Author: Lydia Bugg

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Kung Fu for Girls

Being a writer is hard. There’s a lot of self-doubts that can creep in. You start asking yourself, why am I doing this? Is what I’m writing actually any good? Which is why a book like Kung Fu For Girls: Self Defense With Style is so comforting. The author of this book clearly knows nothing about Kung Fu, or girls, or style. He’s just some guy who saw a Jackie Chan movie once and went for it.

It’s a good reminder that writing isn’t about talent. It’s about confidence, luck, and being the type of person who will dedicate your book to someone called “Mad Dave.”

Usually, when you pick up a book on self-defense, there’s a long bio of the author, including an itemized list of every ass they’ve ever kicked. It’s an explanation for why this person is qualified to write this book. A good bio for the author of Kung Fu For Girls would be something like:

Instead, the author of Kung Fu For Girl’s credentials remain a mystery. We’ll never know what clown school taught Simon Harrison that women can only learn self-defense if you treat us like morons or six-year-olds. The tips all assume that women will stop listening after five minutes if you don’t bring the topic back around to shopping or something cute.

Which is why the main principle taught in Kung Fu for girls is KISSIE KISSIE, an acronym for Keep It Simple, Simple Is Effective. The author advises women to “say KISSIE KISSIE to yourself over and over.” I like to imagine all Kung Fu masters are doing that as they crane kick dudes in the neck.

After explaining KISSIE KISSIE (the second KISSIE is silent), the introduction says, “Kung Fu For Girls can be your pocket bodyguard. Carry it around with you, and it will help you take care of yourself wherever you are.” I don’t know how this book is supposed to help you defend yourself. Are you supposed to consult it while fighting someone? If that’s the case, they really should have included a chapter on reading while being stabbed.

You might have assumed that the phrase “self-defense with style” was a metaphor, but no, this book literally tells you to attack a man with a tube of mascara, lipstick, or a comb. As if I wouldn’t understand that shoving literally anything into someone’s eye is painful. I don’t mean to say that stabbing someone in the eye with mascara is a bad idea. I do that shit to myself all the time, so I know it’s painful.

I love the fact that the end of number five on Handbag Kung Fu says, “try not to run into too many rapists, muggers, or murderers, in one journey!” Damn, I guess my trip to Sin City is canceled. Thanks for the great advice! 

You might have noticed there’s an entire page devoted to beating a man with your cell phone. This book was written in 2004—the bygone days when a cell phone was sturdy enough to kill a man. Today the best you can hope for is blinding an attacker with the flecks of broken glass from your shattered attack phone.

This page also includes another list of the same stuff that a woman might have on her to fend off an attacker: pens, keys, pencils, combs, but it also adds bits of old wood. Who does he think is getting attacked here? Buffy The Vampire Slayer?

Don’t worry, Kung Fu For Girls isn’t full of advice that’s unhelpful because it’s so extremely obvious. Sometimes the advice is unhelpful because it’s so extremely specific. Like this page on what to do if you and one other woman get into a fight with an entire bar full of thugs who have never heard of ducking.

The only place this exact scenario makes any sense is in a ’90s Charlie’s Angels movie. All of the scenarios in the book have a weirdly descriptive quality. “You dozed off on the train. When you wake up, a scary man in a nylon tracksuit, white loafers, and no socks has placed his hand on your thigh.”

Why does what he’s wearing matter? This seems to indicate that the issue with the man placing his hand on your thigh while you’re sleeping is that he’s dressed like a real nerd. If he’d worn socks MAYBE, maybe this would be ok, but white loafers and no socks? This guy needs an ass-kicking.

If the scenario were, “you dozed off on the train. When you wake up, a scary man wearing a bespoke Armani suit, black loafers, and fancy black socks made by the sad Kardashian brother has placed his hand on your thigh,” would the solution just be, girl, you better lock that shit down now?

Another thing I don’t like about the examples is that the drawings are kinda horny. For most of the book, the woman illustrated to demonstrate movies is wearing pants, like on the cover, but as soon as we get to the part where she’s rolling around on the ground, they made sure to draw her in a skirt, with her underwear showing, which seems super necessary for educational self-defense purposes.

Also, every time the book advises to kick a guy in the dick, they really outline precisely where the dick that’s being kicked is. As if the reader needs to see the exact location of the dick in a diagram to properly kick it. Is he hoping we think the dick is located fourteen inches down his left pant leg?

Wait, he does? Oh, I get it! The author’s credentials are so clear now! This is the only book for women about fending off perverts that’s written and illustrated by an authentic pervert!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

Heal Your Cat the Natural Way 🌭

Owning a cat is like saying, I want a pet, but also I want it to hate me. So, owning a cat that you heal entirely with holistic medicine is like saying I want a pet, but I also want it to hate me and be extremely ill.  

I’m not here to tell you that holistic medicine is total bullshit. I’m sure it’s just as effective as writing “I hope I get better” on a piece of paper, setting it on fire, and throwing it in the garbage, but oh no, that’s not a garbage can; it’s a barrel of gasoline, and now your arm is on fire a little bit. That’s exactly how effective I think holistic medicine is– leaving you probably a little bit worse off than before you tried to treat yourself.

The fact that Heal Your Cat The Natural Way is written by a respected veterinarian is proof that the term “respected” is relative. Like, I’m highly respected among the butt and weiner joke community, but that doesn’t mean anyone should listen to anything I say. 

For ease of discussion, I would divide this book into two categories:

1.) Things A Cat Will Absolutely Never Let You Do To It or “Un-paw-nted Meow-lestation!”

At the top of this section is cat acupuncture. I can’t even begin to imagine the iron cast genitals on a man who would try to give acupuncture to a cat. After listing the main advantages of acupuncture, the author notes, “Disadvantages are few, mainly some cats are anxious when needles are inserted,” which seems like a pretty big disadvantage to sticking needles all over your cat’s body. 

Included in this section is a diagram of acupuncture points for cats. Please pay special attention to number’s 31, 18, and 20.

Go stick a needle in a cats butthole is going to be my new way of telling people to fuck off.

Cats are known for looking uncooperative in advertising photos. For example, there’s this fluffy cat bed whose occupant is planning your murder. 

This cute lil police officer who just ominously turned his body cam off.

But no cat is as miserable and angry as the model for kitty electro crystal therapy. Electro Crystal Therapy is “a technique pioneered by scientist Harry Oldfield of diagnosing and treating energy imbalances in the body.” Don’t worry. The cat is not being electrocuted. It just wishes it were. 

Electro Crystal Therapy simply sends electricity through the headband to create an energy field that interacts with the energy field of the patient, aka your cat, to stabilize energy imbalances. It’s a dumb hat full of electrified rocks that your cat has to wear for ten to twenty minutes. Anyone who has ever tried to put a Santa hat on their cat for a Christmas card knows how well that shit is going to go down. 

The entire book is filled with vague references to “energy.” You should have energy but not too much, and if it gets out of balance, hoo boy, you better lookout. There’s no explanation of what is being referenced by the extremely vague term “energy,” but then, I wouldn’t expect a lot of specifics from a book that prescribes the color blue to cure diarrhea. We all know if that worked, every Taco Bell on earth would be preventatively painted blue.

The color therapy section fucking rules because it does have to mention halfway through that cats don’t actually see color. 

It’s like the author wrote this entire section, then remembered that cats couldn’t see color and didn’t want to delete it for word count reasons.

The final thing the book tells you to do, which I don’t think your cat will ever let you, is tape random shit to it to make it feel better. Suppose it has a wart? Tape a banana peel to it.

Cat got a wound? Tape some Geranium leaves to it!

Look how sad this cat is. He’s clearly battled his master for the right to his dignity and lost. Now all of the other cats in the neighborhood are going to call him Geranium legs for the rest of his life (which will be mercifully short because his owner taped some leaves to his gaping holes instead of taking him to the vet).

I was going to say the second part of this book is stuff your cat will let you do to it because it is nothing, like placing some amethyst stones nearby as a pain reliever or locking it in a room with a lavender aromatherapy candle to make it less horny. However, this article can’t be five thousand words long, and I want to talk about the many discussions of cat horniness in this book.  

2.) Much Ado About Cat Balls or “Pseudoscience: The XXX Purr Parody!”

There are little side stories in each section called homeopathy case studies. They each contain a fun little anecdote about a cat successfully treated by cat sorcery author, Richard Allport. The longest one is the tale of a cat who was so angry about getting neutered that his hair fell out.

Imagine the seething rage of this terrible cat. It was so angry; its own hair ran away from it. Then it just sniffed a plant and was like, you know what? Balls are overrated. I need a prescription for Staphisagria because that shit must be good.

Richard Allport didn’t always make terrible cats less terrible, though. At least once he took a cat that had become briefly more agreeable thanks to an injury to its balls and stupidly fixed its balls, releasing the terror once again on the world.

It sounds like someone did their civic duty by kicking this cat in the balls, and this nerd went and fixed them. This is not an adorable anecdote about how homeopathy worked. It’s a crime!

Under the subheading of Male Reproductive Issues- Hypersexuality, there’s a little section full of a bunch of different homeopathic remedies for cats I call the “Oh God I’ll do anything just, please make him stop” section. My favorite of these is the suggestion to massage your super horny cat with lavender oil. What!? He’s totally going to think you’re hitting on him!

A LOT of research has obviously gone into this topic. There’s way more about cat balls in this book than cat cancer. Cat cancer gets two pages that basically say, wow, cancer is a bummer. Maybe have your cat sniff some Rosemary? Also, how are its balls?

Please don’t ask Lydia about cat balls on Twitter. 

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Sensual Fantasy For Lovers

There’s a whole genre of erotica based around humans shapeshifting into animals and having sex with each other at Christmas time. Seriously, it includes such classic novels as A Mate For The Christmas Dragon, Prancer Claws, The Twelve Mates Of Christmas Book 3, and Bear Humbug! If you can only orgasm by reading about a dragon getting a handjob while singing “O Come All Ye Faithful,” the Internet has you covered:

In 1994, when Playboy released the VHS tape SENSUAL FANTASY For Lovers, that wasn’t so much the case. The internet was pretty new at the time, which, I assume, is why this VHS exists. Everything depicted in it is the pumpkin spice latte version of kink. In a world where you can buy a vibrator at Target along with potato chips and Baby Yoda dolls, SENSUAL FANTASY For Lovers has become an adorable reminder of perverts past. 

The vibe of the video is somewhere between couples therapy and soft-core porn. It sort of explains what fantasies are to you as if the person watching doesn’t have a human brain and then shows a bunch of reenactments of grocery store paperback romance novel covers.

I can’t say that I know a ton about what was sexy in 1994. At the time, I was barely more than a twinkle in the eye of a man hoping to bang his wife in a racially insensitive costume.

The first section of the video is entitled “Games,” but it shows one game, which is pool. A woman makes a bet with her boyfriend that the game’s loser grants the winner “one erotic wish.” Foolishly, the man doesn’t invoke the usual genie rules for wishes, and when the woman wins, she uses her one erotic wish to wish for more erotic wishes.

She tells her boyfriend he has to be her sexual servant for the entire weekend, which is way more than one wish, and yet, like a fool, he agrees. We cut to the guy’s extremely ’90s house, and the woman shows up with his “uniform,” which is a banana hammock with a little tuxedo drawn on it and a bow tie.

This is where things get dicey for me. I’ve never understood why wearing nothing but a bow tie is considered a sexy thing for guys to do. If you’re fully clothed, bow ties are a nerd thing, but if you take off everything but the bow tie, now it’s sexy? Bow tie with clothes: lol who are you? Bill Nye The Science Guy? Pee Wee Herman? Bow tie without clothes: hubba hubba check out that hunk? WHY. 

Is it because a bow tie is a remnant of a tuxedo? So the idea is the guy was so impassioned in removing his tuxedo that he didn’t have time to take the bow tie off? Can you even remove the tuxedo shirt without taking off the bow tie? I don’t think so, which means you’re either taking off the tuxedo and leaving the bow tie on purposely or putting on only the bow tie. It’s like bow ties are pasties for boys, and the erotic area they’re covering is the bottom of the neck? Is it just shorthand for, “Hey, I’m classy but also not wearing pants?” Much like A Mate For The Christmas Dragon, I’m never going to understand this.

Anyway, bow tie boy brings his girlfriend a glass of champagne to drink in the bathtub, which I’m much more on board with. I know many people who have learned the joys of drinking in the bathtub in 2020, but it ends up looking a lot more like a scene from Gummo than a Sensual Fantasy for lovers.

The segment ends with the couple having some missionary position sex during which, no joke, the man leaves his bow tie on the entire time. 

We move on to “Pretending.” The section I’m sure many people watching this video and pretending to enjoy it nailed right off the bat. It shows a couple on a ranch that they establish belongs to the man’s uncle. The sexy therapist voiceover says that traveling to new locations can “transport yourself and your lover out of your everyday world where your imagination can carry you through new forms of sexual expression.“

In the same way that animals know when a bad storm is coming and get all freaked out and upset, I knew this was ending with these two having sex in a barn. “Let your partner watch you perform private acts as an enticing new twist to your intimacy. A shower provides a visual treat for your lover as your skin is transformed by the water into a glistening invitation that your lover may find hard to resist,” sexy therapist voiceover says, as the man strips down fully and sprays himself with a hose. 

That is not a shower. Hose water is cold! And let me tell you why this man is hosing off after horseback riding; it’s because horses stink. They stink a lot, and their houses are barns where these two are about to have sex, and they make their houses stinky as well. Which is why laying on a horse blanket on a bale of hay while a horse watches -not nearly disinterestedly enough for my taste- is not sexy.

Maybe pretending is great, or maybe it takes something which is inherently great (sex) and combines it with something inherently terrible (improv). This is underscored even more in the next section, which is called “Film.” 

All of the movies SENSUAL FANTASY For Lovers suggests for role play seem to involve a woman being psychologically tortured. The Sheik, the movie they show people role-playing, is about a woman being kidnapped by a sheik until she falls in love with him. They also mention Nine and a Half Weeks as a good contemporary film to recreate, which is an erotic thriller where Kim Bassinger stabs a dude in the butt.

“Pay attention to details, visit a thrift shop to find the unusual touch that will make your character come to life,” the sexy therapist says. Which just makes me wonder if there’s someone out there who’s like, “Sorry, but that star fleet uniform you’re wearing is red which is for command in The Next Generation, but I only acknowledge the original series where it was the color for operations. Also, you have two pips on your collar, which means you hold the rank of lieutenant, again not commander. I feel like you didn’t read any of my notes on the scenario and I cannot be expected to orgasm under these circumstances.”  

The video wraps up with a section called secret desires. I’m not certain what the point of that section was. The scenario they showed was a woman who had her husband go to a hotel room and then constructed a sexual escape room for him. I spent most of it thinking how hard it must be to do an escape room with a boner. The whole time she’s on the phone with him, and she asks him to describe his wife, to which he responds, “she has the world’s greatest nipples,” leaving me to wonder if there’s a coffee mug for that.

The last piece of advice SENSUAL FANTASY For Lovers leaves the viewer with is to “Follow your desire and embark on the adventure of your own sensual fantasies.” An adventure that may send you on a sacred quest for the perfect bow tie for fucking, or the perviest horse to watch you. Go forth adventures! Go forth and do the weird stuff. 

You can see more of Lydia’s fantastic Photoshop skills on Twitter.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Elvis’ Spanking Classic Blue Hawaii

Very few things about Elvis in 1961’s Blue Hawaii aren’t upsetting, from the way he holds his dog:

To the way he greets his girlfriend after two years in the army: by tonguing down a stewardess, laughing, and saying, “good, she’s jealous!”

The moral of Blue Hawaii seems to be, yeah, Elvis is a dick, but you know you’re horny for him anyway. It’s a thesis that’s outright stated in the last few minutes of the movie when Elvis proposes to his girlfriend by telling her he won’t put her last name on the business they plan to start together.

“In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a proposal,” he says.

“You’re sure?” his girlfriend asks.

“Well, I suppose I could get romantic about it, but you’d say yes anyway,” Elvis replies. A line so dickish if he were saying it today, he would legally have to exhale a quarter-mile long puff of vape smoke afterward.

It’s like the movie was written by a man whose wife left him for Elvis. I mean, the dudes that wrote Elvis movies obviously weren’t trying too hard in general, as evidenced by the title of the 1965 film Girl Happy. 

It’s a movie whose plot involves a mobster hiring Elvis to keep his daughter out of trouble during spring break.

MOBSTER: “Hey, you, the hottest man on Earth, get over here and make sure no one fucks my teenage daughter!”

You’ll never guess what happens, you guys– Elvis falls in love with the mobster’s daughter! It’s cool, though; because Elvis is portrayed as a protector of virginity in his movies. In fact, that’s what leads to the most upsetting part of Blue Hawaii.

The main plot of Blue Hawaii is about Elvis trying to figure out what to do with his life after his return from the army. His parents want him to work for his father’s company, but Elvis wants to do literally anything but that, because he doesn’t want to use nepotism on his Dad’s part to build a career. So, he decides to use nepotism on his girlfriend’s part to get a job at the tourism company she works for.

He ends up leading a tour group that consists of a pretty schoolteacher and her four teenage pupils. His interview for this job consists of the teacher asking, “Do you think you can satisfy a teacher and four teenage girls?” While pretty much winking at the camera.

There’s one teen girl in the tour group who is a horny nightmare. She’s mean and stuck up and tells Elvis to call her Ms. Corbett instead of Ellie, but then three minutes later, she’s hitting on him. She’s got two modes: hate mode and horny mode, which is honestly not that inaccurate of a portrayal of what it feels like to be a teenage girl. 

Elvis tries to get Ellie to enjoy herself. He even gives her a little nickname, “Duchess.” There’s a scene where Ellie’s finally like, why won’t you have sex with me? And Elvis says, “I don’t rob cradles.”

“Did you ever see anything like this in a cradle?” She replies, ripping off her dress to reveal…a very modest one-piece bathing suit. Elvis is pretty much like, “Yeah, that looks like a babies onesie, now GTFO.” 

However, thirty seconds later, he sings a love song directly into this lovesick teenage girl’s ear.

I think it’s important to point out that Elvis would never have responded to actress Jenny Maxwell’s affections in real life because she was 19, which made her way too old for him. When he met his future wife Priscilla, she was 14 and he was 24. According to her memoir, they divorced because he couldn’t have sex with a woman who had a child. At 19, Jenny Maxwell was divorced with a three-year-old son because the sixties were GRIM.

So at this time — when the movie Elvis was telling the 17-year-old Ellie he doesn’t rob cradles — he was maintaining a real-life relationship with 16-year-old Priscilla through letters and phone calls. He wasn’t a robber of cradles. He was the goddamn pirate king of cradle robbing. Again, whoever wrote this movie fucking hated Elvis (rightfully).

Ellie continues to be mean to her friends and cranky towards Elvis as the trip goes on, until she meets a middle-aged man at a luau whom she hits on right in front of his wife. Even more upsettingly, his wife is just like, ‘get it, girl,’ as the older man tries to drag her onto the dance floor. Movie Elvis, who again hates when older men try to have sex with teenage girls, steps in to defend Ellie’s virtue and ends up punching the married guy right in the face.

This punch leads to the kind of fight that only happens in the movies, where everyone goes nuts and starts hitting each other for no reason and with no affiliation or opposing sides. I don’t know what insane person thinks that if you’re in a bar and you see someone else get punched in the face, your response should be to turn to the person next to you and punch them in the face for no reason. Punching isn’t like sex where you see another person doing it, and you’re like, ‘that looks fun. I should go do that too!’ Except in Blue Hawaii world, where it totally is.

That one punch devolves into a full-blown riot that makes absolutely no sense and ends with Elvis in prison. It was very clearly shoehorned into the movie, so Elvis could sing a sad song about being in jail.

Elvis gets bailed out and returns to tour guiding (a bunch of other things happen because this is wildly only a B-plot in this movie, with the A-plot being a lot of songs about Hawaii and also, I think classism?)

Ellie assumes Elvis punching the married adult man who tried to have sex with her is a declaration of his true and undying love. So she steals her roommate’s outfit and perfume and heads to Elvis’s room at night to throw herself at him again. Her roommates show up and are not at all concerned about finding teenage Ellie in the room of their adult tour guide; they just want their stolen shit back. Now Elvis has three underage girls in his room at night, and he’s like…

Of course, their teacher shows up because guess what, it looks like she’s also horny for this terrible man. She kisses Elvis right on the mouth, and all of her students who are hiding on Elvis’s porch see it. Ellie, in the world’s biggest overreaction to witnessing a man be mildly kissed, steals a jeep, wrecks it, and runs into the ocean in an attempt to drown herself. This movie is rated PG.

Elvis, of course, dives into the ocean and pulls her out, the whole time treating her with tenderness and care because she’s suicidal. I’m kidding. He tells her she needs “a good old-fashioned spanking.” That is a direct quote. Then, even more upsettingly, she agrees with him. 

“Maybe I do. Nobody ever cared enough about me, even for that.” She says. And then Elvis proves to the teenage girl he cares about her, via the ass. 

That shot fades out, and we close-up on Ellie in a New York City therapist’s office where she’s getting the help she needs for — obviously I’m joking, it fades into a close-up of Ellie’s recently spanked ass. Elvis has fixed the woman by hitting her!

We pan up to reveal Ellie is happily eating breakfast with her friends! And she’s nice to everyone! And they’re nice to her! Who needs Prozac when you could get spanked by Elvis!

And the moral of the story is: if you know a woman with mental health issues, you can slap that shit right out of her. Also, teenage girls really want to have sex with Elvis, but he would never ever have sex with them, only sing them love songs, give them cute nicknames, and spank the crazy right out of them. 

If you follow Lydia on Twitter @youknowlydia she will promise never to mention this again. 

Categories
NERDING DAY

Howard Johnson’s Sega Game Tips 🌭

Sometimes cross-promotions are successful, like when the Target Dog fought and ultimately killed the Taco Bell Chihuahua. Of course, today, we’re not going to talk about the most beloved dog murder in modern history. We’re talking about a period during the early 90’s console wars when Sega was so horny for synergy they got in bed with a hotel chain who willingly abbreviated their name to HoJo, which sounds like slang for something teenagers do to each other in the back row of movie theaters.

The branded Sega tip videos, which severely missed an opportunity to call themselves Just The Tips, started in 1993. Sega provided Howard Johnson hotels with Sega Game Gear portable consoles, Sega’s version of the Gameboy, and a library of games for kids to play. If they wanted, they could also request the Sega Game Gear tips video, a film fifteen minutes long, and written by someone who clearly hated children.

Watching this video feels like dying. This is something that your brain does to inform your body that something has gone horribly wrong. The premise of the video is a lie in every way. The only “tips” it’s able to choke out are that video games exist, and you can play them while staying at a Howard Johnson hotel. It delivers this information to you through a close up of a man’s face screaming at you while strobe lights flicker.

It feels very threatening, like watching the video has summoned this dude, and if you don’t purchase Sonic Triple Trouble within seven days, he’s coming for you.

The video’s plot is that a lame adult hotel guest is being haunted by a zany long-haired Howard Johnson employee who poses as a waiter, lifeguard, and bellhop to yell at him about Sega games whenever he needs something. It’s positioned as a Twilight Zone-esque nightmare that the SAME MAN has MULTIPLE JOBS, which in the 90’s was spoooOOoooOOOky but now is just called being a millennial. 

The strangest moment in this video is when the hotel guest walks in on a housemaid cleaning his room, and the camera closes up on the maid’s butt. Of course, it is not really a pretty lady at all but the same man who has been torturing the hotel guest with his fantastic video game tips all day. 

Realizing his mistake, the hotel guest passes out, I’m assuming from the immense rush of blood to his boner after discovering his extremely specific lifelong fetish of having a man in a maid uniform read him a Howard Johnson commercial.  

The Howard Johnson promotion went so well there is a sequel to Sega game Tips volume 1, Sega Game Tips Volume 2, which is just the exact same movie with updated “tips.” So, instead of watching a man being driven to madness by a lunatic screaming at him about the Aladdin game, it’s the same thing with The Lion King game instead.

Again, this video is fifteen minutes long, and most of that is one screen showing different video game tips. The amount of text on the back of the box has got to be just about as long as the script, and I know if I call 1-800-I-GO-HOJO I’m getting charged a dollar a minute to have a man in a maid outfit seductively whisper a Howard Johnson commercial to me, and actually, you know what that does sound kind of hot.

Once Howard Johnson was ready to move on, Sega’s wandering eye turned to Post Cereals as a vehicle for delivering their tips. They even reused the hotel employee from the HoJo videos! Jesus, that sounds so dirty, I grew a pencil-thin mustache while writing it.

This time the employee even gets a name! It’s Michael B! I assume with each video they’ll keep giving us information about Michael until the David S. Pumpkins bit they’re doing with him really starts to pay off. I Googled him relentlessly to find out if he’s some kind of professional wrestler who got lost and wandered onto the set, or a talk show host from the 90’s I was unaware of, but as far as I can tell, Michael B. is just Michael B., a regular dude who likes screaming in people’s faces about Sonic the Hedgehog. The strobe lights are…part of it?

The Post Sega game tips video, which was available by sending proof of purchase to Post, features Michael in his kitchen of the future. That means the kitchen has a computer and two TV’s in it, which is not futuristic so much as it is a bad idea. Don’t put all of your electronics in one of the two rooms of your house with the most water.

There’s a lot of aggression toward Michael B. in this video. It’s almost like they rehired the actor but didn’t really want to, so instead of being the impish character who tortures the lame adult, here Michael is tackled by a football player from NFL 95 and blown up by the Sugar Crisp mascot.

Once again, the game tips are all like, don’t forget in Ecco The Dolphin, you need to come up for air, which is just a basic mechanic of the game and not at all a tip. The Ecco The Dolphin section also ends by flashing this quote, which sounds like it came from the day Sun Tzu was really phoning it in.

The third and final entry in the Sega Tips trilogy sees Michael B. replaced by a younger, nameless actor. I like to imagine that he became a real diva behind the scenes and started demanding that they give him a live Sonic The Hedgehog to finish the trilogy. 

Lunchables goes a little more meta with their Sega game tips video, showing a kid we’ll call Michael C. going to watch his Oscar Mayer Lunchables Lunch Combinations Games Tips Video. (Video title by George RR Martin). 

Michael C. is sucked into the TV by the tape and then enters an Oscar Mayer vault and gets into a Sega branded roller coaster, which shoots him down a tunnel. Following in the video’s grand tradition of doing something weird and vaguely sexual, the roller coaster pauses in front of a group of brown pulsating udders which Michael C. touches and then licks his hand, as any normal person would do when presented with a pulsating alien object. 

What does this have to with Lunchables? God, nothing I hope.

Eventually, the roller coaster stops at a sign that says Next Level, and Michael C. finds an Oscar Mayer brand TV that, once turned on, plays for the rest of the video. Hey, this time, at least the tips are actually tips! Like, real cheat codes, and advice for finding hidden stuff in levels!

It took them three videos, two hosts, and several upsetting skits, but they finally figured out what an actual game tip is! I never thought I’d be proud of Lunchables, but here we are.

The video ends with Michael C. safely waking up in bed, finding that the whole thing was a spooky dream, which I hoped would happen to me after watching all three of these movies. Still waiting. 

You can try and wake Lydia from her living nightmare on Twitter! 

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Jamie Gordon: Who has always instinctively known to use his sonar songs to get clues from glyphs, and never needed to be told.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Undercover Grandpa

I normally have a strict rule against watching movies with names that are too close to what their porn parody names would be (Grandpa Under Covers), but I put my principles aside for Undercover Grandpa. After all, it is one of the best action/family/comedy films ever made, in Canada, in 2017, starring James Caan.

Everyone was thrilled when the stars of Undercover Grandpa were announced. Finally, we would get to see actors from two of the most beloved films of all time, The Godfather, and The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story, in one movie! And that movie was being written by the genius that shaped the 1998 tour de force about the world of competitive rollerblading, Brink. 

You might assume that everyone involved in the production knew they had a hit on their hands. Yet around the time of filming Undercover Grandpa, James Caan was reportedly strapped for cash due to a messy divorce, his fourth, and was publicly complaining about being forced to take parts that detracted from his reputation as an actor. Obviously, he must have been referring to something like Wuthering High, a sexy updated version of Wuthering Heights he did in 2015 and not the masterpiece of Ass Kickery that is Undercover Grandpa. 

Even though it’s only been three years, a film this classic deserves an oral history now, before most of its cast dies. So, I put one together with just a few caveats: 

*James Caan was not available to be interviewed

*Jessica Walter was not available to be interviewed 

*Louis Gossett Jr. was not available to be interviewed 

*Dylan Everett was not available to be interviewed

*Paul Sorvino was not available to be interviewed 

*Kenneth Welsh was available to be interviewed but I didn’t want to talk to him. 

*Director Erik Canuel was not available to be interviewed 

My primary source for this oral history is a crew member very close to the production who asked to remain anonymous. I’m assuming people are hesitant to discuss Undercover Grandpa because they’re so humble about their great success. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. What was it like working with the legendary James Caan? 

“Every day James Caan wore one of those hats with two cup holders on the sides and the left side held a blue slushie and the right side held a red slushie. As soon as filming was over, he would yell, ‘Where is my special hat? Bring me my special hat!’ And if it wasn’t brought to him right away, he would get very upset. If you brought him the hat too slowly or if one of the slushies was empty, he would throw the whole hat at you, and it was very cold.” 

Cool! As we all know, Undercover Grandpa kicks ass. He kicks so much ass there’s not even any ass left when he’s done. It’s just straight back and then knees when Undercover Grandpa is finished with you. How much coordination did the stunt scenes require? I’m particularly curious about the one where Undercover Grandpa beats up that guy in the illegal weapons store with his cane for no reason. 

“Well, that was sort of improvised. It wasn’t in the original script, but James Caan just started hitting that guy in the face. I’m not sure if it was slushie related or not, but if I had to guess, I would say that’s probably it. They made us sign an NDA that said we legally have to tell everyone that James Caan did all of his own stunts, and I guess he sort of did if you really lower your definition of what a stunt is, like, at a certain age walking across an uneven gravel surface is a pretty sick stunt.” 

Everyone loves the lengthy conversation about KFC at the beginning of the movie. Were they a sponsor, or did it just feel organic to the writer?

“Yes, they were a sponsor. In fact, the whole thing was supposed to be a thirty-second long KFC commercial, but things just got out of hand. KFC asked for their money back, but the director refused to give it to them. It turns out he had a rare tropical bacteria that was eating his brain for most of filming. After he shot the final scene, he walked off into the Canadian wilderness and was never heard from again. The whole time he kept muttering, ‘I deserve this’ to himself.” 

I noticed that the cast list on IMDB shows a pretty heft special effects crew. Was that all for the scene where Harry’s walker shoots out electricity and shocks all of the goons to death? 

“No, there was originally going to be a talking dog in the movie, it was a huge part of the plot, but James Caan got jealous of the dog and hit it with his car halfway through filming. We tried to find another dog that looked just like it, but apparently, it was endangered somehow? Like, it was the last dog of its kind, so we ended up having to edit out all of the talking dog footage in post. Sometimes there are scenes where the background is a little blurry, and that’s where we edited out the dog.” 

Dylan Everett’s tears at undercover grandpa’s funeral seemed pretty real. Was that an emotional day on set?

“Oh, those tears were real. James Caan kicked him in the balls right before that scene was filmed. He wasn’t even supposed to be on set that day. Showed up just to kick the kid in the balls and then left.”

How nice! The Russian accents in the film seem very authentic. I mean, I’ve never heard a real Russian accent before, but I’ve seen a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Was there a dialogue coach on set for the Goons, or were those actors really Russian?

“No, KFC didn’t give us the budget for that. The director did provide the guy who played General Komenkho with a cassette tape to study, but it turned out it was just one of those things that’s supposed to hypnotize you into quitting smoking, and it was being read by a guy with a thick New Jersey accent. He didn’t learn Russian, and the tape was so bad it actually hypnotized him into starting smoking. Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I heard he sued the production company for a million dollars after he contracted lung cancer.”

In the early days, some of the critics weren’t kind to the movie. The Hollywood Reporter said that it “Gives grandparents a bad name.” Was that difficult for you to see? 

“Well, we knew that grandparents were probably going to be pissed off about it. A whole bunch of them showed up to picket the set. They wanted the word grandpa removed from the title so as not to associate them with the movie at all. They didn’t want to seem like they were endorsing it. Every day there were tons of crying old people on set, and I’m not just talking about the ones that had to be in the movie.”

Well, as we all know, in the end, the movie won the big awards. It took home the best feature and best actor trophies at the International Family Film Festival, a festival that appears to have shut down shortly after giving out the award. What was the atmosphere like at the award show?

“Oh, James Caan wouldn’t let anyone else from the movie go to the award show. I heard that he tried to put the entire trophy in his mouth, and when it wouldn’t fit, he got super angry. Then he said he was going to donate it to the James Caan foundation for underprivileged youth who need to eat James Caan’s ass.”

Hm, interesting, just one last question, is the movie called Undercover Grandpa because James Caan is both undercover and a grandpa, or because he’s undercover as a grandpa? He really is Jake’s Grandpa, right? But there’s some discussion of his blowing his cover? 

“Look, I won’t stand for this kind of bullshit gotcha journalism; obviously, no one knows the answer to that question. I won’t sit here and listen to you disparage the most important Canadian action/family/comedy that was filmed in 2017, starring James Caan. Good day ma’am!”

Lydia will probably talk a lot more about Undercover Grandpa on Twitter.