Author: Merritt K

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UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: A Very Special Today’s Special

In the annals of Canadian children’s television, Today’s Special is up there with Polka Dot Door and You Can’t Do That On Television. While it hasn’t yet received an analog horror take on its premise like The Elephant Show (look up the theme song), it remains a beloved touchstone amongst Canadian millennials. When star Nerene Virgin died earlier this year, thousands of Canadians in their mid-30s poured out remembrances on social media, while anyone south of the border or outside of that age group likely had no idea what they were talking about.

Well, I’ll tell you: Today’s Special was a Canadian children’s series about a mannequin who comes to life with the help of an enchanted hat. Running from 1981 to 1987 on the educational channel TVOntario, it actually predates the film Mannequin and takes place more or less entirely within a downtown Toronto department store after hours. For adults mired in a perpetual adolescence by multiple financial crashes and unprecedented global crises in their lifetimes, that adds an additional layer of fantasy to the viewing experience: on top of the magical mannequins, remember department stores? Remember how beige they all were? Remember tagging along with your mom and begging to be allowed to go to the toy department to see Sky Dancers and Snailiens? No you don’t, you fucking liar. Nobody knew Snailiens existed until they started showing up on eBay.

Where was I? Oh, right. Jeff is a mannequin brought to life by a magic hat. It’s sort of a Frosty the Snowman situation, if Frosty had the body of an adult man but the mind of a child.

This born-sexy-yesterday abomination is coached on the realities of being a self-aware, living creature by Jodie, a store display creator; Sam, an ancient security guard who is also a puppet; and Muffy, a mouse who can only speak in rhyme.

Jeff’s mannequin rules are extremely specific and restrictive. His hat must be activated with the magic words “hocus pocus alamagocus.” If his hat comes off at any point, he reverts to his inanimate form, as he does when the store opens for business. And should he ever leave the store, his life is forfeit. He is, essentially, a prisoner in the store for eternity.

What happens if the store is knocked down? Does Jeff age, perhaps at half the rate of a normal person? Does he die when he becomes a mannequin? Well, he’s not sleeping — in episode seven, we learn that he’s tired because he didn’t know he was supposed to sleep in the first place. Becoming a mannequin each morning, then, is not a restful time for him. Rather, he simply ceases to be until the following night. How do we know he’s the same Jeff when he comes back? More importantly, how does he know?

These are the sorts of questions a millennial who grew up watching Today’s Special might pose in a “7 Shows From Your Childhood That Were Secretly Dark” listicle. But we don’t need to lower ourselves to that level. Indeed, we needn’t fuss with subtext at all when the text itself is so rich.

Most of the early episodes of Today’s Special revolve around basic subjects, with Jeff being a sort of stand-in for the child viewer. In season one episodes, Jeff learns about snow, pets, noses, fruit, hands, and camping. But by the time Today’s Special hit its sixth season, they were running out of body parts and natural phenomena to explain to the world’s first and possibly only male sexy baby. What was left? Well, how about problem drinking?

Most episodes of Today’s Special jump right in after the opening sequence in which Sam closes down the store and Muffy rouses Jeff from his deathless(?) slumber. Not “Phil’s Visit.” Kids in 1987 must have known something was up as soon as the opening credits gave way to Jodie sitting alone on a stool amidst the wreckage of a medieval castle display.

She looks directly into the camera and explains the cause of the disaster: a man drank too much alcohol. Then she explains what alcohol is: a special juice adults drink when they don’t find each other attractive enough to bone sober. But who was the drunkard responsible for this? Sam the elderly puppet? Muffy the lightweight mouse? Surely not Jeff?

No, it was Phil Phenelli, a photographer sent by Storemakers Magazine to document Jodie’s incredible work at creating department store displays. I’m not sure there’s ever been a scenario that speaks more to the heady excess of the 1980s, and all that without a mountain of cocaine. Probably?

Phil, by the way, is portrayed by Gerard Parkes, who is best remembered for his roles as Doc on Fraggle Rock and the bartender in The Boondock Saints. I would say that his performance here is a mixture of the two, blended with a fifth of Canadian Mist.

Phil is an old friend of Sam, the puppet security guard. The two of them served together in the merchant marine. I guess some people are just puppets in the world of Today’s Special and it’s sort of fine? It’s kind of a Muppets situation, except with schnapps. Phil produces a silver flask he’s kept from all the way back when they were sailors and Sam tells him there’s no drinking allowed in the store on account of policy. Phil seems a little disappointed, as if getting hammered in Sears was a thing people did all the time back then and this is a draconian exception.

Sam takes Phil up to meet the gang and he doesn’t seem at all perturbed to make the acquaintance of a talking mouse or a plastic facsimile of a man brought to life by a wizard’s accidental magic discharge. Muffy the mouse wants to be a photographer, so he asks her to be his assistant for the night and they all sing a little song about how great they are and how much fun they’re going to have. Oh, the hubris of man! Oh, the heights from which a toy department can fall!

While Jeff and Jodie change into different outfits for the photoshoot of the store displays (???) Phil repeatedly sneaks off to the bathroom to rendezvous with his dark mistress, liquor.

He thinks he’s being crafty, using breath spray to cover up the cheap whiskey on his breath, but Muffy catches him taking a shot and can smell it through the Binaca haze. Despite being a child-like creature, Muffy knows what booze is and reminds Phil he isn’t allowed to drink in the store.

Now things take a turn. Twisted by the devil alcohol, Phil confronts Muffy — a tiny mouse puppet — and begins threatening her.

“Now just a minute, Muffy,” he whispers, “You’re not going to tell on me, are you? You’re not going to be a snitch and tattle tale about your old friend Phil? Because I think that would be a big mistake, Muffy Mouse!”

When he realizes he’s menacing a helpless rodent, Phil backs off and takes a different tack. He explains how if Muffy tells Sam he’s been drinking, he’ll be thrown out of the store and then he won’t be able to take photos of Jodie and her display, ruining her big night. And that would all be Muffy’s fault, wouldn’t it? Phil, if you haven’t guessed by now, is kind of an asshole.

Muffy debates telling Sam about Phil’s drinking and lands on keeping it a secret for the time being, seduced by the possibility of being an assistant to a professional photographer and maybe getting her big break in the biz. But her troubles are not over. Returning to the children’s department, now ruled over by a muddled ogre, she helps Phil open a camera bag he was unable to in his crapulent fury.

Her reward? A cussing out for making him look foolish in front of Jeff and Jodie, who are surely beginning to notice something is wrong. Nevertheless, they leave their tiny friend alone again with this raging, decrepit hulk while they change into another set of outfits. The overt message here is about the dangers of alcoholism, but the secret message is that people will turn a blind eye to terrible, terrible things in the pursuit of their own selfish desires, such as being photographed for a magazine about department store displays.

Phil slurs his way through “Muffy and Phinelli (Drunken Reprise)” then tries to take a picture of Jodie’s castle display while Muffy moves a toy dragon back and forth in the shot. He screams and curses at her while she whimpers that she’s only trying to help. “If I were you, Muffy, I’d mind my own bizzis and just do like I’ve asked you!” Phil howls, his gin-fuelled frenzy rendering him more beast than man. Finally, he can take the incompetence of his assistant no longer and resolves to put the dragon in the right place himself.

What happens next is both unexpected and obvious, the fulfillment of the promise of the show’s opening. As a child, it probably would have devastated me. As a jaded adult who has seen entirely too much, it cracked me up.

Phil stumbles out from behind the camera, lurching towards Muffy in a threatening posture, then trips over his own feet and crashes like a Brobdingnagian lush into the castle, his wrinkly, alcohol-soaked bulk completely obliterating the carefully-constructed display in an instant. And what is Phil’s reaction to this devastation?

The fucker says…

He tells Muffy to get away from him and he sits alone amidst the rubble, turning once again to his secret lover alcohol for comfort. It’s a truly wretched sight, this senior citizen guzzling Old Crow out of a steel flask on the floor of the children’s section of a department store.

When Jeff and Jodie arrive in their new outfits, Phil blames the destruction on Muffy. Here his anti-mouse bias comes out, when he tries to claim that he couldn’t work with her because of her species — it was just too much of a problem, he says. No, Sam tells him, Muffy isn’t your problem. Alcohol is your problem.

Now the entire Today’s Special crew bands together for an impromptu intervention. Being told you’ve got a drinking problem by a puppet you served with in the merchant marine has got to hurt. And getting this look from a naïve living mannequin man?

Phil has brought ruination and sin into the Garden of Eden that is the children’s department of this magical Toronto department store. He must be wondering how his life brought him to this moment.

Alcoholism was recognized as a disease in the mid-1950s. But if you thought there was going to be any discussion of Phil getting help or suffering from addiction, you’d be wrong. No, the blame is laid squarely on this old man’s shoulders. None of these people know what he saw on the sea, and they dare to judge him.

Muffy desperately wishes she could make him stop drinking, but Jodie tells her she is powerless in this respect. Only Phil can choose to stop drinking, making alcoholism seem like something people just decide to get into one day, like SCUBA diving or Jeffmancy.

Still, Muffy’s hopes are briefly raised when Phil tells everyone that he’s going to try and stop, believing that this means he’s going to get better soon. But Jodie once again brings them crashing back down to earth. It won’t be soon, she tells the mouse, and it may be never. Some people can get better from a drinking problem and some people can’t. It’s all up to Phil.

Hurray for personal responsibility! In the words of Ivan Drago, if he dies, he dies.

Phil hobbles to the exit and takes one last look back at his erstwhile friends and the remnants of what could have been, all washed away in a flood of bottom-shelf bourbon.

He leaves in disgrace and we dissolve back to the opening scene of the episode, where Jodie sits on her stool reflecting on the evening’s events and how important it is to speak up when something is wrong. Her dreams of appearing in a magazine have been crushed by a doddering old souse, which perhaps explains why she seemed to care so little whether he got help or not.

The writer of “Phil’s Visit” was Jed McKay. He wrote on a number of episodes of Today’s Special throughout its six seasons, including “Butterflies,” in which the cast learns about the concept of mortality. To paraphrase Principal Skinner, the kids have to learn about death and drinking sooner or later.

In retrospect, one of the weird things about this episode is that nobody ever really explains to Jeff what alcohol is. Sam, Jodie, and somehow even Muffy already know. Did someone explain it to Jeff offscreen at some point in the past? Has Jeff ever illicitly gotten drunk within the confines of the store? Does he go on from this episode still not really understanding what was the matter with Phil? It’s impossible to say.

Roll credits over wreckage. Cue slow, sad version of Today’s Special theme. What have we learned? The lighting director was Alf Hunter, or possibly the show’s assigned Alf Hunter was named Lighting Director.

Phil never got clean. House mice only live for about five years. Dreams crumble to dust.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who is not an Alf. Who only loves cats to pet. Who has all the proper paperwork to prove Negative Alf status.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Black Tokyo 🌭

In the world of sexual tabletop roleplaying, games exist on a continuum with The Book of Erotic Fantasy on one end and FATAL on the other. Essentially, do you want to frolic with elves and pixies or do complex math to calculate whether or not your character can fit something inside of them? Black Tokyo, a roleplaying game supplement for the D20 system created in 2008 by Chris Field, sits much closer to the “roll for anal circumference” end of the spectrum, with one important distinction: this one is in the Japanese style.

Black Tokyo opens like this:

Fuck you, “Call me Ishmael!” Go to hell, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard!” “Pussy. Cock. Cum.” is officially the greatest opening of any work in the English language. These are the essential ingredients, are they not? To reduce the complex sociocultural matters of human sexuality to three nouns is no easy task, but Chris Field has studied the blade — specifically, the prehensile dick blade — for years. In this volume, he will share the fruits of his labors with us with the generosity of a patient and giving lover. But just what does a hentai roleplaying campaign entail?

That’s right: we’re here to fuck in a non-discrete fashion. I really can’t blame him for that typo, though, because literally everyone on Craigslist Casual Encounters seemed to have trouble with it too. If you find yourself making the same error, “discreet” means you won’t tell anyone about Black Tokyo. “Discrete” refers to the kind of structure Chris Field should be imprisoned in.

Now, are there going to be any actual sexual mechanics or instructions on how to roleplay physical intimacy? Advice for how to incorporate sex into a narrative? Notes on how to set a horrific mood at the table? It’s cute that you’d think so. The entirety of Chris’s advice on actual roleplaying is “watch Wicked City. It’s that anime where a lady turns into a spider after she fucks some guy, remember that?”

Black Tokyo is what some roleplayers might derisively call a “toybook,” a tome that presents lists of new powers and equipment with little interest in developing a setting or characterization. Specifically, it’s mostly about shitting yourself to gain magic armor or turning your vag into a bladed deathtrap. But we’ll get to that.

First, for those unfamiliar with the concept of hentai, Chris helpfully lays it out:

It’s fascinating to see someone try to explain the concept of pornography like this. Like ok, so you know how in most movies they don’t show the dick going in? What I’m saying is, what if there was a kind of movie where they did that? And in this case, it’s also a cartoon. I know what you’re thinking: cartoons are kids’ stuff! Not these ones, friend. Not these ones.

Speaking of the visual arts, I regret to inform you that there are a number of illustrations throughout Black Tokyo. You’re probably picturing the kind of thing you’d see in a “How to Draw Japanese Animanga” book in a Borders in 2003. But they’re worse. They look like the kind of thing a bullied middle schooler who saw Tenchi Muyo one time might draw to impress his friends in an era before omnipresent high speed internet access rendered such abilities meaningless. “Draw us a lady holding a sword and her pussy out and kind of the edges of her boobs visible,” they would cry. “You can do this,” he thinks. He can’t.

Thank you for the assist, David Cronenberg. Another curious thing about Black Tokyo is Chris Field’s constant use of epigraphs. It’s a technique you see a lot in writers who aren’t terribly confident of their own abilities, inserting quotes from famous or quirky sources to make themselves appear widely-read. Here’s the first one:

Chris Field has read or is at least aware of a quotation by William Blake! And he used it to open a section where he talks more about how when you’re drawing something, you can draw whatever you want — it doesn’t have to be something that exists in real life.

Chris’s examples of the infinite possibilities of the human imagination are: 1. What if there was a sexy devil, 2. What if someone melted but like, erotically, and 3. What if you didn’t roll over and fall asleep right after you nutted. This is a dire omen for what is to come.

You might be wondering, though, what if someone drew something that shouldn’t exist in reality? Don’t worry — Chris is way ahead of you.

Wisely, Chris chooses to avoid the premise of sexual toddlers in his grotesque flesh carnival of the mind. But the issue of sexual violence is unavoidable in the source material, and Black Tokyo is supposed to be a supernatural horror setting, so it’s going to come up. How do you deal with that in a roleplaying environment with actual humans at the table? Modern RPGs have developed all kinds of ways to handle sensitive or potentially upsetting topics, but Chris has his own methods.

First, and this is important, you have to tell the players that by sitting down at the kitchen table with you, they are entering your magical realm of depravity. Springing a world of sexual terrors on your player group is not recommended. If they sat down for some third edition D&D and you don’t tell them that it actually stands for Defilers and Dickholes, there’s going to be trouble. Also, I know what he means, but I really wish he’d said “player characters” instead of “players” at the end there.

But how’s a game master supposed to keep track of which of their players is and is not comfortable with having their characters sexually violated? Fear not: there is a simple solution.

Yes, simply have your players draw a big letter R on their character sheets! You know, for— well, you know.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, what kinds of roles might the players be taking on? Before we get to the unique races and abilities Chris Field has cooked up for Black Tokyo, he first suggests that the reader might purchase some of his other works and offers ideas on how the characters he details in those supplements might be used in this setting. Say what you will about him, the man has hustle. (And another epigraph, this time from since-outed sex pest Warren Ellis.) Unfortunately, we’re already getting into some wildly terrible ideas here:

“I know I said I wasn’t including children in my catalog of sexual horrors,” Chris says, “but if you wanted to include them anyway…”

Sorry, but in the event that I am kidnapped and forced to run a game of Black Tokyo at gunpoint, I will allow neither the child who crafts “submissive magical playthings” nor the Israeli blademaster as player characters in my campaign. I’ll take the bullet, thanks.

But Chris Field, it must be said, is a rarified kind of roleplaying pervert. He isn’t content to just lay out the stat bonuses you get for fucking your grandmother without intellectualizing a little. You get the sense that he’s kind of defensive about… all this.

Putting aside the serious, real-world issues of rates of reporting, arrests, and convictions that obscure the day-to-day reality of violent assault, Chris describes Japan with all of the confidence of an anime-obsessed foreigner who visited once and feels that as a result, he truly understands the mysterious character of the nation. Basically, Black Tokyo is The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, except the sword is a penis.

But let’s get into the real meat and potatoes of Black Tokyo: the crunch. The section on “Hentai Feats” opens with a quote from Saul Williams, so we’re off to a great start. First up, we’ve got Barbaric Rage:

What’s hentai about this, you might ask? Well, the first thing to note is that not all of the abilities in Black Tokyo have anything to do with sex. But in this case, there’s more:

Chris Field wrote, “While in your sexual rage state,” then had to continue that sentence, noting the bonuses a character receives while seething with incel fury. The more I think about it, actually, the more this is a little too real. Can we get a picture of the world’s least erotic blowjob to lighten the mood? We can.

Thank you again, Mr. Cronenberg, master of the grotesque. Next up, we’ve got “Black Fatherhood.” It’s not what you’re imagining, don’t worry. Race is one of the few ways Black Tokyo doesn’t get weird. It’s actually about using your unborn demon babies to manipulate their mothers. Chris puts a Camille Paglia quote in here, and I have to think that even she would feel a little weird about that.

Now, I know I just said Black Tokyo leaves racial dynamics out of the proceedings, but there’s one exception. The feat called “Bodywalk,” which Chris describes as “one of the most fearsome hentai no judo abilities” lets you teleport between people’s bodies. There’s a catch, though:

Is hentai no judo a racist form of invented sexual martial arts? Scholars have debated this question for centuries, but alas, we must move on. We must now speak on the ancient and erotic power of shitting yourself. We’re definitely going to need you for this, David Cronenberg.

Maybe I’ve just never sought this kind of thing out, but making poop armor doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that happens in hentai. Critically, soiling yourself is a full round action, which you might think means you can’t do anything else while you’re doing it. However, a quick look at the D20 system rules indicates that while taking a full round action, you can also take a five-foot step in any direction as well as perform free actions, which include dropping prone and speaking. So you could, in theory, announce your intentions, take a single step, fall over, and piss and shit all over yourself to activate your pee pee doo doo armor.

A bunch of the feats have to do with incest, which seems to be a preoccupation for Chris. There’s one where you can do a Freaky Friday with a family member (if you have sex with them first), there’s another that gives you and a family member a stat boost (if you have sex with them first), and finally, a feat that lets you “forge a mystic bond” with your immediate family (if you watch them crank off first). Hm. I’m going to need some art of one of Santa’s elves fondling a diseased Smurf to continue.

Thanks, Chris. And to Mr. Cronenberg for giving us a full, unobstructed view.

Let’s get back to hentai no judo. I promised you prehensile dick blades, and prehensile dick blades I intend to deliver.

Certainly the power of the Phallic Spear Technique is formidable. But practitioners must be cautious. Maybe you can see where this is going.

Yes, your weaponized cock remains vulnerable to amputation. In the D20 system, Wisdom (WIS) determines your “common sense, perception, and intuition,” which is a weird stat to tie to how hard your hog gets. Arguably, those high in common sense would see the immediate issue with swinging their unit around in battle. It is written: those who live by the dick blade shall die by the dick blade.

Phallic Spear Technique not enough for you? Take the “Misogynist Blade” feat!

So now it’s not enough that guys need to have big dicks. They have to have a “brutal combat phallus.” Much like Chris Field’s flexible battle shaft, male sexual standards are getting out of hand.

Things have been pretty phallocentric so far — what does the world of Black Tokyo have to offer female characters? I’m glad you asked!

Vaginal tesseracts! Now we’re talking. No more awkward conversations after you do the deed — just become a sexual Kirby and hoover up your discarded lovers into a non-dimensional hell. And that’s not the only yonic magic Black Tokyo has in store.

You gotta hand it to Chris Field sometimes. “You have made your sexuality a weapon of mass destruction” is an extremely powerful phrase.

Other feats include giving birth to demons, petrifying your lovers with sexual fluids, and reverting the fools imprisoned in your internal pocket dimension into fetuses. But it’s not all pussy stuff. There’s one called “Womanly Suffocation” where your tits melt and choke the life out of a rival hentai no judo practitioner.

And then there’s “Painted With Seed,” an ability that lets you gain stat bonuses from being nutted on. Sure, fine, right? That’s probably the least bizarre thing we’ve seen so far. That’s what you might think, until you realize that Chris thought up specific bonuses for each body part someone’s man milk lands on. Again, maybe you’re thinking I just mean face, tits, or ass. No, I mean 11 discrete body parts.

Look, I know you want to do it inside, but could you finish on my hands? I’ve got to do open heart surgery later.

Moving on to character classes, Black Tokyo gives you seven to choose from.

All the greats are here: demon hunting cannibal, necrophiliac ghost hunter, unstoppable psychic monster. I fully expect that all of these have already been modded into Baldur’s Gate 3.

The “Death Womb Seductress” can crawl around like a spider and turn her vulva into blades, which Chris explains can be used as a natural weapon in combat.

Look — you can attack with your vagina dentata while standing up. But that doesn’t mean you should.

Here Chris also commits the error common to so many men making jerkoff material: not knowing what a uterus actually is. Is it the hole? Can a dick go in there? Hentai scientists aren’t yet certain, nor is Chris.

As for the other classes, the Freudian Oni wields a violent sex offender tulpa, the Flow Witch does magic by squirting, the Harem Mage creates sentient slave women, the Devil Heart Hunter is just kind of boring, the Sacred Pleasurer does mystic yoni spells, and the Ghostkiss Investigator is Dan Aykroyd in that one part of Ghostbusters. Also, Chris uses a Jenny Holzer quote to introduce it.

What’s left? Equipment, miscellaneous non-horny spells, things of that nature. There’s a piece of gear that’s just The Guyver but what if it was one of those sex eggs you have to bust into to activate it.

Lastly, we’ve got a bunch of monsters and worldbuilding notes, such as they are. Some of these are based on actual Japanese myths, but don’t let the names fool you into thinking these are authentic reproductions — Chris has added some of his own secret sauce.

Take the “Akaname,” a yokai that supposedly licks the grime and scum from bathroom floors if they aren’t regularly cleaned. In Black Tokyo, he is essentially a kind of poop vampire.

There’s also a slime monster, like in a conventional fantasy roleplaying game, but it’s made of cum.

“Vicious male semen.” There’s another one of those magical phrases never before uttered until Chris Field sat down to bang out Black Tokyo.

Speaking of, you might be aware that different kinds of dragons have different kinds of breath weapons in D&D. Red dragons spew conventional fire, white dragons breathe icy winds, and Black Tokyo’s “storm dragon” exhales — come on, you know by now.

Cum. It’s cum.

Somehow, we’ve made it this far without mentioning catgirls. Chris has been so intent on weaponizing incest and feces that he’s lost sight of the classics, the erotic tropes that have endured for decades. What if a woman was also kind of a cat, widely considered to be the sexiest of all domestic animals?

Gaze upon the beauty of the Nekomusume and thank whatever god you pray to that existence can contain such wonders. Cronenberg, you’re on hole blocking duty one last time.

Ok, I cheated. That’s actually the mystical kitsune trickster. Still, pretty erotic, right?

We’ve seen a lot of strange stuff in Black Tokyo. We’ve witnessed a man fascinated by Japanese animated pornography attempt to create detailed rules for devouring someone whole with your cunt. We watched as he awkwardly tried to explain that actually, all of this is good for society, if you think about it. And we’ve seen him quote William Blake, Veruca Salt, Mark Millar, NOFX, and more. But surely he wouldn’t go so far as to quote himself in his own book like some kind of early 2000s message board user, would he?

Of fucking course he would.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: KNM, who is a titty vampire. Just a good old fashioned titty vampire, like we used to have before all you kids got weird with this stuff.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Bots Master 🌭

Set in the far-future year of 2025, The Bots Master presents a world where humanity has invented a legion of roboslaves to cater to our every whim. These machines are the cybernetic creations of Ziv Zulander (ZZ for short), robot wunderkind and all-around radical dude. Or as Toolzz explains in the intro,

“Yeah! Well he can’t fade us!

He forgot about the Boyzz and the guy who made us!

Ziv Zulander, master of Boyzz bots!”

But it turns out that his boss, Lewis Leon Paradim, isn’t happy with being the richest person on the planet. LLP wants to rule the world, to be worshiped and beloved by all. His evil plan? Use a new kind of computer chip to make the global population bend to his will. Ah, the wild premises that cartoons came up with in the ’90s!

The brainchild of DIC head, Jean Chalopin, and Toy Biz CEO, Avi Arad, The Bots Master sees ZZ and his kid sister “Blitzy” wage a secret war against his ex-employer to prevent him from using his “Krang chips” to take manual control of every robot in the world. It’s weird because like, they built all of those robots anyway, so if that was their plan all along you’d think they would have just included that functionality to begin with? I mean, it’s also weird because they’re called “Krang chips,” which sounds like something Shredder would eat in the Technodrome.

Also, the show was directed by a guy named Xavier Picard, whose mother named him after the two bravest men she ever knew played by Patrick Stewart.

So: a teen genius fights against an evil megacorporation with his army of wisecracking robots — it’s a solid premise, but it needed something else to set it apart. “I’ve got eet,” Chalopin, a then-43-year-old white Frenchman, thought, “we will include le hip hop!” Seriously, the theme song opens with two rollerblading robots saying “greetings from the street boyzz” and then rapping about corporate sabotage and man’s unlimited lust for power.

This influence pervades the entire series. It was 1993, ok? Executives everywhere were trying to be hip with the kids by slipping rap-inspired aesthetics into their entertainment products. Remember Rappin’ Mike? The Ninja Turtle figure with this bio?

I’m sorry for putting you through that. But it gives you some sense of the relationship mainstream white culture had to hip hop in the early ’90s. That is, it didn’t understand it at all and also wanted to suck the life out of it for sustenance. The Bots Master was essentially mandated by law to have a black rapping robot who rollerblades and sounds like that one Transformer from the Michael Bay movies. Come to think of it, I’m not actually sure whether the rapping robot actually being painted black makes it better or worse than like, a gray or yellow robot. At least the Asian robot isn’t painted yellow, I guess? Yes, of course there’s an Asian robot.

Can we talk about these robots, though? ZZ allegedly invented them to be “young playmates” and named them the “BOYZZ” with two z’s, because the ’90s were a hipness arms race that drove all parties involved to extremes that would horrify contemporary observers. BOYZZ is allegedly an acronym for “Brain Operated Young Zygoetopic Zoids,” a series of terms that sounds like it would get you placed on an FBI watchlist if you Googled it.

The BOYZZ are all fully self-aware and autonomous individuals, yet were constructed to perform exactly one function. One of them plays golf. That’s his whole thing! He was made to be a golfer. He has one arm, and it’s a golf club. He is incapable of doing anything besides playing golf, yet he has the personality of a human male.

 

Is it torment, to have a sense of oneself as a unique being yet be constrained to the narrow design of one’s creator? Or is it bliss to revel in the fulfillment of one’s obvious purpose for existence? That’s a question I leave to the robotheologists.

Anyway, back to the BOYZZ. Some of them are construction workers, some of them play sports. One of them is a doctor. One of them is a cook that didn’t even get a name, he’s just called “cook.”

A bunch of them are disembodied heads built by another robot, whose entire existence amounts to sitting on a shelf and watching TV.

In one episode, ZZ invents a mother robot called Momzz the Mother BOYZZ. Besides having an extremely bizarre name, she looks like this, has a personality based on the DNA of Napoleon Bonaparte (because that’s a thing they can do in the future), and dies almost immediately.

But the absolute worst of the bunch is D’Nerd. He’s an extremely puntable robot with a TV screen for a head whose gimmick is that he always gives the dictionary definitions of words.

It’s unclear whether he likes doing this or can’t help himself, but either way, he makes Alpha 5 from the Power Rangers look like Joe Cool. His existence, like that of unknowable deep sea horrors, stomach cancer, and Ricky Gervais comedy specials, is proof of a not merely uncaring but actively sadistic creator.

None of the BOYZZ were built for fighting, except for Ninjzz, who has a lightsaber and is the only robot in The Bots Master that ever gets to do anything cool. The rest of them were just sort of drafted into ZZ’s guerilla war against RM Corp. That means we get a lot of tennis robots spiking grenades and construction robots dismantling their opponents, but it also means ZZ has essentially drafted an army of robo-child soldiers.

And just who are their opponents? Mostly they’re soulless robots voiced by the old text-to-speech program Dr. SBAITSO (“PARITY ERROR”). And what’s weird is that their creator and the archvillain, LLP, is just… nothing.

He’s barely ever involved in the action and almost never gets to do any fun monologues. He’s more of a hands-off kind of guy, I guess, leaving things up to his lieutenants Doctor Hiss and Lady Frenzy. Doctor Hiss is… well, just look at him. You can probably figure out his whole deal just from that.

I’m kidding, of course. He’s a by-the-numbers Starscream, not a rampaging pervert. It’s not like I could show you a screenshot of him fucking a giant robot dog to the astonished glares of onlookers.

As for Lady Frenzy, she’s a sexy evil lady. It’s a tried-and-true archetype, and one that has no doubt planted the seed for femdom kinks in many young minds throughout history. But Evil-Lyn, the Baroness, and their ilk have absolutely nothing on Lady Frenzy. Her voice actress, Janyse Jaud, sounds like a phone sex operator who suffers from a psychological condition where discussing her nefarious plans makes her uncontrollably aroused. Maybe that’s why she’s doing evil stuff all the time.

She’s insanely horny for ZZ and isn’t afraid to use her smoking hot body and absurdly breathy voice to advance her goals. In one episode she bribes an old bank manager and all but promises she’s going to fuck him until his heart explodes if he does what she wants. And she’s genuinely annoyed when the guy turns her down because his heart belongs only to money.

Lady Frenzy is a particular type of fictional woman, one that never achieved the heights of a Shego from Kim Possible or a Poison Ivy from Batman. But though her name may not be as well known as those objects of forbidden noid-doodle desire, she has inspired a truly impressive level of devotion amongst millennials who can’t really draw but desperately want to see her in a diaper. Google Image Search “Lady Frenzy” and there are multiple results for this kind of thing on the first page by different people. It was enough that it made me wonder if it somehow came up in The Bots Master proper, but the closest I got was an episode where ZZ gets a mind-controlling necklace that hypnotizes her into working for him.

There’s also one where the robots kidnap her while she’s asleep as a “present” for him. You know, normal kids’ TV stuff. You couldn’t make this show today, because of DEI. DEI, of course, stands for DIC Entertainment Industries, the holding company sitting on The Bots Master IP.

You’d think this one would be one of those shows that got maybe twelve episodes, but believe it or not, they made 40. That’s more than Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling, Kissyfur, ALF: The Animated Series, Captain N, and Hammerman, the cartoon where MC Hammer is granted superpowers by a pair of magical talking shoes. Jayce and Wheeled Warriors got 65, though. Good for him, the little bastard.

The big gimmick for The Bots Master — aside from an endless parade of acronyms — is “lazer time.” Of course it’s spelled “lazer,” because they sure as fuck weren’t going to miss any opportunity to shove another z into this show.

When ZZ calls out those two special words, viewers were supposed to put on the 3D glasses that came with the Bots Master toy line. Rather than the classic red-blue ones, these are basically single lens sunglasses and work with the Pulfrich effect. That means that these segments thankfully don’t look like blurry garbage if you’re not wearing the glasses, but for it to work it requires constant lateral movement — so for five minutes in every episode, the world starts whirling by like the background layers in an early ’90s Sega Genesis game programmed by someone who’d just discovered parallax scrolling.

In fact, the Pulfrich effect was also used in the video game Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D in the very same year. Jim even kind of looks like ZZ…

The game was made by a French developer, too. What was in the water in France in the ’90s? I’ll see if I ca– oh, apparently they had a Mad Cow outbreak in France around then, so maybe, uh, that. Now we just need to figure out the Lady Frenzy diaper thing.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, the robot designed solely to enjoy Skyline chili. Torment!

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Captain Power 🌭

In 1987, producer and future accused child molestor Gary Goddard was on top of the world. He was directing the yet-to-bomb He-Man movie and was positioned to take a commanding role in the children’s entertainment industry. With He-Man and GI Joe winding down and the coke-fuelled exuberance of the decade giving way to the depressive slimy haze of the ’90s, Goddard partnered with Mattel to create a new children’s property. The pitch was pure evil genius: a merging of toys and television on a level never before imagined. Rather than simply be a 25 minute ad for its tie-in toys, Goddard’s brainchild would actually interact with them. It was called Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.

A live-action series following the struggles of the titular Captain and his friends against the evil Lord Dread and his feared Bio-Dread Empire, Captain Power is set in a post-apocalyptic world where machines have destroyed human civilization. The show follows the plucky resistance fighters who battle against faceless goons and primitive CGI robots using their “power suits,” wicked techno-armor that looks like something off the cover of a Nintendo game.

Mattel’s Captain Power toys included your run-of-the-mill action figures, but they also produced ships which were Zapper-style light guns. These ships could interact with the show through the large, flashing lights displayed on the enemy soldiers. Hitting them racked up points, while having the ship pointed at the screen during enemy laser blasts could cause the figure in the cockpit to be violently ejected. Despite outrage from parent and consumer groups, you didn’t really need the toys to watch the show. The kids in the commercial don’t even look like they’re having much fun.

They also sold some VHS tapes alongside the light guns, in a package that truly stretched the limits of the term “video game.” There actually was a real Captain Power video game for the Commodore 64, but let’s be honest, if you were seven years old in 1987 you’d rather shoot at real people on-screen and pretend you were having an impact on the proceedings than play this:

So far, so good. Pretty standard stuff we’ve got here — good versus evil, lasers, power suits, things of that nature. But there’s a bit of a quirk to Captain Power. See, it’s a live-action show, and you can’t just have people getting shot to death on screen constantly. So people don’t die if they are killed in Captain Power. Instead, Lord Dread’s minions “digitize” them. As the name implies, this process converts a person into digital data — they’re out of the picture, and there are no bullet-riddled or laser-roasted corpses to deal with.

But, you might ask, what happens to a digitized human in the world of Captain Power? Are they held captive by Dread’s forces as bargaining chips? Are their minds preserved for any useful information they might possess? Possibly, but I have another idea: digitization destroys the physical body but creates a perfect simulation which is then tortured for eternity within the virtual realm.

Think about it. If you were a guy who had the literal brass balls to name himself “Lord Dread,” would you really be satisfied with simply wiping humanity out with admittedly awesome laser-wielding computer-rendered pterodactyl robots? Or would you want them to know what a folly it ever was to oppose you? Wouldn’t you want to make the dream of Roko’s Basilisk real?

So you would construct elaborate programs — simple tortures at first, then moving onto psychological techniques, maybe then letting the foolish humans think they’d escaped, or that their whole nightmare existence was just a dream, and that actually they were working for a comedy website writing about the children’s television series Captain Power, which is NOT REAL, and all the doctors keep telling you that none of it is real.

Haha that would be crazy, right? That’s like the kind of detail you’d get in a gritty reboot of an ’80s kids series, not the source material. I- wait a minute, I’m reading here that all of that is exactly what happens in the 1987 children’s television program Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future.

In the first episode of the show, Captain Power is lured out to the ruins of a city by a woman he knew before the Metal Wars (played by Ann-Marie “Acclaimed Canadian Lesbian Novelist” MacDonald). When he arrives, she ambushes him and tells him she’s going to kill the both of them in the same kind of tone that Don Cheadle tells his wife to kill herself and their children in Hotel Rwanda to spare them the sight of their parents dying.

“They wiped us out…,” she tells Captain Power as she explains why she’s going to do a murder-suicide rather than bring him in to Lord Dread. “Most of them. The lucky ones. Inside the machine, you can feel it touching you. It’s wires and metal, but it touches you. And it knows every secret. Every shame. Every hate. Every love. It knows, and it tortures you with them.”

Again, this is in the very first episode of the show. This is like a highly-acclaimed mid-series Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode dealing with the horrors of war. Are we having fun yet, kids?

You may be wondering, is the process of digitization itself painful? Yes, unspeakably so. “Every cell within your body implodes when you are digitized,” Lord Dread tells a man he has captured for information in a later episode. “Then when you are reformed, these same cells explode.” Neat!

This, in fact, is Captain Power at its core — a horrific, post-apocalyptic narrative where the enemy is just as frequently one’s fellow man as it is the cold, unfeeling forces of mechanized death. It really seems like the creators were chafing under the requirements of producing a children’s television series, because the pilot episode isn’t an exception — it sets the tone for the twenty one episodes to follow.

Episode two has an insane military commander awaiting orders from the long-dead President. He kills his own men for trying to flee his base and then captures Captain Power and one of his buddies and tortures them on screen. When he becomes lucid near the end of the episode, he orders his men to retreat from an oncoming robot attack and sits quietly at his desk contemplating a photo of his dead wife and singing softly to himself before a cyborg dinosaur smashes the door in and implodes every atom in his body.

In episode three, a genetically-engineered madman takes women and children hostage with plastic explosives and calls out Captain Power’s teammate and fellow genetic freak Tank (portrayed by Sven-Ole “Evil Space Cop in Jesse Ventura vehicle Abraxas” Thorsen). By the time they finally come to blows, they aren’t even fighting with lasers, just smashing cinder blocks and flaming pieces of wood into each other’s brains.

Tank later mentions that the two of them came from the “Babylon 5” facility. That’s weird, huh? Well, it turns out that one of the lead writers on the series was none other than J. Michael “I Always Have to Look Up the Spelling of His Name” Straczynski.

What about Lord Dread and his Bio-Dread Empire, though; the ostensible villains of the series? I mean, they get up to some shit, sure. Dread himself is kind of a proto-Borg figure, a bald cyberman who sits in a big revolving chair looking menacing. He’s the type of guy who delegates, rather than getting his hands dirty, and he’s definitely the most interesting and fun character in the show.

We get to see him doing shit like dictating his own new version of the Bible, waxing over the perfect world he’s bringing into being, and getting into spats with Overmind, the supercomputer with which he merged his brain and now acts as an Emperor Palpatine to his Darth Vader.

But again, more often than not, the real monsters in Captain Power don’t have robotic eyes or crudely-rendered jet engines. They’re just ordinary people, people who truly seem to loathe Captain Power and everything he stands for. Or, if nothing else, they’re willing to sell him out for their own ends. Sometimes, this is presented as a morally complex if ultimately wrong move, as when a secret human society hidden away from the war tries to use Power as a bargaining chip to get Dread to leave them alone.

 

But then there are the truly fucked up little freaks who will inform on human resistance fighters for nothing more than their own selfish pleasure. Seriously, an episode where Captain Power has to enter the “cyber web” to access some information features a creep who calls up Lord Dread to tell him where his nemesis is.

What does he ask for in return? That Lord Dread directly stimulate the pleasure centers of his brain with electrical impulses. This is the kind of plotline William Gibson would write if you held him at gunpoint, forced him to consume a large quantity of amphetamines, and demanded that he tell a story appropriate for seven year olds. Sadly, we never got a “drug dealer who sells out his kin for a hit of that sweet daddy lightning and kind of resembles Rob Schneider” action figure.

Neighbor selling out neighbor in the face of the implacable march of evil — where have we heard that before? What if I told you that Lord Dread has a standing army of children called the Dread Youth? In one episode, we get to see him deliver a speech in which he promises, if they give him “their blood, their trust, and their minds,” to bring about a “New Order.” It’s not exactly subtle. If Captain Power aired today people would be calling it woke for teaching kids that Nazis are the enemy.

We learn partway through the series that the female member of the Soldiers of the Future, Pilot, was once a Dread Youth herself. One episode has her infiltrating one of their bases in her old uniform. I guess good on her for the foresight, but you’d think that burning your outfit would be one of the first things you do when you renounce robo-Nazism. Regardless, Pilot has an encounter with a younger Dread Youth member (Laurie “Criminally Underused in the X-Files” Holden) in whom she sees herself. The girl is so devoted to the cause that she threatens to blow herself up with a grenade to stop Pilot.

I’m imagining the writers getting notes from the network saying “listen, we love the bleak atmosphere, the cheapness with which life is depicted in the grim future, but we need MORE murder-suicide threats!”

Also, Pilot ties up and gags the girl after shooting her. This image absolutely became the sexual origin story of someone who spends thousands of dollars monthly commissioning art of blonde on blonde lesbian cyber-Nazi BDSM. Not me. Someone else.

Later, Pilot is placed on trial by a bunch of villagers for her participation in the burning of a human settlement. This one kid is screaming for her blood because his parents died in the fire and when the townspeople decide that ultimately she wasn’t responsible — because she was just a kid herself and, whoops, someone else sold out the settlement after being tortured — the kid’s still furious. The judge hands him a gun and tells him to exact his judgment and we all learn an important lesson about how punishment doesn’t actually undo the harm caused by the perpetrator. Again, this is something that would happen to Major Kira in DS9, not Optimus Prime or He-Man.

Oh, and in the very last episode of the series, Pilot blows herself up to stop Lord Dread’s goon Blastarr from getting his hands on Captain Power’s secrets and technology. Her last words are “go to hell” when the robot asks her to surrender.

Script synopses for a planned but never produced second series of Captain Power were posted online years ago, and they seem to mostly continue the grim tone with one major exception. According to series writer and story editor, Larry DiTillio, one of the episodes was written by Howard the Duck creator Steve Gerber and featured Lord Dread getting a new assistant named Morgana, who was actually the mind of Captain Power’s mother in a robot body. The episode allegedly would have featured the first cybersex scene in television history, because you can only include so many Nazi rallies and suicide bombings in a children’s series before you need to dig up that old hoary trope of the villain fucking the hero’s reincarnated mom in cyberspace.

So that’s Captain Power, a relic of the late ’80s awkwardly sandwiched between commercial interests and artistic intent. Nothing quite worked when it came to this show — the toys were crummy, the narrative was too scary for kids and too goofy for adults, and the whole thing feels like you threw Star Wars, Star Trek, and Terminator into a blender and breathed in the resulting toxic powder before watching Downfall. If nothing else, though; we got this bitching music video out of it, made by the show’s music editor and screened at the wrap party. We can only guess at how the cast and crew felt when they saw it. Proud? Ashamed? Aroused? Aroused.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Burrito, who really fires back! WHO REALLY FIRES BACK!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: WWF’s Maximum Sweat

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Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Diesel 🌭

In the 1990s, anime was a mere rumor whispered of in the basements of hobby shops. Past the Magic cards and pogs lay a secret, semi-forbidden world of “Japanimation” or animé, a realm of animation beyond what our minds reared on the thin gruel of Real Monsters and Dougs could possibly conceive. It’s hard to imagine, if all you’ve ever known is a world in which it’s considered perfectly acceptable for, say, a high-powered businesswoman or a busy househusband to proclaim their love for a bosomy anime protagonist, but there was a time when anime was more or less underground in these United States — quite literally, in the case of the aforementioned anime basement that was whispered of at my school in the same hushed tones as the copy of Wild Things that someone’s divorced father let them rent from the video store. Seriously, they used to run ads on late-night TV with the tagline “This ain’t no Mickey Mouse!”

Anime had a mysterious allure to it in those days, and not just because it was hard to access. Putting aside the Pokemons and Sailors Moon which trickled over to Western channels, it was widely understood that anime was grown up stuff — the domain of older brothers with subscriptions to Wizard Magazine who were almost old enough to grow facial hair. Rumors circulated around the playground about Japanese cartoons where people got cut in half, where naked breasts were on full display, and where tentacles quested into orifices traditionally considered the preserve of married heterosexual couples.

This is the context in which comic artist Joe Weltjens first discovered the manga-turned anime called JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Coming across a fan-subtitled videotape, as was the style at the time, Weltjens’ encounter with the beautiful creation of Hirohiko Araki would blossom into that most sincere form of flattery, imitation, after he attempted and failed to get the rights to bring the series to the west. “To hell with it,” Weltjens must have thought, “I’ll make my own anime! With Star Wars references! And I’ll call it Diesel, after the most popular brand of jeans on the market today, in 1997!”

For the uninitiated, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is a manga series that’s been running more or less continuously since 1987. Trying to describe the plot is sort of a challenge, but here’s my best shot: it’s about a Victorian orphan with daddy issues named after metal legend Ronnie James Dio becoming the world’s sexiest gay vampire thanks to an ancient Aztec mask and taking revenge on his adoptive family in various ways over the course of several decades. The series takes its name from the protagonist of the first part: Jonathan Joestar. From then on, every protagonist had a name that followed the same scheme: JOseph JOestar, JOtaro KuJO, and so on.

JoJo started out as a pretty typical action-adventure story, with a serious and noble protagonist learning mystical martial arts secrets from a flamboyant Italian man and using them to harmlessly punch frogs, but Araki eventually realized that his true passions were prog rock and making his increasingly slutty, twinky lead characters dress in more and more absurd couture, have child-like arguments about the interactions between their superpowers, and drink piss.

So what does Joe Weltjens’ Diesel take from all that? Well, not much. Basically all it borrows is the core concept of “Stands.” In JoJo, Stands are weaponized tulpas. They’re called Stands because they “stand” beside you, except for all of the many, many instances in which they don’t because they’re your hair, a sword, or an entire cruise liner. The prototypical Stand is a humanoid figure that engages in fighting on the part of the character who wields it, making them basically a means of showing fights with superpowers in more interesting ways than characters just shooting lasers out of their eyes or whatever.

You can’t really blame Weltjens for that, though. The single issue of Diesel he produced adapts an encounter from late in the third part of JoJo called Stardust Crusaders, the only part of the manga that had been committed to animation in the ’90s and thus probably all that he had exposure to back then. While things do start to get weird in part three as Araki starts to explore the themes he would build on throughout the series — there’s an extended magical fight between a dog and a bird, a man named Vanilla Ice cuts off his own head, two of the protagonists get their dicks stuck together with magnets, and so on — it’s still in many ways a pretty straightforward adventure story.

Anyway, Diesel opens on an enormous, gaudy mansion complete with golden fountains spraying water into an oddly photorealistic-looking pool that seems to clash with the rest of the art. You can really feel the frustration in this mess. It’s how a hungover freshman would just barely not get an F in a mixed media class. It might as well say, “Whatever. Drawing fountains fucking sucks.”

Inside the mansion, a man named Mr. Botha (deez nuts) sits at the end of a preposterously long table drinking wine like Dracula when suddenly, a gigantic monster that looks like the love child of the Hulk and a Dragon Ball Z character bursts through the door, killing two goons and swiftly dematerializing behind its Stand user. This is the introduction of our protagonist, Tom Diesel — yes, Thomas Diesel is his god-given name — and his Stand, “Meta Hammer.”

And sure, having your lead character bust into the villain’s lair and effortlessly dispatch his henchmen is a decent way of getting the reader to think he’s a real cool guy, but can we talk about his character design? Tom Diesel looks like a loaf of Wonder Bread was granted his wish to be a man.

He’s literally a nondescript blonde white guy wearing a t-shirt, pants, and a featureless jacket. The human eye is incapable of focusing on him, sliding off in search of anything of visual interest to linger on. This man could walk right out of a store with a TV and your statement to the police would be, “Something shapelike took it, it might have had legs.” In contrast, look at the character Tom’s based on in JoJo, Jotaro Kujo.

Is his hat part of his hair? Are those chains part of the standard school uniform? Why does he look like a thirty-year-old bodybuilder instead of a 17-year-old high school student? Who knows, but at least his design raises questions, unlike Tom’s.

Ah, but maybe Tom is meant to be pretty plain so the real focus is on his Stand? Again, though, Meta Hammer looks like someone put Vegeta’s hair on the Hulk and changed the color of his skin. Look, I’ll prove it.

And compare Meta Hammer to Star Platinum, the Stand it’s based on. It’s still just a weird guy at its core, but it at least has some other stuff going on.

Regardless, as you might expect, Mr. Botha is displeased by the intrusion of the world’s most present white man and his blue ghost warrior, but we’re not going to get any resolution, because we’re immediately thrust back in time three months. We get a flashback between a Mr. Evans and Mr. Botha in which Weltjens temporarily forgets how speech bubbles work.

Then Mr. Evans gets cut in half by Mr. Botha’s mysterious powers and lands in the pool with an expression that looks less like one of utter agony and more like an ape watching a card trick.

Now we’re in England. Gosh, we’re really just jumping all over time and space, huh? Tom Diesel returns home to see his adoptive sister May and is attacked by an overzealous guy with an electric Stand before she’s able to calm things down with the power of her own Stand, Mrs. Tits.

This is a good time to bring up one of the weirdest things about Diesel — the art. It’s all just slightly off in that “How to Draw Japanimation” kind of way. You remember those books you’d find at Borders in the ’90s seemingly put together by a guy who’d seen half an episode of Ranma 1/2? It’s like that, only Weltjens can’t seem to fully commit to the bit. Most of the time, characters’ faces look like Platonic ’90s comics guys — the kind of faces you’d see in a good American book like Bloodstrike or Ultraforce. But every once in a while, they’re struck with Weeb’s Syndrome, a condition which manifests in muscle spasms that radically alter the shape and placement of your facial features. Also they sometimes get little storm clouds over their heads. That’s an anime thing, right? Maybe?

Well, Tom finds out that Mr. Evans was killed by Mr. Botha (deez cheeks) and wants revenge. Before that can happen, though, the gang is attacked by… wait for it… an:

This is probably the most famous panel in Diesel. Tom Diesel’s American-ass face hollering about an enemy Stand perfectly encapsulates the futility of creating an Americanized JoJo. Like the cursed attempts to develop an American Peep Show, it was never meant to be, and transplanting the concepts and terms from their home culture to that of the United States simply makes everyone involved seem like howling maniacs.

That said, the focus on that particular panel has allowed the utter madness surrounding it slip into obscurity. I mean, look at this.

That’s a character getting his head knocked off by animated blood, which then sends his noggin flying in a comical arc before it finally comes to rest next to his corpse. Also, credit where credit’s due: this is a semi-original idea from Weltjens. In the original manga, the gang fights a similar blind Stand user who attacks from a hidden location and tracks via sound, but he controls water rather than blood.

Well, Tom does the big damn hero shtick, sending his friends away so he can take on the enemy mano-a-blue Hulko. He even sort-of flies by having his Stand leap into the air and carry him, making him look like a child getting dragged out of a candy store. This is supposed to be our main character and he looks like an NPC in a game called Hulk League Humanball.

Because the guy is hiding like a dirty blind coward, Tom uses his dog to locate him. And here, I have to admit that Diesel actually gets something right about JoJo — there’s a running joke that Araki has a difficult time drawing dogs, and that, perhaps as a result, he takes his frustration out on them in his narratives whenever he gets the chance. If a dog or other small animal shows up in JoJo, it’s probably about to explode. And sure enough, when Tom sends his dog Chewbacca to root out his enemy in the woods, the dog gets its fucking throat slashed.

Probably not the kind of detail I’d commit to including in my adaptation, but to be fair I’ve never really had to draw a dog for work before. Maybe it really makes you hate them.

Before Tom can get any information out of his foe, the guy is stabbed by another Stand belonging to a man standing perfectly straight on a tree branch like a really cool dude. He’s named Chibot, I guess, and he tells Tom he’s passed the first test. Presumably the first test was exploding your beloved childhood dog? Or maybe it was having a blind man die in your arms from samurai sword-inflicted wounds. Who knows, and who cares. This is a half-finished knockoff by someone who screwed up every ingredient except the dog murder.

Possibly the funniest detail in this entire comic is that on the very last page where the publisher had the temerity to include the line “No similarity to any character(s) and/or place(s) is intended, and any similarity is purely coincidental.” Of course this is just a boilerplate “don’t sue us” message included in pretty much any work of fiction, but in this case it’s absurd. It’d be like making a comic based on Star Wars, changing the main character’s name to Doug Petrol and giving him a stupid jacket, but still talking about the Force all the time.

And so ends the first and only issue of Diesel, a comic created because an artist couldn’t consummate his love for a Japanese manga and so resorted to satisfaction through his own hand. It’s beautiful, in a way. It was the kind of thing that could only really happen in the late ’90s, in that brief period after anime began to make its way to the west but before it became a mass culture phenomenon, when American teens were just beginning to swoon over bishonen and have arguments about whether Goku or Superman were stronger. (Neither: it’s Mr. Botha. (deez dicks (Mr. Botha has two dicks.)))

One last thing. Throughout all of this, I haven’t mentioned the single weirdest thing about Diesel. We already know the creator is named Joe Weltjens. But “Joe’s” full Christian name is actually Jochen. JOchen “JOe” Weltjens. That’s right: he is, himself, a JoJo, and I wish him luck on whatever bizarre adventure he’s on right now.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: EveryZig, whose stand is Kajagoogoo, a bashful chaise lounge that turns panties into scorpions.