Author: Lydia Bugg
Unlock with Patreon
Categories
Fucking Day: Tickle MeđźŚ
At the height of Elvis’s fame, he was making three movies a year. By 1965, he was really starting to run out of steam, but a failing movie studio called Allied Artists thought an Elvis movie made on the world’s thinnest budget would probably make five million dollars and save them from bankruptcy, and they were right. They didn’t even commission new songs for the movie; instead, opting to Frankenstein a script together around old, unsuccessful Elvis songs. They called the movie Tickle Me, probably because no one would let them name it Elvis Shakes His Penis Around, Hawaiian Style.
Tickle Me has a pretty typical Elvis movie set up. Poor Elvis just wants to do his manly Elvis activities, in this case bull riding, but he’s thwarted at every turn by women desperate to fuck him. He’s on his way to the bull pen, but oh no, what’s this? Elvis has fallen through a trap door into a humorously large crate of dirty panties those rascally women left for him. How will poor Elvis ever get out of this one?
In this instance, Elvis plays Lonnie Beal, a rodeo man who’s just looking for enough work to keep him afloat during the off-season. He needs money to buy hair dye, guitars, and tight fighting pants, you see. Unfortunately, the only job he can get is at the horny lady ranch! Oh no! Poor Elvis. He’s distraught until he is introduced directly to the butthole of a particularly beautiful woman.
The ranch functions as a fat camp for society women, models, and actresses. As Elvis’s roommate and gay best friend, Stanley, explains: “We roast ’em, toast ’em, wiggle ’em, jiggle ’em, rend ’em, bend ’em, and give them very little to eat.” There are a lot of gags about how the women are so hungry they will pilfer the roast chickens of visiting investors, or get caught hiding in a hay bale eating a comically large chocolate bar. Of course, there aren’t actually any fat women on the ranch. That would be crazy. It’s just Elvis’s usual hot woman mob, but they put some of them in baggy T-shirts.
Elvis’s love interest in this movie, Pam, is an instructor at the ranch, of course. Elvis cannot date a woman who has ever thought of being fat. She’s one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, and apparently quit acting a few years after this movie for another job, being the princess of Langenburg. Pam’s storyline takes the movie in a much stranger and darker direction than just Elvis taunting thin women with chocolate bars for eighty minutes.
Because all of history occurred more closely together than I can fathom, Pam’s grandfather was the owner of a silver mine in the Old West. There’s a legend that he’s hidden his fortune somewhere in the nearby ghost town of Silverado. Elvis learns this because Pam has an issue with near kidnappings. This woman is constantly on the verge of being kidnapped by masked thugs, something Elvis apparently thinks is hot so he sings a love song directly into another woman’s mouth in hopes of making Pam jealous.
Elvis follows Pam to Silverado on a gold hunting expedition, and there’s a long fantasy sequence where he plays the panhandle kid in a restored version of the ghost town’s bar. He sings another song with Pam, who’s playing the role of an old-timey prostitute who feeds milk to Elvis. I’m assuming this is because they didn’t want him to drink alcohol in the movie, but also, there’s some pretty surface level symbolism there for a man whose mommy issues were reportedly thriving.
It takes a few songs and two kidnapping rescues to convince Pam to fall in love with Elvis. One of those songs is called “Dirty Dirty Feeling,” and includes the lyrics, “I hear you’re pretty good at running, but pretty soon you’ll slip and fall. That’s when I’ll drag you home with me, girl. I’m gonna chain you to a wall.” Jesus Christ, that got dark real fast. I wonder why that wasn’t a huge hit for Elvis.
I feel like I should note that the strangeness of this song is underlined by the fact that while in the movie, Elvis is supposedly singing it outside while doing his job tending to horses and being ogled by women, and there’s a ton of echo on the recording. It was clearly supposed to sound like it’s being performed in a large auditorium, and they did nothing to tweak that for this or any other song in the movie.
So, Elvis threatens to kidnap a woman who is experiencing constant near kidnapping, and she’s like, “I love you.” They’re in love now. The only problem in their relationship is that other women just keep throwing themselves at Elvis.
Pam isn’t the jealous type, but when their mutual boss lures him into her office and offers him a raise and a kiss on the mouth, Pam catches them and immediately dumps Elvis. I thought it was kind of wild that Elvis actually cheats on his girlfriend in this movie. He fully participates in the kiss. Later, when explaining it to his gay best friend Stanley, he says, “So she caught me kissing the boss? What’s a brotherly kiss?” There was tongue. I’ve seen what Elvis does with his cousins, so I guess it’s possible he was tonguing down his brothers as well.
Elvis tries to apologize to Pam by singing at her window, but Pam isn’t having it. Good for Pam, but now who will protect her from all those silver mine heiress kidnappings? I guess she’ll just have to make it on her own, because we now cut to Elvis back on the rodeo circuit, sucking at his job. Bull riding is the only sport where all you have to do is successfully sit for a long time, and Elvis can’t even do that. They do, honestly, kind of a funny bit where the rodeo announcer introduces him a little bit less enthusiastically each time as the bull knocks him off immediately.
Why can’t Elvis rodeo anymore? It’s the woman’s fault, of course! He’s simply too lovesick to rodeo good. Luckily, his gay best friend Stanley tracks him down and tells him that Pam is devastated by his loss, and he needs to come to the ranch and win her back. He’s lying. Pam is clearly fine. She does not want to see Elvis. In fact, when she sees him arrive at the ranch, she flees to Silverado, and Elvis and Stanley give chase. They all get caught in a rainstorm, and Elvis forces Pam into the abandoned motel with a slap on her wet ass. It’s not an Elvis movie without a wet lady spanking. If Pam had depression, it’s gone now.
The final act of the movie is a straight up Scooby-Doo episode. Even though the gold-seeking kidnappers’ entire goal for the first two-thirds of the movie was to get Pam to this ghost town so they could force her to find her grandfather’s treasure, now that she’s here, they want her gone. Or maybe they’re hoping to scare only Elvis and Stanley away but somehow keep Pam? The plan isn’t clear, but they do dress up in cheap plastic masks and chase everybody around the motel in a series of slapstick shenanigans.
The last part of the movie doesn’t have any songs in it; I guess because the general topic of Elvis songs is “uh oh, I’m horny,” and that doesn’t translate well to a series of comedic chases. I guess it’s a good thing they didn’t play one of Elvis’s menacing love songs as he attempts to wrestle these masked men to the ground. Something like, “slowly but surely, I’m gonna wear you down, slowly but surely, I’m gonna bring you round, to my way of thinking, my way of kissing, my way of lovin’, slowly but surely, I’m gonna make you mine.”
In the end, Elvis manages to defeat three men by noticing a door that says “Do not Open” which leads to a two story fall into a giant mud pit outside. Each man lunges at Elvis, and his stunt double grabs the top of the door and swings out, so the men are thrown from the building. Stanley also ends up falling out of the door, but instead of landing safely in the mud, he goes straight down into a cellar. When Elvis and Pam go to retrieve Stanley’s corpse, they accidentally find Pam’s grandpa’s gold spewing from the walls of the motel.
Don’t worry, Stanley lived because Elvis movies run on cartoon logic. Pam and Elvis end the movie by getting married at the fat lady ranch, also because of cartoon logic. The boss who ruined their relationship is a guest at their wedding, and it’s not weird or uncomfortable for anyone, because of Elvis logic. They drive off into the sunset together as Elvis sings a vaguely menacing love song, and Stanley is accidentally dragged behind their car.
If you’re still wondering why this movie is called Tickle Me, it’s pervert reasons. According to the trailer, it’s because the movie has “gags that will tickle you, and gals that will tickle you, and hit tunes that will tickle you”. (Being tickled by ladies not guaranteed). I guess “Elvis’s Cheapest Movie” wasn’t a tagline that would sell tickets, but tell the American public they were signing up to watch women tickle Elvis in 1965, and get ready to be crushed under a cascading pile of old-timey prospector money.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, who finally understands the title of that supernatural slashfic. It was an Elvis reference the whole time!
Categories
Nerding Day: Mormon Mouthful
The TV show Happy Days lasted for eleven seasons and was one of the most popular series of the late 1970s, so it makes perfect sense it would get a Saturday morning cartoon spinoff. What makes less sense is that the spinoff would be about three of the main characters from Happy Days traveling through time with a talking dog and fighting Dracula. The cover art for the complete animated series tells you almost everything you need to know about the show. It looks like a bootleg copy of Ukrainian Scooby-Doo.
If you’re wondering how Fonzie, Richie, and Ralph Malph ended up in a time machine, so am I. Keep wondering, chump. This show is never going to tell us. In episode one, we cut to the gang mid-time machine crash. How did they get on the time machine? How did they meet Cupcake, the time-traveling 25th-century chick who is also magic? When did Potsie get replaced with a talking dog named Mr. Cool? How did Anson Williams take the phone call telling him he would be replaced by a talking dog named Mr. Cool? Did they at least offer to let Anson Williams voice Mr. Cool? For some reason, none of these questions will be answered in the show.
The title of the show is probably The Fonz And The Happy Days Gang because at the time Fonzie was so insanely popular that the producers wanted to change the name of Happy Days to Fonzie’s Happy Days, but none of the actors on the show, including Henry Winkler, wanted that, so the name stayed the same. However, the studio wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to stick the solid gold name Fonzie on a cartoon that was definitely just a reskinned American Dr. Who.
Yes, the plot of this show is exactly Dr. Who. At some point, Richie Cunningham, Ralph Malph, Fonzie, and Fonzie’s dog, Mr. Cool, all got into a time machine, and ever since then, they’ve just been trying to get back home. Along the way, they detour to 1,000,000 BC, the moon, Blackbeard’s pirate ship , the year 3057, and Atlantis, and that’s all in season one. Yes, this show got two seasons. It even got some merch.
You may notice that the characters are so poorly drawn they sort of look like those weird Marvel cartoons where they didn’t want to pay Marvel actors for their likenesses, so Black Widow looks like Shmarlett Shmohansson. I’m going to assume they had permission to use the Happy Days actors’ likenesses, since all of the actors from Happy Days voiced their characters. That must have been a wild time for them, going to the studio during the week to record an episode where Richie learns an important lesson about lactose intolerance and then hitting the VO booth on the weekend to do the episode where the Viking Sorceress Grimhilde steals the gang’s time machine.
Every episode of this show sounds so profoundly made up. There’s an episode just called “KELP!” where the gang ends up in 3817 on the ocean floor in a battle between the kelp farmers of Aqua City and a greedy surface dweller who wants to destroy the city. So it’s Happy Days in a time machine, in the future, under the ocean. It’s like this was part of a scientific experiment to see how much you can Ship of Theseus a TV show.
I guess if I were to single out any one episode as the weirdest, it would be the one where Fonzie defeats Dracula, partly because it was so early in the series when they got to the Dracula fight. Most shows don’t bring in Dracula until deep in their tenure. Buffy The Vampire Slayer waited until season 5; Penny Dreadful at least made it to season 3; The Fonz And The Happy Days Gang was seven episodes in before they were like, “this show needs some Dracula.”
Like every other episode of the show, we begin in the time machine, where Cupcake is one thousand percent certain they are about to land safely in 1957 Milwaukee. “You rubes!” the children at home scream at the television, you will never return to 1957 Milwaukee. As everyone looks out the window, distracted and excited about finally ending their six-episode-long journey, Darcula appears in the control room and redirects the time machine. Cupcake gets a lot of shit for being a bad driver, but you try driving when Dracula is yanking the wheel.
They do end up landing in 1957, but instead of Milwaukee, they are in Transylvania at the castle of Count Wolfgang Von Wolfenstein, which, of course, logic dictates is the extremely werewolf-themed name of Dracula. As happens in almost every episode, the time machine mysteriously disappears, and the gang is suddenly stranded. Now here’s where I’m a little confused. If I were the Happy Days Gang, and I’d been to the Ming Dynasty and the Old West in search of 1957 Milwaukee, I would be psyched to be a mere plane ride away from Milwaukee. This show would be over. I would be immediately hitchhiking toward Milwaukee.
Unfortunately, The Happy Days gang chooses to split up with Fonzi, Mr. Cool, and Cupcake opting to spend the night in Dracula’s castle, and Richie and Ralph opting to find a place in the nearby town because silly Ralph is afraid of the nice Dracula for some reason. Of course, they are immediately chased by a wolf, which is another weird, recurring thing that happens in this cartoon a lot. Were wolves really funny in the ’80s? I guess the idea of Richie Cunningham specifically being chased by a wolf is kind of funny. It feels like the cartoonists who worked on the show only knew how to draw certain things, and one of them was wolf. It definitely seems like drawing a wolf was a more important qualification to the studio than drawing consistent human faces.
Back at the castle, Dracula immediately announces to Cupcake that he wants to marry her and make her his queen. Cupcake responds with her catchphrase, which is “cosmic calamities.” She says this like nine times an episode, and it can mean anything. This time, I don’t think it means yes, I will marry you, Dracula, let’s settle down and have vampiric babies. It seems like Dracula wants to marry Cupcake because she has magic powers, but her magic powers almost never work, which he quickly learns when he hypnotizes Cupcake to attack Fonzie, and she instead turns him and Mr. Cool into circus clowns. I think they were trying to cram in as many horror movie concepts as possible in twenty minutes and hadn’t hit clown yet.
Meanwhile, Ralph and Richie are chased down a trap door in the basement where, of course, there’s a gross little guy doing weird experiments. Every Dracula house comes with one. For some reason, this gross little guy is doing some sort of The Fly-style experiment and ends up fusing Ralph and the wolf that was chasing them, which causes Ralph to become a werewolf. Cartoon science is beautiful.
Richie is now on the run from Werewolf Ralph inside the castle, where he runs into Cupcake and Fonzie. This is the conversation that ensues:
​
Richie: “I’ve got bad news, Fonz, and I’m not sure how to break this to you.”
​
Fonzie: “Yeah, we know, Rich, the count is a vampire.”
​
Richie: “Worse, Fonz, Ralph is a werewolf!”
​
Cupcake: “Cosmic calamities!”
Now, Cupcake, Mr. Cool, Fonzie, and Richie are all running from Dracula, Igor, and Werewolf Ralph. A lot of this show is running and sliding through trap doors. They end up back in the lab, where we finally get the Fonzie Vs. Dracula showdown we’ve all been waiting for. Fonzie says, “It’s just you and me,” to Dracula, who turns into his smallest, weakest form, a bat, and swoops at Fonzie.
The show’s biggest problem is that Fonzie’s superpower is being able to do absolutely anything because he is so cool. That makes any conflict difficult, so they sort of have to keep Fonzie distracted by a girl, or trying to observe good manners for a long time, until finally he decides to solve whatever the episode’s problem is with his magic cool powers. In this case, bat Dracula accidentally activates the controls to turn Ralph back when trying to attack Fonzie. That’s how cool Fonzie is!
At this point, the Dracula fight has been going on all night, and Fonzie realizes this, directing Mr. Cool to pull a lever that opens a trap door in the ceiling. The sunlight turns Dracula into a tornado, which reveals the time machine under an extremely time machine-shaped tarp in the lab. The Dracula tornado sends Mr. Cool tumbling through the air, but Fonzie catches him and they both go “AAAAYYYYYYY!” Because this show needs more catchphrases.
They all get back on the time machine to attempt to fly to Milwaukee. Spoiler alert, in the next episode, they land in the Salem witch trials, and Cupcake almost gets burned at the stake. The most shocking thing about this show is that it was renewed for a second season, and even after it was canceled, Fonzie and Mr. Cool both lived on after a transfer to Laverne & Shirley In The Army. They even changed the name of the show to Laverne & Shirley With Special Guest Star The Fonz. I guess that was the only way to sell a show back then. I wonder if it would still work today. All I’m saying is that there’s nothing preventing us from changing this website’s name to 1900HotdogWithSpecialGuestStarTheFonz.com.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Mr. Bob Gray, who has also been replaced by Mr. Cool. Sorry Bob, the fans want what they want.
Categories
Nerding Day: Battle For Milkquarious
Categories
Nerding Day: Whoopee!
