Author: Lydia Bugg

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: All My Children Trading Cards 🌭

I’ve once again managed to locate an entire pack of unopened trading cards from one of America’s most popular collectible trading card series. That’s right, I’m about to pit seven different versions of actress Susan Lucci against each other in the battle to the death we’ve all been waiting for. It’s time to talk about the All My Children trading card collection!

Seriously, there are so many Susan Lucci trading cards in this deck that I started to wonder if All My Children was a show about quintuplets and Susan Lucci played all of the children. Most of the other characters in the show get one or two cards at most. Lucci gets one for every facial expression she’s ever made during rehearsal and two for every time she borrowed an outfit from the Star Trek wardrobe’s hot alien section.

Susan Lucci hair check: it’s slicked back but also somehow enormous and full of springs? Did they put slinkies in her hair? Judging by the top two looks, I’m a little worried Susan Lucci’s hairdresser was a crow trying to make a nest out of its shiny little treasures.

Apparently, Susan Lucci’s character, Erica Kane, is considered the most popular character in American soap opera history. So, if someone bought a pack of All My Children trading cards and didn’t get at least three or four Luccis, they would riot. The excessive amount of Lucci in this deck is for public safety. Don’t worry, though; it’s not all Susan Lucci. The creators of this card deck also used it to commemorate special moments in All My Children, like the time Susan Lucci’s daughter set her house on fire.

Quick, Susan Lucci, reach into your hair and see if there’s a squirt gun or maybe a tiny fire extinguisher in there! All My Children trading cards have three major categories: Susan Lucci smiling, Susan Lucci smoldering, and torturing Susan Lucci. This has to be the most popular trading card commemorating a house fire in American trading card history.

Sometimes, the cards even throw one in that upsets Susan Lucci in a sneaky way. I saw ERICA AT THE CIRCUS, and I thought, oh good, finally, something nice for Erica! Readers, it was not a good day for Erica. This is a card commemorating the time Erica learned that her father, Eric Kane, “the famous filmmaker and infamous philanderer,” had faked his death for financial reasons and was now living life as Barney the Clown! Her father abandoned her to pursue a career in professional clowning. Nothing is worse than that! Can’t Erica just go to the circus?

Do the people who watch this show love pain? Let’s see Susan Lucci in happier times, and we won’t ask any questions about what happened immediately after the picture on this card was taken. This is Erica and the third of her seven husbands. He was probably torn apart by wolves or something. Again, we’re not asking too many questions; just enjoy that Susan Lucci gets to be happy and not have her hair full of trinkets because it’s hidden underneath a hat.

I swear Susan Lucci has cursed these cards. I keep trying to find an interesting one that doesn’t have her in it, but almost everyone who isn’t Susan Lucci has been done so dirty by the trading card manufacturer. What did these women do to Susan Lucci to be forever immortalized in a bad wig, a brown cape, and the saddest half-smile of all time?

Obviously, it’s fine how Susan Lucci definitely made sure these women looked terrible in her trading card set. She’s a boss bitch. You don’t get your own QVC clothing line, exercise DVD, and celebrity perfume (LaLucci) by being a team player. Maybe I’m wrong. There could have been someone else masterminding the cards. I just can’t help but notice the huge gaping difference between Myrtle Fargate’s single card, which refers to her as a “drunken ex-carnival worker,” and a picture of Susan Lucci that just says “HOT”.

So many of the other women in their hot couple cards are craning their necks all weird like they’re being rescued from a yoga accident. Susan Lucci is smoldering right into the camera as she holds hands with husband number five (of seven total husbands). Yes, that is the husband who got married thirteen times to ten different women, and had a secret twin brother who Erica was also in love with. Could you look even half as good as Susan Lucci if you were in a relationship with a man and his secret twin brother without knowing it? This woman is so talented!

Of course, every card can’t have Susan Lucci, or a woman who Susan Lucci has clearly sabotaged in it. Things happen on All My Children other than Susan Lucci being hot. Luckily, the cards have found a way around that. For instance, if Susan Lucci isn’t on a card, what if everyone on it is wearing a mask?

Any of these people could plausibly be Susan Lucci. We don’t know! They’re being cheeky about it. Even the guy in the mustache sort of looks like Susan Lucci wearing a hyper realistic movie mask. Either that or I’m just seeing Susan Lucci everywhere now? Has my husband always looked a little bit like Susan Lucci?

The ultimate All My Children trading card is titled DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE. First of all, it’s so dark that Susan Lucci could be lurking in the backseat of its car. However, all of the non-Susan Lucci people in the picture look like absolute hell. They’re so not Susan Lucci; they are visibly bleeding. Maybe dead. Susan would never. Rumor has it all of her blood was replaced with LaLucci in 1998. She’s technically a window cleaner.

It might seem strange for a deck of trading cards to commemorate housefires, drunk driving, and circus daddies, but All My Children was actually very metal. These are the special moments from the show that the All My Children audience wanted to forever enshrine in a trading card. They’re the type of people who like two things: psychological terror, and Susan Lucci. The psychological terror caused by Susan Lucci absolutely rocks their world. You might think you’re immune to her charms, but I bet you’ll have trouble getting this sultry look out of your head after reading this article. And when I say sultry, I mean SULTRY.

You don’t get to spend a decade slinging jorts on QVC without being a woman of incredible resolve and seductive energy. In fact, she’s so powerful that Susan Lucci hijacked this entire article and also, maybe my life? There are seventeen boxes of something called Susan Lucci’s Youthful Essence Night Cream in my living room. It all expired in 2006, but for some reason, it felt like a good investment at the time. And it feels like Susan Lucci on my skin.

I think my weak personality couldn’t withstand the charisma radiating from these trading cards. I’ve got to stop bringing these things into my home. Yeah, I’m going to get rid of these cards. I’ll need room for the additional nine boxes of Susan Lucci’s Hair Nest System I just ordered. If I disappear in the next six weeks, please know I may have joined a cult that Susan Lucci isn’t aware she started.

This article was brought to by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Koumoutsas, the Susan Lucci of competitive hot dog hurling.

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Hangin’ with Leo

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FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Stacy X

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NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Worth It or Woke

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UPSETTING DAY

Ape Week: The Many Faces of Tim Curry in Congo 🌭

Your cries have been heard, hotdog children. You demanded that I return to my roots and rate Tim Curry’s faces in the movie Congo for Ape Week. I wish rating Tim Curry’s faces wasn’t my greatest talent. I wish the space in my brain that I keep for Tim Curry face rating would hold something useful like math or CPR, or how to make a diamond into an ape-killing laser. I’ve now watched Congo twice in two years, thanks to 1900HOTDOG. A government employee should be sent to check on me any minute now, and I will tell them, “I’m fine; Hotdog made me do it!”

After watching Congo entirely focused on Tim Curry, I’ve come to realize this movie underutilized Tim Curry. His face isn’t even featured on the poster! What a whiff. He’s doing what he does best here, playing both a villain and a bit of comic relief. Funny villain is actually difficult to pull off and he is the master of it. We love him, but when we see a gorilla bash his head in with its fist, we’re like, “Yeah, that seems right.”

Tim Curry’s acting in this movie is downright subtle. He’s letting the accent do a lot of the heavy lifting, and boy is it lifting. I made a note of some of my favorite pronunciations Herkemer Holmolka made in this movie, but it doesn’t translate well into writing. If you want, you can listen to our extensive, perfect impressions on the Dogg Zzone 9000 Podcast episode about Congo. Or, you can picture Count Chocula over pronouncing every syllable in the word diamonds, and that’s basically it. When we first see Tim Curry, he’s doing a gentle evil smirk that is so restrained I barely recognise him. One out of a million Tim Curries. What is happening to our boy?

Congo doesn’t linger on Tim Curry’s little smiles. It doesn’t pan in on his evil scowls. It’s taught me to appreciate Curry in a new way. Ignore the main characters in the scene; ignore the plot; it’s laser gorillas anyway; watch the Curry! His usual brilliance is in there; they just don’t want you to know. Why would you hide this 3.5 out of five Tim Curry face from us, Congo?

A human/gorilla hybrid has to throw a decapitated human head at Tim Curry for us to get that reaction out of him, and it’s so underplayed. It’s a quiet little moment between Tim Curry and that skull where he has to show so many emotions with one quick expression. Yet when you see that face, you know immediately that man is looking at a human skull that’s been torn off at the hands of a super ape that can only be killed by lasers or volcanoes. This is a two-second clip where they quickly cut to other actors reacting to the head. Who cares! Tim Curry is there.

The worst thing that happens in the movie Congo is that a man has to burn a leech off of his dick as a comedic bit, and we never get to see Time Curry’s reaction to it. He’s not in that scene at all, so that face is lost to history. Instead, we’ll have to be sustained by Tim Curry, sadly contemplating a little snack. Timmy loves a snack! I give four out of nine Tim Curry’s.

Did that sesame cake kill his mother? The man looks devastated, absolutely crushed by a pastry. A Congo congoisseur might recognize this as the scene where a soldier screams at him to “STOP EATING MY SESAME CAKE.” On closer rewatch, this is the look right before Tim eats the cake. It makes me realize he knew he shouldn’t eat the cake, but he did it anyway. What a scamp, how perfectly in character. He’s tortured by his love of that sesame cake. Then, after he gets yelled at for his love of cake, he turns to Ernie Hudson to see if he’ll fight for his right to eat cake, and I give that face four Tim Curries, plus a secret fifth one (he’s hiding).

This scene is the most we get to see Tim Curry being Tim Curry before the heads start to come off. He was made for the drama and intrigue of the last fifteen minutes of Congo and not for understated wandering-through-the-jungle-and-joking-about-a-guy-fucking-a-gorilla middle of Congo. You might wonder what the heck Tim Curry’s character is doing there for most of the middle of the movie, and the answer is he’s waiting around to make this face.

Woah, I’m so sorry that was far too powerful of a face this early in the article. It almost overloaded our system, but I managed to use some diamonds I found in the jungle to reconfigure a few things. Let’s take it down a notch and appreciate Tim Curry’s subtle anger at Ernie Hudson for outing him as a Romanian con man who is somehow not faking that accent.

A mere seven Tim Curries for that one. I’ve seen the kind of rage this man harbors for Kermit The Frog. I’ve seen the darkest depths of his soul reflected in the black button eyes of a Muppet, so I can’t buy this burst of rage at Ernie Hudson. However, when Ernie Hudson absolutely destroys Tim Curry later in the movie, I do believe his utter despair. Three Tim Curries, BUT they’re all smoking cigarettes.

Uh oh, I just accidentally released the title of my Congo fan fiction early. Nobody take Ernie Hudson Absolutely Destroys Tim Curry from me, I called dibs. Tim Curry is so hot in this movie; like physically, he’s sweaty a lot, and it makes me wonder if there was an intern specifically in charge of dampening Tim Curry between takes. Here’s a sweaty Tim Curry in a Walt Disney World cave, realizing he might not get to see any diamonds on this Congo trip and will, therefore, never get to make the perfect face he was hired for. A solid five Tim Curries, one of them is smoking even though I specifically asked him not to.

During the last half of the movie, we get my second favorite genre of Tim Curry faces, which I call Scream Queen Tim Curry. We usually know him as a snide, cocky man, making indistinct British noises of joy, but his indistinct British noises of despair are just as good. Here’s Tim Curry realizing he’s in the movie Congo, a meta king, seven out of 12 Tim Curries.

What face would you make if you were about to be punched to death by a human/ape hybrid? Would it be something that reads as, “not this again?” Because that’s what I take from Tim Curry’s absolute exhaustion at the appearance of the murder monkey. What is the backstory on this? Tim Curry has created such a rich history for Herkimer Homolka we’ll never fully understand his complicated relationship with death and killer ape-men, nine very confused Tim Curries.

After a gorilla mauling, you are about to be smashed into liquid Tim Curry here in the Lost City of Zinj. Action.

The power of Tim Curry has been disseminated to a subatomic level. I am Tim Curry. You are Tim Curry; just kidding. None of us are cool enough to be a Tim Curry. It would be a great reveal if Lydia Bugg was a pseudonym for Tim Curry this whole time. Let’s say that’s how I end this article. You don’t get to be Tim Curry. Only I am Tim Curry! Yeah, I like that better.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Hambone, who is the sixth secret Tim Curry hidden… in our hearts.