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TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: The Aliens of Mount Kailas 🌭

Brockway: Ctom, the diaper-chewing maniac behind The President Goes to Heaven, seems to believe every conspiracy theory at once, plus several more he made up. Every one of his ideas is at war with six others, leaving his mind like an old Chevy on a bomb testing range. If his oeuvre has a theme, and it absolutely does not, it’s ctom trying to make peace between the warring clans of bats inside his skull. He’s looking for the Unifying Theory of Nutjob, and this time he’s using the best medium for logic and coherency: the novelization of a found footage sex comedy stage play he never actually wrote.

Seanbaby: You know…

Brockway: It’s introduced as a eulogy for a dead reporter, Don Farto, given by a near-total stranger named Alvine Schwartz.

Seanbaby: Ha, it’s funny, I could have sworn both you and the author said “Don Farto.”

Seanbaby: Oh no, that’s real.

Brockway: It’s nice of Alvine to do this for the family when he barely knew the man-

Brockway: Huh. Maybe you could use fewer spread legs and penises in this funeral speech, Alvine.

Seanbaby: I don’t think this is weird. My life insurance doesn’t even pay out unless my most casual acquaintance comes to the funeral and describes the site of my death using only penises.

Brockway: In my personal experience, sometime after the fifth cock you describe – really right around the point you accuse god of being an alien – that’s when an uncle divetackles you out of the church. But no, the family lets Alvine finish his extremely long anecdote about the many penises he saw on a mountain that looked like fucking. Maybe they were hoping it would dovetail back into their beloved’s life in a meaningful way at the end. It did not.

Seanbaby: As we gather here to honor the dead, a lot of mountains look like labias, am I wrong about this, folks? Like, put on some pants, Kilimanjaro, there are kids trying to ski. Any other time I’d take you up on the offer, babe, but it’s 9am and I’m with a tour group from Cleveland. Might be a little early to pop off in an igneous rock formation, cha cha. Seriously, though; gods are Aliens from the stars, right?

Brockway: I take it back. That’s beautiful, Sean. It’s really only missing one thing-

Brockway: Don Farto is wonderful in its simplicity. If that was a character in an SNL sketch I’d dress like him every Halloween. There will be many fart jokes in this book, but none of them will involve Don Farto. Ctom has no idea what he has here. It’s like he found an undetonated nuclear warhead, then tied it to a stick so he could bash people on the head with it. I’m always divetackled before I can get to this part in my eulogies, but Don Farto deserved better than this.

Seanbaby: This guy opened his eulogy with alien genitals, so many alien genitals, and then ended it with a list of places he went unrelated to the deceased and a guy he lost, also unrelated to the deceased. Don Farto deserved better than this.

Brockway: The rest of the book is told through audio clips recovered from memory cards found on the body of reporter Don Farto. It was clearly written as a stage play with Don Farto as the narrator framing each scene, but I guess the Detroit equivalent of Broadway didn’t want to cast a Don Farto, because this book is the only version of the story. The story of Don Farto.

Don Farto.

Seanbaby: I agree. Don Farto.

Brockway: Though they only met once, in a way, I think Alvine Schwartz knew Don Farto better than anybody.

Seanbaby: You can tell a newscaster produces his own stories when the copy says, “O, look at all these huge penises.” This is one of the best books we’ve ever read. I love the framing device, I love the huge penises, and I love the huge penises.

Brockway: It’s actually sort of a romance, isn’t it? Here were two men, separated by time and circumstance, but spiritually united in their passion for huge, huge penises.

Brockway: Don Farto died how he lived: nearby a handsome penis. Alvine even got the Shiva alien stuff right! This was actually too perfect. If you peel off Alvine’s mustache I’m sure you’ll find that Don Farto faked his own death and then had to do his own eulogy because nobody else wanted to say ā€˜O, look at all these huge penises’ that many times in a church.

Seanbaby: Don Farto broke the story of alien life on a penis festival remote! Can you imagine if Tom Brokaw casually told the nation he was counting giant dongs by space monster architectu– wait, wait I should have renamed him Tom Brokewind.

Brockway: I’m more sure than ever that I made the right decision. You’re doing my eulogy. You’re going to have to wear pigeon-spikes just to keep horny mourners off you.

Anyway, Don Farto also believed Mount Kailas looked like Shiva’s unsheathed dong, and that Shiva lived atop his own hog with his beautiful immortal wife in a state of constant orgy, guarded by cannibals. This is, holy shit, this is still the setup phase for the story. This is all stuff you need to keep in mind before the story begins. This is the text crawl before Star Wars, but the Ewoks eat each other and every fourth word is a bolded penis.

Seanbaby: What an inspiring art prompt.

Brockway: Then a huge penis enters from top of frame and takes several minutes to pass. That’s how we’ll sell the scale.

So Don Farto snuck into the sex palace of the alien gods and somehow did not title his book that. He must hate success, that’s worth 8 million Kindle Unlimited downloads. Anyway, let ctom set an atmosphere of dread like only a master can.

Seanbaby: I think it betrays the author’s fear of sex to have Don Farto know he’s listening to the “sounds of group sex orgy,” then decide, no, it must be the haunting of creepy ghouls, and then have him cower behind a pillar.

Brockway: This is the entire book: The many fuckings Don Farto heard from behind a pillar. Also a better title.

Seanbaby: I agree again.

Brockway: With this story, we will solve every mystery in human history. Right after we check out some sweet melons.

Seanbaby: Dear diary, ba-ba-boing, you gotta see this.

Brockway: A whole pantheon of alien gods converge in this temple to do two things: Confirm every conspiracy theory ctom believes in, and not quite fuck. One of them is a bigfoot. Wow, Look at the size of those melons.

By which I mean bigfoot balls.

Seanbaby: It’s crazy that this guy runs and hides when he hears sex, but will stare directly at a sudden Yeti’s dick while it’s performing a musical number. “The sasquatch, or bigged foot, has a green mound of pubic hair surrounding a helicopter of a phallus, so mesmerizing it is with its swirling, twirling. Oh wow, look at the velocity on that penis. These many penises.”

Brockway: Narada is a Jolly Green Sasquatch who plays the woodblock, the sexiest instrument, and he’s here for the orgy that will end all time. Dick stuff is literally all that happens in heaven, because ctom believes it’s the only good thing about any form of existence. He thinks every second you spend with a dry dong is a millenia in hell.

Seanbaby: I’ve heard this exact speech from so many FedEx guys.

Brockway: The A Plot of this book is how much erectile dysfunction sucks, but the B Plot is a sprawling cosmic tale about a universe in disarray.

…

Because god has erectile dysfunction.

Seanbaby: This is so many words for an author to explain, “My limp dick made me crazy, readers, but not in a cute way. I am crazy crazy. You’re in quite a lot of danger.”

Brockway: But you didn’t let him finish. Let him finish. It makes sense if you’d only let him finish!

Actually all the gods have erectile dysfunction. Because of diabetes, which they also have.

Brockway: This probably doesn’t have anything to do with anything, but at the time of writing this ctom was a 70 year old man with diabetes.

Seanbaby: “O, Goddess, O, Glorious Creator, I picked up some pamphlets on preventing erectile dysfunction, but my schedule has been so busy lately. O, Great Parvathy, I should get back into bird watching that would help me get outside more. O, Goddess, where was I? Ah, yes, orgy.”

Brockway: Ctom sure writes an orgy like a dude who’s never been invited to an orgy.

Seanbaby: Where did all this story’s momentum go? Did Don Farto forget the stakes? This is no time to sit around getting high. He needs to rally these men and bigfoots! Come on, gang! We’ve got to work together and get god’s dick hard!

Brockway: I think this was supposed to be important? Don Farto will open and close every scene by describing the rolling mists that obscure his view – that’s part stage direction, a leftover from back when he was pretending somebody would produce this, but also…

Brockway: He might be trying to say god is just blowing smoke out of his ass. In the hands of Kurt Vonnegut that could’ve been a cute little touchdown in an otherwise horrible story about genocide. In ctom’s hands it’s a clumsy punt in a manifesto advocating genocide. It’s less charming, is what I’m saying.

Seanbaby: I’ve watched enough ctom movies (one) to know this was only a fart joke. If you asked him to explain it, he would say, “In my experience I’ve found the quickest way to ruin a joke is to explain it, but very well: it’s a playful take on how it is quite funny when things come out of a butt. Now, I’d much rather talk about how I haven’t had a boner in 37 years. I blame it on the diabetes, but it’s tooth-clenching fear. In fact, I’ve pooped my pants, which is funny because it’s true.”

Brockway: Oh good point. Of course we have that trademark ctom poop and piss play. It’s like David Fincher with his morally bankrupt protagonists or James Cameron with his jaded cash grabs to fund his submarine addiction. Artists call that a motif.

Seanbaby: Oh great, it’s the part of the orgy where Don Farto talks about his entire family’s struggle with incontinence.

Brockway: Yes, actually that is precisely correct. But we’re still on a different orgy for now: the many horny flaccid gods are soon joined by the reincarnated bodies of everyone who died on Alien Cock Mountain – they’re all either mountaineers, CIA agents, satanists, or Jews. That’s me being silly: Those are all the same thing.

Seanbaby: Most of this checks out, but 700,000 Moloch abductions per year seems high. That’s about one in every five children. Like, the chocolate milk industry would notice that.

Brockway: No, Nestle’s in on it. All corporations and banks are. It’s all part of a hideous conspiracy by the Jews to ruin the world by putting dildos up their asses. I worry you think I’m kidding, but no, you don’t.

Brockway: Another author might have left that a figurative condemnation. Ctom thinks figurative condemnation is an additive the Jews put in soda to keep us from seeing the real colors. In this story, bankers are literally destroying the universe with anal stimulation.

Seanbaby: If you’re telling me that ignoring the warning label on a dildo is specifically destroying God, that only makes it hotter.

Brockway: Remember, ctom is doing this to collate every insane belief he has – from anti-semitism to homophobia to the fake moon landing – into one single narrative. You need to trust me that these are narratively important buttholes.

Seanbaby: “This is Don Farto on location behind a pillar at a star orgy. It now appears butt stuff has insulted God’s penis and inspired some kind of universe-collapsing dance. More on this as it develops, check out the size of those melons.”

Brockway: It sounds weird when you put it like that. Anyway, Bigfoot tries to convince Shiva’s wife to fuck other gods. Ctom gets as close to a joke as he ever will.

Seanbaby: I . . .

Brockway: Come on, that’s almost something! That something is racist, but it’s close to coherent. You won’t believe this, but that’s a recurring theme of ctom’s work – huge green alien god penises. And racism. He doesn’t have a lot of respect for the blacks, he doesn’t trust the Mexicans, he outright hates the Jews, but oh man – don’t even get him started on the worst of them all: his fellow Indians.

Seanbaby: I can’t tell if the author is mad at Indian movies for being unrealistic or Indian space orgies for being unrealistic.

Brockway: Both. He wants to make the only realistic Indian space orgy movie, but those fatcats in Bollywood won’t let him. See, ctom is folding in how unappreciated he feels as a filmmaker with his rampant homophobia, then passing it through the mouth of an alien god of destruction, while using the whole thing as an excuse to complain about diabetic erectile dysfunction. This is almost a Kojima game.

Brockway: ā€œSuper cool!ā€ Said no CIA agent about any muslim exercising their religious beliefs.

Seanbaby: “Wow, this is not how I pictured Muslim heaven at all. Cliffs, mountaineers, loose boulde– whoa they have a fornication room! Alright, everyone, I’m coming in, but if anyone tries any gay stuff in here, I’M GOING TO KILL MYSELF.”

Brockway: So listen, the Peace Corps is secretly funded by the CIA. We know this. We only have to look at the straight-laced Peace Corps agent, with his 9AM haircut and his polished shoes, to spot a narc. You probably didn’t know that anyone who climbs a mountain is also a spook. It gets tricky – you can climb a hill for a picnic, you could maybe even do some light hiking, but above about 5,000 feet, you are a Jewish agent of satan.

Brockway: It’s almost an aside that Osama Bin Laden was a secret mountain king killed the day after 9/11. That’s just a fun one ctom slipped in as an easter egg.

Seanbaby: This is such a fascinating dumbness. He seems to know caves don’t have electrical outlets, but he still pictured terrorists wheeling a dialysis machine into one as if they didn’t know. In the end, Osama Bin Laden’s worst enemy was forgetting the cave electric smarts me have. And CIA cartographers. And bomb. Only with their powers combined could he be stopped.

Brockway: That’s just one small, incidental example of ctom’s idiot madness. Every single person reincarnated on this mountain is a secret CIA operative responsible for a conspiracy theory ctom learned about in a downvoted Reddit comment.

Brockway: I love picturing that. Six entire teams, all shooting at Kennedy from different locations, just 17 bullets coming at his head from every possible direction at the same time. His head detonating like a Gallagher punchline.

Seanbaby: Another inspiring art prompt.

Brockway: Now, it might take a little bit to figure out how that’s all the Jews fault- haha just kidding. It doesn’t take long at all.

Brockway: The Federal Reserve is actually a private bank for Jews. Okay, that sucks but it’s almost normal-brained in this era of pedophile pizza basements. But saying the Jews killed Kennedy because he was circulating Kennedy Bucks you could redeem at the White House for pewter skull rings and BB guns – that’s the special ctom flavor you can only get here, in the mad diary of a flaccid diabetic.

Seanbaby: It all makes sense once you consider maybe everyone in the entire world is lying except for the least coherent lunatic. Let’s hear this limp-dicked racist out.

Brockway: Anyone could have called ā€œcrazy stuff about Jewsā€ in this book by a… Catholic Muslim? What the fuck? No wonder ctom is so confused. But who here put money down on antivax shit making an appearance? Looks like a lot of you have your hands up. Keep them up if you also guessed Ganesh wasn’t an elephant, he was just super autistic.

Seanbaby: “O, Goddess, you dumbass. You thought your son was non-verbal because of his elephant face, you idiot. O, you loathsomely stupid Maker of All That Is, it was because of the vaccines. O, Great Pavathy, if only your gentle wisdom had backed Republicans during the Creation.”

Brockway: ā€œSo autistic he became an elephantā€ isn’t even close to how that works, ctom. It’s maybe the origin story for a Zach Snyder Babar reboot, but it’s about as far from medical science as you can get.

You know where all this talk is going…

Brockway: Holy shit, maybe you didn’t. Did you have ā€œstarve the autisticā€ on your conspiracy bingo card?

Seanbaby: I had “forty minute unbroken scream at own penis,” so I already gave myself the bingo chip. I won so, so long ago.

Brockway: Alright, let’s run down your card then and see if you won the 10% off coupon at Golden Corral. You know about fluoride poisoning? Did you know the Jews are doing it to our salt?

Seanbaby: Wow, this has everything. It’s like a less horny, better written Ready Player One. End of joke, watermelon smash.

Brockway: How about 9/11 false flag operations? Wait, that’s no fun. Unhinged ctom whimsy demands remote controlled planes and atomic bomb-proof supertowers.

Brockway: You’ve heard the one about how Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing, and then confessed to it if you watch The Shining backwards through tinfoil with one of the secret constellations poked into it?

Seanbaby: Is Don Farto still dictating an overheard conversation about 9/11? I’ve never seen anyone this bad at an orgy.

Brockway: Nobody’s dick works and they’re all trying to distract each other from their simultaneously limp cocks. ā€œWait, don’t look down! Fuck! Uh… both the Kennedy Tag Team Special and Kubrick’s moon landing were executed by a CIA agent named Cigun! He carved his name into the moon!ā€

Brockway: ā€œIt’s not flaccid, it’s just flexible. Fuck! Did you know we discovered the secret to immortality, and they denied it to us? I’m assuming I mean the Jews!ā€

Wait, let’s have you call it right now: What was the secret to immortality? Where could you find it? Lock in your answer.

Seanbaby: This feels like a trap. I mean, it’s obviously something racist mixed with something magical. The absolute craziest thing at this point would be if it was just, like, vitamins or whatever.

Brockway: You’re worryingly good at this.

Yes, it was HGH. They used to sell it at GNC. You know – that store in the mall next to the Orange Julius that always smells like foot powder. That’s where immortality was, it’s why Ponce de Leon died in a Vitamin Shoppe. So close and yet so far.

Seanbaby: This is kind of a humblebrag, but I’ve seen enough people die in a Sharper Image to know this is bullshit.

Brockway: This is a wild turn, even for a book about a butt-toking alien Shiva. I think maybe ctom is angry here at his own failing body and looking back on the time when he felt most alive: Ripped to the tits on human growth hormone in the food court of a 1987 shopping mall.

Seanbaby: This is nuts in a specific enough way that may help explain everything. So he was buying homeopathic vitality pills from a conspiracy radio host and got cut off from his supply when that host… hold on, let me look it up… oh no, died from pills. Which means this, all of this, is the author’s way of coping with the death of his placebo dealer. Most people would have switched to juice cleanses, but ctom went to the stars for a sex party for floppy-donged 9/11 truthers.

Brockway: This is top shelf bonkers conspiracy theory. It just feels like it’s missing that special something without the liberal elite literally eating dead babies to live forever.

Brockway: Man, if only there were some way to get back to that happy place, by which I mean an unregulated GNC store, without just, I don’t know, making bathtub human growth hormone.

Brockway: Motherfucker is using bigfoot as a mouthpiece to push moonshining HGH. We went into this book knowing for a fact this man was insane, and he took that as a personal challenge.

Seanbaby: This is a recipe for homemade multivitamins using over-the-counter regular vitamins. I dare this book to get dumber or crazier. O, Goddess Parvathy, I fucking dare it.

Brockway: …

McDonald’s is people.

Seanbaby: O, hell yes.

Brockway: Round about here the bathtub HGH really starts to kick in. There’s breakdancing. Bruce Lee shows up.

Seanbaby: “Don Farto: Ueli is showing Parvathy a breakdance move. Damaged Memory Card.” Put it in the Smithsonian.

Brockway: ā€œBruce Lee breaks into a celestial orgy to beat up god.ā€ That’s art. That’s what art is. It almost rules! Until it doesn’t.

Brockway: ā€œExcuse me, I heard you talking and I just wanted to insert that the Jews invented evil. I suppose, anyway. Do go on, I’m sorry to interrupt. Yes, I will do it again.ā€

Seanbaby: This book is like if Hitler owned two Furbies and left both of them under the same bed (watermelon smash).

Brockway: I didn’t bring enough bibs to this article.

When ctom pulls out of the hugs, which is what HGHeads call overdosing on toilet hormones, we really start to Megazord these six thousand conspiracy theories together.

Brockway: It’s actually pretty simple. Lucifer and the Jews are in league with the freemasons, or possibly are the freemasons, and when they’re not too busy mountaineering or eating McChildren, they’re executing a master plan to decimate humanity.

Seanbaby: “This is Don Farto, wondering what it would take for these gods to post their orgy schedules where people could see them and time my meals better around them. Everybody hates the Jews here in space, for a lot of complicated reasons. This is Don Farto, reporting from a broken, uselessly penised body.”

Brockway: Of course none of this would be happening if Hollywood had given ctom a chance.

Seanbaby: “But I’m not talking about me, the narrator assures you, the reader. My normal-sized p-penis is fine, I stammer, nakedly revealing more than I meant to.”

Brockway: That’s the root of all this. He showed up in Los Angeles with nothing but brainworms and a dream, proved five times he couldn’t make a movie, and the only way his anthill mind could reconcile his own failure was with an 80 page manifesto about devil Jews and erectile dysfunction.

Brockway: Jews created socialism, communism, and democracy! All equally evil. I guess the one true government is facism, which does work so long as your dictator has a huge and beautiful penis. HOLD ON, a huge and beautiful penis that he can maintain an erection with. That almost sounded ridiculous.

Seanbaby: “Say that again, rumors of wars? Usury? Got it! Sorry, the sounds of this sexual orgy are making it hard to hear these crimes against the Gentile.”

Brockway: You see, ladies, ED is really an everyone problem. Because the second, and I mean the very second a boner performs at less than peak efficiency, you’ll bash your own skull in with a rock. You know you will. Better that than to live even a second in the hell of not always having a dick in you.

Seanbaby: This sounds true, but I wouldn’t know. Ladies. O, sexy wet Narada Muni.

Brockway: That’s the bigfoot, and I agree.

Hold on, there’s a twist ending!

Brockway: Stefan recognizes Shiva as Cigun, his fellow CIA agent and lynchpin to everything from Kennedy’s battle royale assassination to Stanley Kubrick’s 1969: The Moon Landing. And since all CIA agents are Luciferian Jews who worship Moloch, a demon they invented, that must mean… it never comes up again!

Seanbaby: You can sum up this book by saying “A weird hate crime along with a few other things,” but those few other things are starting to collapse in on themselves. I’m not sure this story can take too many more twists before it’s down to just hate crime.

Brockway: You forgot the HGH recipe. It’s technically a hate crime cookbook.

Anyway, what Stefan really wants is to steal Shiva’s wife, who is actually Shiva, who is actually Cigun. But BUT this is expressly not gay because it’s the girl parts of Shiva-Cigun. You know how in anime there’s always some gross technicality like the 14 year old girl is really a two hundred year old witch so it’s cool if you see her panties? This whole book is that, but for ctom wanting to touch a penis.

Seanbaby: “O, Wondrous Lady Parts of Shiva, if only I was 30 years younger and my bitterness congealing into antisemitism was instead a bottle of Art Bell vitality pellets.”

Brockway: Double twist, Shiva already poisoned Stefan. Double SUPER twist – Stefan knew that and didn’t take the poison! If you’ve ever played action figures with an eight year old, you recognize the stage of storytelling we’re in. English professors call it the Kraft Conflux: when dinner’s ready and you have to cram everything in before mom gets mad.

Seanbaby: “Oh, Idiot God Dummy, you didn’t know I had a force field this wh–”

Brockway: Shiva and Kala literally bounce out of there.

Brockway: If you don’t remember Kala, don’t worry – he leapt into this story for the first time just to Gummi Bear down Cock Mountain with his flaccid god-friend, leaving Shiva’s girl parts at the mercy of Stefan, the undead Luciferian Jew CIA Mountaineer who team-killed Kennedy. In screenwriting terms, they call this Pureeing the Cat.

Seanbaby: “Oh, Luscious Titties of Girl Version of Shi–”

Brockway: Weird. It’s like ctom has issues with women. But what would a fringe conspiracy nutjob obsessed with penises and suffering from ED possibly have against women?

Seanbaby: “I keep getting cut off. I think this book is collapsing into incoherence too qui–”

Brockway: Anyway, the mac and cheese is ready and mom put hot dogs in it so we have to get the fuck out of here. Story over.

Seanbaby: Hold on, let me wrap my hea–

Brockway: Ueli turns into the new Shiva – and this time he’s able to keep it up. He reinserts himself into Pavarthy’s vagina and together they fuck a spiritual wall up between us and the evil Jews who run McDonalds. The perfect ending!

Wait, almost the perfect ending…

Brockway: The perfect ending!

Seanbaby: Oh no. The twist was that all this really was meant t-to be a… comedy?

Brockway: Maybe? I think ctom wanted to be the Q-Pilled Kurt Vonnegut. An author seamlessly mixing genre, meta-commentary, and autobiography into quirky novel length essays on the state of the world. Only ctom believed every insane thing anyone ever told him, his dick didn’t work, and he only made it 82 pages. I guess that makes him more Tom Robbins, if instead of trying to fuck your college girlfriend, he stormed the capitol building. Anyway, signing off from heaven, I’m Rob Farto.

Seanbaby: And on huge penises, I’m Penis, Penis Penis.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

Dogg Zzone 9000, Episode 148: Harry Dean Stanton’s Drunken SNL with David Bell

Seanbaby wanted to do an entire episode about that time Harry Dean Stanton and The Replacements got pants-off drunk and fucked up Saturday Night Live. Brockway and David Bell thought that was a great idea, but they were also pants-off drunk.

Categories
PODCASTING DAY

BIGFEETS, Episode 7: Hellhounds vs. Home Squeezins

The Bigfeet Boys watch Season 1, Episode 7 of Mountain Monsters: Kentucky Hellhound of Pike County. Wild Bill was briefly killed in the making of this episode.

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Hot Dog Appreciation Day

Hot Dog Appreciation Day: The Double Plot

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Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Mortal Kombat Annihilation… The Book! 🌭

As they say in Mortal Kombat, welcome back to the stage of history! By now you’ve probably already purchased Mortal Kombat 1 and have spent hours enjoying sharp gameplay and a continued inexplicable use of the letter ā€œkā€ instead of ā€œcā€ as a branding exercise. Also, Mortal Kombat 1 is actually Mortal Kombat 12 because it reboots the series in canon. Also, Mortal Kombat 9 was just called Mortal Kombat because it also rebooted the series in canon. So if you’re keeping track, there have been three different Mortal Kombat 1 games: Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat, and Mortal Kombat 1.

Just like the devious shapeshifter and weirdly cool hang Shang Tsung, Mortal Kombat loves reinventing itself. Whether you’re tearing someone’s head off in an enchanted forest or punching someone’s head off in a haunted forest, Mortal Kombat has long explored the diverse world of two people hurting each other in a quasi-spooky place. And, you know what? It’s worked for them. If only all of us could find the peace in our hearts that Mortal Kombat has found ninjas throwing different elements at one another.

With the success of the series, Mortal Kombat has spawned three theatrical releases, in this article referred to as ā€œmovies.ā€ Two of those ā€œmoviesā€ (or ā€œfilmsā€ as they’re also called when trying to impress someone on a date who’s losing interest fast) were successes! The first of those successful movies was called ā€œMortal Kombat.ā€

The other successful movie was called, and this is going to throw you for a huge loop, ā€œMortal Kombat.ā€

If you’re a fan of Mortal Kombat, I’ve got great news: These movies are, in fact, based on that video game series. They have action. They’ve got excitement. They’ve got credits at the end with fun music. I don’t want to spoil it, but our old friends Sub-Zero and Scorpion appear! And they’re both so cool. One throws ice and the other is all about fire but he throws a rope. They’re so cool, mom. Oh, and Reptile is cool too! Acid spit!

Between the two talkies called ā€œMortal Kombat,ā€ filmmakers decided to try something original and created one called ā€œMortal Kombat Annihilation.ā€ Whether it’s a good movie or not is lost to time, which means it’s absolutely not a good movie. It turns out that the key to the success of a Mortal Kombat film is having a ā€œstoryā€ rather than just pointing to random characters from the video game series while going, ā€œThis guy? Right? You remember him? Cool, huh?ā€

None of the last four hundred words are important.

What’s important is that Mortal Kombat Annihilation has a middle grade novelization that includes pictures from the movie! Whoa! It’s like being able to own the movie before it leaves the theaters! All the disemboweling of the games, but now Ms. Teiss can yell at you for doing a book report on it. What do you expect my parents to do? They bought me the book! It’s their fault, Ms. Teiss!

Mortal Kombat Annihilation is a 59-page-long book. That might not sound like much, but the book is actually way bigger than you think because it includes eight pages of color photos from the film! The crazy thing? They don’t even count as pages. Those 59 pages are all meat. There’s not a wasted moment in the book. Nobody here is trying to fill space here to hit a specific word count to get paid for the assignment. Nobody would ever type a redundant sentence to hit a specific word count to get paid for the assignment. Personally, I find it offensive that someone would type the same idea three different ways while routinely clicking ā€œtoolsā€ and then ā€œword count.ā€

The important thing to know is that Mortal Kombat Annihilation is a direct sequel to the movie ā€œMortal Kombatā€ but entirely unrelated to the movie ā€œMortal Kombat.ā€ That latter ā€œMortal Kombatā€ is a reboot that isn’t in canon. It all makes a lot of sense if you’re chugging a bottle of turpentine and slamming a car door on your head.

Chapter one begins with the haunting lines:

The next couple paragraphs specify what ā€œEarthā€ is, which is nice for people who don’t keep up with video games and/or consciousness. It turns out that, while Liu Kang and Sonya Blade and Johnny Cage had stopped Shang Tsung, that was only the beginning! Shao Kahn has refused to accept the terms of the tournament and now Outworld is invading Earth!

Also, I wanted to make fun of the Rayden/Raiden thing, but the games seemed to also jump back and forth so I can’t really give you anything on that front.

If you’re a fan of Mortal Kombat, you know this means that this story is supposed to be an adaptation of Mortal Kombat 3, which is weirdly called that because it was the third Mortal Kombat game. I don’t get it either. But it also means that Mortal Kombat Annihilation features kameos from some of the koolest kombatants you kan konsider.

Fortunately, an entire interdimensional war based on three and a half games of a long running series can be pretty well reduced to 59 pages. And the space is well used. Here’s a passage that, when you break it down, is about 2% of the entire book’s length:

I’m not critical of the writing. It’s just impressive that that’s genuinely a good sized-portion of the book. If you read that one passage about 50 or 60 times, it’ll have taken about as much time as reading the entire book. And since people on TikTok tend to talk more about how many books they’ve read rather than quality or content, this is an easy one to throw on the list to impress strangers who would gladly plunge their hand into your stomach like it’s the movie Saw for a key that unlocks success.

Speaking of success, I have to take my hat off, then put it back on, and then walk out the door like Grandpa Simpson for the way they write Jax. Jax is black. Which means he has to be written like Gary Coleman was auditioning to play Mr. T. Jax isn’t a bad character in the games. But you do get a sense that whoever wrote or edited this book really… lacked cultural experience. Is that a way to put it? Lacked cultural experience?

Speaking of lacking cultural experience, this book loves telling you who’s beautiful. Jade. Sheeva. Heck, we all know Kitana is supposed to be Liu Kang’s love interest despite the fact she’s clearly better for Bo’ Rai Cho. Mortal Kombat Annihilation has a confused mid-puberty-like horniness. This author really wants to kiss Kitana so much, just right on the face.

What makes this book a delight to read, besides that it ends, is just how weirdly hard it tries to shovel in every Mortal Kombat character possible. To be fair, that is part of the movie. On the other hand, it makes for stellar passages like:

My only note would be that I wished there was an even greater ratio of talking about fighting to actually fighting. That said, it would probably make this book longer than 59 pages, which would ultimately turn it into something closer to a war crime than a middle grade book for children.

Mike Drucker is an Emmy-nominated comedian, author, and television writer. He’s written for some shows you probably liked. He’s written for some shows you probably didn’t like. He also worked as a localization editor for Nintendo of America and wrote an entire book on Silent Hill 2. His desperation is only matched by his loneliness.


This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: AnAndy, who is so surprised by this dedication that his mouth is a perfect gaping O.

Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: Twisted Metal 2 Endings 🌭

The TV adaptation of Twisted Metal is a silly take on what would happen if the exploding vehicle apocalypse ended the world in the mid ’90s. It’s how a coward would adapt Twisted Metal. The original Twisted Metal games were about a business wizard, Calypso, who granted one very monkey-pawed wish to the last survivor of an anything-goes car fight. Every character had their own reasons for slaughtering their way to this prize, and each of them got their own cinematic ending. They were, every single one of them, completely nuts.

Seanbaby: Because they’re the best, and because Brockway and I are the 2-Bru Brothers Two forever, we chose to watch the endings from Twisted Metal 2. It used the top storytelling talent an ice cream truck fighting game studio in 1996 could source internally. Brilliant wordsmiths. Creative geniuses. And to celebrate them, we’re going to rate each of the endings on the traditional scale of Insane! to Awesome! with the dangerous deadzone of Stupid! located between them. I will be the red speed missile and Brockway will be the blue M.I.R.V.. If you’re a visual learner, we’ll let Axel, the character with tires for hands, explain:

Seanbaby: Let’s start with Mortimer Scharf’s ending. He sounds like a type of diarrhea named after the scientist who discovered it, but he’s more of a Frankenstein mercenary? He fights in a hearse named Shadow and he’s been hired to be in the tournament by the ghosts of people who were run over in the first Twisted Metal game. Their plan was to squeeze into Mortimer’s trunk and wait for him to win. Then, when he got close to Calypso, they would grab him. It was a flawless plan and it worked. They fucking grab him. And as they take Calypso into the sky, the narrator, Calypso, says “only one man knows what happened to him. And that man is… ME!” Then boom– he’s on the wing of a passenger jet screaming his catchphrase at a child, “I am Calypso! And I thank you for playing Twisted Metaaaaaal!” I don’t know what you call it, but it’s not a story. This is more like a raccoon’s understanding of what’s going on as it flees through a Halloween store.

Brockway: You can’t have an unreliable narrator narrate his own death and then wonder if he died. He would know that, as both the narrator and person who died! He is perhaps the only person guaranteed to know that, twice, from both sides of the story. Oh no. Oh no I’m getting mad at these and it hasn’t even been one yet.

Brockway: Insane. Completely insane. It’s stupid, of course it’s stupid, it’s a stoned teenager free associating in study hall. This story ends in a Metallica logo and part of the Cool S. But I can’t take this away from the Insane category when a business genie surfs the ghosts of the unjustly killed onto the wing of an airplane just to gremlin a kid for kicks.

Seanbaby: I agree, this is insane and nothing else. A sane person couldn’t come up with it because they’d think, “A passenger jet taking off during the end of the world wouldn’t fly straight into ghost turbulence.” And a smart person couldn’t come up with it because they’d think, “Wait. We forgot about the magic wish. A magic wish is a better plan than grab.” And I honestly can’t picture an awesome person and Mortimer Scharf in the same room. Mortimer Scharf sounds like a website selling untrustworthy jars of celebrity farts. Mortimer Scharf’s is the brand name on a pudding cup in a graveyard vending machine.

Brockway: This is the exact face of every alt right poster on the internet.

Seanbaby: I think Mr. Slam might be the most representative of all the Twisted Metal 2 characters and stories. He’s the 14th idea from a person who ran out of good ones 14 ideas ago and his ending is a wad of cliches the author is remembering wrong. Simon Whittlebone is an architect who got fired for loving tall buildings too much, so now he rage-kills in his bulldozer, Mr. Slam. And if you beat the game with him, he wishes for Calypso to let him build the tallest building on Earth. But instead of twisting his words, he grants his wish with no catch. The only twist comes when Simon falls off for no reason. I don’t know what to call it. It’s like reading a children’s book but the moral of the story is an unrelated truck driving into your bedroom.

Brockway: This is the first piece of media bold enough to portray architects as belligerent dipshits and skyscrapers as their cock substitutes. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m just saying it’s changed my architecture headcanon forever.

Brockway: This is so stupid. This pronounces ā€œironyā€ wrong and when you try to correct it, it storms out of the office party and punches a copy machine. This is a guy in a beer helmet telling you about Objectivism at a AA hockey game. This is the ironic twist to a Twilight Zone script written by Todd McFarlane.

Seanbaby: I’m not sure it’s even stupid. This is more like a self-piloting car trying to drive to Stupid. It does have things I love, though; like when Calypso adds, “To this day, you can still see the dent in the street made by the crashing body of Simon Whittlebone. I let it serve as a reminder that everyone has a chance of winning my contest. EVEN FOOLS!” It’s fun because he’s trying to spin it like he didn’t forget to do his one job as an evil wish granter. I also like how much they overworked the art. The animation style of wiggling terrible drawings seems lazy, but these cutscenes are not that. There are so many unnecessary planes, birds, and explosion puffs happening behind the dumb shit. Some maniac said, “All I have is a single picture of a deranged architect and what I’ve learned in this After Effects tutorial, but if you give me the rest of this lunch break I’ll give you the Sistine Chapel.”

Brockway: I can fix this. See where he falls off the building, right past the eagles? They should grab him with their claws and swoop away, the end. And then in Twisted Metal 3 he comes back as a guy being carried around by an eagle. He shoots missiles with his feet. That’s called an emotional arc.

Seanbaby: Let’s get Minion’s out of the way. He doesn’t have a wish or anything. He just grabs Calypso and throws him in a pit. “Time to rot in Hell with your little sister,” he says, almost certainly to a player who has know idea what the fuck he’s talking about. I’m not sure if Calypso even has a little sister; this might be a reference to the wrong video game. It’s trash. It’s what an auto-reply would send if you got an email asking if you finished the Minion cutscene.

Brockway: I actually remember this. I remember being mad at this. Minion promises some elaborate hellish backstory and then at the end he just pushes a nerd into a hole. Actually wait, I’ve just come to love this.

Brockway: I’m a fan now, but this is still stupid. These endings are at their worst when they have some lasting effect on the lore. Now we know how Calypso got his powers, when we could have spent that 35 seconds explaining how a raptor architect accidentally got rocket feet that exploded his children.

Seanbaby: I’m taking my missile off the board. This isn’t anything enough to be a word. If you’re a writer and you write, “I guess the demon, who looks like a demon, throws the bad guy in a demon hole wait he has a sister,” you’re effectively as bad at your job as is possible. If you died at your desk and the cleaning staff finished your scripts, would anyone know? If an orthodontist was this bad at his job, he would crawl in with a mop and say, “I am tooth, let’s mouth now. Psst! My sister is also tooth.”

Seanbaby: Next is Sweet Tooth, the flame-headed maniac clown in an ice cream truck. Everyone knows what he wants!

Brockway: Yeah! He’s gonna wish to be the boogeyman! That’s actually kind of cool in an extremely lame 1990s way, like a tale Todd McFarlane tells after spinning around on his stool and asking you to fuck his wife-

Seanbaby: That’s right, he begged to be made into a bug!

Brockway: Fuck!

Seanbaby: I’m making it sound too sane, though. See, he wanted to be a gentle bug living his life in peace, free from his madness. But both the wisher and the wish-granter got every detail wrong, so he turned into a homicidal caterpillar who longed only to return to the flesh of man. That might be an eternal torment in any other story, but in this one the narrator makes it clear caterpillars can become human if they really mean it. It’s Kafkaesque, but Jeff Kafka, a 5-year-old in federal custody for murder.

Seanbaby: I rated it full insane. This has no connection to anything we know about clowns or vehicle combat. If a human was telling me this story I’d say, “Fuck you, I know you’re a caterpillar.”

Brockway: Insane, but I’m also adding a modifier of stupid. This ending knew it had to pervert its own intention, forgot to do that, drew a heavy metal clown worm instead, then tried to leave a sequel opening but forgot to do that too and drew more clown worms. Why would eating the flesh of an old gardener return him back to human form? Does that work for every caterpillar or just clown ones? Are some people ex-caterpillars who ate a grandma? Should I be suspicious of hairy men who undulate? These are the little details you should hash out before sending this off to animation, and by animation, I mean your son’s burnout friend who lives in the garage.

Seanbaby: Twisted Metal named their cocky Hollywood character Ken Masters, which is the exact name of the cocky Hollywood character from the obscure video game franchise Street Fighter.

Brockway: W-what the fuck?

Seanbaby: Was it an oversight? A reference? It seems impossible to accidentally name your character after the third most popular character in a thing everyone knows. It’d be like naming your daughter Joey Fatone, and I know because I did.

Brockway: He’s even got the kind of shitheel country club bad boy sports car that Street Fighter Ken drives. Are they trying to hijack the canon? Malibu already scalped the bastard. I know he deserves punishment for his beautiful hair and treatment of the waitstaff but this feels unearned.

Seanbaby: When you beat the game with Ken he goes up to Calypso, a famous twister of wishes, and precisely says, “I’m an actor and I’m really, really good. And I’ve been struggling, searching for my big break for over six weeks. Please, Calypso, you’ve got to make me famous. Make it so the whole world knows my face.” You dumb fuck, Ken Masters (the Twisted Metal one). You’re just asking to get your face torn off and turned into the sky.

Brockway: Oh yeah, we’re bigfacin’. 100%.

Seanbaby: And after their entire atmosphere is made of Ken’s screaming flesh, the animator shows everyday people still going about their business. Construction, dog walking, plane crashing, skyscraper burning– life has to go on! But I don’t think the sky face is the weirdest part. The weirdest part comes at the end when Calypso, like an impish child, adds “It’s a nice face. I do not regret what I did.”

Brockway: Insane. Insane in a way so pure and oldschool that it’s actually refreshing. This is the return to Coca-Cola Classic after New Coke. If a homeless man on a bus told you this story you would give him 20 bucks to get off the street for his last night alive before the amoeba finished eating his brain. I do not regret what I did.

Seanbaby: I almost think it’s stupid, I do not regret what I did.

Seanbaby: The elderly World War II soldier in Twisted Metal is named Captain Rogers, which is the name of the elderly World War II soldier in Marve– look, maybe Twisted Metal wasn’t designed to be held up to this kind of scrutiny.

Brockway: The names are not the hardest part of creating characters, Twisted Metal writers. You could have called him Captain Blorp Fantastic. Dang, that sucks. Captain Spoof Moofy. Captain… Captain Morm Banswer. I retract my statement.

Seanbaby: Captain Rogers (the Twisted Metal one) is weary from all these wars… tired of this long life. So when he goes up to get his wish from Calypso he decides he wants to do it all again. “Give me the body of a 20 year old!” he wishes like the world’s dumbest goddamn wisher.

Brockway: He didn’t change the head, like the head isn’t part of the body! Young body! Old head!

Seanbaby: I might have only called this stupid, but at the end Calypso screamed, “MAYBE NEXT YEAR YOU WILL WIN TWISTED METAL AGAIN AND ASK FOR THE HEAD OF SOMEONE THE SAME AGE!” And it’s definitely insane to think this character, Barely Legal Muscle Guy With Tiny Sad Mummy Head, should tease your sequel.

Brockway: Completely mad. Buff Bod Mummy Head is the perfect opponent for Missile Foot Raptor Architect. Man, I really thought I saw where this very stupid twist was going – he wished for the body of a 20 year old; he’d get his own grandson dead at his feet – but this twist juked me. It spun effortlessly around me as I flew past it, divetackling a refreshment table. It continued on to its own end zone to score on itself twice and then spike the ball up its own ass.

Seanbaby: Let’s do one that rules. When Amanda Watts wins she knows what she wants and doesn’t give a shit how any evil wishmaster spins it. She says, “As my prize give me the ability to drive at the speed of light.” And you know what that means: time travel. She drives past a 1950s barbecue, through the Old West, and stops to confusingly explode pirates in Pirate Times– all of the classic epochs! It is the best. She runs out of gas underneath a dinosaur foot, but she had to know something like that was coming. You don’t wish for “make me go any direction, faster than I can see” if you have plans tomorrow.

Brockway: Yes, hell yes! Calypso didn’t even twist this one because it kicked too much ass. That’s the evil genie loophole. Try it. Rub a blood-soaked lamp and wish to crash a race car into a black hole, that genie can’t do anything but clap. This is Rated Awesome. Intelligence isn’t everything. Smart people get books, wine, existentialism. Stupid people get time travel, dinosaurs, race cars. This is stupid people putting together everything they have access to, and getting a badass short film. Put together everything smart people have and you get Nausea.

Seanbaby: I love every choice here. Every shape was decorated in rainbows and explosions. They dedicated a third of her time trip to a little postwar planned community. And then paleontologists discover her remains and they become an international mystery? That’s adorable. They live in a world where the leading cause of death -by so much- is race car sorcerer. Hey, National Museum of History, you think he might have had something to do with the unexplainable car you found? It might be my favorite detail of the Twisted Metal world-building– everything is totally normal, but we’re also in the middle of a supernatural apocalypse. Bored delivery drivers exist alongside crashing jets while the sun sets somewhere behind the shrieking sky face.

Brockway: In the Twisted Metal world you would carbon-date a crash helmet to the Cretaceous and be disappointed it was only a time-traveling race car driver.

Seanbaby: We’ve seen some stupid shit so far, but if you want to know what it looks like when a Twisted Metal writer has given up entirely, it’s Thumper’s ending. He demands to be king of the world, but oh no, everyone in the world is dead from the Twisted Metal tournament. Whoops. It would have the same impact if he wished for cookies and Calypso said, “I ate the last of them. They were very nice cookies, I do not regret what I did, I am Calypso and I thank you for playing Twisted Metal.” Sorry, I thought I was building to an absurd joke, but that’s exactly, word-for-word, what Calypso would say.

Brockway: Boo! Boo this tripe. You! The wheel-armed abomination below this sentence: Boo this with me!

Brockway: Irredeemably stupid. Like a Sunday School morality play for kids who live in a town with a lot of industrial metals in the groundwater.

Seanbaby: It’s almost worse than stupid because it makes the other stories make less sense. The lore is tainted with the detail that on a good year, the Twisted Metal tournament might kill the entire world. That changes a lot! At the very least it means next year Thumper is going to be fighting only babies. Wait, this universe has ghosts. So the sequel would be babies vs. ghosts vs. ’90s gangbanger? That actually sounds rad; change mine to awesome.

Brockway: No.

Seanbaby: Last year Calypso sent Captain Jamie Roberts’ brother spiraling into space. So when she gets her wish she demands, and I quote, “YOU LET ME SEE MY BROTHER. No, wait–” And… I mean, come on, lady. You’re practically begging to be dumped in deep space. This is day one wishmaster twisting. This is too basic for monkey paw kindergarten.

Brockway: It’s just like a cop to assume the laws and systems we have to govern car wishes don’t apply to them-

Seanbaby: But it’s not a twist on Jamie– it’s a twist on us! In the second, dumber twist, it turns out this was all part of Jamie’s plan. Her brother has been sitting in outer space the whole year eating and breathing, you know, stuff he had in his patrol car. He goes, “Guess Calypso tricked you too, huh, sis. Now we’re both stuck out here.” No, you fool. Jamie installed rockets on her cop car and they space-drive back to Earth. And when the animator read this he said, “You’re an idiot and I can’t draw any of that. I’ll have it on your desk in 20 minutes.”

Brockway: Twisted Metal writers think outer space is just a big time-out for grownups? That’s how I explain a shuttle disaster to the orphan of heroes.

Brockway: This is a toddler’s understanding of irony, wishes, space, police, cars, and vengeance. This is a two year-old revenge pooping their own pants because you accidentally threw away their favorite rock. There’s a cause and an effect and then muddy brain-static in between the two. There are so many layers of stupid here they’ve stacked high enough to reach the insane bar.

Seanbaby: This game was rated T for Teen, but I’d argue most 13-year-olds would have notes on this. Now that I mention it, is there an age where you think cops live forever in space? I think if you showed this to a baby, its first words would be, “What the fuck am I looking at, you stupid fuck?”

Brockway: If your mother heard you use that kind of language she would blast right down from space time-out and tan your hide, Morm Junior.

Seanbaby: It’s so important how you word your wish after you win Twisted Metal. And I feel like every character goes into the tournament knowing this. And yet this is how Mr. Grimm worded his: “Every moment I don’t have a soul, I get weaker. My job is too hard. People! They have a tendency of not dying! Fast enough! Pleaaaaase, Calypso! Accelerate the process! Do whatever it takes to make them die faster!” He does! Everyone in the world dies and Mr. Grimm eats all their souls. Oh, but then he’s hungry and no one left to eat, darn. I think it was meant to be another ironic one, but this is more like how a horse would explain carrots.

Seanbaby: Mr. Grimm’s story is how I will scientifically calibrate stupidity for the rest of my life. “I want to eat the world; I ate the world, bye.”

Brockway. I’m tempted to think this is just stupid, and it is stupid. It’s the kind of stupid that needs UNFOOD written on the walls so it doesn’t fill up on plaster. But somewhere around the point a supermodel strangles a businessman with two neckties and a double-fisting uzi guy interrupts that young woman’s grief, we’ve crossed into awesome.

Seanbaby: Yeah, the animator’s relentless insanity really saved this one.

Seanbaby: Inspired by how they would have a better angle to look at titties, Mike and Stu wish for the ability to fly and then jump off the roof. Calypso watches them shatter against the sidewalk and jokes, “Good thing these first class tickets are refundable.” So I guess his original evil loophole was going to be first class airline tickets, not “flying” into the ground. This is kind of embarrassing. It means Mike and Stu, the “stupid” characters in this, the stupidest thing, accidentally came up with a better ironic fate than their wishmaster.

Brockway: What happens if you die while out-twisting the twistmaster? Do you switch places, Freaky Friday style? Do you merge Man With Two Heads style? Wait, no I’ve got it: You stay dead but he has to take your place and live life in your honor, Mad Men style. This needed one more frame of Calypso a year later, parked outside a Warrant show getting a Tammy pregnant in a camaro that has seen better days.

Brockway: Stupid but with a distinction. This isn’t stupid as intended, it isn’t laboratory stupid, carefully engineered. This is wild stupid found growing inside the latrine pit of the Dipshit Ward’s Annual Camping Trip for Troubled Idiot Youth.

Seanbaby: I found this one inspiring. The stupid can do anything.

Seanbaby: My notes just say, “Fuck YES: Undercover robocop.”

Brockway: Krista reunites with her father, Calypso, who looks deep into her eyes and sees the tiny LAPD branded cog. You know, from the ex-criminal watchmakers in the LAPD Cyberdaughter Engineering Department. That’s when he knows she’s really a bomb set to detonate if they hug. But such is a father’s love, he’ll forgive even the most exploding of wayward robocop daughters. Together, they embrace their fate, by which I mean explosion.

Seanbaby: I rated it insane. When Krista says, “Hold me, daddy, I’m just a machine now, but I’m scared the explosion will hurt,” and then he does… I was genuinely moved. But I also acknowledge a wish devil and his undercover robocop daughter reuniting and immediately dying a second time are not the events of a sane world.

Brockway: 2 parts stupid, 2 parts insane, fuck yeah parts awesome. I am down with police brutality if it means rebuilding felons’ daughters as secret cyborgs who explode in the presence of love.

Seanbaby: This ending is incredible. Axel only wanted one prize– the strength to face his father, who fused him to these tractor tires thirty years ago. His father greets him by saying, “WHY’VE YOU COME BACK! I THOUGHT I’D GOTTEN RID OF YOU!”

Axel is the most dangerous missile platform in the world, and his father is a grouchy guy in a barn, but instead of shooting him, Axel howls, “FATHER PLEASE! RELEASE ME!”

This is an unforgivable request. He replies, “YOU WERE ALWAYS TOO SLOW! TOO DAMN STUPID! AND YA STILL ARE! GONNA TAKE TEN MORE YEARS ON THE WHEEEELS TO SET YOU RIGHT! YOU NEED TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON!”

I don’t know how barn court works, but this is outrageous. The penalty for asking to be let out of your tires after three decades is another whole decade of it? Nonsense. Axel goes, “NO, FATHER! I’VE LEARNED MY LESSON! LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT I’VE LEARNED!” and tears his own arms off. It’s so aggressively not any kind of poetic justice or payback. This is like getting mad at Foot Locker’s return policy by mailing them your penis.

Brockway: And he just floats away into the corn, limbless! The sequel sees Axel picking up where we left him: dead in a drainage ditch seventy feet from his father’s barn.

Brockway: Completely insane. Ripping your own arms off to prove you don’t have daddy issues is in the DSM-IX. It’s the twist ending to the epic DSM saga.

Seanbaby: Before Axel’s ending I would have argued all of these stories were exactly what they looked like– lazy morons failing their way into unintentional comedy. But Axel’s ending is too perfectly deranged. I think they knew. I think all of these might be the work of 1996’s most forward-thinking genius troll. Let’s look at the last one to be sure, but I’m confident I’m right.

Seanbaby: Marcus knows he’s in a video game, and Calypso is proud of him for figuring it out, but it turns out he was having a dream, not doing a Matrix.

Brockway: Classic stupid! The definition of stupid. ā€œIt’s all a dreamā€ is two scoops of vanilla stupid, it’s handjob in the back of a Chevy stupid. The kind of good old fashioned stupid that may have never existed, save for in the romance of our own nostalgia.

Seanbaby: I take back my previous theory. There is no hidden message here. This isn’t any kind of outsider art. Whoever made these is a goddamn idiot.

Brockway: Wha- who could have foreseen this twist ending?!