Author: Robert Brockway

Karate Blazers 🌭

Gamers love to nostalgia-wank about the good old days of gaming, back when everything was bits and women weren’t interested so it didn’t even matter that they weren’t allowed. I’m not immune to it, myself: I adore pixel art and I’ll always remember where I was when I first found out ninjas kidnapped the president. Games weren’t better then. The good ones were, and still are great — and if you have anything bad to say about Chrono Trigger I will pick up my best friend, who is a frog with a sword, and throw him at you. But there was also so much forgettable garbage that you, perhaps understandably, have forgotten about.

Let’s talk Karate Blazers.

104% of all games in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s were just reskinned arcade brawlers that the developers knew you would never beat, if only out of disinterest. They weren’t designed to be good, they were designed to bilk you out of seventy-five cents because Super Hang-On was busted. And Super Hang-On was always busted. It was the McDonald’s ice cream machine of the arcade. Here’s the secret: There’s no such thing as Super Hang-On — it’s just a demo screen and a plastic motorcycle, there to lure you into the arcade where you’ll settle for Day of the Punch or some shit.

Karate Blazers is the perfect example of that mindset. It actually starts kind of awesome, before it becomes quickly apparent that the game does not want you to play it.

Look at this amazing cast of characters in the intro screens:

Okay, not Mark. I honestly forgot about Mark, just like the casting director of Degrassi Junior High did when Mark was up for his dream role: “boy in background.” Mark is a cunning design trick: He’s a quarter-burner. Sometimes you’ll panic while hitting continue and accidentally pick Mark, and then you have to kill yourself as quickly as possible to pick someone cool again.

Hell yes, that’s better. Glen’s got a flat top, thunderous fists, total invincibility, and flat top again. You’d be an idiot to pick anybody else.

Oh. Oh, but you didn’t know about Gil! What’s justice, to a man like Gil? I didn’t have that question in my heart before, but now that’s all there’s room for. What is justice, to Gil? Is it a righteous wave that does not break early? Is it a crowded, sandy handjob in the back of a VW Bug? Is it some kind of conditioner? Gil is a question, and my quarter is the answer.

Good god, this is Sophie’s Choice. The only thing I like better than an unkillable flat top or a mysterious himbo is an idiot ninja. You can’t make me choose between these three amazing warriors and also Mark — it’s just not fair!

If Karate Blazers is skimping, it’s not on characters. It’s not story, either. In the early ‘90s, a video game was only as good as its story was short. If you needed more than two sentences of plot, you were making a Kojima game. And even Kojima only got four sentences back then. Here’s the story of Karate Blazers, in its entirety, and I promise I’m not leaving anything out:

I did not omit a single screen, I didn’t crop out any text. The story of this game is “girl has scrolls, then bad guy, then no scrolls and girl glows.”

You must stop him! Rescue her! Or wait, rescue the scrolls and avenge her? Hmm. That glow is suspicious. It could be rescue her from the power of the scrolls. Listen, all of these questions have the same answer: Uppercut.

But hold on, let’s go the wikipedia page that this game hilariously has:

Oh, so… yeah. “Girl has scrolls, then no more scrolls and girl glow.” Actually a pretty good way to convey that story, Karate Blazers.

Incidentally, Karate Blazers only has a wikipedia page because some of the characters later make a guest appearance in a better game. A fitting legacy for Karate Blazers, also known as “they moved Final Fight two spots down and I didn’t notice in time.”

Shit, I forgot the most important test. Before we go any further, we have to make sure this is a proper ‘90s brawler. Where is the racist Jamaican caricature we beat up?

Oh okay, cool. It has to have at least one Jamaican or it doesn’t count as-

A-all right. Well, it can have more than one Jamaican so long as-

Well, dang. I’m wrong about everything. This was actually the best ‘90s arcade brawler. It had the most racist Jamaicans to beat! That’s the law, I didn’t make it!

I suppose we should get started talking about the video game I’m talking about.

Here’s Mark again. Haha, you forgot about Mark already didn’t you?

I got as far as seeing Mark’s walk before I restarted the game for anyone not Mark.

He walks like you’ve only ever told him about walking, but he’s never seen it done before. That’s what an AI thinks walking is, if you only feed it photos of people fighting diarrhea. Mark, there was no test, you offered no answer, and somehow you still got it wrong.

Let’s go with Glen:

Mark, watch this shit, are you watching? This is how you fucking walk:

Glen walks like he’s practicing for tits. It’s kind of a sexy werewolf prowl. If you saw that motherfucker walking towards you like that, you’d have no idea what was about to happen to you, only that you did not properly prep your holes for it.

Here’s how Glen jumps:

In Karate Blazers your only jump is also an attack, so every time you want to jump — and you will want to jump a lot — Glen does that fucking mental air-plank thing. Every one of his fights looks like documentary footage of a salmon going up a waterfall.

Once again, I do not understand how you’re possibly going to beat what Glen is bringing to the table. But we owe Gil a shot.

Here’s Gil’s walking animation.

This is not off to a great start, Gil. We’re barely registering above Mark levels here, and Mark levels are what we use to calibrate the scale. How about that jump, buddy?

That’s almost a normal jumpkick, you beautiful idiot. Gil, unless you summon a giant neon hair scrunchie and hula-hoop across the battlefield right now, thi-

That’s Gil’s super move, and I didn’t mention Mark and Glen’s because they were nothing. I didn’t bother recording them. Mark did a jumpkick that shot out force waves, and Glen punched the ground which glowed a bit. There was simply no precedent for Gil to turn himself into the spokes of a glowing hair wheel and drive across all who oppose him.

This is it: This is what’s justice to him.

Akira, that is a tough act to follow.

Look, you’re clearly awesome. You’re both a dipshit and a ninja. You’ve got purple jeans and you’re wearing pantyhose for a shirt. Torn pantyhose. But Gil brought Magical Girl energy to a Double Dragon clone. This walk better be something else:

Akira! You walk like a crab trying not to wake up the kids. You walk like your underwear is around your ankles and you’re trying to fuck something that’s only slightly faster than you. Are you trying to guide an invisible, drunk bear toward freedom? That’s what happens on Fun Fridays when the physical therapy nurse asks patients to try the Running Man. This walk alone easily puts Akira in the lead. But let’s see that jump:

Pretty funny. It’s not “nature is telling Glen to spawn” funny, but it’s up there. That’s not a double jumpkick. That’s how modern dance communicates the joy of spring. Keep in mind this is an attack, so all of Akira’s battles…

Look like the theater kid snapped. There are six racist caricatures in this gif and one of them is wearing Prince’s laundry-day outfit. Whatever’s happening here is clearly a hate crime, but which one? Or rather, how many?

You may have already noticed that Karate Blazers has like four enemies, and its secret is putting eighty of them onscreen at the same time.

Quick, how many Andrew Dice Clays do you see here? Three? You’re wrong twice: There are six, and they’re all Joe Piscopo.

This isn’t just lazy, it breaks the whole game. When all 17 of the same guy converge in the same place, there’s no way to tell their attack animations apart. You can’t time a counter when one punch is actually ten punches, so you end up just getting mobbed by more minority hunks than a Lindsey Graham wetmare.

But the game isn’t hard. It’s just cheap. There are a lot of leather-clad dudes, but they’re only dangerous when they gang up on you, and they’re all dumb as shit. It’s like fighting an Idaho biker gang, or 4chan.

Like check out this guy, who spends an entire boss fight pee-dancing behind a box.

Here’s that boss, by the way.

He is disappointingly bland. He’s got kind of a wrestler open-mic night vibe going on – like he’s really just trying out some new material on Thursday to see what’s worth bringing into the ring on Saturday. “Eyepatch? Is it eyepatch, you think? Eyepatch and rave hair? Surely not eyepatch, rave hair and dick board. Two out of three. What do you think?”

But it’s just the first level. The bosses are the only place games like this really get to shine. They’ll ramp up as we go. They must!

Anyway, here’s our next gang: The portly weebs.

Their main and only form of attack is attempted handshake:

And when the game puts thirty of them onscreen at the same time it looks like a Limp Bizkit mosh pit.

It looks like a teenage employee trying to survive a Wal-Mart Black Friday. This is every Juggalo meetup when the girl arrives.

There’s just no elegant solution to this game’s terrible combat. Well, not mechanically elegant:

Welp, here’s the next boss:

I guess it scans that the boss of the portly weebs is just the portliest and weebiest. Dressed in a skimpy Mai Shiranui costume and so dedicated to his craft that he rolls everywhere like a fat Katamari.

Please meet your fourth enemy type: eight hundred robots.

And that’s… actually pretty cool. I really did not see robots coming into this mix. So what are they gonna do different? Laser eyes? Plasma swords? Rocket cocks, which I call Cockets? No? Nothing? Just ordinary mobbing and punching? Here, you know the words. Sing along:

You know, I’ll give you this one, Karate Blazers: The best way to defeat robots is actually through interpretive dance. They understand neither love nor art, and Akira’s battle frolic is both.

This is getting old fast. Let’s just air-sass our way through the robot level until we get to the boss, which is probably some lame scientist or something.

Wesley Snipes!

Holy shit, Karate Blazers, this is legitimately awesome. I never would have thought to put Wesley Snipes in charge of the robot army — in all my books, he fights the robot army. Wait, what’s that you say? There are actually two Wesley Snipes standing in the same spot? Fuck. Yes. Has somebody been reading my screenplay, Passenger 114: Always Bet on Double-Black?! But I was told it was unfilmable! That Wesley Snipes had too much dignity! That I was misunderstanding the basic tenets of both movie-making and roulette!

Surely, there’s no way to beat the Multi-Snipes.

Unless…

Honestly, the rest of the levels after this were a letdown. How could they not be? It’s just like the tagline for Passenger 114 says: “Once you go double-black, you can never double-back.”

Let’s skip right ahead to the final boss of the whole game. Eyepatch Dickboard wasn’t very good, and Dinner Roll: King of the Weebs was directly terrible, but Karate Blazers gained a lot of goodwill with Blade II: II Blades. I’m pretty amped to see what form their crazy final boss will take…

It’s Eyepatch Dickboard again???

Karate Blazers truly never thought anybody would get this far. They never thought anybody would want to get this far. Who would waste sixteen dollars in quarters just to hit the prance button all afternoon?

This guy!

And that’s Karate Blazers. There were five enemies sixteen thousand times, you beat the end boss at the very beginning, and from start to finish the only move that worked was a war jete. I burned a solid day romping through pixel stereotypes just to bring you this ending, which I present here in its entirety:

Again, I did not omit a screen. I did not crop out text. You and the boys are giving the casting director of Cats your best sex-yowl, and then there is girl.

Wait, also scrolls!

Nevermind, this ending works.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, toasty god: who is now serving six consecutive life sentences for Prancing With Intent to Kill.

Tags 2020, arcade, beat em ups, Free, games, karate, Video Games

NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Ultimate Tag 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 10/28/2020
11 Comments on Nerding Day: Ultimate Tag 🌭

Ultimate Tag is a real show that I did not make up no matter how many times I fact check this sentence. Nope, still real. Are you sure? Yeah, holy shit. This is the world, everybody. We’ve reached stupid critical mass here and any further stupid will have to happen in space.

I know talented artists that have struggled their whole lives to land a show on TV. They practice and study, refine and revise and kill themselves perfecting their craft, sure that one day they’ll be good enough for the bigtime. But that’s not how TV works. That’s not how anything works. Everything in this garbage society works like this:

RICH ASSHOLE: We need a new show. It literally doesn’t matter what it is. Pick a thing.

RICH DIPSHIT: What about children’s games? We do them but with huge children.

RICH ASSHOLE: Adults?

RICH DIPSHIT: Yeah, those.

RICH ASSHOLE: Sounds good, do you want to kill a sex worker and blame a minority?

RICH DIPSHIT: Always!

Anyway this semen in the eyeball of quality is hosted by J.J. Watt and several lower Watts who, as I understand it, are football.

Yeah, those are the hosts this show deserves. J.J. Watt’s brothers look like they’re two different species on the timeline of animals that evolved into J.J. Watt. I’m sure somebody’s going to jump in here and tell me they all give huge kidneys to war orphans, but they look like somebody trying to draw Tom Brady from memory and they speak every sentence like it’s a word puzzle.

Everything you need to know about Ultimate Tag’s atmosphere can be described by their theme song. It’s a little number called Ladies and Gentlemen by a band named Saliva, which critics once described as “painfully unnecessary.” That’s the only appropriate anthem for Ultimate Tag, which seems to less pay homage to the ‘90s than to wildly misunderstand what was charming about them in the first place.

The actual game of Ultimate Tag is exactly what it sounds like: It’s tag reimagined by Mountain Dew. There are special courses and alternate rules but it’s important to remember that, at its core, Ultimate Tag is wussier than normal tag because you’re not allowed to touch each other. You pull flags. Flag tag is the pillow humping of playground games. It’s the game you play when your PE teacher can’t afford another ‘incident’ on his watch. Flag tag is the version the mitten-mandatory kids do at the James Buchanan School For Sexually Bizarre Children.

That got a TV show!

Ultimate Tag courses are mostly just repainted Double Dare sets full of extremely minor obstacles for aspiring Influencers to stumble over. Sometimes they branch out and do some pretty crazy setpieces that still manage to be boring, but in the air.

Ultimate Tag was an idea so bad it wouldn’t fly as a MadTV skit, and it was executed worse than Muammar Gaddafi, a Baltimore traffic stop, or a MadTV skit. Ultimate Tag sucks… but what we’re really here to do is make fun of the Ultimate Taggers.

Yes! They rolled up some American Gladiator characters! To play tag! Holy shit, what a gift for me. Thank you, Ultimate Tag! I take back none of the things I said about you, but thank you for doing my absolute favorite two things in the world: Trusting professional athletes with a creative task, and wildly overestimating the enduring legacy of American Gladiators.

Let’s meet a few of the pro taggers!

This is Horse:

He kind of looks like you accidentally threw away Kit Harington but managed to find him again at the dump, and his persona is that he’s very angry… like a horse? His catchphrase is “you ain’t never gonna put the horse down” which is just patently untrue. They’re like the easiest animal to put down. Half of all animal deaths in pop culture are horses with broken legs. We put horses down if they look like they have a headache. Horses die just to prove cowboys have emotions. We kill horses for emphasis. They’re like the underline of the animal world.

Here’s Flame:

Her whole deal is that she’s a martial arts and weapons expert, neither of which she is even close to allowed to use in this — again — extremely gentle game of flag tag. She acts like a cold and calculated killer, and then they let her loose to do what she does best… which is jogging around a Burbank soundstage for twenty seconds while looking mildly annoyed.

This is Viking:

He seems most committed to his character, which consists mostly of him improvising incorrect facts about viking villages. “In my village,” he roars, “the boys would… you would tend to chickens!” This claim is met with general confusion. “In my village,” he roars again, “we used… wooden swords! We slapped each other with wooden swords!” The vibe is confused, anxious. “Vikings lived in villages!” He roars thricely, “I looked that up!”

This is Beach Boy:

Whose entire persona is “shorts.” He’s happy, none too bright, and you could probably fuck him in South Padre and not worry that he’ll get all clingy and try to start a long distance thing when you head back to Oklahoma. He will giggle at the “homa” part though. Every time.

Meet La Flair:

The mandatory dickwad who used his own real name as his alter ego. Fuck you, you placeholder of a man. You cardboard cutout audience member. I’d say you’re like mayonnaise but sometimes people notice the absence of mayonnaise. You’re the paladin of Ultimate Tag.

Here’s the Iron Giantess:

Her whole deal is that she’s huge and strong but — again — she’s not allowed to use either of those things in this, a game of tag for children who need safety scissors. In fact, both of those traits are significant disadvantages in a game whose only defining attributes are speed and agility. I think the idea was to have her be like what Andre the Giant was to wrestling, but instead she’s like what Andre the Giant was to heart medicine.

It’s The Caveman!

Hahaha, fantastic. I guess his persona is that he’s been unfrozen into modern society and then thrust into the game of Ultimate Tag? That’s a terrible use for an unfrozen caveman! Bring him to the mall and laugh at his antics. Bring him to the airport and watch him freak out about godbirds. Fuckin’ bring him to high school so he can make you popular — you only get one, maybe two unfrozen cavemen in your life. Don’t burn one on Ultimate Tag.

Now it’s time for Banshee:

She’s the show’s wild card, which mostly consists of her making crazy eyes and embarrassing screeches. Banshee claims to lure men in with her beauty and sweet song only to lead them to disaster, which you might recognize as actually a siren. Listen, some people run good and some people read good. It’s true that some people do both, but if you agree to be on the show Ultimate Tag, it’s safest to assume you’re not one of them and just ask for help with your homework.

And lastly, we meet Geek:

He thought Napoleon Dynamite was really funny, and so did everybody else for like four months. That was the last time he understood society. When they asked him to make up a tag persona, he didn’t have an idea, but he did have an old Halloween costume and a desire to belong again.

Anyway, don’t watch Ultimate Tag. There are like three funny minutes in each episode where they force athletes to do improv, and the rest is just watching Crossfit enthusiasts do some light jogging and deal with mild frustration.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Nick Ralston: whose tag persona is Man With Gun and has never been tagged.

Tags 2020, Free, Sports, tv

LEARNING DAY

Captain Video vs. The Space Idiots

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 10/26/2020
2 Comments on Captain Video vs. The Space Idiots

Captain Video and his Video Rangers was a 1950s sci-fi TV series that absolutely pioneered the burgeoning art of not giving a shit. They barely named the characters. Captain Video’s first name was Captain and The Video Ranger’s first name was “The.” He had generic adventures in space and the show was so low-budget they couldn’t afford to make all of it so they showed clips from other shows to fill the time. That’s no joke – large chunks of early Captain Video episodes were just somebody watching a better show and explaining “all the people you see are really undercover Video Rangers.”

In keeping with that grand tradition of drunken apathy, Captain Video’s Children’s Activity Books were 7 pages long and half of one of those was a form you had to fill out. You colored things like “the commissioner’s radio” and “an unadorned wall.” You could listen along to a custom album for each book, presumably with all eight words on it. You could cut out your own puppets which, in true Captain Video fashion, don’t even fold up right and fall off your finger when you move them, thus ruining the daily play you put on for your dogs because it is the plague, and shit is getting weird.

Tags 2020, children's books, coloring books, Free, tv

FUCKING DAY

Denise Richards’ Hottest Scene

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 10/22/2020
4 Comments on Denise Richards’ Hottest Scene

The last movie sex scene I brought you was that time the kid from A Christmas Story jacked off a sentient dirtbike. But that was more a condemnation of The Dirt Bike Kid’s flagrant violation of child protection and robotics laws. It has been said that I’m just not a very erotic writer, and I cannot let that stand. So today I bring you a very normal and good sex scene that every single one of you should have no problem masturbating to. Have you already guessed it? It’s…

Eroticism is mostly foreplay, so let’s set the scene. We open on a plain bedroom, which grows slightly less plain when Denise Richards enters it. Denise Richards was 1994s Sexiest Girl Still Alive according to a poll of fifty-two-year-old men who still worked at the mall. She comes in wearing a fringe jacket like a saucy little warlock, and coos to a nearby camera: “You want the usual?”

A voice on an intercom answers in the affirmative, which sets the stage for this to be a kind of psychosexual voyeur thing. But James Spader is not yet in this scene, so that can’t be the case. There’s a twist coming: Denise Richards pours a generous drink, and then we pan down as she empties it over an exposed human brain.

The voice on the intercom sighs. It’s the brain, and the brain enjoys this treatment. Man, James Spader really should have been in this. This is a violation of his entire contract with the year 1994. Denise Richards asks the camera if it wants a little more action, then leaves and returns having actually put on more clothes.

It’s a little hard to see, but that is a special, extra-sexy robe made out of white feathers, presumably just for this occasion. She sheds it immediately, because that is the sexiest thing you can do while wearing an ostrich. Underneath, she is dressed in sensible white clothing — the height of ‘90s sexuality. She begins a clumsy strip tease while the brain aggressively yells things like “show it to me baby!” and “take it off!” — both of which she is already doing. We all had dial-up back then. I guess there were lag issues. Denise Richards does what I think is the Macarena with a little sit-down break in the middle:

And despite her only taking off six dead swans and one stocking, the brain cries out in pleasure, then explodes with a shower of sparks:

The brain sighs, sexually spent.

And that’s the story of that time Denise Richards made a brain cum. That brain, as you may have guessed, was Paul Walker.

May he donut forever in that great big Safeway parking lot in the sky.

I’m being unfair, of course. No, not about Paul Walker — he would genuinely love that.

I mean there’s a context for this scene in which it makes perfect sense. A set of details which, according to screenplay law, means that this scene simply had to happen for the story to be complete. In the film Tammy and the T-Rex, which I’m not making up no matter how sure I am that I’m actually lying about that…

Denise and Paul’s characters are crazy about one another, but as is so often the case with young love, Paul is killed and has his brain put in the body of a robot T-Rex. The T-Rex is ultimately destroyed but the brain is saved, so Denise’s character keeps it in her room and gets it off on occasion until she can steal a corpse to implant it in, because Denise Richards can definitely handle that operation. The scene where Denise Richards jerks off an animatronic T-Rex to completion was sadly left on the cutting room floor.

The director, Stewart Raffill, explains his vision:

“A guy came to me who owned theatres in South America and he said, ‘I have a T-Rex.’ It was animatronic and was going to a park in Texas. The eyes worked. The arms moved. The head moved. He had it for two weeks before it was going to be shipped to Texas and he came to me and said, ‘We can make a movie with it!’ I said, ‘What’s the story?’ and he said, ‘I don’t have a story, but we have to start filming within the month!’ and so I wrote the story in a week.”

So anyway, take note aspiring screenwriters: If you’ve just graduated from a prestigious two-year MFA program and lucked into a fellowship that will allow you to start your long crawl from intern to writer’s room, you can go fuck yourself until you die from it. This is how movies get made.

Tags 2020, Free, movies, sex

PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Karate Rap

Basically every hobby I have is either problematic in nature, or quickly becomes problematic because of the way I do it. Take memes: I can’t just enjoy them and move on; I have to dig into them. I have to research them. I have to hunt them to the ends of the earth until I finally corner them, having already taken everything away from them, leaving them only animal desperation. That moment — when a once civil thing becomes feral? When you can see intelligence die in their eyes, to be replaced by fear and fury? That’s what gets me off, but with memes. Do y’all know The Most Dangerous Game? I’m going to Most Dangerous Game this meme. Here’s the Karate Rap, a third tier viral video that did around a million views back in 2012.

We open on Sensei Dave, who’s got kind of a sexy stepdad in a sitcom thing going on. There’s definitely a Patrick Duffy That Fucks vibe. Let’s call him Patrick Muffy, and move on.

He looks at the camera and the first words out of his mouth are “keep training, you’ll get it!”

Then the camera spins around to show him talking to a sleepy ten year old who came here to learn how to Crane Kick bullies, but his parents paid for a whole month so they won’t let him quit now that he knows real karate class is just Sensei Dave hitting on moms. Yes, somehow this video actually has the balls to take place in a strip mall karate dojo full of 9 year olds with anger issues, making it the most realistic depiction of karate ever put to film.

Sensei Dave really goes through the rolodex of ‘80s karate shit. He meditates and then glows with energy as he ascends to another plane where karate is relevant:

And he throws mild punches to the camera in between extreme zooms on his kiai face.

It’s right about now when Sensei Dave starts rapping, a term I use generously. The chorus — “Ichi, ni, san, shi, come on everybody train karate! Karate: train your body!” — will stick with you until the day you die. But Sensei Dave’s flow is somewhere between Debbie Harry and grandma making fun of your music after too much wine.

Next we meet Karate Girl.

I’m not being sexist. She is.

That’s how she introduces herself:

I’ve trained karate around the world

I’m known all over as Karate Girl

I’m witty, I’m pretty, got the female smarts

So listen to our rap about the martial arts

I’m not going to touch ‘female smarts,’ and I’m also not going to touch Karate Girl, since she’s sultrily lounging around on the foot-sweaty mats like she only gateway’ed on choking and now nothing less than a full shoulder throw gets her going:

The video really does seem to think karate is sexy, a logical fallacy nobody has made since Van Damme. Here, enjoy Karate Girls bending over in their formless white gis to show what might be formless white asses.

Then Sensei Dave brings in his mistress to show them how it’s all done.

As is the way with all karate instructors, the child’s dojo soon gives way to grander delusions. Now Sensei Dave and Karate Girl dress up in Meat Loaf’s bathrobes to rap with a backup band whose every member is competing to be the first asked to leave the costume party for poor taste.

They go full ‘80s as hard as they can and in every direction. They shift transparent over a nighttime cityscape like they’re in the credits of a sexy detective show:

Sensei Dave channels that Top Gun energy to break boards with the band and high five, while Karate Girl only catches part of the message and kicks the bass player in the gut.

They even slip in a few quick seconds of that most ‘80s musical moment: The flirtatious conversational duet.

Sensei Dave: “I’m a black belt!”

Karate Girl: “Makes my heart melt.”

Again, nobody has been this turned on by a white guy doing martial arts since Jean Claude Van Damme got to star with himself in Double Impact.

You know what’s especially crazy about this? They actually had some kind of budget. When Sensei Dave fails to rhyme “I train in my car” with “I’m a nin-ja!” we cut to…

Those were cutting edge effects back in the day!

Here Karate Girl briefly changes her name to Samurette – the only martial-arts themed self-burn more dismissive than Karate Girl — just for this sweet sword slice cut.

That’s actually what worried me about this video. The budget was too high for something of this caliber. It was filmed too well. And there were moments like…

That black belt over the excessively tiny towel? It feels too self-aware. I get that they intend a bit of silliness here, but that feels like the moment in a parody where you stop laughing because they’ve taken it too far. And this is before Karate Dog, with his Karate Bone:

This is the internet. You know the rules: We’re not allowed to laugh at somebody if they want to be laughed at. For this to be truly funny, they had to have meant this video in earnest. At least a little bit.

And so the hunt begins.

Jump down to the YouTube comments and you’ll find multiple people claiming to be in this thing:

But the concept of internet points combined with anonymity have turned every commenter into that kid who told everybody he was the basis for Boy Meets World. We all have Canadian Girlfriends now.

Still, this is a positive start. Next we find out if Karate Rap has an IMDB page. That’s not a high honor — I have an IMDB page and fans regularly message me on Twitter to tell me they loved me when I was Robert Evans.

But it does help legitimize the date: Karate Rap was made in 1986 – well before we invented irony!

More importantly, Sensei Dave has his own page! His name is David Seeger, and he went on to direct music videos for the Mickey Mouse Club and daytime soaps. So he actually specializes in making short films so shoddy they leave you questioning their legitimacy:

Now we’ve got a name. This is the part in the hunt where I kneel down to touch some spoor and crumble it between my fingers, looking to the horizon and whispering “he’s near.”

You hear me, Sensei Dave? I have fondled your spoor!

On one of his pages, Sensei Dave posts a little explanation of the Karate Rap, which is thus: His kids found out about their parents’ embarrassing past and wanted to post it on YouTube for Canadian Girlfriend Points.

Another page clarifies their intent in making Karate Rap: Yes, they were serious. They meant it as a demo reel to kickstart a career in music videos. And it worked! Sort of! Disney saw it and thought “these people look like they work cheap” and that happens to be the exact and only requirements for working on a Disney live-action show.

Please note I have switched to “they.” Because now we have learned that Karate Girl was actually Sensei Dave’s wife, Holly Whitstock Seeger.

Please also note the repetition of the hilariously false claim that MTV wouldn’t touch rap in 1986 (they’d been playing it since 1984), with the twin implications being: That’s the real reason MTV wouldn’t play Karate Rap even after the Seegers’ many desperate submissions, and also that the Seegers were actually pioneers in rap and it might not even be a thing without their important work.

Sensei Dave was serious about his karate, too. If you hadn’t already guessed that from lyrics like “I’ve walked the streets, I have no fear — I always know my karate is near!”

In Karate Rap, he variously claimed to be a ninja, a shogun, and a samurai, but he is actually a 9th degree black belt, which qualifies him for one free pretzel (with purchase of child-sized drink) at any Wetzel’s Pretzels in the greater Davenport area. He’s rocking that mall ninja lifestyle to this very day with his fanny pack full of shurikens and, presumably, hard candy snacks for the grandkids.

He’s also a Knight of Malta! Somebody please just introduce Sensei Dave to Dungeons & Dragons; it is a much cheaper way to get people to call you cool pretend titles.

David Seeger also started Samurai Studios Inc., which has apparently pivoted from making ‘80s videos that look like 2000s videos making fun of ‘80s videos, to making 2000s websites that look like they’re making fun of ‘90s websites.

Wait, holy shit – Sensei Dave actually inherited the legacy of making “media that’s hilarious because somebody tried” from his father, Hal Seeger, who you might know from one of several cartoons you definitely don’t know:

A legacy which Karate Girl is tragically optimistic about!

This is an entire family based around the rapid-fire production of D-list media to be made fun of by internet comedians. Seriously, every single one of his siblings also pursued careers like “frequent extra on CSI shows” and “staff writer for sitcoms that last four episodes.”

This is too much. I’ve gone too far. You stopped rooting for me six paragraphs ago. I’m not even the anti-hero anymore. I’m just the bad guy. And now I’m hunting this poor meme into its den. I’m coming after its children.

That’s not a metaphor.

There’s a small, almost shy little subheading hidden in the About section of one of their production studio pages. It’s called ‘It’s a Family Affair.’ Sensei Dave and Karate Girl have many children. And those children have also gone into making media you laugh at for the wrong reasons.

That is three generations of an entire family dedicating their lives to making stuff for us to make fun of! Each new baby, with their first breath, inherits a storied legacy of crap! They’ve been churning out pop culture corn syrup since the 1930s — nearly 100 years of Hot Dog material!

I may be the only person in nine decades to say this: Thank you, Seeger family. I am a fan of your work!

Tags 2020, Free, karate, Martial Arts, rap, videos

PODCASTING DAY UPSETTING DAY

Podcasting Day: The Duets of Movies with Jason Pargin 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 10/16/2020
1 Comment on Podcasting Day: The Duets of Movies with Jason Pargin 🌭

Happy Upsetting Day! Hopefully you’re not upset that you’re getting a podcast instead. Today we discuss the important and oft-overlooked movie genre: Over the Top.

Now, I know what you’re saying: “That’s not a genre, that’s a movie! A great movie! You are not the men to bring it low!”

And you’re right. So we contacted Jason “David Wong” Pargin for backup. He’s known as the “alternate thumb position” of podcasting, and today we finally find out why. We’re not here just to make fun of Sylvester Stallone’s wild misunderstanding about the importance of armwrestling in modern society, we’re here to make fun of its entire legacy: from The Wizard to Road House, from Twister to the Huey Lewis/Gwyneth Paltrow classic… Duets? Yes, Duets! We make fun of Duets! We dare.

Haha, that’s the poster for Over the Top?!

Haha, that’s the poster for The Wizard?!

Haha that’s the poster for Duets?!

Haha that’s the poster for Road House?!

Twister is beyond reproach.

I also once again defend my title as “Most Losingest Competitor” in Seanbaby’s Book Game! Guess how it goes! Hey, fuck you. Maybe it goes well this time.

It… it doesn’t.

And remember, Jason’s here promoting his new book: Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick. I have read this book. All the way to the end. Yes, I know you’re proud of me and I appreciate that, but I mention it because I know the book is fantastic. It’s funny, thrilling, stupidly hilarious, and also subtly, cuttingly relevant. I don’t know how he pulled all that off, but he really did. It’s sort of Idiocracy for the Elon Musk generation. It’s sort of cyberpunk for the TikTok generation. It’s funny and it’s deep and it’s compelling and it’s satire and it’s a book! You read those!

While you’re here, please remember we’re still just starting this podcast. It really helps if you like and subscribe to The Dogg Zzone 9000, and it helps immensely if you review it. Try to mention how big our dicks sound!

Tags 2020, Free, Jason Pargin, movies, podcast