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Learning Day: Italian Without Words
Author: Lydia Bugg
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Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite doctor wizard, who’s also a smug 1960s swinging bachelor. That’s right, I could only be referring to Gold Key Comics’ Dr. Spektor. The superhero who is like Dr. Strange, except worse in every possible way, including his skills with women because this is the issue where Dr. Spektor gets his ass kicked by an owl and then gets dumped.
Unlike Doctor Strange, Dr. Spektor is not a real doctor. He’s more like one of those chiropractors that sell male enhancement supplements. Honestly, that would be more impressive. I don’t think Dr. Spektor even has a real job. His full name might be Dorian Reynoldo Spektor, and he’s doing some creative abbreviating. And you should know Dr. Spektor is also fully human– he has no real superpowers other than a pretty good memory and a large library of occult books. He’s a man who has read too much, and his job seems to be Scooby Dooing around the country with his girlfriend to point at supernatural creatures and go, “Yup, that’s a ghost. I’ve got a whole book about them, and that is what they look like.”
Our story today, “NIGHT OF THE OWL!” opens with Dr. Spektor and his girlfriend, Lakota Rainflower, a Sioux woman, riding in the car together. And because this comic was published in 1976, he refers to her as Pocahontas and asks her why she seems sad. To which she responds, “You mean you don’t know?” This conversation is a relationship 911 on multiple levels, but Dr. Spektor remains unbothered.
He’s instantly like, “Thank God, something more important popped up. I almost had to listen to my girlfriend’s feelings instead of hunt ghosts. Can you even imagine?” The thing Dr. Spektor and Lakota have stumbled upon is Dr. Spektor’s cousin Anne being menaced by an oddly sexual bird man with thick thighs. I’m proud to announce this owl has awakened absolutely nothing in me. However, I do have the urge to crush some Duolingo today for some reason.
The fact that this buff owl keeps mentioning how pretty Ann is will be important later. It turns out Cousin Anne has a lot going on. Her dad was recently obliterated in a house explosion after becoming inspired by Dr. Spektor to dabble in the occult. You might even say this whole thing is all Dr. Spektor’s fault. Luckily, it’s also a convenient way to escape an awkward conversation with his girlfriend.
Dr. Spektor knows exactly how to deal with a problem caused by the sinister book known as the “Demonomicon.” He’ll have to fight it using his own copy of the very same book, the “Demonomicon”. Did he get it in a two for one deal at Occult Party City and gift one to his favorite cousin in lieu of a sympathy card after his wife died? Who’s to say? It’s important to remember that no one can prove anything.
I feel like Dr. Spektor didn’t need his copy of the “Demonomicon”; he just wanted to make sure everyone understood that his cousin didn’t own a book he didn’t have. His whole thing is books. It’s all he’s got. Using the “Demonomicon”, we learn the buff owl is not a Harlem Globetrotter in disguise. It’s a demon named Andras, who, much like a regular bird, thrives on chaos. As Dr. Spector quietly reads in his private library, Andras goes around literally ripping planes out of the sky and prying railroad tracks out of the ground for fun.
Back in his library, Dr. Spektor sips some tea, avoids his girlfriend, and decides they need to have a seance to contact his dumbass ghost cousin and ask how they can get rid of Andras, even though it seems like Dr. Spektor has access to all of the same information as his cousin. Dr. Spektor is suddenly like, “fuck it, this, the book is really long and I think a seance would be cooler,” which is true. But it turns out they can’t contact Dr. Burton’s cousin since the medium thinks the guy is still alive. Convenient excuse, medium!
Now, I bet this whole time you’ve been wondering if there’s an owl man running around, are people going to blame retired superhero who is not technically Batman, The Owl, for all of Andras’s destruction? You’re absolutely right, my friend. The Owl has sought out Dr. Spektor to file a copyright complaint on the Owl Demon.
You have to wonder if this whole story was a way to remind Dr. Spektor readers that The Owl exists because there really isn’t any reason for him to show up other than an owl demon giving the man-shaped owl community a bad name. He serves no real purpose in the plot, but we obviously have to include him in the demon owl story, right? After all, we all remember his classic catchphrase, “BY THE WAY, IN CASE YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE THIS OUTFIT I’M WEARING, MOST PEOPLE KNOW ME BY THE NAME OF… … THE OWL!“
The cops show up to arrest the owl (not The Owl) for tearing airplanes out of the sky with his bare hands and he scampers off into the night. Dr. Spektor tries to convince the police that the bird they’re looking for is actually a demon but no one buys it and Dr. Spektor is very clearly used to that, so he just kinda dips. On their way back from the failed seance, Andras attacks and kidnaps Anne. Dr. Spektor’s plan to shriek, “ROLL UP THE WINDOWS, QUICK!!” does not work.
Dr. Spektor’s next idea is to “try to stop Andras somehow,” but it fails, because Andras is a supernatural demon and he is an ordinary man named Doctor. In fact, it’s such a useless gesture Lakota is genuinely offended he didn’t ask her to help. I mean, why not die respecting her?
Lakota could probably have taken that owl. If she pictured Dr. Spektor’s face on him and let out some of her frustration about dating a man whose job is solving the occult problems he caused, Andras would be dead as hell. Instead, we learn Andras has some kind of hypnotic powers that make Lakota and Dr. Spektor unable to fight him. Who knows why he bothered. Maybe it’s hard to get liquid nerd out of demon feathers?
Andras also uses his bird hypnosis on Anne to prevent her from running away. He flies her into a tree and says, “You live here now, Anne! I know it’s not the condo with a fenced-in yard you were hoping for, but it’s home, Anne! Don’t fall out of our home, or you’ll die. Sorry, about the mind powers. I promise it’s mostly a safety thing, not a sex thing. Okay bye, I have to go destroy. Ha! Heee! Haa-Haaahh!” I don’t know why I’m paraphrasing when I can show you the full riveting speech:
This is a great villain monologue. Andras’s motives are so clear. He wants to cause chaos and hang out with Anne. The fan fiction for these two writes itself. Sadly, Lakota is not as jazzed about Anne finding eternal love with Andras as I am. In fact, she’s pretty pissed at Dr. Spektor and has the wild idea that all of this is a little bit his fault somehow?
He could have taken this woman to TGI Fridays in the first panel of this comic and they would still be together. To make matters worse, The Owl returns, and Lakota does not like his vibe because she wonders if “a sane man would risk his life taking the law into his own hands.” Hey, “Doctor,” are you hearing this? You, the man who fights ghosts– who is currently looking to fist fight a hypnotic superbird of Satan with no plan? Dr. Spektor should really see the writing on the wall here, but he’s too busy hanging out with his cool new friend in the owl costume. He misses every single sign she gives him, and she is not subtle:
And that’s a wrap on Lakota. He will never see her again, but he’s too distracted to realize that. His cousin’s spectral form shows up to tell him which tree Anne is in, so he’s got to go rescue her. The Owl tags along, and they have an epic showdown with two regular owls, which the comic book tries to convince us is the pinnacle of danger. These hollow-boned creatures are predators, but their primary prey is mice. Almost any adult man should be able to fight an owl. If a combined weight of eight pounds of grouchy bird is a threat, these two superheroes are doomed.
But it’s actually worse than two men going into a ring with a couple owls and walking out defeated because the owls aren’t real. They’re an illusion created by Andras with his hypnotism skills. Learning this is how Andras’s hypnotism skills work makes me wonder what Anne thinks she’s been doing this whole time she’s been stuck in a tree with him. Did she think he was Taye Diggs? Haha, I hope not because the big twist of the comic is that this whole time, the owl demon was, in fact, her father. That’s why he was so obsessed with Anne, because, as Dr. Spektor so eloquently puts it, he still wanted to “possess” his daughter. Anne is like a cool lava lamp, or a tennis racket that he left behind when he went full owl.
I did not get the vibe of fatherly affection coming off that bird demon. He was trying to get his cloaca wet. I know that he was possessed by a demon, but this is still so messed up, and no one acknowledges it. There’s no awkwardness. They banish the demon and Anne drives off into the sunset with Bird Daddy.
Dr. Spektor returns home to finally learn how hard he has been dumped. She hit him with the “please don’t try to find me” in her goodbye letter. That’s the ultimate dump. Not only are they broken up, she doesn’t want him to know her address. That’s how sick of ghosts this woman is. “SILENT FUCKING RAGE,” he thinks to himself.
At least she had the decency to leave behind a framed photograph and a tomahawk for him to remember her by. He should have seen this one coming. He asked her to help save his cousin from bird marriage to her Dad, and she literally said, “I have a bad headache!” That last panel is a man truly defeated both romantically and physically by an owl. Dr. Spektor may have sent him back to hell, but Andras won this issue.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Lucas Keen, but in case you don’t recognize his crushed velvet jumpsuit, most people know him by the name of THE PURPLE HONEYCREEPER.
You probably think that The Chicken Girls are way too mainstream for 1900hotdog to cover, and I completely agree with you. After all, Chicken Girls The Movie currently has over forty million views on YouTube. As we all know, it was the flagship program of Brat TV, a YouTube channel aimed at teen girls who wish The Disney Channel included more product placement and less talent.
The creator of Brat TV recruited a bunch of young influencers with built-in audiences to star in his YouTube shows. They got real acting experience and some sort of paycheck, and Brat TV got to make soap operas for babies. You might be wondering, is this Brat TV related to the Bratz dolls? No, the word Brat is legally unaffiliated with everything they are doing at Brat TV. You can tell Brat TV apart from the Bratz YouTube channel because Brat TV has 4.5 Million more subscribers.
Chicken Girls was so wildly popular it spawned multiple spinoffs and launched many of the Chicken Girls from social media stardom into actual C-list fame! One even got her own Nickelodeon show about a teenager who accidentally sets her principal’s boat on fire and has to work off the boat debt. It’s called Side Hustle, and that is the real plot. So, for Chicken Girls The College Years we were left with Rooney (she’s the artistic one) and Birdie (she’s also the artistic one). It feels a little bit like a Gumby spinoff starring two Pokeys, and unlike the wildly popular Chicken Girls The Movie, it’s obscure enough to be featured on 1900hotdog.
As we all know, The Chicken Girls is the name of a friendship/dance troupe. They battle an evil dance troupe called Power Surge and learn lessons about life, love, and products that teenagers can buy along the way. This season, it’s Takis. At the fictional Providence college life revolves around Takis.
I’ve been through so many feelings about Chicken Girl fandom in the last forty-eight hours. I went from, “What is The Chicken Girls?” to “The Chicken Girls are a criminal organization,” and somehow ended on, “Oh no do I kind of love The Chicken Girls The College Years: Presented By Takis?” Come along on that journey with me.
You see, it’s generally agreed upon by the Chicken Girl fandom that after season six, Chicken Girls really took a dive. However, Chicken Girls College Years was a rebirth of a quality series. The actresses portraying Rooney and Birdie were billed as also Executive Producing and these girls have that scary Gen Z confidence that allows them to do things like post this picture on Instagram to their 6.1 million followers with the caption “sit down, be humble,” and tag the Visa cash app. Birdie will never regret this picture, even when she’s no longer 21 and dating a guy who looks like he played Archie’s peyote guy on Riverdale.
How will that confidence translate into art? I wondered. For one thing, the product placement is absolutely shameless. These ladies would French kiss a bag of Takis for the full twelve-minute episode if that’s what Daddy Taki requested. They are getting that bag, the bag being held tightly by Takis corporate. In the first episode, it takes a full eight minutes to get into the Taki’s conversation, but here’s how it goes: Rooney is jealous of Haven, a trans girl in her photography class whom the teacher heavily praises for her point of view. Very cool that they included a trans character, and most of her storylines have nothing to do with her gender identity. Uncool that that made her say, “Want some Takis waves? Come on? They’re wavy potato chips with delicious flavor.”
“Oh wow, these are amazing…I think it’s the intense crunch you get when you bite in,” Rooney replied normally; how a girl would normally say that she loves the intense crunch of new Takis waves even if Takis wasn’t paying her any money. A little investigative journalism on my part has led me to believe Rooney isn’t actually a huge fan of Takis. After this episode they mainly focus on Birdie eating the Takis, and she does NOT eat the spicy ones.
The executives at Takis wanted to get to the Takis quicker, so in episode two, at one minute and forty seconds, Birdie learns that Takis are the best-selling product at the coffee shop where she works because there’s nothing like washing down a spicy chip with a hot cup of coffee. If I were Birdie, I would have quit immediately after learning these Takis statistics. She has to clean that coffee shop’s bathroom! Instead, she just says, “I love these Takis intense Nacho Roll chips. They’re not hot and insanely cheesy. So good, but still so intense even without the spice!”
After the first two episodes they just stuck a skit at the beginning of each episode where Rooney is trying to come up with a photography project and gets inspired by Birdie eating Takis. She decides to photograph her friends eating Takis and call the project “face the intensity.” I’m sure she got a solid D plus.
Despite their sponsorship, Chicken Girls The College Years will look you right in the eyes and say, “We did not have the budget for that.” One scene requires two frat boys to have a conversation while weightlifting, but this show has five sets total, and none of them are gyms. So, the frat boys lift five pounds in the living room of the frat house, where they film all of the party scenes.
You know how sometimes guys get together to chat and bench ten. They also sleep next to each other on lawn chairs in the same frat living room, in front of a decorative banner that says “TEAM Alkohol.” A boy bedroom was simply not in the budget. The two person frat exists in this one room. If they leave it, they die. These characters might be ghosts?
The show is a soap opera, so most of the storylines follow the girls’ social and dating lives. Rooney goes to photography class, and Birdie, who dropped out of college in season one, works at a coffee shop on campus. However, the Takis sponsorship only lasts through episode six of the nine episodes, and episodes seven through nine are wildly more interesting and ironically spicier than the Takis-sponsored episodes.
There is a very special episode that I’m so glad they tackled. It’s about pretty privilege. You see, Rooney is so hot that everyone thinks she can’t also be a talented photographer. If you or someone you love isn’t being taken seriously because of how very hot they are, that shit sucks. Remember, hot people can also be fun and talented too! That’s why we hate them.
Haven also gets her most robust solo storyline, which is about her stepbrother apologizing for outing her to her family before she was ready, and there’s a half-decent episode about consent that heavily involves the frat guys. It’s the culmination of the show’s main storyline that really converted me to a Chicken Girl The College Years fan. A major plotline throughout the season is that Rooney and Birdie are both casually dating the same guy. His name is Miles, and he’s into artistic rock tumbling. Rooney calls him “hot art guy,” I call him Cactus Shirt Boy.
The boy wardrobe on this show was zero dollars total and the girl wardrobe was ten grand per outfit. The disrespect this show treats their male actors with is kind of inspiring? I feel like this show treats men how most shows treated women until 2010. The casting call for Miles probably said, “Cactus Shirt Boy – likes rocks and lying to women. No other motivation. Name subject to change if we can’t find a cactus shirt.”
The thing about Cactus Shirt is he’s so noticeably dull and has no romantic tension at all with either lead character. He’s a rock tumbler? That’s his cool art? Everyone watching had to be like, what is the deal with Cactus Shirt? Then you come to episode seven, a mere one-episode separation from the tyranny of Takis. It’s called “The Kiss.” There are no will they/won’t they couples that could kiss in this episode, so you might be a little baffled by the dramatic title. You might also notice that at the end of the episode, there’s an enormous replay spike in the YouTube timeline:
What could the teens be replaying so voraciously? It’s the episode after Rooney and Birdie find out they are both dating Cactus Shirt. Cactus Shirt has decided he wants to tumble rocks with only Birdie from now on and goes to tell Rooney when Birdie walks in on them. The girls aren’t mad at each other, but they are both deeply troubled. They spend the episode avoiding each other and panicking until they meet up at the coffee shop, and they KIIIIIIISS. The Chicken Girls fall in love!
As someone who grew up seeing LGBT representation in teen shows as the occasional flamboyant Disney villain, I’m just so psyched for The Chicken Girls. It turns out this show is not JUST a shallow cash grab; it’s a slow burn friends-to-lovers lesbian drama that was extremely sponsored by Takis? How can I not love that? If you go back and rewatch it, knowing this is the ending, everything makes so much sense. The Takis represent the fire of their unrequited love for each other. It’s all Blue Heat Hot Chili Rolled Tortilla Chip subtext.
Chicken Girls The College Years Season 2: Presented by Takis, sadly wasn’t as successful as Chicken Girls The College Years Season 1: Presented by Eos Lip Balm. Season 1 premiered with 1.2 million views and ended with less than half that. Season 2 premiered with 898K views and finished with 363K, a far cry from the forty million amassed by The Chicken Girls Movie. This may be the end of Rooney and Birdie’s story, much to the disappointment of Birooney shippers. Brat TV is more focused on their slate of other popular shows, including Chicken Girls Season 11, and Charmers, a legally not Charmed show about young witches who love lip balm.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin‘s OzTV’s Beef Boys: The Divorce Years brought to you by Del Taco’s new Beefy Cheesito Grand Meato Supremo with Flavor Sauce.
I have a single question about demon powers: do demons have powers? If the answer is yes, there’s one quick follow-up: How do I say, “Please don’t use your powers on me; I’m a useless little clown,” in Latin? Some people are more curious about demons and their powers, though. Some people have 101 questions about demons and their powers if you can even believe it! That’s too many questions!
Dr. Lester Sumrall, the author of 101 Questions & Answers On Demon Powers, is the kind of fire and brimstone preacher who added poetry to his spite. In our modern times, the things he was preaching against are honestly pretty adorable. To get an idea of his personality, here’s how Dr. Lester Sumrall described movies in his 1940 classic, Worshipers of the Silver Screen:.
“We have permitted the death-dealing bombs and poisonous gases from the celluloid Babylon to tear our society to fragments. Her shrapnel of lust is flying with fiendish wings to destroy every mortal possible. Her sleeping ether in the pulpit has put the ministers in a peaceful coma WHILE THEIR FELLOW-MEN ARE BEING DASHED INTO HELL. Her tear gas has blinded the parents as to the real danger the motion pictures have upon their children. Her arsenical smoke of nicotine, alcohol, and pornographic novels is giving convulsions to a wicked society. Her mustard gas of infidelity is burning away the vital life of our young generation.“
Sir, this is A Hundred And One Dalmatians. They’re not trying to shrapnel you with lust; they’re just trying to ask, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a whole bunch of Dalmatians? It’s not that deep.
His book titles are pretty amazing. One is called Adventuring With Christ, which sounds like the story of someone resurrecting Jesus to help them steal the Declaration of Independence. By far, his best book title is Roman Catholicism Slays, which basically forces you to picture The Pope in drag. This man loved Catholicism!
101 Questions & Answers On Demon Powers isn’t Lester F. Sumrall’s best work. The first couple of questions are great, but you can tell there’s a point around question #21 where he realizes 101 is a lot of questions. All of this could have been a bathroom stall pamphlet.
No, you should French kiss the demons. Is this man really making people buy his book to learn if they should fear demons? Basically, his answer is that, no, demons should be afraid of you if you’re a good person who has never seen a single movie. Remember, if you watched Cars 2 or Shrek Forever After, you’re going straight to hell! Convulsed to death by the filthy mustard bombs of your Shrek lust!
As you can see by question #35, this man has completely run out of ideas for made-up questions about demon powers. He hasn’t even answered, “What is the coolest one?” or “Which type of karate works best against them?” and he’s already out of ideas. If someone asked this question at a book signing, you would know their mind blanked at the last second. “Hi… more of a comment t-than a question? How much… knowledge of any, um, any existing situation does an evil s-spirit have? Sorry, wait, I guess that was a question.”
Weirdly, Lester includes this question and takes a full page to answer it. It turns out demons “do their own research” and go off things they heard. Here’s how Satan worded that before he had Facebook:
A large portion of this book involves pointing at things in a room and asking if they are evil spirits. Here’s a fun tip that will let you solve the mystery way before you read the answer: It’s always an evil spirit. Anything you do that causes boners, fatigue, or an unhappy wife is probably caused by an evil spirit.
I’m pretty sure the Spirit of Gambling is a Mississippi riverboat casino that I’ve been to. Sadly, the answer to “Is there a spirit of gambling” isn’t, “Yeah, and it rules. Their fried shrimp is delicious.” It’s another old man rant about how Jesus is better than gambling, even though Jesus has never given me two hundred dollars and a complimentary Long Island iced tea.
The amount of things this man finds satanic is so long I don’t know how he could exist in our modern world. This book was published in 1983, and he’s still furious about the Beatles. John Lennon had been dead for three years. He’s been hating all pop culture for over four decades and he never updated his music enemies? This was a time for forgiving the Beatles and hating Metallica.
Forget The Beatles; Dr. Lester was still upset with close up magic and ventriloquism. I kind of agree that ventriloquism is demonic, and we should ban it. Not for religious reasons but because I don’t want to see gross little puppet hands. I don’t want to live in a world where things have been touched by them. Still, this feels like me ranting about the devil owning AskJeeves.com today.
Lester seems to forget he’s the one writing these questions and gets a little angry that he keeps having to answer the same ones over and over again. His answer to question #90 seemed a little grumpy to me, but then I remembered how similar it was to question #74. He’s yelling at the hypothetical asshole he made up to remember he already said no to Halloween masks and menacing puppets. Do you think there’s any chance he’ll be fine with jack-o-lanterns? Get it together, strawman.
Not all of the questions make him angry. He loves it when he comes up with questions that let him rant for three pages. In one case, the question is, “Can you just rant about television, Grandpa?” Oh, my can he, sonny.
“Please comment on” is not how you start a question. Also, this has nothing to do with demons or their powers. This book has 60 questions about demons and their powers at best and 41 questions of filler. The book’s most practical advice is the answer to the questions we’ve all been asking for years, and I’m so glad that someone finally tackled it: can you bring a baby to an exorcism?
“Huck it wherever, the baby will be fine”- Lester Sumrall. I don’t know why you would want to bring a baby to an exorcism, but if you’re a busy parent/exorcist, Asmodeus can watch the kid and resist your Christian influence at the same time. I hope whoever asked this question was real and Lester kept in touch with them. Did the baby grow up okay? Did they ever light someone on fire with their gaze? Befoul any ground with their footsteps? Dr. Lester never published another book after this one, and I feel this advice deserves an update. He has similarly upsetting advice about exorcising dogs:
This is another question I really need some context for. Was someone trying to convince this man to wrestle a rampaging German shepherd to the ground and pray for it? Or is this a Christian hypothetical somewhere in the realm of “If you were a hotdog, would you eat yourself?”
I would not take Sumrall’s advice on babies, dogs, or how hard the Pope slays. If I could give this author 101 pieces of advice, they would all be variations of how he should calm the fuck down. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Is calming down an evil spirit? It is! This was all a trick. I’m the evil spirit of enjoying yourself for fifteen minutes, and I’ve infected you all with my sinister little japes.
You’ve been huffing the mustard gas of JOY! The shrapnel of your chuckles will tear apart our society. I’ve flown in on my fiendish wings of silliness and distracted you from the futility of life. Your vital time is being burned away by the poison of having a little bit of fun. My evil plan has worked!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Cuevas, the Evil Spirit of Rewatching Old Kung Fu Movies While Doomscrolling On Your Phone.
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Fucking Day: She’s Too Young
