Author: Seanbaby

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Many Certain Deaths of Commando Cody, Part 2 🌭

When we last left Cody, flying Sky Marshal of the Universe, he had taken a bothersome shoulder bonk and was tumbling off a cliff to his certain death!

How is flying Cody, the flying Commando of the skies going to get out of this one!? Can you guess? You have only seconds left to guess!

As usual, Commando Cody’s title card forgets to mention the extreme danger the show left him in, so I’ll remind you: he fell off a cliff. When we left, the flying man was falling! Off a cliff! Do you have your guess locked in for how he survives!? Ready?

As he fell, Cody remembered he could fly. Zero stars out of five. And instead of flying up to kick the ass of the men who insulted him with such a sad murder attempt and finish his mission, he flies away. This continues the trend of episodes opening with a very obvious solution to last week’s problem followed by every character forgetting what the hell is going on and leaving in opposite directions. Hi, everyone! Welcome back to… 

At the end of Chapter Seven, Cody and Ted are, without question, blown to pieces in their plane. Graber and Daly aim their ray gun at the plane, watch as no one jumps out, and then destroy it. It’s fucking over. Cody is dead. Unless he and Ted did something extremely clever, they are wet plane debris and all of this was for nothing.

So here’s how they survived: Somehow, between frames of film, Cody put on his helmet and said, “We should bail out,” the same way you might tell your wife, “Taco Bell is discontinuing Mexican Pizza.” Ted responded with, and I quote, “Okay.” He said it how your wife might say, “I can spread some dog food between two crackers if you ever want one.” It’s mostly bored disgust, but with a touch of whimsy. Ted figured out the rules to this show long ago and he knew the moment he got on he wasn’t going to have to land this plane. He parachutes to safety using the same stock parachute footage as Joan, and then, of course, the bad guys leave.

Back on the moon, Cody and Ted steal one of the moon cars which, as you may remember from Part I, are sweet as shit. Unfortunately, the Radar Men chase after him in a sweet car of their own. Ted forms a desperate plan. Remember those grenades from earlier that did nothing? Ted wants Cody to fly out with one of those and try again. Cody says, and I quote, “Okay,” and flies away.

It’s a bad plan and Cody immediately screws it up by flying the wrong way. Two seconds later he’s nowhere to be seen and the enemy car blasts Ted. This is a show where falling off a 30 foot cliff takes four to five minutes and twelve different mannequins, and here we are with a dead Ted two seconds after the fight starts. And he’s not “dead” like we see a tank explode and next week they show how he climbed out before that. They show him bounce off the wall and get his space suit’s air tube knocked out. They show him asphyxiate. They show him die. And the last thing he ever said was something moronic to the dumbest man in space who ignored him and left.

Cody drops one grenade on the enemy car which does nothing, then flies back and climbs inside the car it’s shooting. Without saying a word, he fixes Ted’s air tube. Through a series of events so insane they’re difficult to coherently describe, we are back exactly where we started before the cliffhanger. It’s like the producer came in and said, “Are the Chapter Eight and Nine pages done? Actually, let me guess– the tank blows up and then we find out, gasp, Cody isn’t in it?”

And the writer said, “N-no! The crisis is Ted! Ted, he loses an air tube, right? A-and Cody can’t help b-because he… he already left! To fight the tank! But here’s the thing: he comes back. To fix: the tube?”

And the producer said, “My god, Ronald. Hot dagnabbit, you’ve done it again.”

Normally if I saw this sequence of events I would assume it was a coded message sent by the  prisoner being forced to write a moon drama, but it’s pretty normal for Commando Cody and his enemies to stop making sense at the beginning or end of a chapter. And while it’s weird as fuck how they got there, we all knew Ted was going to be saved by either A: Cody Plugging The Tube Back In, or B: Just Waking Up. Half a star, you predictable dipshits.

At the end of Chapter Nine, the bad guys shoot their ray cannon at a mountain to drop it on Cody. We know he’s normally pretty indifferent to danger, but this time he is straight-up daring Death to take him. He stares up at the toppling mountain, motionless, for thirty or forty seconds which is nearly 60 seconds in watching-an-avalanche-fall-on-you time.

After some more time, the flying man finally decides his best move is to wait some more and then jog very close to the mountain, presumably hoping the disaster forms some kind of stone igloo over him. It’s strange, even for him, but it seems to be the show’s way of saying, “You thought he flew away. Nuh uh. Here he is, verifiably not doing that. Now who looks stupid, viewer?”

When we last left him, Commando Cody was buried alive by a roaring tidal wave of rock! He’s fine, by the way. And the bad guys had something else to do, so they drove away.

At the end of Chapter Ten, Cody is trapped in a room being filled with deadly gas! Like the resourceful survivor he has proven himself to be, he leaps into action after a long, ponderous silence. He’s holding a pistol and standing by a window leading to fresh air and escape, so naturally he crawls toward the phone in the center of the room and dies along the way. How’s he going to get out of this one? Does he deserve to get out of this one? This feels like they locked him in a room with a key and a sack of poisonous snakes and it says “TO BE CONTINUED” just as he starts emptying the bag into his pants.

He might really be dead this time? This predicament is so serious even the guy writing the title cards calls attention to it. To put that into perspective, he did not bother mentioning the exploding plane, the avalanche, the fall off a cliff, the asphyxiated friend, the exploding car, or the other exploding car. And speaking as a writer, it’s going to be a real challenge for them to write Cody out of this “clearly dead from poison gas” jam he’s in.

I mean this: God bless the Radar Men From the Moon writer’s childlike understanding of all things. The lab Cody and his friends were in had a giant ALARM button next to the phone, presumably in case of some kind of viral or toxic disaster. As is protocol for this type of thing, the alarm sounded until a cop heard it from his car and strolled inside. The officer saw three dead bodies in the chemical lab and took a couple big sniffs of the air. He decided,”Yep! Poison!” and made three trips into the deadly gas cloud to drag the corpses into the slightly less poisonous hallway. I am almost certain none of you saw that coming. If you’ve seen this before you said, “Oh yeah, this is the Cody episode that introduced the poison-proof supercop character.”

Cody, by the way, is still clinging to a pistol as he gets pulled from the room. The cop doesn’t find this suspicious since in 1952, most of science was pouring chemicals on apes to see which ones made them bulletproof. Finding a room full of dead scientists without handguns would be the situation worth mentioning.

It took some time, but the writer is really starting to get a hang of these cliffhangers. At the end of Chapter Eleven, Commando Cody gets shoved into a high voltage prop and the show fades out on him getting fucked in the nervous system by a moon base’s entire supply of electricity.

This isn’t how you leave an audience in suspense. This is how you change the way we think about meal preparation forever. Commando Cody is so beyond dead. The most underpaid stuntman in the world stood in the center of a fireworks factory explosion for such a ludicrous amount of time he probably smelled like a gunfight until the day he died. And in the fiction of this universe, Cody is functionally nothing more than a pot pie. Don’t even bother with next week’s title card which probably says something like “DEATH OF THE MOON MAN.”

You might be thinking, “I know how this show works. There’s no clever twist. He didn’t swap himself out for a robot or put on rubber moon pants. The bad guys are going to walk out and Cody will get up as if nothing happened.” Come on, don’t be ridiculous. They won’t end the series on that.

Goddamn it, Commando Cody.

Categories
NERDING DAY

The Many Certain Deaths of Commando Cody 🌭

In the 1950s, it was pretty normal for a superhero to be some guy with a rocket pack. One of those superheroes was known as Commando Cody – Sky Marshal of The Universe! Each of Cody’s adventures ended with him in the perilous clutches of certain death, but I’m here to ask: “did they really?” Hot Dog Readers, this Nerding Day we are going to take a critical look at every dubious cliffhanger from the 12-part saga: Commando Cody in… Radar Men From the Moon!

The story of Radar Men From the Moon is this: a moon laser is destroying targets on Earth to prepare for Retik’s invasion of our planet, so we send Commando Cody up to stop it. It’s more boring than you’d expect, but we’re not here to talk about the boring parts. We’re here to talk about all the times we are led to believe Cody dies and rate them on the key cliffhanger components of Danger, Surprise, Cleverness, and Adventure. The four elements combine to form the five stars of the…

The first cliffhanger comes during a battle between Cody and two henchmen. In a fight scene choreographed by a box of curious kittens, Cody swaps hugs and wiggles with Retik’s moon men. Retik is four feet away, firing his space pistol into the fight very carefully so as not to kill his men and then missing and vaporizing one the moment he has a clear shot at Cody. In sports terms, this would be like passing to LeBron James when he’s alone under the basket and then watching him turn to the crowd and hurl the ball directly into the new nose job of his publicist. It’s wrong, but a suspiciously deliberate kind of wrong.

Make no mistake, though– Retik’s gun rules— it shoots disintegration bombs, holds one bullet, and it takes so long to reload it would be faster to walk over to your target and prepare it red meat until it got heart disease.

The battle goes on for, as I alluded to, quite some time until finally Cody has fussed away from the final living henchman and taken cover behind a flimsy prop. I’m not sure what it’s for, but if I had to describe it, I’d say it’s something a Moldovan educator would build to teach children shapes can NOT be fun. The Sky Marshal of The Universe cutely peeks out from behind it, Retik shoots it point blank, and kapoof– Cody and the prop are atomized in a puff of smoke. There is literally no question he is dead and gone on a molecular level.

See you next week, I guess, for Commando Cody’s funeral and the subjugation of Earth?

Episode two starts with a title card that’s pretty casual about the death of the show’s main character, describing his on-screen murder as a mere plan “to disintegrate him with a ray-pistol blast.”

Oh, weird. It turns out Cody leapt behind a star ottoman in a different take from the one shown to us in the first episode. I guess in 1952 you could just tell your audience, “No wait, we meant he dodged that.” After this miracle, Cody gets up with the grace of four hangovers and casually punches Retik’s henchman in the face. Neither actor knew how to perform a stage punch, so it looks like the crew agreed on, “Just blast him in the fucking face, George, but not, like, the hardest you can.”

Then, even more casually than the punch, he puts on his hat and leaves. That’s how he escaped certain ray-pistol death– in the most obvious way we were deliberately shown didn’t happen. Make note of it, because it is almost always the secret to Commando Cody’s survival.

In the second episode, “MOLTEN TERROR,” Cody escapes with a gigantic ray gun and Retik sends “a car” after him. Here’s what’s crazy, though: the car is amazing. The crew could have glued some fins and tubes to a Buick, but they actually built a functional moon tank with racing zigzags. They show Car rattling up rocky hills at 30mph and effortlessly pulling 90 degree turns like it’s too stupid to know it should roll over. I mean, look at this kickass thing:

Car is awesome. If I was the background prop or costume designer for Radar Men From the Moon and saw this drive onto set, you wouldn’t even have to say anything– I would already be committing ritual suicide in shame. Calling this a “prop” is like calling Hulk Hogan “local Tampa senior” and his contribution to society “baldness advocacy.” This tank is how you would write The Declaration of Independence in Car. I have officially stopped rooting for Commando Cody because betting against Car is the dumbest move on the entire moon.

Car is so incredible that Commando Cody and his friend Ted don’t even bother trying to shoot it. They’re lugging a huge cannon making up the bulk of the plot, yet they know, instinctively, this ultra powerful, super important weapon could never do shit to stop Car. So they drop it and run into a cave. And here’s a useful tip for anyone hiding from Car inside a mountain– it can melt mountains. One of the pilots says, “Set the ray gun at constant heat. We’ll melt the cliff and bury them alive,” and less than 15 seconds later the entire landscape is lava. The episode ends with Commando Cody cowering at a dead end as he watches all before him become magma. There’s no question he dies. He is looking right at a tidal wave of lava as it crashes into him. RIP, Cody. You fucked with the wrong car.

So episode three, “BRIDGE OF DEATH” must be about whatever journey a human soul undertakes when you die on the moon, right?

Once again, the horrible death we clearly witnessed is downplayed on the title card as a mere pickle. The show describes Cody and Ted’s predicament, being dead as fuck, as “trapped in a cave by the moon men, who use their ray-gun to melt the rock walls.” This is exactly how a moon cop would spin it if Moon Fox News was interviewing him about the foreigners he lava-murdered for suspected robbery.

So fine, we already get how this show works. Cody’s actually alive, but how? Oh, it’s the exact way I’d assume he’d get away if I hadn’t been shown a liquid mountain smother him? No shit.

Commando Cody watches the lava, watches the lava, watches the lava, and finally points to the left and says, “Maybe we can get out along that side.” He says it like they’re looking for a parking space at Dave and Buster’s. He says it like he’s helping his wife put together a puzzle and they love each other and their time together. And he seems to already know this pussy show doesn’t have the balls to kill him.

He and Ted stroll outside. They could easily walk away but Cody decides to stay and throw a grenade at the invincible tank. It does less than fuck all, of course, and worse– it lets the pilots know he’s alive. One of them says, “They must have gotten out,” the same way you might say, “Hey, the guy from Burn Notice is in this.” Then Car, and this is going to sound crazy, drives back for no reason and everyone goes their separate ways.

It’s weird. Maybe there’s a moon law where you only get one shot at melt-raying a fugitive? It could also be that everyone in the show somehow knows Commando Cody is rule-bendingly unkillable for the first 9 minutes of each episode. He’s like a kid with fingers holding the last three places in a Choose Your Own Adventure book– if he ever runs into Death he simply shrugs and undoes time. No, seriously, I still can’t believe they straight up killed the main character a second time and he got out of it by saying, “Nuh uh, guys, I actually left?”

In Chapter Three, Cody rockets back to Earth and lands in the middle of a shootout between gunmen and police. In any other show they’d say, “What have we found ourselves in the middle of now!?” In Commando Cody, they silently pull out their guns and join in. They don’t seem upset or surprised and could truly take this shit or leave it. I can’t tell if the actors are incapable of expressing emotion or if hopping into gunfights is how our grandparents made new friends in the ’50s.

The bad guys drive away, so Cody takes the cops’ car and goes after them. They shout, “Halt! You can’t simply climb out of a rocket ship in the middle of an arrest and steal our car!” I’m kidding. The cops seem fine with the whole thing, don’t mention it, and we never hear from them again.

Cody is in hot pursuit! Except no one told the actor portraying him, who looks like he’s driving to the grocery store to pick up a Secretary’s Day cake. He was maybe going for “cocksure,” but overshot it and landed on “man who knows he has a 10% off cake coupon.” Cody doesn’t give a fuck how this car chase plays out. Cody looks like he’s fondly remembering how the peach blossoms smelled those spring mornings in Racial Slur Falls, Georgia. If you told me this actor died this was a fill-in shot they had to film with his corpse, it would make more sense than his acting decisions.

The bad guys stop on a bridge to set a bomb, and it goes off right on Cody’s car. No one could have survived it, and then the fiery wreck rolls off the bridge for a second certain death. Oh, no. How is Commando Cody going to get out of this one. We’ll have to wait for Chapter Four, which is oddly not called “SHIT, COMMANDO CODY BLEW UP ON THAT BRIDGE.”

They assume you already know how he got out of this one, so the Chapter Four title card doesn’t even bother mentioning the bomb on the bridge. What’s the point? It’d be like Mötley Crüe’s manager telling you he biked to work the day he had to arrange for six teenage abortions.

Cody is okay. It turns out he jumped out of the car before the bomb went off. In a way, it is sort of surprising how in a make-believe world of unlimited possibilities and wonder, the reveal for every cliffhanger has been “he got out of the way of whatever in the most ordinary way possible off camera.”

I and a lot of people reading this grew up in a Golden Age of genre fiction. In the ’80s and ’90s, a superhero would have gotten laughed out of the Justice League if they escaped a bridge bomb by simply not going onto it and watching it explode. A real hero would have de-molecularized the ions or guessed the right wire with a boomerang throw or grabbed a mattress off a truck and surfed the shockwaves across. The A-Team would have driven straight through it yelling, “I knew those blast proof van panels from Act 1 would come in handy, B.A.!” MacGyver would have landed right next to the bomb and suddenly remembered he had his nephew’s potato clock in his jacket. Quantum Leap would have been far away, playing with his titties as a female, wheelchair Lincoln. So fuck you, Cody, for having so few skills the writers have to get you out of every situation by having it turn out to be not very dangerous after all.

At the end of the next episode, a villain traps Joan in a plane by sabotaging the controls, parachuting out, and leaving her to die! She’s helpless! Careening to her doom! Commando Cody rockets to her aid! He climbs inside! The ground is coming at them! The controls don’t work! The flying man and his petite companion are falling out of the sky! What is the man known for his rocket pack going to do!? How can he save this small, carryable woman!?!?

Oh, man. He didn’t do anything. They flew right into the ground and exploded. I wonder if there are some events they didn’t show us, or if they’re dead.

This is another cliffhanger where the show figured you weren’t on the edge of your seat. The previously-on title card describes Joan and Cody’s airplane disaster as… let’s see… holy crap, they don’t even mention it!

How they got out of it is dumb, but dumber than you’d expect, Cody’s contribution was not to carry Joan to safety but to tell her to put on a parachute and get out. So wait, what? She was sitting next to a goddamn parachute this whole time!? What was all this “adventure” for? It was time she could have spent doing the first thing any occupant of a crashing plane would think to do. And you might be saying, “How is a 1952 woman supposed to know what parachutes are, much less what falling is?” It’s a fair point, but she witnessed a man parachute out of this very plane thirty seconds ago, and when Cody told her to put one on she didn’t say, “Put on that ‘pair of shoes?’ Why, I’ll have you know the pair I already have on are top-of-the-line designer suede and they cost seven dollars! You men. Hand me my cigarettes and tell the driver to slow down.” She put it on the proper way and competently leapt to safety.

So okay, to sum up, a woman in an out-of-control plane had every means to escape on her own, was shown exactly how to do it, and the writer decided she still needed Commando Cody to streak through the skies and perform a daring mid-air hijacking to not explain parachutes to her, but remind her they exist. Maybe 70 years ago people hated women enough for this to be normal, but it caught me way the fuck off guard. And it’s exactly this kind of non-sexism I carry in my heart that has allowed me to crush so much fine ass all these years. No, listen: my views on equality drop panties.

At the end of Chapter Five, which is excellently called…

… Cody and Ted are driving along a mountain road and Daly is heading straight for them in a stolen ambulance! He aims it toward their car and flops out of the moving vehicle with the grace of a distractingly untrained stuntman. It looks like they stopped the show to stress test a sex doll’s neck joint. Ted sees this and screams, “IT’S GONNA CRASH INTO US!!” Cody, with only tens of seconds to dodge this pilotless car, does not! Fuck!

This is the second time in twenty minutes Cody has been in a totalled car as it falls off the road, but he and Ted had more than enough time to jump out of the car. Hell, they had enough time to bring their car to a full stop and get out without doing a diving neck somersault like the unquestionably paralyzed henchman who just launched an ambulance at them. Still, the next chapter is called “HILLS OF DEATH,” so maybe he’s really dead this time, viewers.

Okay, “HILLS OF DEATH,” how did they get out of this o– oh, they jumped out of the car. Well, okay. Sure.

At the end of “HILLS OF DEATH,” Cody is hit in the shoulder by a rock and he falls off a cliff! Jesus Christ!

They really wrote themselves into a corner with this one. How is a flying man, in his flying suit, supposed to survive a fall? Have you ever seen anything as doomed as this man?

Will he land on something soft? Will Ted catch him? Did maybe he not fall at all? You’ll have to wait until next Punching Day to find out, hot dog readers! That’s right, this article about cliffhangers has a cliffhanger! Tune in in six days for the conclusion of The Many Certain Deaths of Commando Cody!

Categories
LEARNING DAY

How to Catch Fairies

This book is called How to Catch Fairies which you might think to mean something like “how to find the magic inside yourself” or “craft shopping on a budget,” but it’s exactly what it sounds like. The author and witch, Gilly Sergiev, seems to really believe the night is filled with mythic creatures you can abduct and molest.

To be more clear, you won’t be catching a lot of fairies. The title is a lie, or at best, a 2002 book store’s version of clickbait. Most of the fairies can’t be captured, and from her descriptions, they can’t be seen or touched either. What Gilly does include is a lot of traditional spells which my research suggests she made up and added the word “traditional” to. These usually involve mixing a few herbs together and performing some self-delusion exercises while pretending really hard there are magical sprites nearby. Let me get even more clear: the author of How to Catch Fairies is very stupid, but thinks you, the reader, are even stupider.

As you’d expect, every type of fairy requires a different hunting technique. For example, it’d be absurd to think you could capture a Mist Spriggan with a trap made for a Night Santa. Unfortunately, the instructions for catching them are always dangerously incomplete and printed in a tiny, unreadable cursive font, sometimes on a background of the same color. Go ahead and try to squint your way through these instructions on catching a dwarf before he’s escaped and reported you for a hate crime:

Assuming the creatures known as “dwarves” are real, you catch one by writing your name and your problem on a piece of paper and burying it. This would explain why the author’s neighbors keep finding little notes in the cul de sac that say “GILLY – LONLY” and “GILLY – WISH WAS SMART AND DWARFS ARE REAL.”

If you did it right, and who would fucking know if you did, a dwarf will appear! Or your problem will be solved! Gilly assures you “you will know instantly when the magick starts,” which means you can only catch a dwarf if you decide one was responsible for something good in your life and the only reason such an unlikely thing could ever happen is magick. I’m not saying this book is only for delusional losers, but the logic is clear: you have to be one if you’re going to make this dwarf-catching plan work.

Catching a hobgoblin is a little bit more humiliating than catching a dwarf. What you want to do is have a picnic, but leave a seat open for a hobgoblin. Make sure none of your friends sit in the hobgoblin’s spot which should contain a glass of beer in a ritual circle of puka shells. Now you just party, with the kind of people who party with fairy catchers, and keep checking back in with the empty place to see if a hobgoblin has joined you! Your friends may laugh at you and never speak to you again, but at least when you’re arrested for having an open container at the park you can tell authorities it was the hobgoblin’s, it was the hobgoblin’s, let me go aiiiiiieeeeee it was the hobgoblin’s.

Okay, let’s stop screwing around with these weak ass mini fairies. Let’s catch something more dangerous. Let’s catch a… holy shit, there’s one for catching a Giant?

Okay, Gilly seems to know giants don’t exist, so the best you can do is ask a mountain to fill your life with the “safety and goodness” of a giant. Which begs the question, which goddamn fairy tales are Gilly going off of? Giants, to my understanding, are just large people who eat the normal-sized. Since when do they merge with volcanoes and offer nebulous “goodness” to people who put candles in bread? This is nuts– you wander around a mountain watching bread candles flicker until you find a spot with no wind and walk in a circle? And the only way you know if it worked is if you kind of feel like you might have more “giant qualities?” You didn’t catch a giant, you idiot witch. You just lit your lunch on fire during a nature hike and had your wish of “indeterminate feelings” granted. I get we’re not doing science here, but how is this “spell” any different from “nothing?”

We should catch something dark and serious next. Like a… whoa, a banshee!?

It turns out banshees, spirits who wail horrifyingly at corpses, are good actually because it helps verify your loved ones are truly dead. Plus, if I’m reading this correctly, battling one for your life is a refreshing pick-me-up! These are the types of points Gilly makes in between tips on building merman traps.

We all sort of live in our own little worlds with their own subjective rules. Maybe you think cats can see ghosts or that vaginas have “g-spots.” It’s hard to tell what’s regular real and what’s the real you wish was real, but one way you can measure reality is to consider the consequences of being wrong. If it turns out your cat can’t see ghosts or there actually is a secret place you can “poke” to “assemble an orgasm,” what would happen? Well, in the example I’ve given, being wrong means you die from ghost ambush and none of your exes like you enough to attend your funeral. Now that you know the stakes, you check all available data. So buy as many papers as you can and check to see how many sad ghost ambush obituaries there are. In my test run, about 8% of them were, which means cats see some ghosts, and one in every 12 and a half women experience pleasure.

Maybe I’m not explaining it well. What I’m trying to say is that Gilly is provably a dumbshit, but maybe there’s a way we can test if she’s also a liar. Does she believe this nonsense herself? Well, it seems anyone who believes in magical creatures of lore must also believe there’s a certain amount of danger in fucking with them. So let’s look at one of the rituals for catching something less benevolent than a party goblin or a mountain feeling and see how she deals with the potential danger of a reader really seeing one.

So if you’re hunting a harpy, you “hang around” on the beach, singing and whistling. That’s it, that’s the whole ritual, but wait, she does mention, “If you’re a male, prepare to meet your doom.” Holy crap, my doom? T-there’s not, like, a magick move I can do or an apology whistle? The men reading your book are just dead from something you told them to do? Jesus, Gilly.

This is what I mean. Maybe she’s a murderer, sure, but if this witch truly believed invisible monsters were out in the water waiting to kill whistling men, wouldn’t she devote more than half a sentence to harpy safety? This dingbat knows you’re not going to meet a siren, but I’m not sure if it makes her book less pathetic or more pathetic. Speaking of pathetic, she seems to be catching a lot of these imaginary creatures so they can fuck.

Meet the fairshee, a tiny fairy man so beautiful you can’t help but fall in love with him. “It can be great fun to spend time with them,” types the fairy book author into her Microsoft Word document.

“It looks like you’re writing too horny to be writing,” suggests Clippy, her virtual helper. “Upgrade to the Office Pro Suite for over 30 high-resolution (640 x 480) pictures of balls!”

If you’re interested in catching a fairshee, it’s actually pretty easy if you have no self-respect and a lot of imagination. First you have to play it cool. They are not into desperate witches. So you spend a week very deliberately thinking about fairshees and then really, really not thinking about them. If you do it right, one will appear in your dreams. Then you… well, I guess your subconscious starts sucking and fucking. To be clear, the best case scenario for this lengthy magickal ritual is you have a dream where you get laid by a very small man dressed like your starting level bard.

If you’re looking for a sexual fairy relationship while you’re still awake, you’ll want to catch a nymph. They appear to you if you go into the woods with a “deep need.” And I know what you’re thinking, amateur witches: “DEEP NEED!? DEEP NEED DOES NOT BEGIN TO DESCRIBE WHAT MY YEARNING BODY IS READY FOR.”

Okay, I hear you and you’re in luck. Gilly says if you “have particular need,” what you’ll want to do is find a natural shrine and put some of your clothes on it. Maybe you were expecting some kind of herbal ointments or mushroom circles, but no, you only need to go into the woods -very horny- and start getting naked. It’s how the pros fuck ghosts in the forest.

Now, to catch a gnome Gilly says you… hold on, this is just a story about a water stain on her wall that sort of looks like little men. And, oh. Oh, she named them. She named the shapes on her wall and after she talked to them she realized how lucky she was to have them as friends. This is quite something. You don’t normally see a writer capture loneliness so crushingly outside of a suicide note. I don’t know if I have a joke for it. I think I’d better Google this author and make sure she’s still alive.

Oh.

Not only is Gilly alive, but she has been desperately sexless for quite some time writing books about how to summon cock. She can’t stay focused on any other subject. As we’ve seen here, even when she sets out to publish a book on fairy kidnapping, she always ends up writing about her true passion– wishing really hard something would fuck her.

This post was brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme patron, Nick Heyman, who thinks about Fairshees so rarely they have sex with him in his dreams every night.

Categories
FUCKING DAY

The Chippendales Board Game

Hi, readers of 1900HOTDOG! It’s Fucking Day, so let’s share the most erotic of activities: the board game. “What a sarcastic fellow,” you’re thinking, but no, warm those genitals up and look at what we’re playing:

The CHIPPENDALES AFTER HOURS GAME is a captivating adult experience for “ANY NUMBER CAN PLAY.” It was published in 1983 when men who looked like unrepentant sex criminal mugshots were not only considered handsome, but professionally handsome. It was also a time when board games had all the tactical depth of hoping you rolled a six and nothing else.

I haven’t read all the rules yet, but we’ll figure it out as we go. We both start on the CLUB square, the farthest corner from the sexy crotch which is functionally where a person exists already if they’re playing a board game about strippers.

I’ll let you go first, but before you roll, let me tell you the object of the game. We are racing to collect enough money, through acts of humiliation and nudity, to buy a set of paper cuffs and become the saddest cosplay stripper. This board game was designed to get all the men in the room naked and please take a moment to think back on all the rooms you’ve been inside and picture how many of them would have been more fun if every man was nude. What I’m saying is everyone in a group agreeing to spend their night playing board games and having a camera-ready asshole is a desperate longshot.

So to be clear, this is for square people to spawn an orgy. If you’re in a room of close friends and everyone gets naked for sexual dares and nobody starts boning, you unfuckable losers should have to introduce each other for the rest of your lives as, “These are my celibate friends, Dusty Gonads, Pointless Vulva, Sexless Urinetube, and Flaccid Tony.” You and I aren’t like that– our love will definitely be intertwined by the end of this article. Anyway, that’s a later problem. The bottom of the box says we each start with $25.

For your first turn you roll a 4 and land on CHARADE, which means…

Okay, it’s just Charades, but you get to decide what to act out and since your opponents are the ones who get money for guessing it, you’re incentivized to make sure no one can do that. In game design we call this “Fucking Stupid.” But let’s assume you’re a sportsman and act out something guessable. You’re… okay, you’re shitting your pants? Farting your pants. Farting off a boat! The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps? Let’s see… it’s not shitting your pants, so… wait, it was “shitting your pants?” THAT’S THE FIRST THING I SAID! Goddamnit, anyway, thanks for winning me ten dollars.

My turn. I roll a 3 and get GO DIRECTLY TO DANCE FLOOR. At the dance floor, the rules say…

Okay, so I stand up and dance and I have 20 seconds to convince you to buy $2 kisses from me. Hello, eight easy dollars and one piece of very chewed gum. So with my charades guess and those four kisses you bought from me I now have $43 and your fucking gum. You have $17, and to put that into perspective, the bottom of the box says the first male player to be naked down to their underpants and also have $175 is the winner. But let’s not be the first people to actually finish the CHIPPENDALES AFTER HOURS GAME. You roll a 2.

You’ve landed on PICK A MEMBERSHIP CARD, so here you go:

I believe in honest work for an honest dollar, so I’m still giving you the kisses you paid for during my turn making this card pointless. I’ll let you draw again.

This is a weird game. We’ve spent quite some time now waiting for you to define penetration with a handsome tongue in your mouth and you didn’t get a single bill of Chippendales Play Money for your troubles. You know how a game of Monopoly drags out dull game mechanics until someone loses their temper? This game does the same thing but until someone has a dick in every hole. Speaking of, to keep things moving, I think it’d be okay if you drew another MEMBERSHIP CARD.

Well, this really killed the mood, but at least you got $2 for it. You’re up to $19 and we all know a little bit more about limpness. My turn! I roll a 1 and land on TAKE IT OFF. I’m assuming that’s what it sounds like? Let’s flip over the box and look…

Way ahead of you, bottom of the box, but these are some pretty draconian stripping rules. If you don’t count things like rings and watches, every time I take an article of clothing off, I’m 50% done being naked. I admire the rush to get things going, but at the rate we’re collecting money we’re going to be balls naked five or six hours before anyone’s near a win condition. I get that’s the kind of thing that would get the designer of the CHIPPENDALES AFTER HOURS GAME to shriek, “That’s the point, THAT’S THE POINT!” Still, this game sucks and I feel like the people at this orgy are going to refer to it as “that boring orgy.”

You roll a 4 and land on KISS A PERSON OF YOUR CHOICE. Hello again, this is quite a lucky spot to land, but you still only have $19. On my turn I roll another 1 and get PICK AN AUDITION CARD. AUDITION CARDS are exactly the same thing as MEMBERSHIP CARDS, usually down to the exact wording because this game is dumb as shit, and I get…

What? “Describe ultimate experience?” I get we’re only here to be led into a fuck by a trail of poorly disguised sexual escalations, but I’m not going to dignify this with a response. “Describe ultimate experience” is something I’d expect the subtitles say in a Japanese bidet commercial starring Kevin Spacey. I’m drawing again.

This isn’t even close to what I charge for five sensual knee bends. I’m taking this as an insult and drawing again!

So it’s a dare, but it’s not clear if I dare you to do something or if you dare me to do something. The bottom of the box says…

It’s still not super clear, but I think I select a person, dare them to do anything I want, and then give them $5 if they do it. Which means this is another gameplay element incentivizing players to make the game impossible. The smart move is to dare you to give me $6 or one of your hands, but I think it’s more in the spirit of the game if I dare you “anal” and call you coward. You know what? I think I’m going to dare you to draw three hunks from the unrelated deck of Chippendales playing cards included with this board game and stare at them for 30 minutes. Here’s $5 for doing so, bringing you up to $24 and me down to $38.

As per the conditions of the dare, stare now for 30 minutes:

Something you love about me is how I love to name hunks, and the five of spades is Bunless “Star” War-Skid, who models potato recipes for vegetable photographers. The two and seven of spades are twin hunks Rash and Rosacea Rightstuff shown here obviously after they kissed so long their beards started growing in. You still have 28 minutes left to stare at them or you have to give me my $5 back.

Great work! It’s your turn, and you roll a 4 to land on the crotch space.

This does nothing, so nice crotch roll, dumbass.

It’s my turn again; I roll a 5 and land on GO DIRECTLY TO BAR. This means…

Great. I’m stuck at the bar drinking until I roll doubles. That has a 17% chance of happening, so I should be just doing that for about 6 more turns. In game design terms this is what we call “very good game design.” It’s your turn, like it probably will be for awhile, and you roll a 2 to land on PICK A MEMBERSHIP CARD. Here you go:

This is a lot of pressure on you to say anything other than “GIANT DICK GIANT DICK GIANT DICK!!!“ to polite chuckles, plus it awards you no money. At this point I’m not sure if the lack of rewards is a design decision or a mistake, but I didn’t roll doubles so it’s your turn again anyway. Let me know when you’re done, I stopped paying attention to thumb through the deck of Chippendales playing cards which, once again, have nothing to do with the game they were included with.

Bonch Groin, Five Inches for Hire.

“The man who fucked this watermelon is 7% Uzbek,” says Beef Ancestry, performing his famous party trick.

Bonch Groin scoffs. “He’s just using mirrors or something. Nobody can taste Uzbek,” he informs you. “Plus he’s wrong. This dick is 100% American.” Hi, this is the kind of thing that goes through my head while we each take turns rolling dice and getting absolutely nowhere.

“I’m just here to do the roofing, but sure I could use fifty bucks,” says Gino ‘Sex Datsun’ Giuessepe. I think this to myself while you roll something that makes you curse and then shrug, shyly taking off your shirt, pants, and socks.

I assume this one is some kind of amazing prank by an employee at the playing card manufacturer. There’s simply no way a man with two square inches of un-haired flesh whose stripper persona is “indecent exposure at a children’s birthday party,” would be included in a deck of cards aimed at female masturbators. And I know it was the ’80s and this is what 25-year-olds looked like back then, but if you told me this man was a grandfather of nine, I’d believe you. I’m completely lost in the details of the world that allowed this man, Uncle Laffs the Pussy Barber, to exist. “It’s your turn,” you keep saying, fully naked at this point.

“I’m going to hatch these fish eggs in your moistening birth canal,” says Hunk Zero, visitor from the stars.

“I hope you don’t mind, gorgeous. I borrowed a shirt,” coos bite-sized hunk, Testes Shrinkray.

“No grapes for you,” whispers Gerald Cock. “You fucking piece of shit.”

“Are you sure I can’t talk you into changing that score to a D, Mr. Health Inspector?” I brainstorm while you continue to scream, “IT’S YOUR TURN!”

“Manjo Pubefood? No… Salad Jake, Penis Daredevil? Maybe just Slip Cucumber? Cobb Vulvasplash. Shit, none of these are working. Graham Circumcision?” I mouth silently while you grow more furious and nude.

“This one!” I shout. “I found a really good one! Ten out of ten hunk, no jokes– great hunk, outstanding hunk.” You agree without reservation and we get back to the game. Where were we? I think it’s my turn and I don’t roll doubles, so it’s your turn. You land on the MEMBERSHIP CARD one and get:

You just look naked and sad. Another setup for pedestrian wackiness with no reward. Let’s try another and see if it’s any better.

At least this one is worth fake money. You sigh and start listing things you might penetrate with a banana. “You can put it in your… butt. You could vaginally insert a banana… suck it like a, you know, penis.” The CHIPPENDALES AFTER HOURS GAME has removed all joy from eroticism and whimsy. “You could eat it, I guess. You could eat the disgusting butt banana,” you say to earn your five imaginary dollars. I can barely look at you. You’re like a whore being told she can keep whatever she finds in the cup holders. You’re like a chimpanzee holding a funeral for a doll it thinks is a corpse. You’re like Carlos Mencia asking the waiter if he can pay for his meal with the sketch idea “Spider-Mang: Far From Homie.”

I don’t roll doubles so it’s your turn again. A tear crawls down your cheek when you see you’ve landed on PICK A MEMBERSHIP CARD again. You flip one over, dreading whatever forced silliness will be on the other side… 

You look at the card unable to believe it’s worse than you could have imagined. You look down at your naked body. “Banana. Banana float,” you decide. For zero Chippendale Play Money dollars. For nothing. We both look down at the board for what feels like an eternity but is actually only 17 hours.

“Ha, what if you really did say d. Anchovies,” I joke.

“I’ll never forgive you for what you’ve done today,” your ghost says. “That’s right, I died. End your fucking article with that, asshole.”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Aidan Mouat: the Patron brought to you by the new Arby’s Edible Six Cheese Sandwich Mask with Cheese.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD

There was once a man named Bruce Tegner who spent the ’70s writing the same martial arts book over and over and over then changing the name of the martial art on the cover. He was a shin-kicking, backfisting master of a thing he called Judo, Aikido, Jukaido, Tai Chi, Ju-Jitsu, and sometimes Savate. He was also deadly with most weird sticks. And some of his techniques were so lethal they could only be trusted in the feet of the pure-of-heart like the intended audience for this Punching Day’s topic: 1976’s SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD.

You’d think this would be a survival guide for children in an increasingly dangerous world, but the stakes in SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD could not be lower. This is not a book about kidnapping prevention or pedophile identification. It teaches you how to fuck up a different 10-year-old and nothing else. In fact, I can prove it’s a weak ass book for bitches because look:

This copy was previously owned by a Karate school with a leaky roof run by someone named “Slendl Srbltrrp” who warned readers “DO NOT REMOVE FROM DOJO.” Well, I’m holding the book right here, Slendl, far removed from your dojo, and I’m intact as fuck.

Still not convinced this book is for pussies? Let’s zoom in on some of those accolades. Looks like CHRISTIAN HOME & SCHOOL called this manual on beating up children a “very readable little book.”

That’s the cruelest taunt I’ve ever seen. I fucking dare someone in Christian home school to say that shit to me. Leave “this was a very readable little article” in the comments and see what happens. I will pull so much of you apart your organ donor card will become a dark punchline for the man collecting your remains in a shop-vac. And the judge at my liquefaction trial will say, “You were right to do it, handsome liquefaction defendant! I sentence you and a guest to four nights at the Wailea Beach Resort in Maui!”

The book goes over a lot of the attacks you’ll see from your fellow third graders, like, for instance, a bare-handed strangulation from behind. By the way, the defense to this is turning around and kicking them in the knee. You might think it’s asking a lot of a child to decide when they should escalate playful roughhousing to full-on maiming, but you can take some comfort in knowing anyone who is taught to escape a choke by just kind of leaving and throwing a close-range sidekick will never hurt anyone with their Karate for as long as they live.

That’s not to say all of the attacks in this book are unlikely and pathetic. Some of them are absolutely overpowered. Look at this one:

Those are moves 53 through 59 of the same ass kicking. For dozens of pages, this kid unleashes a single unbroken combo against his opponent’s face, neck, and shins. And here’s a fighting tip for youngsters: if you’re queuing up hit #35 of a 59-hit combo, your classmate has been dead for some time. Oh, this seems like a good time to mention all of Bruce Tegner’s fighting techniques work best on attackers who announce they are attacking you and then stand very still for 20 minutes.

I should also mention Bruce Tegner always includes a weird chapter in his books on how to deal with pests. Not violent bullies or muggers, but everyday annoying people. In this one it’s called “Section Four: Annoying & Humiliating Actions,” and it’s at least the 7th time I’ve seen Bruce explain to his readers this secret technique for escaping a friendly lean. Here’s what you do, and follow these instructions carefully: if someone is leaning on you, fucking karate chop them with one of your hands. To his credit, it’s not NOT a fun idea.

It’s a lot to ask of a child to know when to unleash the full force of their deadly arts, but Bruce is expecting much more from the children of the reader. He’s expecting your kid to identify incoming foot attacks and react with different defenses for each one. His idea to block a kick by kicking it is optimistic, but I think most fighters would agree putting a leg between you and a kick is a way better idea than using your arm. But Bruce’s idea of waiting to see if a kick is going to be a knee and then ducking down into it to brush it aside with both hands– that’s nuts. It’s what I would act out if my charades clue was “Man Who Has Never Even Seen a Fight.” I know these techniques are 44 years old and developed during a time when the government listed ninjas as “Very Fact,” but authors should at least try to knee one kid in the head before they declare themselves an expert on it.

This is from the section on GROUND KICKING. There’s always a few parts of a Bruce Tegner book where the reader can’t be sure if they’re supposed to be the good guy.

Like all self-defense authors, Bruce Tegner believes you, the victim, are in an intellectual arms race with your attacker. If they find out you know how to duck into knees to nudge them aside, they will throw brain chops. If they know you know the defense to brain chops is spin-screaming, this will almost certainly be a feint. For well-trained children, all of these calculations happen in the blink of an eye. If you truly study SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD, the chest cavity of any kid who leans on you will be shattered before your brain has even caught up to your Karate.

KEEP IT SECRET!

A lot of you are probably thinking, “This is a readable little book, but I’m often facing off against multiple fourth graders. Are there any techniques for me?” Oh, shit yes. You want to see how to beat up two children at the same time? Scroll down zero inches.

Shin kick! Shin kick! Twist your legs for a crossover double shin kick! Shin kick them until one of them is hurt and use them as the shin kick! This is going to be the most important secret you and I will ever share, but the only defense you need is shin kick! Steps 1 through 213— shin kicks! If your enemy has shins and trouble with cursive Qs, your kick is where their bitch ass journey ends! Now get out there and defend yourself against some children!

This article is brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme Patrons Neil Schafer, Nick Ralston, and Eric Spaulding who have never met and never knew until now they could merge to form a giant panda.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Fucking WHAT, Archie?!

In 1980, Archie Comics Group published Archie #298 of the Archie Series, and I am here 40 years later to make the case for it being the craziest comic ever published. It is the first media of any kind to ever score the rating of MAXIMUM!? on the Archie Derangometer, which says it all making everything past here mere whimsy in support of a point already perfectly made.

The story begins like nothing has or ever should start– with Archie shrieking the word “PLASTIC!” at no one and with no context. He’s furious, screaming it like a curse. Archie is filled with a dark insanity and the people around him live in constant fear of it bursting out like Anne Frank’s family watching her hold in a sneeze. When it comes out, the rules of everyone’s universe suddenly change and nothing can escape the wet spray of Archie’s madness. Welcome to Archie #298.

Note Jughead and Betty are not saying, “Oh this plastic bullshit again.” This is the first time Archie has ever spoken to them about plastic, much less lost his mind at them about plastic. There’s also no plastic on or near him which means he was on a walk with his friends in the park and his own thoughts wandered to plastic crimes so awful he had to stop and scream “PLASTIC!” He continues…

Archie exists in a fiction with loose rules. He has addressed readers directly to sell Twinkies, fought the Predator, and killed wizards by calling on the actual Christian God. So it isn’t unusual for the horny Riverdale gang to stop rubbing their pubises on Archie to do something like an environmental PSA. But are we sure that’s what this is?

It seems to be an environmental rant, right? Maybe Archie read something about the dangers of non-biodegradable waste and he’s simply having trouble remembering it or expressing himself? Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for this famously conservative and known psychopath to be howling about the plastic apocalypse?

Well, aside from violent, philanderous, stupid, cruel, and ginger, the best way to describe Archie is “a teenaged cranky old man.” This comes out here because the first reason he gives for his seething hatred of plastic is not how it kills seagulls or overcrowds landfills– it’s how plastic prevents him from listening to goddamn records before he goddamn buys them like he used to.

I’m not sure this is plastic’s fault since plastic has been around at least as long as vinyl records because vinyl is fucking plastic, but Archie accidentally makes a good point– retail trends have eliminated nearly every opportunity for consumers to masturbate in record stores.

So in case you fell for my masterful misdirection up there, no, this is not an environmental story. This is Archie deciding he hates the shit out of plastic and desperately trying to justify it while his loved ones try to reason with him. And to be clear, this is not a genius writer hiding a metaphor for American politics in a children’s comic. This is nothing more than what it is on the surface– a fictional character losing his mind because he’s being written by someone losing his mind.

Oh, by the way, Archie comics in the ’80s had three stories inside each issue. Let’s take a quick break from this plastic one and look at a scene from the second Archie feature!

Oh. Oh no.

Let’s maybe go back to the plastic one?

So Archie’s second reason for hating plastic is because of fastener packaging. Not because it refuses to decompose and its manufacturing causes carbon pollution, but because teenagers can no longer go into a hardware store, paw through a vat of unlabeled nuts and purchase a single unit. Again, I’m not sure this is the doing of plastic. This is like declaring war on zippers because no one will let you suck them off.

Anyway, Archie’s third reason for dedicating his afternoon to destroying plastic is cheese. CHEESE! SEE IT IN THERE?

Fucking try to open cheese! Archie DEFIES YOU! Oh, you say it’s got an e-z opener tab!? AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? BETTY, YOU TRUSTING, IGNORANT BEAST DID YOU SAY IT’S GOT AN E-Z OPENER TAB!? TO ARCHIE!? YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS TO EAT CHEESE OR BE LOVED! PLASTIC CONSPIRACY HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE YOU’RE IN ON IT I’LL KILL YOU I’LL RIP YOUR FACE OFF AND PRESERVE IT FOREVER IN Y-YOUR PRECIOUS PRECIOUS PLASTIC!

With no one taking Archie’s warnings seriously, he does what every ranting lunatic does– he merges his new anger with his previous frustrations and loses all perspective of the original problem which he was wrong about this entire time and all contradicting facts are evidence of a deeper conspiracy. Archie is now only this rage and obsession, and he declares to a grocery store that sealing albums, wood screws, and cheeses in plastic will lead to the end of all things.

Let’s take another break from the plastic story and check back in with the one where Reggie leapt out of the bushes to sexually assault Midge.

I’m not fucking with you; I didn’t edit any of these panels. The full context is this: Reggie saw Archie running and had an idea: if he blinded and face raped Moose’s girlfriend, it would look like Archie was running from the sex crime! The one hitch in his plan was how he chose to commit this act on a girl in Riverdale, each of whom can identify Archie by taste.

So to sum up, the less crazy story in this Archie comic is one where Reggie ambushes Midge, licks her mouth to frame Archie for sexual assault, it doesn’t work because she doesn’t care, and then it also doesn’t work because everyone licks her mouth all the time, the end. Let’s get back to the plastic thing.

Archie has become so defined by his hate for plastic and so detached from reality by trying to make excuses for it, he is now willing to literally die rather than give any ground in a deranged argument he started for no reason. He’s willing to sacrifice all his dignity and relationships in the name of some unclear vision of the way things used to be. I want to stress again: we have no reason to believe this is a metaphor for American politics. This is ordinary Archie craziness wobbled slightly off its axis to accidentally create exceptional Archie craziness. Assuming this meant anything would be like watching a cat run across a typewriter and thinking it wrote “Help me I didn’t die from heart failure I was poissned you need to solve my murder hi this is mom, *poisoned, sorry typing is hard w/ ghost hands” on purpose.

As if this would end any other way, Archie self-destructs. His plan (to drive himself mad with cheese packaging rage, close his eyes, and sprint into the street) backfires almost immediately.

While Jughead and Betty try to find all of Archie’s neck shrapnel, let’s take a look at this comic’s third Archie feature. Maybe it’s not the troubling work of a lunatic!

Jesus, I’m not glad we did this at all. If I’m following the plot, this story is about Jughead smashing an unattended boy’s toy boat? Who would write that? And why? Surely there must be some kind of denouement that…

Oh. So in the ’80s when a group of strange teenagers broke your toy you… went with them into the open ocean? They didn’t even put a life vest on this boy they kidnapped. They just let him stand on the deck while Veronica cranks that shit into the chop like a racing motorcycle. She’s 15-years-old and her boat doesn’t have railings! There should be another panel of this comic where the gang takes a blood oath to never speak again of the boy, whose name they never learned, who they borrowed without asking and lost at sea.

So now that we’ve finished the backup stories of whimsical sexual assault and well-intentioned child abduction, let’s get back to the final page of Archie’s plastic adventure and see if he learned a lesson.

What the fuck? Archie didn’t learn anything! A fucking ice cream man could have pulled up and said, “That’s why you don’t ignore reason and implode your life over nothing, son! If you want to stay safe, make sure all your products use Real Plasticâ„¢!” and it would have been fine. Instead, Archie heard a doctor say the word “plastic” and he recreated the exact circumstances that just injured him. And is it “a long story,” Betty? Or is it, “Our mentally ill friend decided plastic was attacking him 10 minutes ago and we’re children with no means of helping the criminally insane.” And then it just says END after the main character has a mental breakdown and flees from his own delusions.

This is a targeted attack against everything you know to be true and right. It’s so deranged the author gave a Story By credit to the abortion ghosts who shrieked it at him in the night and it should have been the last Archie story ever told. The idea of Archie coming back to Riverdale High in issue #299 for another everyday framed-for-facerape story seems absurd. He’s like a wild animal. These kids can’t be around someone capable of assaulting them and running into traffic any time he can’t open cheese. Every issue of Archie after this should have been about the authorities hunting him, END.

…

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