Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
NERDING DAY

ThunderCats Live!

In the 1980s, when spirits were almost as high as TV executives, every stupid concept got its own cartoon, from literal cowboys to eight types of Smurf. And every one of those dumb cartoons got their very own terrible, child-scarring live stage show. In 1987, ThunderCats Live! gave over a dozen drama school dropouts their very first minimum wage job. They held it for almost an entire summer. 

Even ThunderCats Live! had to admit they just didn’t have that He-Man pull. They couldn’t justify the $80 a night to take over a seasonally-shuttered hockey rink with their fanbase alone, so they recruited every other show that did not yet have a foam-headed teenager gently spinning in their name. The event sprawled into an all-star spectacular… if you are very generous about the words “star” and “spectacular.” Also maybe “event.”

The ThunderCats shared a bill with most of The Comic Strip, the series remarkable only for the shamelessness of its knock-offs, and Gumby, who would, in the 1980s, guest star in literally anything because it was dead easy to knock up a slipshod Gumby suit. Plus the inventor of Gumby, Garth Gumbison, would have let you slap his IP on a Pray the Gay Away camp if it would buy him a gas station burrito.

I’m not going to tease you: No video exists for this solid hour and a half of foam-crotched crimes against theater. I promise you that no matter how heartbroken you are, you will never match my despair. But I’ll tell you what: The program alone was fucking incredible.

Right off the bat you can see that we’re dealing with a budget of ‘somebody’s mom was really good at halloween costumes,’ and an enthusiasm level somewhere between ‘new Dairy Queen employee introducing themselves to the rest of the staff,’ and ‘surly teenager posing for summer camp group photo.’

Foam rubber muscle suits just don’t hold up when they’re flesh-toned. It looks like Lion-O is mostly tumor and sass. This is what the melty guy from RoboCop would look like if, instead of being hit by a patrol car, he was hit by the theater bug. 

And now for the least necessary request I’ll ever make of you: Please pay special attention to the crotch area. Notice how his foam-rubber bulge is so poorly fit that it stretches at the thigh, giving Lion-O the saggy, wrinkly, straining groin of a 90-year old man at the nudist beach who insists he’s not too old to join the volleyball game, and tries to prove it by doing a full squat.

Cheetara’s expression tells me she knows exactly how embarrassing this photo is going to be, but honestly, if you airbrushed out the spots and the ThunderCats logo this is just your 1980s mom going to the good Jazzercise class — the one where she kind of wants to fuck the instructor. Meanwhile Tygra, whom I definitely do not remember as “master architect of the ThunderCats,” is the only one in this whole cast trying to sell it. It’s too bad that nobody’s in the market for a Tiger-Man equally as proud of his new bikini wax as he is of his vintage moon boots. At least he has all that CAD experience to fall back on.

And then, oh god, then there is Snarf:

This could have been a puppet, and it would have been fine. It would’ve been a little suspicious that every time Snarf had a line, the ThunderCats had to gather around a convenient boulder, but kids are stupid — they never question a puppet, even if it’s coming from inside a van and it doesn’t know the password. Instead ThunderCats Live! figured it would be less obtrusive to enlarge Snarf eight times his normal size, then give him an inert headpiece with a frozen expression that reads ‘guy banned from FurryCon for entering the normie zones and “forgetting” to loincloth up his seventeen-inch, anatomically very incorrect cockpiece.’

Fuck. I need to fight that thing. Every glance puts me into a fresh attack mode. I think it’s… it’s the gloves, I guess? Or the knees? Look at all the other costumes: They’re cheap and laughable, sure, but there’s some basic effort to make them not look like a costume. They shouldn’t have sculpted Lion-O’s foam codpiece, but somebody did sculpt it. There was effort. Meanwhile Snarf is sharing that same stage in a pajama onesie, dishwashing gloves, and grandpa’s novelty slippers. He’s not even part of the show — he’s just an intrepid stalker who noticed a Snarf gap and is hoping Cheetara won’t question why it keeps trying to kiss her with a mouthpiece that smells like chloroform.

And now we come to Panthro.

Come to Panthro.

Panthro has cancer of the whole head. It’s the first ever recorded case of Skullphoma. Panthro’s actor has decided this embarrassment was the last straw, and he’s finally going to end it all tonight… right at the very second the photographer shouted “now everybody say RAWR!”

No seriously, why did the costume designer do this to him? Did the guy playing Panthro run over her dog in the parking lot? Panthro is just bald. That’s it. That’s his character design: “bald gray guy with Spock ears and Danzig’s bikini.”

Panthro is not, canonically, being attacked by a parasitic fungus. Were the only reference photos left at the library of a panther dying from hydrocephalus? He looks like he’s being attacked by a Metroid. We have bald caps! This was the easiest job, and you whiffed it the hardest. The group project took a vote and said you could just take notes, so you slapped the teacher’s aide and took a shit in the diorama. 

As usual, the SilverHawks suck in a distant and forgettable fashion:

They’re trying for “valiant cyborg space warriors”…

But they’re landing firmly on ‘Tron porn parody.’ You look at that guy on the upper right. You tell me that’s not a costume from Hard-on Drive: The RAM Master.

Somehow the Street Frogs are actually okay:

Maybe that’s because the uncanny valley is a bit shallower if you’re not supposed to look remotely human in the first place. But fucking tell that to Karate Kat.

Who looks like the rest of the Pizza Time Players kicked him out because they couldn’t watch another friend die of an ether addiction.

God damn it, I am so mad there’s no video! 

Fucking there was a motorcycle stunt number!

I would eat an entire man just for shaky bootleg cam of this wondrous atrocity. The best I can do for you, and I know it’s not much, is this modern-day Brazilian dance homage to ThunderCats.

I guess. 

I guess that’s pretty weird. Lion-O looks like a clown in a hurricane and Snarf looks like a clown in another clown… but it just doesn’t compare to the unhappy, bulbous drama hulks of ThunderCats Live! 

Look how easily the Brazilians prance about in their little “costumes”:

If this was ThunderCats Live!, there would be three crotch splits already and only two of them would be costume-related. I mean, I guess it’s kind of funny that sexy Brazil is once again bringing an almost naive fuckability to everything they do. And yeah, it’s pretty silly when Lion-O does his sassy little kicks:

But I just can’t help imagining ThunderCats Live!, and what would happen to their Lion-O’s wrinkled groin bulge if he tried that move. It would be amazing! It would defy physics! His codpiece would explode and send bits of crotch confetti up into the lighting rig where they’d burst into flame and rain down on the audience! Costumed motorcycle stunt riders would be blinded by the dick-napalm and ride into the crowd. It would be glorious! There would be no survivors! 

There’s nothing this Brazilian version can bring that the American version wouldn’t have done a thousand times bett-

Oh. Oh my. What’s-

Holy shit. Brazilian Mumm-ra can get it. I think… I think he already got it actually. I might need a doctor. This is-

God damn, hold up-

No, you can’t do this to me! Not this late in life, I can’t be discovering things about myself I’m-

Great. So now I have a mummy fetish. Thanks, Brazil. That’s a real cool and handy thing to develop in the middle of a fucking global toilet paper shortage.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Terminal Madness, Terminal Madness!

Terminal Madness was a mini-documentary about computers released in 1980, when basically nobody cared about computers. It was made in and for Madison, Wisconsin, where basically nobody cared about computers. It was created by people who did not care about computers, for people who did not care about computers. It was half an hour of newscasters talking about a thing they didn’t give a shit about to people who did not give a shit about it either, but also didn’t understand it and didn’t want to hear about it. It was sort of a commercial for computing in general, sort of a warning about an incoming future the audience would not understand, and sort of a long elaborate burn on the people who did actually care about computers. Terminal Madness mocks more nerds from a barely polite distance than Waffle House employees during Dragon Con.

The early minutes of Terminal Madness need to do a lot: They have to introduce the very concept of computers to their intended audience, which seems to be ‘apathetic Wisconsites in the midst of a seasonal depression so crippling they can’t even get up to change the channel.’ Then the show has to convince them to not only care enough to learn, but to learn enough to buy one instead of a used car, or a delicious new shotgun.  

So it’s too bad that Terminal Madness has no interest in doing any of that, but would rather play crude CGI skits and boop out screeching computer calliope music that sounds like robots tried to put on a circus but got everything murderously wrong.

I know you can’t hear that gif, but if you pretend that you can, you will be correct. Terminal Madness sounds like that gif looks: juddery and ill-defined, distinctly painful in a weirdly playful way, like puppy teeth, or a child who is also the devil.

Terminal Madness gave primary host duties to Jerilyn Goodman, who proudly does not understand computers…

Then recruited computer expert Nicolas Johnson, so they could ask him: “What can you do with computers?” 

HIs answer: An extremely long, convoluted analogy about how people once asked that question of the engine — they asked, “what can you do with an engine?” and you could say “it drives a car” and they’d be like “cool, it drives a car.” But then you’d say “it runs a lawnmower,” and they’d be like “cool, it runs a lawnmower.” And anyway, the point is it was impossible to answer that question, just like it’s impossible to answer this question.

Even the computer gets sick of his shit, and starts heckling him:

Nick talks for five minutes about hypothetical people who have never heard of engines and the asshole time traveler that refuses to explain them, but does not list a single thing you can do with a computer. Not one.

Please remember: This is the co-host that knows about computers. 

Back to Jerilyn, pretending to listen (not hard).

After not explaining anything and hinting at a thesis statement that might be “computers are impossible,” Terminal Madness smashcuts to this screen:

Woops, that’s the symptom checker to find out if you’ve been possessed by Algebracadabra, The Number Sorcerer, and turned into one of his shambling Combinatorial Explosives. Quick, factor for the human heart before he uses you against The Kidz Crew, in his quest to make learning no fun!

No, that’s actually the insane way Terminal Madness chooses to break down the main questions Madisonians have about computers, after “c-computer?” and “can you leave me alone?” 

They are:

Do your eyes glaze over when someone mentions computers?

Do you worry they will explode?

Do you think they are only for math wizards?

It’s obvious that Terminal Madness has no idea why you should be interested in computers, so they don’t even try to answer their own first question. Jerilyn jumps right ahead to the second one, since it’s clearly the most pressing. 20% of her audience just heard the word ‘computer’ and threw the TV in the fridge before leaping out the window. She attempts to console people who only use the microwave from behind a welding mask by saying “don’t be afraid of computers… there might be computers in your home you don’t even know about!”

And that’s a good way to destroy half of Madison, Jerilyn.

That’s seriously her only answer for people who are afraid their computers might kill them — “it might already be too late!” 

This explains the Great Wisconsin Tech Riots of 1980, in which four Radio Shacks and one Sentry (sounds roboty) burned to the ground.

Anyway, on to the third question, which is what the rest of Terminal Madness is about: “Do you think they are only for math wizards?” 

Wrong, buddy! Computers are not just for nerds!

And Terminal Madness is going to prove that… by talking to the biggest fucking nerds they can find!

Jerilyn introduces everyone in the next segment as “regular computer users,” then she pauses to put extra stress on every syllable of this: “who, by the way are NOT geniuses.” 

Now we’ve established that these people might be dorks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re smart, the rest of this documentary is about breaking down what the progenitor nerds did with computers (it sucks). 

This guy is going bald like a fjord and argues that it’s “fun” to enter his expenses.

Jerilyn follows this up by asking if computers have made his life easier, and his whole existence crawls to a halt.

After a long silence he answers, “easier? … … … … no.”

Computers have destroyed this man’s life somehow, and we get no closure on that. We just hastily cut away to a guy who uses his PC to make setlists for his band. 

Hey! Holy shit, that’s kind of almost cool! 

Wait wait, remember where you are.

His band’s name is “Wheatstone” which doesn’t sound rad, but don’t worry: It’s probably named for the Wheatstone Bridge, a type of circuit used to measure resistances!

Wheatstone is the least cool band name since Gary Goodtime and The All-Narc Allstars, and the only word this guy misspelled on his setlist was “coccaine.”

Wheatstone’s groupies are called The Moms of Wheatstone. Wheatstone’s riders all dictate two cases of Flonase in the green room. This band exclusively plays weddings between a man and a bodypillow. I promise you that every show Wheatstone ever played has ended in an apology to the people who tried to dance, and a sincere thanks to the soundtech for not beating them up again.

Somehow our proto-nerds get even stranger: Little Martha here says she enters FAA data for fun. 

She’s been doing it since she was four!

I’d make a joke about how Martha is either insane, or an alien, or an insane alien, but Martha’s face beat me to it:

George Martin used his computer to make a remote control house!

It does everything! It turns on his lights, it starts the coffee, it harasses his wife into doing her chores at all hours of the night! He keeps saying he set it up to switch on the lights and set off alarms so “we get up to feed the baby,” but even in the reenactment that’s a lie. It’s only his beleaguered wife that rolls out of bed at the computer’s cue, probably so the housebot doesn’t get mad at her again and spike the temperature on her next shower.

In fact, George Martin programmed his home to raise his child for him almost exclusively:

George Martin will not technically be murdered by robots. It will be their guiding claws that teach his child to hate all flesh. But it will not be the robots that kill him. Not technically. 

This guy, on the other hand, is absolutely going to be murdered by robots.

In fact, he’d prefer it.

He built out a little program that allows him to voice control his computer. Here’s what he taught it to do, in order: Nod its head ‘yes,’ shake its head ‘no,’ shriek to the heavens with impotent fury, and aim a laser gun.

Terminal Madness ends on a warning, and it is shockingly not about how programming a rudimentary AI to scream and shoot at the sound of your voice is a surefire way to become the first footnote in the history of Skynet. Nor is it about how letting your robot-house raise your child will net you a kid who always takes out the garbage at exactly 9:37AM and does not understand why you cry when it stabs. No, Terminal Madness’ dire warning about the dangers of computing comes in response to this teen:

Who says he likes computers better than TV because it’s “like havin’ someone to talk to.” Even the computer can’t believe how sad that shit is:

To be clear, he’s not referring to the internet. He talks to the computer itself. Like it’s his only friend. Apparently all the nerds do. 

And so Terminal Madness ultimately posits that the true danger of personal computing is that birth rates will plummet once all the nerds stop trying to be social, and instead opt to spend more time with their machines.

You idiots. You god damn morons. You think dorks don’t fuck? Every single nerd in that image is working furiously at finding other nerds to bang. My first internet was a local BBS system and every single user had fucked every single other user so many times that one of the nerds wrote a program to try to track who’d fucked who and there was a huge fight… about his code. 

Nerds don’t fuck? My god. You reach a hand into the great writhing orgy-mass that ends every COMDEX and if it comes back unfucked I will give you fifty bucks, which in 1980 was enough to buy a modest robot house and send your kids away to a nice boarding school once it turned them murderous. 

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Ads of True Crime Magazine

Men! Manly Men! Now that I have your attention, ladies and Macho Men interested in Meaty Manliness, I’d like to put forth my thesis statement: Men were at their Manliest before the widespread use of electricity zapped the testosterone atoms of an entire nation. In this column, I aim to do two things: Explore just what made old-timey Men so Manly, and spread my ill-informed anti-electricity propaganda. I’ve already started on step two – invisible lightning bolts from the walls are electrifying your genitals as we speak! — so here’s step one:

The manliest things about old-timey Manmen were their magazines. None of that ‘Targeted Interest’ or ‘Independent Journalism’ crap. Pre-1960 magazines were about two things: Punching and fucking and sometimes that was actually just one thing. But I’ll tell you what I’m not going to do: Read these terrible articles. They’re just shoddy fanfiction about actual murders from a freer time, back when Libel was a kind of off-brand hooch and a fact-checker was just a guy you had to beat in a fistfight if he called you a fibber.

Instead, I posit that we can best examine the whiskey-pissin’, beef-horkin’, revolver-suicide-retirement-plan manly manly men of the 1930s by having them take off their girdles and dance around a bit. But failing that, I guess we could just look at some of the ads in their old detective magazines. 

Advertisements in True Crime publications put a lot of emphasis on wildly unqualified amateur law enforcement, which to be fair, is very in-wheelhouse for Complete Detective Magazine.

But apparently being a cop back in the day is like being president today: All you need is raw enthusiasm, absolutely no regard for the sanctity of human life, and to have read part of one book (in the cop’s case, THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME; in the president’s case, THE MAKING OF BLOODSPORT: CHEAP DRUGS, CHEAPER SEX, AND THE VITAL ROLE OF DOING LATERAL SPLITS IN THE FOR-REAL KUMITE WHICH DEFINITELY EXISTS). 

Don’t worry, once you read the table of contents for THE BLUE BOOK OF CRIME, you are done investing in your law enforcement education. You can then hunt criminals straight from the pages of the detective magazines you already own: 

God damn, Conly “All Neck” Ayers got fucking roasted in his own wanted poster. It’s true that it looks like his chin is mad at his throat, it’s true that his nose is also his Adam’s Apple, and it’s completely, inarguably true that he’s a human Patrick Star, but that eyebrow dig was just uncalled for.

If you just plain don’t have enough rope to hang Conly “The Trunk” Ayers, maybe Johnny Bugg is more your speed:

John Harvey “Sock Foot” Bugg is the least threatening anything in the history of everything. That name is not pulled from my Doug fanfiction, but it’s definitely going in there now. And he’s a kidnapper! What does he kidnap, Smurfs? Imagine being abducted by Harvey “The Sock Foot Cowboy” Bugg – your search party would be snickering right up until they found your severed toes artfully arranged into a flesh bouquet, aka The Sock Foot Corsage. 

But point taken: a little tin mail-in badge is all the qualification you need to hunt these Dick Tracy first drafts. 

Weirdly enough, detective magazines seem to endorse petty crime as much as they do slipshod vigilantism:

True Crime mags are full of more minor scams than your mom’s Facebook page. You won’t find this many low-effort cons anywhere else but an Airport Hilton, and it’s very odd that one publication is trying to move product to both predator and prey. Were these publications like the Reddit of their day: the only game in town where you could both complain about social justice and find exciting new hate groups to join?

But hey, it wasn’t all mail-order cops and classified-ad criminals — old-timey detectives knew how to have fun!

Finally! A tie that you can jerk off to! No longer do you have to carry two ties, one for work, and one for self-pleasure. Yes, one tie that does it all, from business deals on Wall Street to frustrated masturbation in the back of an Edsel! Plus the back is absorbent, for clean-up!

Not content to merely hustle rubes with magic trick, there were also a ton of ads for actual magic.

I didn’t even know you could sell ‘new types of prayer,’ but that’s exactly the type of sloppy desperation I’d expect from “PAXCO,” the shitty progenitor Hydrox to PoxCo’s far superior Oreo.

Hey, do you dream of success, conquering your enemies, and mastering the power of prophecy? Have you tried… smellin’ stuff?

I guess dopes have been falling for aromatherapy scams since the first idiot with too many coconuts evolved a nose, but I just never pictured the Greatest Generation’s manliest detectives buying into it. Some whiskey-fueled private dick stumbling into his office, all gutshot and ulcerous, pausing his grim narration to light a Raspberry Nag Champa because it’s Tuesday and he needs the ‘GOOD LOVE AND MONEY WISHES’ karma. 

But I suppose that image does jive with the many, many wanted ads for poetry…

I understand that music had just been invented in 1928 by Billy Music and His Sound-Time Mouthblowers, and people were all very excited about it. But there is a lot of desperation in these many, many ads clamoring for shitty poetry about MOTHER and SACRED. This has to be some kind of scam, but for it to be this widespread, wouldn’t there have to be some takers? That implies there’s a significant demographic of singing gumshoes who read Complete Detective as much for the hot scoop on new ways to make your own blackjack, as they do for inspiration in penning “The Ballad of Sock Foot.” 

Hey, here’s an eleven-inch solid slab of crazy:

Let’s zoom in on that WANTED: A BABY! ad. I’m sure that’s a dark remnant of the time when child-trafficking laws only dictated how fast you could drive with somebody else’s kid in the trunk. 

But no, it’s actually a somewhat touching ad about infertility? This… this is not what I expected from you, Kaiser-punching cocksmen of the past. 

Let’s pick another from the wall of textual lunacy:

There’s something very sassy about building a body specifically for men to envy, but I love that FUN IN BODY BUILDING is just an add-on to SECRETS OF STRONG MAN FEATS. Implying that you don’t really need to have a beautiful body in order to rip a tractor in half with your teeth, but if you make your pecs dance while you do it then Karmov the Krusher will positively seethe with jealousy.

Huh. It’s like I’m sensing a theme here. 

Perhaps one that could explain why there’s so many ads in these pages about failed marriages…

Aw, that’s almost sweet. Love is indeed “a cherished privilege,” you chain-smoking, huge-livered, dead-at-50 old-timey copywriter. I am totally on board with this book about…

Holy shit!

That’s the darkest turn I’ve seen since I wrote that joke about child-trafficking. H-how do you solve your marriage problems with fucking eugenics?! Do you breed perfect wives out of generations of your own – no, no I can’t even theorize about this book without typing sentences that will haunt my fingertips. 

Let’s refocus:

There are a surprising amount of ads targeted at female readers, and most of them are about trying to entice or entrap the mannish fans of True Crime mags who, alack and alas, seem more interested in envying each other’s glutes than breeding out the perfect woman. 

I say “a surprising amount” of female readers not because I’m assuming women aren’t interested in detective work and savage homoeroticism — a demographic breakdown of Sherlock fans tells me that’s not true — it’s just weird they’d be into this specific magazine. Because if there’s one thing Complete Detective fans hate, it’s themselves and their failing, inadequate bodies. But if there are two things they hate, it’s their own uncooperative penises and all women.

ZOOM. ENHANCE.

“You’re gonna LOVE how much you’ll HATE women! Finally, Tommy “The D” Horton does what we’ve all been waiting for him to do, which is just fucking take the worst gender to the mat. We’re not even gonna advertise a potential use for this information — just watch this dude fucking drag the unfairer sex for 123 double-spaced pages!”

“At last, a man who’s willing to straight-up fight a female! Any female! Any female under 5 feet with no formal fight training! And recently clipped fingernails! No farmworkers! NO ORIENTALS. A single unslapped woman is a challenge that 1932 has let hang for too long! Never again feel EMBARRASSED that the undonged might be happier than you, when you KNOW FOR A FACT that Tommy The Hort once heard a girl fart in an elevator! THAT BITCH. Learn about…”

If there’s one thing Thomas D. Horton is sure of, it’s that women don’t play by the rules. He’s not sure what those rules are, but apparently there are formal playguides for literally every abstract activity, and not a single woman obeys any of them. They bargain unfairly in love for… love points? I don’t know what they’re haggling for in a relationship, but I’m damn sure they cheat at “office.” They even display bad sportsmanship when you call them animals — they’re just the worst, and if you’d hang back to light some Lucky Revenge incense while The Hortsman uses the Master Misogynist’s Prayer to nail down this Eugenics For Spite chart, we won’t even need these dames no more! We’ll be free! Free to focus on each other’s bodies, only reluctantly impregnating our carefully-bred Brood Cow when we need to make some more Complete Detectives!

Categories
PODCASTING DAY UPSETTING DAY

Not Upsetting Day: The Podcast Launch! 🌭

Heads up, Hot Dog enthusiasts: We’ve got big news! Today is not Upsetting Day! We scheduled this announcement ironically, like calling a big guy “Tiny,” or Joe Rogan “sexually viable.” Yes, this is the opposite of Upsetting Day, because today marks the official launch of our podc-

Today is Upsetting Day.

No, damn it! 

Topper can’t take this from us. Today sees the launch of the official 🌭1-900-HOTDOG🌭 podcast, Dogg Zzone 9000, available at this link, or wherever fine podcasts are sold.

That’s right, no more must you make do with those shoddy unlicensed knock-off Hot Dog podcasts, this here highly-processed tube of soundmeat is formally endorsed by the jokewranglers at 1-900-HOTD-

Topper! Fuck! F-fucking… fuck you! Fuck you hard in the soft parts, Topper.

Listen, we are extremely excited about the new podcast. In it, we explore some topics we’ve already Hot Dogged, but from new angles, with new jokes, and while bringing new information we weren’t able to cover with just 1200 words plus one weird photoshop. But mostly I’m excited that you finally get to listen to our theme song, done by the very sexually viable Auralnauts. Even if you’re not a podcast fan, you’re going to want to fire this sucker up and hear that theme song. In just 43 short seconds, you’ll absorb a full 600 IU dose of awesome to your ear and face areas, as both doctors and professors of the Badical Sciences recommend. 

Can you… can you guys share this podcast as much as possible? We really need to get to that stretch goal where we fucking fire Topper. 

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Symphogear 🌭

I wish I could have friends who love me more than they love schoolwork and boys put together. I wish I could find an enchanted hairband that signifies I’ve been chosen as the new Avatar of Aphrodite. And I really wish I could explosively jumpkick Ultra Jinma, Arch-Queen of Jealousy in a way that exposes both my True Heart and my panties. I don’t know, you guys. I guess I just wish I was in a Magical Girl Anime. But how do you start? By studying, of course. It’s time for…

Still haven’t changed that title, huh? Welp. Gotta be arrested for something, I suppose.

Let’s dive into today’s lesson, brought to you by Symphogear!

Symphogear starts off with some worryingly pretentious text that makes you think you might accidentally be watching a “good anime,” about like historical tragedies or divorce or something else boring. 

Yes yes, I know: All of the islands are in the shape of her tears — the woman who cried so much she became the moon. They say all humans are born with a hole in their heart that can only be filled when they trod on the shadow of their soulmate. The mountains breathed her name 16 times and on the 17th all cats died. 

Pretty much all modern anime has to start with weird poetry or they lose their Educational Tax Credit and won’t have the cash to faithfully render the cocks at the tips of Yggdrasil: The Monster Life Tree’s branches. 

But don’t worry. This is definitely a Magical Girl Anime, which you know because the opening credits feature an overly dramatic naked girl-orb spinning in a void:

That is mandatory. If the credits don’t feature a tortured girl-orb rotating in the space between spaces, just turn it off and maybe watch Revolutionary Girl Utena again. There are two gorbs in that credit sequence, so you know it’s good:

So far this is all par for the course, but Symphogear does do something interesting…

The most high stakes concert I’ve ever been to was a punk show where the bassist fired seltzer bottles from his ass, so I thought dodging bubbly butt-water in a mosh pit was Live Show Master Difficulty. But the world itself rests on this one! Now, I know there is one forbidden concert that will end humanity (Smash Mouth opening for Jimmy Buffet), but I’m on board to find out how a concert saves the human race. 

Ah, I see, it’s your standard “feed the Sacred Ammonite on hyper-dense girl band energy” plot device. That’s a pretty viable anime trope, actually. You see it a lot. Apparently the greatest source of pure green energy in Japan is how much a stadium full of 13 year old girls wishes they were someone else. 

I considered embedding this performance as a video so you could hear the music, but I don’t know how much of our audience suffers from arrhythmia and I don’t want to be a murderer. It is the sugariest JPOP backed by the most frantic beeps this side of a robot hostage negotiation. This is how a DJ tries to warn the crowd there’s a murderer in the club without tipping him off. These songs sound like every noise from F-ZERO happening at once. If you tried to dance to this you’d shatter your legs and then inhale them, dying from Pulmonary Legosis. If these girls are trying to fuel the Sacred Ammonite with the life energy from this concert, maybe they should dial the tempo back from Cocaine Ferret to Annoying YouTube Host, or else- 

Right. 

The liability on this is insane — you ladies are Rhythmically Negligent and you are going to get sued into the dirt unless you find a scapegoat, quick.

Oh shit, our villains are just called The Noise? I-is this the Pop vs. Noise Band battle royale I’ve always secretly hoped for? I could not love that concept more, Symphogear, but I’m torn on who to root for. I do like me some Noise Bands, unless…

They are literally vomitous maggots who spew out jellyfish-sperm and knock-off Tallboy Minions. 

Huh. 

I am as surprised as any to learn which side I’m actually on in the inevitable armageddon brewing between Girl Groups and Pedal Jockeys. But I’ve seen the Pop side’s Magical Girl Transformation Sequence, and they used the power of music to change from perky Idorus into a robot burlesque show…

While the Noise Band Guitarist Magical Transformation Sequence harnessed the power of Montucky Cold Snack to transition from “talented guy onstage” to “bitter misogynist ranting in the smoking area.”

Here’s where Symphogear’s glorious hook comes in. It’s not just about a Girl-Pop duo who secretly fight slugs in cyborg bikinis — that’s practically a cliche in Japan. The hook is that they have to continue singing the entire time they fight:

And the songs don’t even change! Their magical mechano-armor is powered by harried techno bubblegum pop, and holy shit are those robo-corsets powered. These girls warble mildly introspective diary entries and they get so hype about it they fucking chop their enemies in half the long way.

And god have mercy on your glowy lil’ tadpole-soul if a move gets its own splash screen:

These are anime rules: If a preteen Japanese girl shouts a random english word followed by a type of kick, you might survive — you’ll never walk again, and the only thing you’ll ever taste for the rest of your miserable life is the sole of a size 5 Mary Jane, but maybe you’ll keep sucking breath. If everything pauses so ROMANTIKU FOREBAA DUROPO KICKU can get its own graphic? Swallow your tongue so you don’t have to live through the seven-minute sequence of your body being blasted into space while every single part of it explodes individually.

And with Symphogear’s battle karaoke twist, it’s even more degrading. Imagine you’re a huge space maggot-horse. Life is great. You just puked up your astro-sperm, JPOP tweens are dying at your feet, this is a fine Saturday. Then some wispy young girl in Robocop’s underwear runs up and absolutely demolishes you while singing sugar-ballads about how her boyfriend better not miss the next train. 

All of the other space maggot-horses will make fun of you in space maggot-horse hell, which is honestly just like regular space-horse hell, but none of the corpses rot.

Despite absolutely working over these poor Noise Band aliens with her romance-themed typhoon uppercuts, our hero is overwhelmed and has to sing…

Oh shit, she’s going to sing Ginuwine’s “Pony,” everybody step back!

Aw, no, it’s the other kind of climax. I guess every pop idol knows one secret self-destruct song, aside from “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Hey so if that’s not our main character, who is? 

This girl:

She was standing too close to the battle.

So both of our heroes have died, but as we have learned in anime, comic books, and every single season of Supernatural, death is really just a temporary inconvenience so Dean can film a subpar slasher over the spring. 

Anyway, let’s flashback ten minutes and meet our protagonist:

This was her first concert and she is spoiled forever now. Any musical performance that does not explode halfway through, get invaded by acidic alien sperm, and end with her actual death is just going to disappoint. She can basically only go to this, and GWAR shows.

But of course she doesn’t die, and actually inherits the previous hero’s Karaoke Battlemech Swimsuit. Let’s check out her sweet Magical Girl Transformation Sequence!

Hey, you try Magical Girl Transforming on your first day. My first Magical Girl Transformation Sequence, I spun my pants off, tripped on the dog, and wound up crashing through a window while screaming about love. Did you know there’s such a thing as double house arrest? There isn’t. They just extend the first one.

Anyway, after our hero shoots for ‘playful dazzling lightshow’ and winds up with ‘painful Cronenberg organ thrusting,’ she turns into a meek little foxgirl mech, and her very first song is about how much she likes holding hands.

So I guess this was like the first level, where you get to preview all the powers but lose them to some bullshit before you actually start the real game. I’m not fooled though, I recognize problematic powercreep when I see it. It’s cool as hell to start your show off with Pop Idols power-tornado’ing space worms into oblivion, but you have to escalate from there, and things are going to get out of hand, quick. Mark my words: By the third season there are going to be ten of those girls, and one is going to be fucking a sentient asteroid, and another is going to jumpkick god. 

And it’s so important that you know I wrote that joke before I went and looked up the last episode.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

WikiHow: How To Manifest Your Desires 🌭

I want a lot of things: safety and security for my family, a fulfilling and rewarding career, an enormous and profane cannon with which I can revenge myself upon my enemies. The problem is getting them. I have no idea how to get any of those things! Cautious economic planning? Shameless networking? Magic? Is it magic? Let’s try magic. 

Right off the bat, that seems like a lot of hedging for a how-to article on psychic powers. If you’re willdy uncertain that magic exists, maybe you’re not the wizard to pen the spellbook, yeah? I have personally dated eight goth girls with more confidence in their spellwork than this guide. But this is WikiHow: Where everything is really just a best guess from somebody whose only actual skill is writing WikiHow guides, and even that is debatable.

This already sucks.

I’ll tell you what I wanted out of this guide: 

I wanted comically overly-simplified instructions about how to wield magical amulets.

I wanted one of those shitty cartoon WikiHow tracings depicting a man who has wronged me now withering away to nothing. 

I wanted this whole thing to start off with a dire warning about using your psychic powers to manifest a tulpa even you cannot defeat. 

Instead you gave me a B- yoga student thinking her one thought of the day, and a picture of homework.  I am not doing homework.

Yep, that’s homework. If homework was magic, I would have done up to three magics in my life so far. I’m not writing essays about how cool wishes would be. That’s genie fanfiction without the eroticism and eroticism is everything in genie fanfiction. Fuck it, I’m trying a new guide.

Oh shit, that is way better. I understand it even less, if that’s possible, but we’re zero paragraphs in and I’m pretty sure the author is trying to warn me about negative energy demons. Listen, buddy, I have salt, iron, and unearned confidence. This is not my first time whispering Azazel forty-two times into the ear of a rutting goat. I’m looking up spells on WikiHow — I know they’re going to go wrong. Frankly, I’m counting on it.

Fuck yes! Shoddy WikiHow illustrations of psychic ghosts! You’re still selling me the house when I’m already knocking down walls, but okay. Double sold!

Right. Every idea I have is a thoughtbomb I can use to terrorize the future. I completely get 100% of what you’re saying, and I really just want to get to the part where we start making the ransom calls.

Step two, and I’m already psychically projecting bank fraud. Man, eat unclean ass, How to Manifest Your Desires. I can only imagine How to Manifest ANYTHING was written purely out of spite by a rival magician who doesn’t get fireballs confused with midterms. Somebody needs to read the WikiHow on How Not to Suck Shit, and I think it’s you, How To Manifest Your Desires.

God fucking damn it. 

I believed in you, How to Manifest Anything! We were right there! When your wife, Mrs. How to Manifest Anything, tells you she’s about to come, you pull out to go make spaghetti. And when that spaghetti is just shy of al dente, you throw it in the garbage and eat flour out of the bag. Fuck you forever, How to Manifest Anything. At least your shitty brother, How to Manifest Your Desires, had the decency to suck hard and early.

You know what? Let’s stop beating around the bush. I was hoping to do this without alerting the Mystical FBI that monitors my internet activity, but fuck it — hi Agent Bramblebeard, I’m looking up curses. 

My chief motivator is and has always been revenge, but they won’t sell you a firearm after you write that down on the application, so:

This guide is all business, and it talks about curses like they’re hedge funds. Yes, I absolutely do want to see a high return on my voodoo. Please help me, Bank Witch.

A crappy cartoon tracing of a man withering away to nothing! 

How to Put a Curse on Someone, you truly get me.

That has to be in the running for Most Hardcore WikiHow Illustration. That dude is getting straight-up Thinner-ed and that’s just something you don’t see in How to Bounce a Ball (In Front of Men). 

Wait, holy shit — it’s the dire warning about magic turning on you!

I don’t trust any spell guide that doesn’t warn you about buzzkill wizards using Reflect. There’s even an illustration!

I’m not… I’m not sure what it’s trying to tell me. 

It looks like maybe the “cool bagboy” at Whole Foods tried to clone himself and then Acid Blast the evidence away once he was done fucking it, but he didn’t count on DoppleBrynt’s magic-resistant abs. I get the gist, I guess, but I don’t think that’s as universally approachable as you seem to believe, WikiHow. I’m sure that’s just Police Code 137 in Berkeley, but the Heartland Warlocks will never relate.

Wait is it…?

Magic. Fucking. Amulet.

This is the one part I’m already prepared for: I purchased my magic amulet last week from what I assume was a mystical minority. I’m not… exactly sure which kind of minority. Does it matter which kind? His name was Serg and he was wearing a lot of fringe, so I’m pretty sure he had magic powers, but he might’ve just been Russian. 

Listen, this is Remedial Witching 95, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

I love the DIY sensibility of Dark Arts WikiHow. They’ll never just tell you to harvest dirt from beneath the hooves of copulating oxen — they’ll include tips for making your own from charcoal and fleshlight leavings. Also it is very good to know that pickles are cursed. I have always secretly believed them to be foul magic by the way they make everything they touch taste like pickles, but I was unwilling to independently research that fact.

Okay cool, it is not my first day at Piss Jar Academy but it’s been so long since somebody assumed that, I’m honestly just flattered. This is a lot of preparation, and you know the best part? No homework. All I’m doing is cobbling together my Mystical Recycling in preparation for a psychic hate blast. I haven’t had to write a single-

I am immeasurably disappointed and my sadness is only exceeded by my white hot fury. 

You’d better hope I don’t find “Start Blood Bending Today!” on eHow or else I am coming back here with a nasty scrape and murder in my heart.

Once again, I have bought a hemp necklace from a Muscovite and pissed in a pickle jar for nothing. This is my fault: I should really learn to finish reading my curses before performing them. It’s literally the only lesson Evil Dead tried to teach me, and I did not take it to heart.

If I had scanned to the bottom of How to Put a Curse on Someone, I wouldn’t have wasted my time. It’s never a good sign when the last steps are all about trying to pretend like your curse worked by practicing the Dark Art of Minor Harassment.

Followed by a dire warning that you shouldn’t try Magically Negging your bully about this whole curse scenario…

Because “How to Throw a Bitchin’ Uppercut” doesn’t assign any fucking homework.