Category: NERDING DAY
Unlock with Patreon
As America enters its Century of Humiliation, its political leadership is hard at work trying to make the country as unattractive as possible to potential tourist dollars. Consider that this may have the incredible result of creating a wave of embittered, ex-theme park employees with stolen mascot costumes, easy access to firearms, and a grudge against the administration. If trends continue, the guy who plays Tigger may soon have the opportunity and motivation to do one of the funniest things of all time.
Visitors who nevertheless brave the visa fees and harassment by border goons to visit America’s scenic landscapes, famous cities, and plentiful strip malls may experience culture shock, whether it be from the size of restaurant portions, the lack of public transit infrastructure, or the random daylight kidnappings by masked men claiming to work for the government. But it was ever thus. One comment I’ve heard expressed incredulously about America, over and over again, is “yew ‘av advertisements fer medicines on the telly?”
Buddy, we have way more than that. We have goddamn A-lister superheroes shilling allergy meds.
Published in 1999, Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 was a sort of tie-in comic to The New Batman Adventures, which was a sequel show to the Primetime Emmy-winning Batman: The Animated Series. That places it in the awkward teenage phase when superheroes had moved past selling Hostess Fruit Pies but weren’t yet on the level where they could star in three minute long short films promoting Audi.
It seems like a more naïve time, looking back. I can imagine the executives selling the Bat Family/Claritin partnership to the creative team, arguing that the Rubicon had already been crossed long ago. Batman had already pushed McDonald’s, Diet Coke, and even, in 1987, a chain of discount stores.
I can’t tell if that tagline is supposed to be a bit, like a French guy saying “they’re open non-stop ’til Christmas?” Regardless, they resurrected the ’60s Batman and Robin to convince shoppers to buy products at Zayre. Not Burt Ward and Adam West, mind you, and not the original costumes, either. But it’s wild to think that you could already do Batman as a nostalgia play in the 1980s. And for the record, Adam West did do at least one ad as Batman during the run of the ’60s show. It was for U.S. Savings Bonds.
Anyway, the comic. This guy invented a “white orchid” and Bruce and Tim Drake are standing watch at a big gala celebrating his achievement, because obviously if you do anything with plants in Gotham City then Poison Ivy is going to come after your ass. You’d think all the botanists would have gotten the message and moved to Metropolis by now. Also, I’m pretty sure white orchids exist? Whatever, I’m putting too much thought into a set-up for a drug pitch.
A couple of things. First of all, “chum?” It’s been a long time since I watched the ’90s Batman cartoon, but it’s really difficult for me to imagine Kevin Conroy talking like Adam West did while calmly explaining to Robin how the Siamese Human Knot was going to break every bone in their bodies. Second, “Tammy” is really pushing the envelope of how DTF you can be in a twelve page promotional comic about antihistamines.
Poison Ivy attacks! Tim is caught by a vine because he was too “groggy.” Interesting. But hold up, let’s talk about the credits. Christopher Priest has written stories for Conan, Deadpool, and Black Panther. Joe Staton created the character Huntress and drew for Dick Tracy, Green Lantern Corps, and Guy Gardner. Mike DeCarlo inked Batman: A Death in the Family. Rick Taylor did colors on a number of DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse joints. And Paul Kupperberg has edited over 1,000 comics. Between them, the men that created Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 have accumulated four Harvey Awards, two Inkpots, and an Eisner.
Kind of makes Batman’s stilted dialogue about Tim’s OTC antihistamine-induced drowsiness hit differently, doesn’t it?
Batman and Robin fight Ivy but she electrocutes Robin because their suits are statically charged and the protective case of the flower is too? I don’t know. She gets away, is the point.
Ivy ransoms the orchid and Batman goes to get it back. But this time, he tells Tim to stay home so he doesn’t fuck everything up again with his pussy-ass allergies.
I know that this comic only exists to sell Claritin. But maybe Batman and Robin weren’t the best picks? Like you’re telling me Batman, the guy who has a flying tank, exploding boomerangs, and Bat shark repellent isn’t equipped to deal with ragweed? So if Mr. Prep Time develops hay fever one day, that’s it, the whole operation is fucking over? They could have picked anyone for this. Make it the Flash and if he sneezes he turns a half-dozen nearby pedestrians into red mist.
Thankfully for Tim, Alfred shows up to deliver some copy from the brief. Tim and Alfred go to a late-night on-demand doctor — being a billionaire’s ward has its perks — and the doctor prescribes him something.
I don’t get why we’re being all coy about this when we get to the money shot. Let the guy tell Robin that only CLARITIN gives you fast-acting relief from allergy symptoms without drowsiness, so you can get back to being tortured and brainwashed by the Joker. Like, the cover already says Claritin. Did DC draw the line at having the name come out of a character’s mouth? Or was there some kind of law preventing them from actually saying it? Well, there actually might have been. We’ll get to that later.
Meanwhile, Poison Ivy’s going to kill the guy who invented the flower she stole and take his money when Batman and Batgirl arrive. She attacks them by hurling potted plants and spraying them with pollen. It isn’t pollen that makes you horny or fall asleep or makes trees grow out of your skull or anything, though — it’s just like, really bad regular allergy-causing pollen. Nonetheless, Batman and Batgirl succumb to fits of sneezing. I wonder if it pained Christopher Priest to write Batman as such a dipshit. Grab a Bat pollen protection mask out of your utility belt, asshole! Use a Bat fan to blow it away! Hold your goddamn cape up over your face! All looks lost, until…
Robin shows up.
You might not be aware of this, but sneezing famously makes noise. So Ivy’s line here implies that this pollen is going to knock Robin out rather than merely aggravate his sinuses. But the power of Claritin has rendered him immune to seemingly all of Poison Ivy’s plantological warfare. Seems like cheating, but whatever. Turnabout is fair play, so Robin gasses Ivy right in her stupid, sexy face.
There was never a second Batman Claritin comic, which I think is a shame. They could have expanded this out into a whole allergy-based run. Have Tim scarf down a bunch of Benadryl to beat Poison Ivy again — only this time he’s taken too many and he starts having hallucinations. Batman vs Hat Man!
The existence of Batman: Claritin Allergy Special Issue #1 is strange in its own right. But it gets weirder. See, there weren’t always pharmaceutical ads featuring knowingly smiling men in their 60s or sexually indistinct sad blobs being followed around by rain clouds on American television.
In fact, it wasn’t until the late 1900s that a young hotshot ad executive proposed that the main customer for drug companies wasn’t doctors, but consumers. I bet you’re picturing a Don Draper type, but her name was Liz Moench, proving that women, too, can innovate in ways which make the world worse.
The first televised direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ad aired in 1983, for a pain med called Rufen. Almost immediately, the government told the company to take it off the air — which seems weird, considering that they weren’t promoting seed oils or saying that women were people. But remember, this is when we had an FDA that wasn’t run by a worm-addled bridge troll. They told drug companies they had to spell out side effects in TV ads, which made them much less attractive as marketing tools.
But then in the mid-90s, a company called Schering-Plough got an idea. They started advertising a new medication on television without actually saying what it did. All they really said was “ask your doctor.” The name of that drug?
Yes, Claritin, the very same drug that helps the Boy Wonder fight crime. And in 1997, the FDA, frustrated by these kinds of slippery tactics and possibly “encouraged” by well-meaning multinational drug conglomerates, decided to slough off the chains of censorship. From then on, drug companies could omit all the extra information they used to have to put in their ads as long as they had a website or a phone number consumers could call to get it. They were also allowed to start making specific claims about what their drugs did.
Drug companies won. Between 1995 and 2006, their spending on DTC advertising increased more than tenfold to $5 billion. The Batman Claritin comic was an early part of the drug advertising boom in the US, which remains one of only two countries in the entire world that allows the practice. The other is New Zealand, but they haven’t produced a decent supervillain since Sauron.
On that note, Liz Moench went on to have quite a career in the pharmaceutical advertising industry. Among her accomplishments, she was partly responsible for making Voltaren (diclofenac) the most-prescribed NSAID medication in the late 1980s. Diclofenac is prescribed for both people and animals, and was widely used throughout the ’90s on livestock in India. In the early 2000s, after scientists realized that a huge vulture die-off was occurring in that country, they narrowed down the cause to diclofenac prescribed to cattle. The vultures that ate the dead cows experienced liver failure, and over 99% of all vultures in the country died as a result.
Vultures eat dead animals, and without them around, there were a lot of rotting carcasses spreading disease. The absence of vultures also allowed the feral dog population to boom, causing tens of thousands more human deaths from rabies.
Would it be uncharitable — absurd, even — to say that Moench was responsible on some level for the Indian vulture crisis? Perhaps. But I think you lose the benefit of the doubt when you go to work for the industry that created the opioid crisis. On the flip side, she is indirectly responsible for a kind of funny comic where Batman gets mad at Robin for having allergies. In conclusion, the Batman Claritin comic can’t exist in the same universe as 40,000,000 alive Indian vultures.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Doug Redmond, who makes a killer cocktail with like seventeen claritin and two bottles of vodka. Ok it’s less a cocktail and more a cry for help, but Doug nails it.
I think it was Simone de Beauvoir who said that we will know feminism has achieved its aim precisely when women are allowed to be as deranged, incompetent, and generally mediocre as men without it reflecting on their sex as a whole. And from that perspective, perhaps those women who doggedly pursue lives of self-obsessed madness are to be celebrated for their role in inching us ever closer to that world.
To say that Deuandra T. Brown is merely one of those women would be to do her a disservice. She is a multi-hyphenate artistic lunatic — a filmmaker, writer, model, singer, actor, and dancer. Regarding her cinematic output, the easy reach is to call her the female Neil Breen. But need we compare a woman genius to a man? Can we not simply appreciate it on its own merits?
Today I want to talk about White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Deaundra’s most recent film. It is a sequel to the film Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox, which told the tale of an ancient Egyptian woman whose sister stole her true love.
Furious, the spurned woman sought out the aid of a witch/pirate, who granted her a necklace that transformed her into a big snake.
Centuries later, the Diamond Cobra and White Fox necklaces were found by two long-lost twins, Diamond and Targella. One of them was possessed by the ancient Egyptian snake lady, so we’re kind of doing a Yu-Gi-Oh! only instead of playing children’s card games, the Egyptian ghost starts killing people by spitting snakes at them.
The sisters meet, have a Birdman or Dragon Ball Z beam battle depending on your generational point of reference, and laser blast a cop investigating them into space.
Then they merge into one person, like Dragon Ball Z or Steven Universe depending on your generational point of reference, and a goblin man on a huge iPad says that the curse has been broken.
I have not seen Diamond Cobra vs The White Fox. I only know all of this because the first ten minutes of White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye is footage from the first movie. Now we’re all caught up, and all questions about snake women, laser battles, and iPad goblins have been resolved. Onto the sequel!
Deuandra T. Brown loves smash cuts, and every one of them hits like an After Effects energy beam to the face. We have so much to get through, but let’s just take this in for a minute. Papyrus. Inexplicable colon. ZEPTUNE. What is clearly a fucking spaceship and not a planet. Beautiful. Wonderful.
That’s Targella Diamond, the fusion of Targella and Diamond. I don’t know why she looks like she just got out of bed to try and catch a bat that flew into her house. I don’t know why it’s ten years and six months later. I don’t know why we cut to a bald man wearing accent lashes hanging out with some aliens who start nuking earth. Maybe that recap should have been twenty minutes long.
Targella Diamond wanders around this spaceship, and then this happens.
I called her the female Neil Breen earlier, but I think Deuandra T. Brown might actually be closer to Jodorowsky. We’re on some The Holy Mountain shit right now.
A big snake who is also the Golden Eye Queen tells Targella Diamond to find all of the pieces of the Golden Eye jewelry in order to break the curse, which was broken when Targella and Diamond merged in the last movie. Maybe this is a second, different curse?
Earth looks different than I remember.
Meet Travis. He’s played by a guy named Maxxx Payan, who is inexplicably not a porn actor despite having the name, facial hair, and build of a guy whose top credit should absolutely be Stepsister Suckfest 6. He’s at a rave in Arizona, where he meets the eyepatch woman from the first movie. She has now transformed into a young woman whose role in the plot appears to be doling out pieces of Golden Eye jewelry at random to various people, inevitably bringing them great misfortune.
Travis asks her “who may I say I’m speaking to today” like he’s calling her about her long-distance service rather than trying to crush ancient Egyptian pirate pussy. But she’s into it. Where will the night take them? Well, we— SMASH CUT to Jade, 30s, rideshare driver, on the phone with her brother.
Their mom went missing and Harlem is working with the Russian mafia to get answers. SMASH CUT to New York City.
Film is the art of the cut. Inserts, reverse shots, close-ups — these are the basic building blocks of filmmaking. Some artists cut far too little. James Nguyen, the creator of Birdemic, is notorious for his long establishing shots of cars arriving and parking at their destinations. If Nguyen is one end of the spectrum of cinematic excess, Deaundra T. Brown is at the other. Cuts across time and space just happen every few seconds and if you’re lucky you get a Papyrus title card telling you where and when you are. The effect is one of disorientation, confusion, and anxiety. You could achieve the same experience White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye‘s editing produces by smoking PCP then running into your therapist at the grocery store.
A rare two-shot. Most of the movie is filmed with single actors centered in front of a green screen. Here we get an actual location, which I initially thought was a hotel room until I noticed the coin-operated bleach and fabric softener dispensers on the left. What is this impossible space? Are we in the backrooms? At least there are some context clues here — we know the guy on the right is a detective, on account of his badge and magnifying glass sitting next to his laptop.
“I can’t find your missing brother and dad,” he tells this woman, Riley. “The case happened in Arizona. It’s outside of my zone, he replies” My man, you’re a cop. Cops have jurisdictions. Sonic the Hedgehog has “zones.”
Riley asks him again and he completely changes his mind. We’re up to eight characters now, but let’s meet some more. Southland Tales had seventeen major players. I think Deuandra can beat that. It’s time for a White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye character lightning round!
Here’s Jennifer and Raspberry. The former is a news anchor, which we learn when she says “I gotta go report the news.” Her last name? It’s normal.
Later, Jennifer Townhall shows up on TV to deliver exposition wearing her dead friend Raspberry’s fur coat.
Dead? Yes. Raspberry is murdered by Harlem, who is Jade’s brother. Remember her?
Harlem killed Raspberry on the orders of Alexei, the Russian mobster he’s working for in order to get answers about his mother’s disappearance. For this deed, Harlem learns that his mom was caught up with the “Donnie Barbeque gang.”
My favorite thing about Alexei is that he has a sticker on his phone that says “MILF Hunter.” It’s little details like that which transform otherwise stock roles like “Russian mob boss” into living, breathing characters. Like, maybe he wanted his wife dead because she wasn’t MILFy enough.
While all of this is happening on earth, Jade and Harlem’s mother and Riley’s father are being held captive on the Planet: ZEPTUNE by an alien named Azulon. He looks like this.
He wants the Golden Eye ring, or maybe the bracelet or earrings or necklace, because Deaundra T. Brown read one screenwriting tip about MacGuffins and decided that if one MacGuffin is good, then four should be given congratulatory oral sex. It’s unclear why Azulon thinks that holding these people hostage will help him get the jewelry. It’s like he forget a step between “torture earthlings with diamond magic” and “get ancient artifact.”
It’s also unclear why he wants it. I’m not sure even he knows. I think he just looked around and saw everyone else chasing after some gaudy ancient Egyptian accessories and decided that’s just what people do. And I can only assume that this scene, in which the editor has conspicuously left the green screen backdrop in the movie, is a clever reference to the hollowness of Azulon’s life, defined solely by what society tells him he should value.
That’s twelve characters so far. We are barely halfway through the cast.
So: Targella Diamond goes to Travis’s concert and fucks him afterwards.
I was shocked to realize that this is the only instance in the film in which the director/writer/star sleeps with one of the many characters who look like ketamine dealers. She does get to perv on another guy in the shower at one point, though.
That’s Ahsan, a member of the Moroccan mafia who kills Alexei to get the Golden Eye ring from him. Targella Diamond does not fuck him, but rather turns into a big snake and bites him to death. I kind of appreciate that — it takes restraint to say yes, my twin-souled ancient Egyptian space heroine bangs the emaciated guitarist/weed dealer who sings “Smooth” by Santana Featuring Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20 to himself alone in his sad kitchen, but not the jacked North African dreamboat. Or maybe there just wasn’t enough time for two sex scenes — we’ve got more characters to introduce!
Dice, everybody! He’s a techwear doofus who works for Alexei. Here’s his sister!
She gets the Golden Eye Necklace from a beautiful stranger in Egypt, which looks like the shattered ruins from the end of a Dark Souls game where the world is collapsing in on itself.
Alas, she’s killed by Honey Q, who is, of course, the niece of Donnie Barbeque.
Well, not by Honey Q, but on her orders. She’s actually executed by Honey Q’s goon, Dream.
Honey wants the Golden Eye earrings, because they are “with magic” and are worth “over a billion dollars.” On the basis of a dream she had about them, she sends out two other goons to raid Travis’s house to recover them. Travis is dead or in space now because Azulon blasted him with his eye lasers after he tried to explain that he had a one night stand with Targella. In response, Azulon literally says “what is this ‘one night stand’ you speak of?” It feels like he’s making fun of the movie and it’s so unbelievably stupid that for a moment I thought maybe Deaundra T. Brown was a long-term performance art project by the world’s greatest fabulist.
Azulon’s got a friend slash subordinate! Her name is Topaz.
She tries to bash Targella’s head apart in Ireland, but is defeated by an ancient Egyptian laser blast.
There’s also a third, unrelated space monster in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye, Ezul. We saw him earlier. It goes without saying, but he wants the Golden Eye jewelry. He’s bald, has fabulous lashes, and tries to kill Targella by teleporting in front of her moving vehicle, responding to her rude comments by saying “I love you too,” then blowing a kiss that’s a fireball at her. Sir, you are clearly a Kano and not a Sonya Blade.
He does this on two other occasions, in contexts that make no sense. He just shows up on someone’s laptop or in their mirror, they’re confused or frightened, and in response to nothing he says “I love you too” and explodes them. Maybe it’s an alien power word and it’s just one of those weird linguistic coincidences, like how there’s a filler term in Mandarin that sounds a lot like an English racial slur. Like a nice version of that.
Christ. We’re at nearly two thousand words and I still have a half-dozen characters to get through. Here’s a quick one.
This guy appears in a single shot and is never seen again. He symbolizes all of the strangers in our lives, the faces we see but once before they vanish again forever into the mass of humanity, forming part of the backdrop of our lives yet, impossibly, each with their own inner worlds and realities. It’s that, or this is a stock footage shot Deaundra liked enough to put in the middle of one of her expositional rap montages, which feature some pretty impressive guest verses!
Fuck. I can’t get distracted. There’s still so many more guys to talk about. There’s a whole subplot where this guy Mario is working for Honey Q but used to work for Alexei and Alexei wants him back? But then he falls in love with a cop named Maria and she makes him wear a wire to spy on Honey Q. Also he wears a Jay Kay-style giant furry hat.
Honey Q kills him when she realizes his betrayal.
Maria tearfully vows revenge.
Targella goes to Milan for basically no reason. Forgot Jodorowsky, Adam Sandler is more apt. Think about it — she’s using her self-indulgent movie as an excuse to travel around and put a bunch of her friends onscreen. I think she might just be an independently wealthy madwoman who is living her best life. Unlike Detective Morales, a CIA agent whom Targella evaporates with a laser blast.
Again, the cuts in White Cobra Diamond Fox vs The Golden Eye are incredible. But this, I think is my favorite one.
This is the shot introducing us to Travis’s sister. She looks like someone doing transgressive Dr. Horrible cosplay, which is maybe the meanest thing I’ve ever said. Obviously she wants the Golden Eye jewelry, which she describes as “very, very rare” like it’s a drop in an MMO instead of a one-of-a-kind amulet of the cosmic gods. Anyway, Targella kills her by making her stab herself to death when she comes looking for Travis.
She’s not the only one who can do that, either. Ezul kills Honey Q by manifesting in a cloud portal above her dining room table and forcing her to shoot herself in the head before doing the kiss of death thing to Dice.
Deaundra isn’t precious about her mind-children. Anyone can die in this movie, and nearly everyone does. Whether they’re run down by a Toyota Corolla, stabbed to death by their own hand, or immolated by a heat ray, the cast is winnowed down significantly as we near the end. This might actually be a slasher movie where the slasher is a Mary Sue reincarnation of a space queen.
Travis, Travis’s sister, Honey Q, Dice, Dice’s sister, Alexei, Ahsan, Mario, Topaz, Morales, Raspberry, and the detective are all dead. Most of the survivors meet up in Phoenix, then teleport to Zeptune. They fight.
Targella wins, of course, and gets all four pieces of the Golden Eye. She’s taken to space, where Lady Iris gives her the fifth piece — the glasses.
She transforms into Queen Golden Eye, which is also the name of the worst performer at a millennial gaming nostalgia-themed drag night.
Queen Golden Eye explodes Azulon and Ezul. Two months later, the white cop guy is prowling the stock art streets when Queen Golden Eye appears and explodes him, too.
The end. I’m not kidding. That’s the last shot of the movie. My sincere hope is that everyone had fun working on this, but in an interview for the prequel, one actor says that she didn’t even know what the plot was because there had been over seven hundred script drafts. With anyone else, I’d say she was exaggerating. But I believe in Deaundra T. Brown.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Greg Cunningham, who didn’t even need to read the article because HE LIVED IT! WHAAAAAT?
