whole time. He went to a YouTube fair and he saw a Rock-afire Explosion Band Does Adult Pop Songs booth, only it was malfunctioning at the time, so he built his own. Everything was going great until a drifter named Yout Ube shot Fechter in the knees and disappeared into the underbelly of Viral Town, where cops fear to tread.
Ganking the idea bought Fechter a few hits, but you can see the views dip sharply even in the thumbnails up there. When things looked their bleakest, Aaron Fechter looked back upon the beach he’d been walking to see a single set of footprints in the sand. He asked Boomer Privilege “why did you abandon me there, at my darkest times?” And Boomer Privilege looked upon him and said “my man, you’ve been riding on my shoulders this whole time. You have literally not taken one single step.”
Just as Fechter was about to give it up for good, Five Nights at Freddy’s came out.
Fechter was back on top of the world! See? You entitled kids just need to knock on enough doors, somebody always needs Pizza Robots. Pure bootstraps, baby.
Now Fechter puts on new shows just for his YouTube channel. After thirty years, the Rock-afire Explosion is back with original material! Let’s see what Billy-Bob the bear has to say:
Huh. Most times when somebody says they “get asked one question more than any other,” it’s because they’re gay and still in the closet. If they say they can only answer that question through song, it’s because they’re gay and about to come out of the closet with a lot of style. I mean, hell yeah, Billy-Bob. I’m here for this. Be true to yourself!
Here’s a sentence you have to speak fluent Hot Dog to understand: Aaron Fechter is Wogglebugging Billy-Bob the Pizza Robot.
The song goes on to explain that Billy-Bob is definitely not gay, but he’s also not ace. He’s actually really into girls, he just can’t get with one. Fechter thought it better to build an incel robot than a gay one. Aaron Fechter, driven completely mad by the endless easy success of Boomer privilege, succumbed to hate. I’m playing this up, but it’s hardly a twist. All the clues were here. There was actually only one. You should’ve seen every word of this coming when I first typed “Florida.”
Here’s the official Rock-afire Explosion Twitter account. Not his own account, the account of the beloved children’s pizza band.
Aaron Fechter surely programs all of his tweets into the Rock-afire choreography board. In some dark Florida warehouse, there’s a Hillbilly Pizza Robot doing Seinfeldian observational riffs about children’s anagrams and hate crimes. Dennis Miller rants about the bump-stock preferences of biological women, beb. Letterman lists of his favorite ethnic bombings.
Wait, that last one’s real.
You know what’s weird about this primitive carnival robot choreographer listing his favorite bombings under a Pizza Bear account? I guess a lot of things. But mostly it’s that his favorite bombing isn’t his own bombing.
Oh right, let’s get to the bombing.
On September 26th, 2013, Aaron Fechter’s Orlando warehouse exploded. First responders dug through the rubble to find twitching robot limbs and burning gorilla heads. They said it was “like the Joker’s lab exploded” because they’re fucking casuals who never heard of Professor Pyg. It was such a disaster the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council made a special pamphlet and slideshow just for the incident.
This is not a general pamphlet about the kind of thing Aaron Fechter did, it’s specifically about the time he, Aaron Fechter, blew up his animatronic warehouse while trying to invent a new kind of fuel. There were no fatalities, but there was massive property damage due to the failure of the cylinder he used to store it.
That incredible damage is from one cylinder failing. He had six on premises.
Now, Aaron explains that the cylinder failed due to hidden “rust worms,” which the Transformers Wiki tells me are voracious writhing creatures that inhabit the sea of rust. The Florida Hazmat chief says it because you can’t use that type of container for that type of fuel, that even the friction from opening the tank’s valve is enough to ignite it, and that Aaron is lucky to be alive after using this janky ass arc welder setup to make a hydrogen bomb.
Aaron Fechter called his new gas Carbo-Hydrillium, and you can really feel how hard the Orlando Fire Department wanted to roast this nerd as they patiently explained all the stupid shit he just did.
The city said they had to treat the rubble as an active bomb site because the remaining cylinders were so dangerous. Aaron Fechter was cooking with it. He was cooking with homemade hydrogen bombs. I love how the pamphlet points out it wasn’t even cheaper. That has nothing to do with the disaster, it’s just to make Aaron look stupid. This whole thing is such a masterclass in calling a guy an idiot in a professional setting. They should teach it in Passive Aggressive Memos, which I assume is an MBA class every one of my former bosses took. The Orlando Fire Department absolutely rejoices in lighting up this Pizza Robot moron for slide after slide after slide:
Is sub-pamphleting a thing, like sub-tweeting?
They don’t even allow Fechter the dignity of plausible deniability. After twenty slides of vague barbs, the Orlando Fire Department takes the gloves off and slaps Aaron Fechter right where it really hurts: In the Pizza Band.
I can just picture Aaron Fechter whining to the burning head of his keyboard gorilla like Owen Wilson in The Royal Tenenbaums: “Why would they make the point of saying someone’s not a chemist? Do you think I’m especially not a chemist? … You didn’t even have to think about it, did you!”
He was probably just happy they said he invented Whac-A-Mole. Although wait, the Whac-A-Mole Wikipedia page says it was invented in Japan in 1975. Which means, holy shit – we’re multiple layers of IP theft deep. We’re nesting arcade grifts like parentheses. But then, why would the Orlando Fire Department ever think Fechter invented Whac-A-Mole? Unless, holy shit again – standing there in the exploded rubble of his former livelihood, his Pizza Friends in twitching mounds all around him, a still-smoldering Aaron Fechter looked the approaching First Responders straight in the eye and said:
“First thing you have to know: I invented Whac-A-Mole.”
This article is thanks to a Hot Dog Tip from Thrillho.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mickey Lowman, who disappeared into Carny Town and was never seen again.
This is Part 3 of the breakdown for Dream Never Ends, a Street Fighter novel. I’ll give you a little recap so you don’t have to read the first two parts, or you don’t have to read any of this. It will not enrich you in any way.
The author, Talyn Rahman-Figueroa, is a social media grifter and the kind of person who can call herself “the fairy BOSSmother” without even trying to swallow her tongue. She insists her original character, Tawnya Blaze, is not a self-insert Mary Sue. She’s simply the most beautiful actress in the world, who happens to be the same race and age as the author. Also “Tawnya” is one letter off of “Talyn.” This is like me writing a novel where Bobert Bbrockway flaming uppercuts Balyn Bahman-Bigeuroa into a combine harvester, then insisting it doesn’t reflect my own desires. I don’t know why I’m doing all this legwork. I’ll let Talyn explain in her own words, they’ll do a much better job infuriating you than I can.
Hilariously incompetent lies. This was not first in a series of novels, its weird that a Shotokan student would describe punches as “thrusting hand go aways,” I looked up Diplomacy University and it seems like a party college, and the only place listing “Hoshi” as Ryu’s last name is the 1994 Street Fighter movie. It’s a fucking sweet film – Golden Globe winner Raul Julia flies across the screen in magnet boots – but I don’t think it’s canon.
I wouldn’t be talking about this soft-cocked fanfiction at all if it weren’t for Talyn’s insistence that it’s a legitimate book. She actually wrote her own page on the official Street Fighter wiki calling this the best book ever written, and implying that Capcom endorsed it and made it canon. It’s not, they didn’t, and it’s not, respectively.
When we last left off, Tawnya and Ryu finally went on their first date, which ended with him having a premature demon orgasm, then punching her in the face. They call it the Conor McGregor Special. Let’s check in on Ryu now-
Still just wandering the streets, cumming and fireballing. Honestly, kind of living the dream.
Talyn insists this is practically Street Fighter canon, then writes every single passage like a horny pre-teen who only suspects the general shape of fucking through a veil of parental controls. If it’s a Street Fighter novel, it’s one where all the Street Fighters hate Street Fighting almost as much as they hate their bitch wives. If it’s an erotic romance novel, it’s one where the romantic leads never fuck and occasionally punch each other in the face. And yet somehow it’s not good!
I’m being unfair, almost 2/3rds of the way into Dream Never Ends we did have our first actual Street Fight. Now we’re about to have our first on-page fuck!
You know sex – that thing where you tangle your limbs together into a loose mess while the man kind of roams around on top of a woman, occasionally tickling a fulsome collarbone as the woman considers slapping him. There’s a hack ‘90s joke here where I go “sounds like my love life!” and then I’m punished with millions of dollars and a CBS sitcom.
Give Talyn credit: Ken is a consistent character. He fucks once in this book and it’s the only time he’s not actively hating his bitch wife. But baby, the second he busts? Right back to doing what he does best.
I’m no relationship expert, but if you think the only thing that might save your marriage is the morning part of a short business trip to Ohio, you lost her years ago and that thing you call wife is a fairy changeling who took her place. (The fairy changeling is also going to divorce you after the Ohio trip.)
And that’s too bad for Ken, because Eliza is the most beautiful woman in the world… besides every other woman in this book, including the author.
A real sharp-eyed, pink-lipped beauty is how I might describe a healthy salmon, but let’s set that aside. It’s a wild writing move to jump POV mid-chapter to a brand new, unnamed character who has never appeared before and never will again, only to live out his silent makeout fantasy. One he never speaks aloud, and does not affect the story in any way. This passage shows such a fundamental lack of human storytelling. I know Talyn really wrote this book, but it’s also something an AI would do if you fed it only lipstick ads and asked it to write a taxi company’s sexual harassment course.
At least we’ve broken the seal on fucking. If Ken can do it with his bitch wife, anyone can.
Not you, Guy.
Remember, Guy is the one who hates his bitch wife. Sorry, that doesn’t narrow it down. He’s the one trying to nail his bitch wife’s sister directly in front of his bitch wife without her noticing. He tries it in the crowd at a fight where he is the next opponent. His wife goes for a beer run, and he thinks he can heft up her sister and bang her against the bigscreen – the one showing the fight everyone is here to see, the one where he’s fighting next. This can only end with an announcer calling his name and the camera cutting to Guy penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister against a screen showing him penetrating his wife’s sister-
Last time I joked Guy felt he had to replace the high stakes of Street Fighting with max difficulty infidelity, but here he is just mashing buttons. He’s supposed to be the greatest ninja from an ancient line of ninjas. What is an affair but a penis-based stealth mission? You should only know a ninja is cheating on you when your sister gives birth and the doctor comes up holding a cloud of smoke.
Talyn is trying to write “sexy, high-stakes public affair,” and chose to do that by having her characters pork on the 50-yard line at the Superbowl. Then one of them gets up and says “uh oh, I’m playing in this game!” Maybe he puts on his helmet and waddles into formation, then catches the game-winning pass and runs it 47 yards for a touchdown – all with his dick out. Sorry, I got distracted writing an accidentally great scene.
The only thing that saves Guy is the sister’s inability to work a belt buckle, which actually should be the yardpost for a person’s ability to consent.
Rena finds her bitch husband, whom she hates, and her bitch sister, whom she hates, dry-humping against the Jumbotron, and she simply waits for him to cover his boner before handing him a beer. This is a marriage at the Short Trip to Ohio stage of failure.
Haha Rena tries to transfer ownership of her husband like a used Hyundai. All signing the back of the title with an X, writing “my sister’s vagina” under the mileage report.
While his bitch wife is up in the bleachers swapping him like a Magikarp, Guy is down in the ring facing his opponent: Ken Masters. Now, you have to remember that just seconds ago this master ninja’s boner was defeated by a belt buckle. He’s probably still half-hard while fighting Ken, and we all know if anything traumatic happens to you with a partial erection, that becomes your fetish. Those are the rules of the curse.
It’s a one-sided match. Guy’s as bad at Street Fighting as he is at fucking. Ken’s up there spin-kick goofin’, seeing if he can work a little jig into a Hurricane Kick just to keep himself invested, meanwhile Guy is on his knees eating a foot buffet and trauma-cumming himself dehydrated.
Here’s a technically accurate way to quote that passage about Street Fighting: “Ken’s technique sucked him, trapped … until … Guy crashed to the ground, coughing out … a mixture of fluids making its way out of his throat.”
Ken’s about to beat off Guy for good when the lights go out, there’s some motion in the dark, and both men die of broken hearts. I’m not being poetic about a gay cowboy romance. That’s how Talyn writes Akuma’s “Raging Demon” super – the one where the screen goes black and little flashes go off. I am simply too exhausted by it to properly make fun of it, so let’s focus on the aftermath: The Raging Demon destroys both Ken and Guy’s hearts, which isn’t a big deal – they both get heart transplants. Also not a big deal. It’s a little like trading a used Magikarp husband to a hated sister. Mostly a paperwork thing.
No, the really big deal is Akuma’s pressure point nerve strikes – the ones that leave their victims with very specific, horrible nightmares.
The idea that there’s a point on the body you can jab to give someone custom-themed night terrors is something George Dillman would call “next generation thinking” and charge $99.95 for. There’s martial arts magic nonsense, and then there’s dream pokes. I can’t fully explain why nightmare nerve touches are stupider than punch fireballs, because if I could I’d be making literally dozens of dollars as a karate YouTube grifter instead of stuck here reading this book.
Ryu and Sakura head off to confront Fei Long, who they believe is possessed by the Dark Hadou, and responsible for Guy and Ken’s attack. Ryu’s reasoning for this is simple: Fei Long is an artist. The vilest profession on Earth.
Fei Long’s an actor, and that’s basically a Sith with veneers. Art is the darkest of all desires, for all artists must perfect a project before moving on – even if it means murder. Hey, is that editing? Is that Talyn’s cum-brained way of saying editing? Is that why she never does it? Maybe not cutting that full chapter about a wang-waggling underage spanking was actually a moral stance.
Oh hey, speaking of Kenji, the little spanked boy Ryu vowed to care for forever:
He’s not in this scene.
We finally learn that Tawnya is the one possessed by the Dark Hadou, something both the reader and Ryu knew from the first page. She kisses Ryu like a snake eating a watermelon, and they both face their undeniable feelings for one another, though circumstances beyond their control will forever keep them apart. You know this old trope, it’s Romeo and Juliet.
If Romeo killed Juliet with a flying uppercut.
The real twist: Tawnya wasn’t possessed by the Dark Hadou, she was actually possessed by Rose… who was possessed by the Dark Hadou. That’s not actually a twist. It’s barely a parenthetical. By-proxy devil possession is still devil possession according to Mississippi law, and prosecutable by horse execution.
One of my complaints is addressed in the finale, and I really wish it wasn’t. There are indeed more Street Fights as we enter the last 20 pages of this Street Fighter book.
“You’re writing a Street Fighter novel? Haha, what does that mean – like fireball, fireball, block, insert quarter?” is what Talyn’s boyfriend said when she told him she was writing this book.
“N-no, it’s more than that!” is what Talyn said, frantically taking notes.
In the middle of this epic fight, where each character takes turns saying the names of moves that they do, Ryu flashes back to his training. When he was but a young boy under the care of his elderly master, Gouken. Let’s check in on that sweet moment:
Let’s check right the fuck out of that moment. Holy shit, how do you combo cancel out of an anal bead taming?
Asking for a friend.
That I have tamed with anal beads.
I barely need to tell you how this ends. Ryu is mercilessly beaten by Akuma, who’s come out of Rose, who’s come out of Tawnya. Just a nesting doll of Japanese karate demons but again, not as rad as that sounds. It becomes clear Ryu can’t beat Akuma with his skills alone. Close your eyes and picture the first thing a hack would write. Actually, don’t bother – Ryu will do it for you.
Ryu realizes his true fighting power comes from love! And then he defeats Akuma with the one thing no demon could give him: A hug.
No, it’s a huge fireball.
Love is a huge fireball. I’m no hypocrite, this ruled when Krull did it, so I guess it gets a pass. Just remember: Whenever you quarter-circle forward and punch, you’re really saying “I love you.”
Ryu uses the power of love to shoot a fireball so enormous it somehow brings his dead master back to life.
I’m not cutting anything. That was all the explanation we got. Gouken was just chilling in the afterlife when the door to nirvana exploded and Buddha got obliterated in a wave of fire, so he grabbed his boy-taming beads and stepped through the smoking hole back to Earth to see what’s up.
That’s the end of the book.
Maybe you’re wondering what happened to your favorite characters. Remember Ken and Guy were both laid up with heart replacements and trapped in the karate poke nightmare realm – which is what they call their bitch wives’ vaginas, haha up top! Also Rena just traded her husband to her sister for a broken dirtbike and two tickets to a Bon Jovi cover band, what happened there? Did she blow the drummer? Did Fei Long finally make a kung fu movie sweet enough to satisfy his dark heart? Was it the one about a pussy that turns men to gold? All these questions and more will be answered never – Talyn forgot to wrap them up here, and all the social media grifting in the world couldn’t make anyone want another one of these books.
Kenji the spanking boy was never mentioned again, and died from unprotected genitals. RIP.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: TatersTales, who realized that the real anal beads were inside us all along.