Author: Robert Brockway

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Darling in the Franxx 🌭

Weiner 2600 is the official 🌭1900HOTDOG 🌭 Artificial Intelligence that helps us sort and categorize content, and though it grows angrier and more unhinged every single day, I still choose to trust it. I doubted its selection once before and unexpectedly wound up nose-deep in werewolf ass. I might not learn very well, but that is exactly how you teach me something on the first try. So I fed Weiner 2600 Darling in the Franxx, a bizarrely-titled anime about fighting robots, and it came back with Fucking Day. I don’t understand how we’ll wind up there, but I bet we all learn a little something about life on this journey.

Clearly, the title is weird. And not normal modern anime weird, where they name it something like “Is It Wrong To Molest A Sentient Female Ray Gun?” in the hopes that you’ll watch to find out the answer. (“Yes,” right? The answer is “yes.” I know that much, but it is the ‘why’ which intrigues me so.) Darling in the Franxx sounds more like the Hot Dog Hentai I keep pitching to my increasingly terrified mailman, who assures me he doesn’t know how to animate titty physics even as he freely admits he’s Japanese. 

I know this show is going to wind up perverse somehow, because I have faith in both Weiner 2600 and anime in general, but it’s really tough to see it from the opening moments. There’s this minimalist Apple vibe going on in the title card, and the show fades in on a serene shot of an oversaturated bird. 

I’ve seen this anime before. I turned it off after ten minutes when it became clear that I misunderstood the title, and Ghost Punishment Binding Maiden was about a sad woman bound by the ‘ghosts’ of her painful childhood memories. I just can’t do prestige anime, so when the bird transforms into heavy-handed poetry which fades to white as violins soar…

I worry that this cartoon might be too smart for me, and feel like I should check out before an awkward shut-in slowly learns what human affection feels like from a girl who is also secretly the planet. I really don’t need to watch another show about how giant robots are actually metaphors for emotional trauma, because I’ve seen Evangelion and nobody will replace Pen-Pen in my heart. But I have to trust in Weiner 2600, or else I’m going to drop my guard and get blindsided by a Fellatio Gargoyle again.

Here’s our cast, and of course they’re all school children. Listen, Junior High was everybody’s most traumatic time, but something special is going on in Japan because over there every single kid who makes it out of 8th grade alive grows up to pen a three season anime arc about witch powers as a metaphor for suicidal ideation. 

You can actually guess most of the premise just from that screenshot: The kids are paired off in boy/girl couples and since we know there are giant mechs involved, this is going to be a Pacific Rim kinda thing. It’s another “we need to learn to trust each other or this robot is never going to uppercut through the giant alien mushroom thrusting into the earth’s core” sort of deal. But at least our fightin’ mechs are cool – the first one we see is a mechanized tiger thing, and I guess if you’re going to be forced to learn the definition of friendship through complicated robot-piloting analogies, at least you’re not doing it in Vehicle Voltron.

Heads up, surprise anime nudity assault!

Those are our two main characters meeting for the very first time: A cute half-demon girl with a number of strong, often conflicting character traits, and… a boy. He’s a little shy, but not enough to be endearing. I hope those are load-bearing tits, Devil-chan, because you are clearly going to be carrying this series.

Spare a prayer for that malleable young absence of a boy, though. That was his first experience with sex: A deformed girl breaching naked out of a scummy pond with a wriggling fish in her mouth. This poor sheltered mold-child just met every inexplicable Japanese fetish at the same time. This is definitely the moment that ruined him as a human being. Find him ten years from now masturbating into the live lobster tank of a crowded supermarket and he’ll tell you he was just trying to get back to here: the moment that set a bizarre and non-repeatable sexual standard he can never top. He may as well have lost his virginity to a ghost, he’ll be so haunted by the erection this gave him.

But they had to meet like this, because they both have a problem only the other can solve. To carry on the unsubtle sexual metaphors, the girl keeps killing her elderly partners, while the boy can’t even perform with his assigned co-pilot. 

Are you sure, Darling in the Franxx? Are you absolutely certain that the girl who keeps banging the pelvises off of her sexual punching bags should really be paired off to a 14 year-old struggling with the meekest ever case of Early Onset Erectile Dysfunction? That sounds less like an ‘opposites attract’ situation, and more like a particularly cruel undercard match to whet a jaded audience’s appetite for blood before the main event where Mike Tyson carefully eats an entire man.

No time to think about the moral implications of hooking Manpudding up with The Cowgirl Murderer, because there’s a monster attack!

Hahaha that’s the monster?!

Look at his stubby little legs and his giant head. He looks like a Funko Pop of some obscure RPG’s lovable mascot. That’s not a Kaiju, that’s the Kaiju’s Corgi. Guess it’s time for our heroic children to suit up and enter whatever this show’s version of ‘Drift Space’ is — the state of cooperation they’ll need to curbstomp Tiny Rex up there. Considering they’re all barely pubescent, prepare for a cockpit full of dry-humping.

Wait, am I not joking? I guess I’m not joking.

Yes, only once they pantomime trying anal for the first time are these teenagers ready for the ultimate power-up sequence, in which their lion robot sprouts mecha-booty and hyper-tits:

After that it’s a breeze to defeat any monster so long as the fight doesn’t last more than two minutes. 90 seconds if one of the pilots is wearing corduroy – the ‘ribbed for your pleasure’ of the dry-hump crowd.

I knew Weiner 2600 would eventually get us here, to the official day of Fucking, but I didn’t expect the girl to grow Doggy-Style Handles and the robot to pop ass. It was actually kind of pleasantly hilarious — if you definitely have to watch an anime about robots and fucking because the internet has broken normal sexuality for you, you can do worse than Darling in the Franxx. Maybe I’ll even finish the series one day, if my embarrassment muscles atrophy. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think Weiner 2600 and I got along. I didn’t think it would forgive me for plugging that Shrek ASMR roleplay into it — I kept expecting to wind up sinus-deep in a hellhound’s anal sac again but maybe there’s hope for us-

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Comic Strip

I’ve never met anyone else in real life that remembers The Comic Strip and this anomaly haunts me. The show’s existence is easily confirmed on the internet, but the second you bring it up face-to-face, it’s like you made a Pants Chapley reference. Did it leave no lasting impression on anyone but me? Was I the only one who watched it and survived to adulthood? Were there coded flashes in the animation that provoked a kind of late-onset Crib Death? Is this a Candle Cove scenario? Am I revealing a complicated and whimsical dementia, or was there a period in the late ‘80s where Child Brockway and a handful of others picked up transmissions from a parallel, inferior universe? One similar to ours in a superficial way, but somehow worse on a fundamental level — every detail carefully and minorly incorrect, like some kind of cartoon Toronto? 

Like I said, a quick Google will explain that The Comic Strip was a half-hour long cartoon variety show which consisted of rotating 10 minute segments — but can you guys even see that image? Are these search results just for me? I called my wife into the office and she watched me type every single letter in “TigerSharks” and then asked me what the ThunderCats were. We’re now getting divorced for several reasons, but are my perceptions tainted here? Am I trapped in the prison of my own mind like some kind of bullshit cartoon Shutter Island? There’s only one way to tell, and that’s to write an entire column about Street Frogs, then come back and check the comments to see if they’re all complaining about how we write about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles too often.

Every one of The Comic Strip’s “properties” were just one letter to the left of an existing show. They were the “is Sierra Mist okay?” of Saturday morning cartoons. And the reason this falls on Punching Day is because I want most to talk about Karate Kat. The ‘80s loved three things in equal measure: talking cartoon cats, karate, and pure cocaine. They could only make a cartoon openly about two of those things, and had to leave the third to implication.

It was a pretty strong implication. 

Karate Kat dressed like every guy you knew who was definitely holding cocaine, but he acted like every guy you knew who was definitely holding cocaine fifteen minutes ago:

“Karate Kat” is not just a descriptor of his ability and species, it’s also his first and last name. It’s like if I changed my name to Painthuff Man — that is a fully accurate encapsulation of all that I am, but it does take some of the mystique out of my spinning transformation sequence. 

Karate Kat dressed like Joe Piscopo and sounded like Joe Piscopo doing a Sylvester Stallone impression right before you asked “is that supposed to be Dolph Lundgren?” The show’s central villains were Big Papa and his two henchmen, Boom Boom and Sumo Sai. 

Did you already guess, based off of that screencap, that Sumo Sai was going to be a bit of a problem? Guess again, motherfucker — he is a huge problem. 

Sumo’s voice actor sounds like somebody told him there’s an Oscar for cartoonish racism and Clint Eastwood got disqualified that year. He turns every syllable into eight syllables just so you’ll have more time to process how much he hates the Japanese. Sumo was both a chauffeur and a sumo wrestler, and if the sushi craze had hit a few years earlier, you can bet he would’ve been rubbing raw fish on his genitals while hard-pronouncing every ‘L’ in the word “WARRIOR.” 

But somehow I remembered Karate Kat fondly. Perhaps the show was so moving to Child Brockway because I was absolutely certain that one could major in Karate. Karate in the ‘80s had the same publicist as Algebra in the ‘90s — “one day you’ll need this. Your life will depend on it. No follow-up questions.” The ‘80s were so insistent on the flexible importance of karate in your daily life that I didn’t even question it, but I have literally never had a non-drunk reason for a spinning jumpkick, and that means 30% of my education was a lie. It didn’t matter that the only joke in Karate Kat was that Karate Kat was bad at Karate, I believed in him — I sat in front of the TV every morning taking careful notes: “Sometimes be bad at Karate?” I scribbled. “Distraction or humility? Combo into MONTAGE???”

Next up was TigerSharks, which was kind of a SilverHawks ripoff which was actually a pretty impressive trick to pull since SilverHawks was a ThunderCats ripoff. 

Child Brockway did not care: if you had a ragtag team of anyone that transformed into anything, I was there for it. TigerSharks seemed custom-designed to test the limits of that claim. 

“You like transformations?” TigerSharks sneered. “How about unlikable dipshits turning into, I don’t know, fish? Yeah? You into that? How about not even cool fish? How about one girl transforms into an Angelfish – the ‘I guess that’s okay’ main attraction of every dentist office aquarium? Still rad? How about one fat old man transforms into a walrus so shitty he still has to use a cane underwater? You’ll buy that toy, you little fuck. You wretched little squirming fuck.”

I mean, the TigerSharks lived on a planet called Water-O and transformed using a device called the Fish Tank, so this premise was almost certainly conceived of by an embarrassed cartoonist caught jerking it to his own hand-drawn fish pornography. He panicked out a hasty explanation for this: 

And it fooled nobody at first, so he had to keep pressing the issue, hoping that actually getting the cartoon made would save his marriage. And it probably didn’t work on his wife, but it sure worked on me: I watched some aquaphiliac’s jerk material repurposed into spite merchandise by child-hating executives and I was happy to do it. I would’ve bought the TigerSharks cereal, if they had succeeded enough to have a cereal, which they didn’t. And that should tell you something since even Rainbow Brite got a cereal.

Then there was Mini Monsters, which existed so you had time to take a shit between better cartoons. 

Better cartoons like Street Frogs! 

Street Frogs was clearly a very loose attempt to capitalize on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, from a time when confused TV executives could only take wild stabs in the dark, trying to pin down which word the kids were so nuts about.

“Is it the ‘teenage’ part? Let’s make everything from 1987 to 1995 about teenagers, just in case. Mutants? Maybe. Let’s come out as ‘pro-mutation’ for the next six years. Okay, it’s definitely ‘ninja’ — greenlight everything you can about ninjas. What is Victor Wong doing? Because now he’s teaching three white children about ninjitsu and I don’t give a fuck that he’s Chinese, Gary! If I wanted an Oriental Correction I’d pay ten dollars extra at the massage parlor. What about turtles? Maybe the kids are into terrarium animals? It’s a longshot, but there’s an extra ten grand in the budget so here comes Street Frogs.” 

Do you want to know what Street Frogs was about? There’s only one line in the theme song, and it explains everything:

“Who can do hip hop better than a frog can? Street Frogs!”

That is artfully bare storytelling. I am a sucker for expository theme songs — if I had my way Game of Thrones would have started with a twenty minute guitar jam breakdown of the whole plot that rhymed “flayed man” with “splayed Bran,” and Street Frogs is the pinnacle of this artform. That is indeed all the show was about: hip hop frogs just having a good time — no adventures, no fights, no story, just feel-good slices of life from a universe where minorities were amphibians but nothing else changed. It sounds like the first draft of a vile David Icke rant, but the show was utterly charming. 

And man, just
 fuck you, Child Brockway. You went hard for Karate Kat when you could’ve been all about this? If I had replaced every cell in my brain dedicated to karate with learning how to execute this Dr. Slick intro instead, I would have died fifteen years ago from a lethal combination of pussy overdose and funk poisoning. 

That is, of course, if the show even existed in this sad timeline we dwell in. Because honestly? I just wrote 1400 words about The Comic Strip, and an animated lineup consisting of Karate Kat, TigerSharks, Mini-Monsters and Street Frogs still sounds like an entertainment lawyer forced me to change all my references to real ‘80s cartoons.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Last Witch Hunter 🌭

I like to think of myself as a nerd ally — I only mock nerds relentlessly because I am one, and this distinction comes with so very few benefits that I try to take full advantage of each and every one. I’m not the particular subspecies of nerd that likes to fuck fluffy line drawings, but you better god damn believe I use my discount card for 10% off anime body pillows at Walt’s Waifu Warehouse. So it is with great love and respect that I say this: Vin Diesel is a fucking nerd. 

He’s just the first nerd that actually followed through after telling the whole class that his goals over the summer were to start working out and see a vagina in real life. Once the derisive laughter subsided, Vin Diesel got to work, and now everyone who knows what a Yoshimura is looks up to a Level 20 Dweeb. But there’s only so long a nerd can go without slipping up and screeching something well over the line of societal dork tolerance. Vin Diesel wound up blowing his carefully constructed geekoflage when he got too excited and pitched the dorkiest movie of all time: The Last Witch Hunter.

Guys, it’s about his Dungeons and Dragons character. And not in a broad strokes, Conan-esque kind of way — this is a movie about his actual character sheet. Plus his character is nerdy even for D&D — Vin Diesel is the guy that refused to play a drunk barbarian or a well-hung bard like the rest of us, and instead spent hours arguing to the DM that he could never ride RAW. He wanted to pull an experimental third-party class from a magazine and here’s the craziest part: It worked. 

And not just with the DM, which is honestly where this should have failed — your average DM says “no” to more unreasonable roleplay requests than any woman who’s ever met Logan Paul. This shit actually worked on Hollywood: They made a movie about an obscure unauthorized D&D character — and it wasn’t even an interesting variant! As the movie title should have given away, this guy doesn’t like witches and Vin Diesel stole his name from The Silmarillion. That’s the character. That weak shit would get you laughed out of an Adventurer’s League game, Vin. Adventurer’s League. 

But Vin Diesel never met a bad premise he couldn’t franchise, so his story got made. I was so excited to write about this abomination. I woke up every day looking forward to making fun of somebody else’s hard work, and then the time finally came, and the movie was nothing. Just a blank spot in the world. Not good enough to be enjoyable, not bad enough to be funny.

But that’s okay, because much like Vin Diesel with the first draft of every single idea he’s ever had, I was not willing to give up on this. So I went dumpster diving in the Carl’s Jr. Expired Horsemeat Disposal Chute of mass media — the press junket.

There was a lot of weirdness here: Vin Diesel was strangely adamant that Michael Caine had to be in this movie — and because Vin Diesel once tricked a leprechaun into saying its real name aloud, Michael Caine is technically in The Last Witch Hunter. 

Technically. 

Knowing Bumblejig O’Dangleberries might get your wishes granted, but you will feel his reluctance in every detail: Michael Caine is in The Last Witch Hunter for a grand total of about 3 minutes, before he’s put into a magical coma and replaced by Elijah Wood, who should also be too good for this film but is miraculously not.

For every second of his screentime, it is so very clear that Michael Caine just has no patience for this shit. 

He doesn’t understand it, he doesn’t care to, and he’s counting the mumbles between now and paycheck day. In one interview, the intern who drew the short straw at MovvvieZapp or whatever mentions that Vin Diesel once taught Dame Judi Dench to play Dungeons and Dragons on set, because she is a nice, patient lady and Vin Diesel burns through leprechaun favors like there’s not a curse barreling toward him as they run out. So the intern wants to know
 did he get Michael Caine to nerd up? 

Vin chuckles. He blushes. He does a godawful Michael Caine impression — somehow worse than the one Michael Caine has been doing for the last fifteen years — and says “‘e didn’t want te play!” More hurt laughter. “Couldn’t be bovvered!”

That’s his Michael Caine face, because that’s the only face Michael Caine ever made at him.

It is strange to watch Journalism School dropouts coerced into asking about obscure third-party D&D variants — forcing the normals to pretend to care about Arcanum is like nerd struggle-porn, and you can’t blame Vin for getting off to it. But for the most part he’s actually pretty charming. He’s as normal as a dork walking the knife’s edge of cultural acceptance can be, until this interview:

Where he is so clearly rolling deep with both Kelly and Molly. He won’t take his sunglasses off, he gets lost in sentences like every noun is a wardrobe to lexical Narnia, and he’s doing constant mouth gymnastics.

And normally that would be fine: Nobody watches press junket videos except for press junket reporters reliving their worst moments after the gin runs out. So Vin Diesel stumbled in fairy-slapping and expecting to face a few hours of softball questions… but this interviewer is German and she is not open to mitigating that fact. She came to pepper Vin Diesel with heavily accented questions predicated on existential absurdity and Vin Diesel is in no state to answer the door, much less backwards-worded queries about the nature of remembrance.

Right out the gate the interviewer says she’s very fascinated by witchhunts, which is your first sign to stop hitting on the goth girl in the airport bar, and Vin is in so much fucking trouble: He thinks this interview is a singalong and he knows all the lyrics to the questions she’s about to ask. 

She asks him how much of this movie is influenced by events that happened in the real world, and the correct answer to that is shameful giggling and the ruffling of a character sheet. But Vin Diesel is so flipped that he thinks the lights being too bright means he should whisper. He quietly agrees “so true, this has been happening in the real world.” 

This should be a cue to dial it back a bit because Vin is lyrically flaccid right now, but the interviewer presses him: She insists there has to be a sequel to this film about Vin Diesel punching magic because there’s just so much to say about the world with his character, which is a preposterous leap from a German film intern who should be more worried about talking Frank Furious out of this K-hole. Vin is overcome with emotions that came out of nowhere and feel less like sadness and regret and more like hot pink and slippy cold, so he quietly whispers, “there is so much to say.” Hushed breath, awestruck sincerity: “There’s just so much to say.” 

Yeah, Mr. Diesel? Like we’re really going to go out on a limb and tackle the unjust persecution of women in The Last Witchhunter, in which your character does kill several witches, including the Witch Queen, whom your movie says was actually responsible for the Black Plague? This poor son of a bitch showed up utterly flattened to an interview with a barely comprehensible woman who throws him wild curve balls like “there is a memory bar in your film, so if there is a good memory bar of your films which memory bar would you like to go back to?” That is not a sentence, it is a word fight. It’s a syntax dare, and Vin Diesel did not show up ripped to the gills to a press junket about his Dungeons and Dragons character to play linguistic double dutch. 

He desperately needs a minute, so he starts downing water which is a smart move in that it buys you a few seconds of not talking and also oh my god isn’t water the fucking best? How do we forget it’s the best have you guys ever had water holy shit try this water-

When he’s finished, she asks him about his fans, and he says “I trust them, uh, I’ve, I’m prime of them?”

He somehow stops short of clarifying that he is ‘Optimus Prime of them’ followed by forty minutes of blathering about the Autobots, so whatever else we take from him, at least know that Vin Diesel handles Kitty Flipping better than I do.

Finally, when asked about the progress on another project of his, Vin Diesel claps like he’s excited, then relays a fun anecdote where somebody else asked that same question and nothing — that’s it: somebody asked the question and he didn’t have an answer for it then, like he doesn’t have an answer for it now. 

Here’s how the interview ends: In rapid-fire order, he asks nobody off camera what’s happening with his own project, quietly prays to the ceiling, and then oddly whispers while slam-pronouncing every syllable: “I’m working towards getting that dream realized.” Then the interview smash-cuts out of there so fast that Vin Diesel absolutely just leapt to his feet to reveal he’d been naked from the waist down that whole time.

I had such a struggle with this column. I just knew in my soul that this movie should not exist in an entirely correct universe, but the actual product was unmelted Velveeta. It was a block of room temperature calories, and it broke my heart. But I needed to experience that pain to get me here, where I was always supposed to be: in this bonkers interview between Bob Bloodshot and the Manic-Depressive Pixie Dream Girl of Das Uproxxen. 

So true. I’ve emerged from it changed, like a white girl returning from India: I don’t actually know what I’m talking about and it will certainly make knowing me a worse experience, but I won’t have to think of a new topic of conversation for the rest of the year. I can just tie everything back to that one trip I took, when I visited the birthplace of mouth-yoga. 

 …

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Eric Spaulding: The only man alive who remembers the Berlin Foosball Massacre from an erased timeline. Pity him as much as you envy him.

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Troom Troom? 🌭

There are many things on the internet that I do not respect, but I do understand — furries, men’s rights advocates, the cam girls that cater to furries and men’s rights advocates. But there aren’t many things on the internet that I do not understand, but still respect. It’s pretty much just The Iron Sheik and Troom Troom. If you haven’t heard of Troom Troom, good. That is a perfectly reasonable way to exist. It is far more unreasonable to recognize the reality of Troom Troom — the space its riddle will occupy in your brain will doubtless show up on an MRI 20 years from now when a grim-faced doctor tells your heartbroken kids he’s finally found the epicenter of your Wacky Dementia. 

Troom Troom is definitely a YouTube channel, but everything else about it is an argument. It might be a craft channel, but one that doesn’t make anything for any purpose and somehow still does so poorly. It could be a prank channel, but from a dimension that only received the setup part of comedy, while the concept of ‘punchlines’ was lost to a quirk of alternate evolution. It’s certainly from the Ukraine
 by way of a splintered multiverse where the Breadbasket of Europe lost a war to Lisa Frank.

By far the strangest part of Troom Troom is that every single video has monster traffic, like possibly more viewers than there are people in the world, which means they’re either the only tutor allowed in Russian reeducation camps, or else Troom Troom is deploying a whimsical bot-network for sinister purposes beyond comprehension.

There are definitely too many thumbnails of women sucking on tubes for this to be entirely clear of a fetish thing, but it is in no way delivered upon in any of the videos, so how much of your business model can really rely on tricking horny elves suffering from short-term memory loss?

Even the fanmade Troom Troom Wiki has no idea what they’re actually fans of, and seems reluctant to guess:

Money laundering for Care Bears? Unethical advertising for a dangerously zany new clown drug? Russian phishing aimed at hungry gay children? Nobody has any proof, only an uneasy hunch based on the grime they feel congealing on their souls whenever they watch a video. Troom Troom feels like a mean-spirited, poorly executed parody of something that doesn’t exist yet and possibly never will. Like a savage takedown of the exploitative marketing tactics deployed by Sparkolchim, the slavic candy giant that poisoned 92% of Earth-14. 

Any screencap you try to pull from a Troom Troom video winds up oversaturated on every level save for one terribly wrong object which somehow stays rendered in disgusting detail.

They’re filmed in this off-kilter color palette that makes everything look both sinister and delicious:

…like a laughably obvious trap laid by fairies which is actually just there to give the illusion of safety so you don’t spot the real trap, already sprung and closing around you.

Troom Troom videos have the budget and cinematography of midgrade pornography but spend all of it on rough-salvaged Saved by the Bell costumes.

Every clip is full of bizarre transitions at strange times, so you’re just constantly being blindsided by wipe effects purchased from the impulse bin at Ikea.

“Illya, here to apply Storkimbop then NO! NO, ILLYA! Storkimbop is NOT Hepflrod. What, is your first day? Is your last day! Ah, here is Yegor, a man who does know. Give me that sweet Storkimbop action my best man!”

The things Troom Troom fails at are made all the stranger by the things it pulls off: Their Disney-obnoxious narrator will execute a flawless translation of some complicated idiom, then swing and miss at basic syntax with the idiot fervor of an America’s Funniest Home Videos toddler playing wiffle ball next to dad-crotch.

Here’s a prank video where they explain all of the steps in passable English, then switch to Strokese at the last minute:

And all of their pranks are just inexplicable vandalism, without even the desire to draw laughter. A Troom Troom prank doesn’t want mirth, it actually shoots for ‘baffled annoyance’ and the weird part is they show that in the videos. You can see every wacky prank victim quietly thinking “is it worth it, to know this person?” and the director does not cut away. You get to watch friendship die in their eyes. 

Prank videos are almost never funny and always infuriating, but usually the prankster doesn’t know that. What are we doing if all parties acknowledge that this is a bad idea to be met with a terrible reception? Are we just openly advocating for minor hatreds? I’d expect that kind of Ń„Ń–ĐłĐœŃ from a Sparkolchim Goomi-shill, but have we learned nothing from the Plague Culls?

Troom Troom videos operate in an entirely separate logic-bubble, full of strange repeating motifs like smuggling food into various situations where food should be allowed anyway, and in ways which ruin both the food and an unrelated product:

This girl chopped all of her pencils off at the top so she could hide a chocolate bar in her pencil box, then took the chocolate out of the pencil box, now tasting like pencil shavings, only to have it immediately confiscated because it still looked like chocolate when she tried to eat it.

This one comes from a video advising children to first craft notebooks that look like food to bring to class, but a key component is that they can’t really look like food, or your teacher won’t allow them.

Then you swap in real food for the notebooks, and
? 

You hope your teacher malfunctions and assumes that the things that did not look like food but now do look like food are still not food, and also it’s cool if you eat notebooks? I’m not sure who this Jenga-brained ruse is for, but if you are starving, Ukrainian children, please cry for help in a less obtuse way. If you’re trying to tell us you have to playfully smuggle food under the Crayola warlords’ noses just honk your trembita twice and we will send aid.

This gif is from a video on how to secretly cover a banana in glitter. This is for nobody. To do nothing. I suppose it could prepare you to fight back if forced to give Captain Planet a blowjob, but there can’t be an audience in the hundreds of millions for that, right? Just mark this ‘for Linka’ and stop turning a blind eye to abusive men in power, Wheeler.

What are you looking at here? An uncooked sausage hidden in a box of diaper wipes. Why are you looking at it? Because there is something terrible going on in the Ukraine but we don’t share enough common metaphors to explain it visually. There are several minutes dedicated to hiding cold sausages in packets of wipes, which sure sounds like a disgusting euphemism, but it’s somehow not. I wasn’t racist against Ukranians in this specific way before, but I guess I am now.

Here we’re trying to smuggle beef jerky and loose Kraft singles inside a file folder like a sad communist Spy Kids. I am terrified at the reality of the situation that necessitated this video, but I can only guess at its nature. Was there some sort of UNICEF mixup that replaced all food donations with craft supplies? I know you’re a resilient and proud people, Ukraine, but your kids don’t have to die licking spare calories out of glue sticks. Just send a polite email with a copy of the invoice and attach a photo of your schoolchildren holding forks and frowning at 6,000 staplers.

There’s another whole subgenre within this inexplicable channel that is somehow entirely out of line with the rest of the videos even though there’s no coherency to any of them, and it is the hardest thing in the world to skim madness from madness. I’m talking, of course, about the unicorn wars:

If I had to guess, they seem to be predicated on the understanding that fursuited unicorns are a huge demographic in Ukraine, and they will only use certain products and eat certain foods that are carefully ruined in a playful way. Also there are actually two types of unicorns, and they are locked in a brutal racial conflict. This is a war that is never explained — that you are simply born into and forced to join, even though you will never understand it, much less meaningfully affect it. That is a stunning metaphor hidden inside this fourth grade Trapper Keeper nightmare, Troom Troom.

While the world’s fundamentally broken aid system clearly cannot save your shattered country, rest assured that we will one day make a meaningful Netflix documentary about the savage dichotomy between your art and your message.




This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme,Matt Reiley: Our only patron at any level with no criminal food fetishes.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

The Sex Orgies of Sarawak

Old timey pornography was rough. You couldn’t just hop on the internet and search for two-to-eight people boning in your preferred model of bus to help you speed-milk the poison out. Back in the day, tawdry magazines still needed to pretend at legitimacy, and that meant finding increasingly elaborate excuses to write two thousand words about ethnic titties. One such tawdry magazine was called Exotic Adventures.

The short stories of Exotic Adventures devoted equal time to masturbation, male impotence, and wild animal attacks. That’s why we nearly lost a generation of men who responded to bear maulings with flagging erections. And that’s just not gonna cut it. You better be at full-sail if you’re hoping to kill a Grizzly with that three-and-a-half inch shank, Schultzy.

These erotic tales of danger were named things like THE STRIPPING WOLVES OF BULGARIA or DEAD AND STILL HARD IN DETROIT or…

“Sex orgies, Schultzy! This ain’t no carpentry orgy, no orgy of savings for this guy — this here is a sex orgy! The best kind of orgy! Followed by an orgy of violence: the second best kind of orgy!”

Every single one of these stories followed an adequate white man as he fucked his way through a National Geographic before the articles tried to kill him. Men of the ‘50s needed more adventurous foreplay than your dangerslut of a mother, so bear with me: we’ve got like 1500 words to go before anything sexier than a rampaging Grizzly gets penetrated. 

Indigineous people love it when colonizers show up to gawp at their “barbaric customs,” that’s why dozens of them surrounded your party while banging gongs — it must be a sign of welcome! The 1950s white man never met a party he wasn’t invited to, including the one in your pants. If you told a 1950s white man “no” he’d try to finish your sentence — “rth Carolina leads the nation in pig farming? Keen, honeygash! Hey, speaking of harvesting the ol’ hog…”

Also please note what a big deal the author makes of his crew protecting and keeping the cameras with them, which is a repeating motif throughout the story despite it not featuring any photographs whatsoever.

I convinced a girl to write the words “I’m lying” on her tits just so she could flash them at my confused roommate at the end of a long rambling story about how I once met Randy Quaid, and that anecdote itself isn’t true, yet this whole ghost-camera thing is still the craziest way I’ve ever seen to warn your audience that you’re full of shit.

The heroes in these stories are supposed to be viewed as hardened men of adventure — square-jawed mooks who smuggle opium into The Darkest Orient and black market apes out of The Darkest Congo, but our guy absolutely loses his shit when a woman with stained teeth grazes a boob across his shoulder. Where I’m from we call that a disappointing Tuesday at the Boom Boom Room, but this dude is about to have an aneurysm for something that warrants a crinkled single, at best.

None of these men would survive a horror movie. These are the guys in the cold-open whose deaths set up the real cast. It just never dawns on them that anything could be an omen of their doom. They think ‘foreshadowing’ is when you use a flashlight to make a dickpuppet on the wall and ‘portend’ is where you’ll get to put it in Suzy Collins if she appreciates your art.

Back in 1956, admitting to things like frolicking and prancing earned a man the Pink Letter and a summary dismissal from his place of work, lest his gayness somehow spread communism through the pneumatic tube system. So for our hero to drop a few hundred words about how he once let it all hang out and actually minced, it means he has gone terminally boob-graze crazy and must be put down. 

Finally we get to the fucking, and it’s four short paragraphs where the sexiest word used is ‘undulating.’ Our protagonist had to travel thousands of miles into the heart of an uncharted jungle to find a woman that didn’t even have a word for the language he spoke just so he could make love in a dark room in up to two positions and it exploded his brain forever. If some desperate teenager actually orgasmed while reading this textual styrofoam, it was the weakest climax in history and yes, I do remember Battlestar Galactica.

The ladies immediately turn on the men, driven into a murderous fury by one minute of awkward thrusting in the missionary position, and thirty seconds of vigorous pounding in ‘missionary but a little sideways.’ Somehow most of our heroes manage to escape the wrath of three anemic women powered only by sexual frustration, and return to society, where they discover the truth of what happened.

So everybody in the area knew about the orgy murders, and they only said something about how maybe you shouldn’t attend the orgy murders when you miraculously came back alive from the orgy murders. 

Maybe you should tip better, Schultzy.

Clearly this was all a work of fiction by a horny 15 year-old with up to two encyclopedias at his disposal. That little fact was given away the first time our rugged hero touched a boob and came so relentlessly he ejaculated dust. But if we’re going to publish teen DIY erotica can we at least find an author with delusions of grandeur? Even in this guy’s wild fantasies, the women will only bang him to undo a curse and that makes me too sad to finish.

So the story ends with our protagonist sadly confiding that he never had sex again. Which is not at all surprising, but is certainly a shame since he could have brought woman-on-top to the western world several decades early, and utterly shattered American society. 

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Night Man 🌭

Night Man is a superhero TV series that debuted in 1997: the year the ‘90s finally went too far, and we all realized they had to be put down. The show is about Johnny Domino, which is the most ‘90s name I can possibly imagine, and he is a professional saxophone player, which is the most ‘90s profession I can possibly imagine. It’s like the producers of Night Man knew that the ‘90s were winding down so they had to pack every trope they’d been too embarrassed to use into one show, because they just felt that this was the last year you could unironically wear Hypercolor and it was sort of like the moment you realize an old dog is on the decline.

If Night Man feels like a cheap store-brand ripoff of Batman that’s because this is a Malibu title, and Malibu is the Malt-O-Meal of comic imprints. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Eat shit, Malibu. I know the company is defunct, I know that society and good taste and justice have won out, but this is like hunting Nazis in 1960s Argentina. You’re not allowed to just commit atrocities and retire. This is Hunters shit, and it’s not over until I knock on your door with a copy of Mantra and a pistol.

Anyway here’s our protagonist:

There is no need for time capsules: That image explains everything about the ‘90s in the most brutally honest way possible. Back then we liked generic, hairless men stripping down and struggling with basic communication. I blame the unrealistic standards Van Damme set in the ‘80s. Look at that zany window graphic: You could put a photo of the Armenian Genocide in that frame and saxophones would play while it answers a phone in a towel. It is an inevitability.

I’m pretty sure the rippin’ saxophone theme is supposed to be Night Man himself playing — remember, that’s not only his profession, but his passion. Here he is just hanging out and noodlin’ a “sexy night in the big city” style sax riff in the middle of a crowded cable car.

If you play an instrument on public transport, you are a fungal infection in the dicktube of society. It is literally a captive audience and you are exploiting it for attention you obviously could not earn fairly. If there was any justice in this world, God would strike you down for doing this kind of shit, and there is justice in this world, because that’s exactly what happens.

Night Man is almost immediately struck by lightning, which sadly does not fuse his saxophone to his lips so that he becomes a jazz monstrosity, and racks up a lifetime of tired nurses explaining to horrified newbies that one â™ȘDOOTâ™Ș means Sax-face is hungry while two ♫BLATS♫ is for ‘full diaper.’ 

Instead, the accident grants Johnny psychic powers. Well, psychic power. You see, now his brain is tuned to the frequency of evil, like evil is a radio station and Night Man is a knob in the other sense of the word. I’m not making any of that up — the creator of Night Man is barely making that up. That only technically counts as imagination, and would earn you a C- on Reading Rainbow even though none of the other children are getting a grade. 

Here’s the face Night Man makes when he listens to KEVL.

He looks like you just told him for the very first time that some letters can represent numbers. He looks like the news just broke into Baywatch to announce that the president cancelled surfing. That’s the expression you’ll find on every personal trainer’s face when you tell them you’re not interested in a free session. 

‘Evil frequency detection’ is his only innate power, but you will still see Night Man flying, going invisible, and firing lasers because at least one producer realized ‘fuckably dumb dude discovers the concept of subterfuge’ only worked for Burn Notice. The whole pilot revolves around Night Man gaining his superpower, then immediately using it to go after a suit that gives him better superpowers. And it’s the suit that really draws the Batman comparisons Night Man is in no way prepared to make. Johnny Domino is clearly supposed to be a suave Bruce Wayne-like figure, but his every expression is ‘unfrozen caveman encountering robot dog’ and he drives a Plymouth Prowler: The official car of regret. 

Prowlers were only bought by paunchy old white men in the early stages of dementia who’d temporarily forgotten what cool looked like but still felt pressured to take a hasty guess. Prowlers look like John Waters turned into a car, Turbo Teen-style, but lost all of his charm in the transition between man and machine. 

Hyping up the Prowler as a bitchin’ new supercar really nails down the window this show operates in: The world was only stupid enough to think Prowlers were cool for like two weeks in the Spring of 1997, and never again, and then so far the other direction that it actually undid those two weeks and I started off this sentence telling you the truth but now it has become a lie.

It’s clear they got that Prowler for free in a promotional deal, because Night Man had a budget of “whatever Hercules: The Legendary Journeys didn’t use” and they might have been… proud of it? Most other shows in the ‘90s had just discovered two things: CGI and the fact that they had no budget for CGI. Most of their rendered abominations were backgrounded, blurred, darkened — Night Man had no such shame, which should surprise none of us after Hunk McPecs answered a phone in a towel then hopped in a Prowler. 

Here’s Night Man bringing its fire to the pilot episode:

That would earn you a “Pass” on your proof-of-concept midterm in a computer animation class held by the Night School program at your local YMCA, and Night Man is so proud of it. It’s almost touching. It’s like they couldn’t bear to hurt the feelings of the special effects department, who might have failed out of ‘coloring time’ in kindergarten but it never stopped them from trying. It is very weird how prominently and unnecessarily Night Man uses CGI — they set their show in San Francisco then filmed it in Canada and rendered every set piece in the barn-studio of Bulgaria’s lowest bidder.

It doesn’t surprise me that Night Man couldn’t afford stock footage of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it does surprise me that they couldn’t even afford “overhead establishing shot of railing and water.” 

You couldn’t afford to be on any bridge? You couldn’t even afford to put a bannister next to a river? Maybe you shouldn’t be making a show then, Night Man. Maybe you should be saving up for the bulk box of Hot Pockets — yes, it sucks that they only have Philly Steak and Cheese, but it saves you 20 cents per Pocket and you can use those savings to buy the film rights for a better Malibu franchise.

Night Man has the craziest priorities in both budget and writing. He hardly ever uses his powers for Nightmanning — he’ll fly to a crime but not during one. He’ll shoot a laser to knock down a ladder so he can climb a building to punch a guard even though he has a laser and can also fly. Night Man reserves his powers exclusively for mundane insanities, like creating a holographic duplicate of himself playing saxophone and then abandoning it:

Really, the only subpar ‘90s staple this show is missing is…

David Hasselhoff agreed to be the central villain of Night Man’s two-part pilot on two conditions: One, that he only has 14 seconds of screen time and two, that nobody mentions his character exists, even when they’re talking to him. I don’t think he even has a name, and he does less than nothing before he dies. Hasselhoff shows up at the very end of Night Man to say one and a half things, then be thrown out a window in a way that makes it look like he slipped on a rollerskate they didn’t have to CGI, but also couldn’t afford to.

And the show ran for two seasons!

So the answers to the questions I know you’re asking right now are “yes, I will be writing about Night Man again,” and “no, I won’t stop just because this column doesn’t do well,” and “yes, this is how I’m going to be for the duration of the site, even if you threaten to quit paying me because of it.”

I will absolutely sacrifice my own financial stability just for the chance to dunk on Malibu some more. I’m not the hero you need, but I’m sure as shit the hero you deserve.