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Nerding Day: Marihuana
Category: NERDING DAY
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Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite doctor wizard, who’s also a smug 1960s swinging bachelor. That’s right, I could only be referring to Gold Key Comics’ Dr. Spektor. The superhero who is like Dr. Strange, except worse in every possible way, including his skills with women because this is the issue where Dr. Spektor gets his ass kicked by an owl and then gets dumped.
Unlike Doctor Strange, Dr. Spektor is not a real doctor. He’s more like one of those chiropractors that sell male enhancement supplements. Honestly, that would be more impressive. I don’t think Dr. Spektor even has a real job. His full name might be Dorian Reynoldo Spektor, and he’s doing some creative abbreviating. And you should know Dr. Spektor is also fully human– he has no real superpowers other than a pretty good memory and a large library of occult books. He’s a man who has read too much, and his job seems to be Scooby Dooing around the country with his girlfriend to point at supernatural creatures and go, “Yup, that’s a ghost. I’ve got a whole book about them, and that is what they look like.”
Our story today, “NIGHT OF THE OWL!” opens with Dr. Spektor and his girlfriend, Lakota Rainflower, a Sioux woman, riding in the car together. And because this comic was published in 1976, he refers to her as Pocahontas and asks her why she seems sad. To which she responds, “You mean you don’t know?” This conversation is a relationship 911 on multiple levels, but Dr. Spektor remains unbothered.
He’s instantly like, “Thank God, something more important popped up. I almost had to listen to my girlfriend’s feelings instead of hunt ghosts. Can you even imagine?” The thing Dr. Spektor and Lakota have stumbled upon is Dr. Spektor’s cousin Anne being menaced by an oddly sexual bird man with thick thighs. I’m proud to announce this owl has awakened absolutely nothing in me. However, I do have the urge to crush some Duolingo today for some reason.
The fact that this buff owl keeps mentioning how pretty Ann is will be important later. It turns out Cousin Anne has a lot going on. Her dad was recently obliterated in a house explosion after becoming inspired by Dr. Spektor to dabble in the occult. You might even say this whole thing is all Dr. Spektor’s fault. Luckily, it’s also a convenient way to escape an awkward conversation with his girlfriend.
Dr. Spektor knows exactly how to deal with a problem caused by the sinister book known as the “Demonomicon.” He’ll have to fight it using his own copy of the very same book, the “Demonomicon”. Did he get it in a two for one deal at Occult Party City and gift one to his favorite cousin in lieu of a sympathy card after his wife died? Who’s to say? It’s important to remember that no one can prove anything.
I feel like Dr. Spektor didn’t need his copy of the “Demonomicon”; he just wanted to make sure everyone understood that his cousin didn’t own a book he didn’t have. His whole thing is books. It’s all he’s got. Using the “Demonomicon”, we learn the buff owl is not a Harlem Globetrotter in disguise. It’s a demon named Andras, who, much like a regular bird, thrives on chaos. As Dr. Spector quietly reads in his private library, Andras goes around literally ripping planes out of the sky and prying railroad tracks out of the ground for fun.
Back in his library, Dr. Spektor sips some tea, avoids his girlfriend, and decides they need to have a seance to contact his dumbass ghost cousin and ask how they can get rid of Andras, even though it seems like Dr. Spektor has access to all of the same information as his cousin. Dr. Spektor is suddenly like, “fuck it, this, the book is really long and I think a seance would be cooler,” which is true. But it turns out they can’t contact Dr. Burton’s cousin since the medium thinks the guy is still alive. Convenient excuse, medium!
Now, I bet this whole time you’ve been wondering if there’s an owl man running around, are people going to blame retired superhero who is not technically Batman, The Owl, for all of Andras’s destruction? You’re absolutely right, my friend. The Owl has sought out Dr. Spektor to file a copyright complaint on the Owl Demon.
You have to wonder if this whole story was a way to remind Dr. Spektor readers that The Owl exists because there really isn’t any reason for him to show up other than an owl demon giving the man-shaped owl community a bad name. He serves no real purpose in the plot, but we obviously have to include him in the demon owl story, right? After all, we all remember his classic catchphrase, “BY THE WAY, IN CASE YOU DON’T RECOGNIZE THIS OUTFIT I’M WEARING, MOST PEOPLE KNOW ME BY THE NAME OF… … THE OWL!“
The cops show up to arrest the owl (not The Owl) for tearing airplanes out of the sky with his bare hands and he scampers off into the night. Dr. Spektor tries to convince the police that the bird they’re looking for is actually a demon but no one buys it and Dr. Spektor is very clearly used to that, so he just kinda dips. On their way back from the failed seance, Andras attacks and kidnaps Anne. Dr. Spektor’s plan to shriek, “ROLL UP THE WINDOWS, QUICK!!” does not work.
Dr. Spektor’s next idea is to “try to stop Andras somehow,” but it fails, because Andras is a supernatural demon and he is an ordinary man named Doctor. In fact, it’s such a useless gesture Lakota is genuinely offended he didn’t ask her to help. I mean, why not die respecting her?
Lakota could probably have taken that owl. If she pictured Dr. Spektor’s face on him and let out some of her frustration about dating a man whose job is solving the occult problems he caused, Andras would be dead as hell. Instead, we learn Andras has some kind of hypnotic powers that make Lakota and Dr. Spektor unable to fight him. Who knows why he bothered. Maybe it’s hard to get liquid nerd out of demon feathers?
Andras also uses his bird hypnosis on Anne to prevent her from running away. He flies her into a tree and says, “You live here now, Anne! I know it’s not the condo with a fenced-in yard you were hoping for, but it’s home, Anne! Don’t fall out of our home, or you’ll die. Sorry, about the mind powers. I promise it’s mostly a safety thing, not a sex thing. Okay bye, I have to go destroy. Ha! Heee! Haa-Haaahh!” I don’t know why I’m paraphrasing when I can show you the full riveting speech:
This is a great villain monologue. Andras’s motives are so clear. He wants to cause chaos and hang out with Anne. The fan fiction for these two writes itself. Sadly, Lakota is not as jazzed about Anne finding eternal love with Andras as I am. In fact, she’s pretty pissed at Dr. Spektor and has the wild idea that all of this is a little bit his fault somehow?
He could have taken this woman to TGI Fridays in the first panel of this comic and they would still be together. To make matters worse, The Owl returns, and Lakota does not like his vibe because she wonders if “a sane man would risk his life taking the law into his own hands.” Hey, “Doctor,” are you hearing this? You, the man who fights ghosts– who is currently looking to fist fight a hypnotic superbird of Satan with no plan? Dr. Spektor should really see the writing on the wall here, but he’s too busy hanging out with his cool new friend in the owl costume. He misses every single sign she gives him, and she is not subtle:
And that’s a wrap on Lakota. He will never see her again, but he’s too distracted to realize that. His cousin’s spectral form shows up to tell him which tree Anne is in, so he’s got to go rescue her. The Owl tags along, and they have an epic showdown with two regular owls, which the comic book tries to convince us is the pinnacle of danger. These hollow-boned creatures are predators, but their primary prey is mice. Almost any adult man should be able to fight an owl. If a combined weight of eight pounds of grouchy bird is a threat, these two superheroes are doomed.
But it’s actually worse than two men going into a ring with a couple owls and walking out defeated because the owls aren’t real. They’re an illusion created by Andras with his hypnotism skills. Learning this is how Andras’s hypnotism skills work makes me wonder what Anne thinks she’s been doing this whole time she’s been stuck in a tree with him. Did she think he was Taye Diggs? Haha, I hope not because the big twist of the comic is that this whole time, the owl demon was, in fact, her father. That’s why he was so obsessed with Anne, because, as Dr. Spektor so eloquently puts it, he still wanted to “possess” his daughter. Anne is like a cool lava lamp, or a tennis racket that he left behind when he went full owl.
I did not get the vibe of fatherly affection coming off that bird demon. He was trying to get his cloaca wet. I know that he was possessed by a demon, but this is still so messed up, and no one acknowledges it. There’s no awkwardness. They banish the demon and Anne drives off into the sunset with Bird Daddy.
Dr. Spektor returns home to finally learn how hard he has been dumped. She hit him with the “please don’t try to find me” in her goodbye letter. That’s the ultimate dump. Not only are they broken up, she doesn’t want him to know her address. That’s how sick of ghosts this woman is. “SILENT FUCKING RAGE,” he thinks to himself.
At least she had the decency to leave behind a framed photograph and a tomahawk for him to remember her by. He should have seen this one coming. He asked her to help save his cousin from bird marriage to her Dad, and she literally said, “I have a bad headache!” That last panel is a man truly defeated both romantically and physically by an owl. Dr. Spektor may have sent him back to hell, but Andras won this issue.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Lucas Keen, but in case you don’t recognize his crushed velvet jumpsuit, most people know him by the name of THE PURPLE HONEYCREEPER.
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Nerding Day: The (Devil’s) Workshop 🌭
Blue Comet Press was an independent comic book publisher founded, staffed, and terrorized by Craig Stormon. Craig has a tough vibe to pin down, he’s kind of like a child granted a Zoltar wish to be big, and then sent six hundred years into the future to fight in a time war he had no chance of understanding. Now he’s back, and he has PTSD from robot attacks that haven’t happened yet. He is a madman standing at the edge of infinity, and instead of therapy he slowly burned down a comic book imprint over the course of a decade. He started BCP in 1986 and ran it until the mid ‘90s, and he never published a title that went beyond three issues. Craig Stormon himself was BCP’s most prolific and most canceled creator, and he was in charge of cancellations. They say if you hate yourself you’re probably not alone, but only Craig Stormon has a choir of alternate universe Stormons heckling his every move.
The (Devil’s) Workshop was one of many Blue Comet Press titles that didn’t make it past the first issue. That makes it lucky – some titles didn’t make it beyond issue zero. He canceled them before they started, because his child-brain has been tragically shattered and spread across the chronoverse. The (Devil’s) Workshop was Stormon’s response to the ‘90s edgy comics craze which, like all of human existence, Craig Stormon both despised and desperately wanted to be a part of, but couldn’t figure out how.
You might remember the main character, Windraven, from Blue Comet’s flagship title, L.I.F.E. Brigade – a team of bewildered superheroes fighting every comic book plot at once. Windraven was the Indian psychic magician who got her powers twice, once from the fact that all Indians are magic, and twice from a living comet who’d never met her and didn’t realize it was granting her the exact same set of powers again. Her primary personality trait was bikini, and she lost half of it for The (Devil’s) Workshop. Windraven is an embodiment of the saddest thing that can happen in comic books: When a nerd falls in love with a sexy lady he made up. She shows up in multiple titles, surviving several cancellations. She’s the one thing Craig Stormon can’t let go of – well, her and the pinless handgrenade he carries everywhere for arguments.
Like all Blue Comet Press titles, The (Devil’s) Workshop opens with a completely insane frothing manifesto from the editor, Craig Stormon, ranting against the very artists he’s working with in this issue, often including himself.
Craig Stormon writes like the moment after a child falls into an ape enclosure. Just pure shrieking chaos. Every Stormon editorial feels like a man in a dynamite vest is screaming over your shoulder while using you as a human shield against a wary SWAT team. The opening sentences of this comic book blame you, the reader, for assuming Craig Stormon was selling out to the edgy comics craze. He invented the concept of bad girls in 1991, maybe 1992, you idiot! They didn’t exist before that! Also the penciler for this issue was a son of a bitch whose ghost almost certainly haunts the trunk of Craig Stormon’s 1981 Buick Electra. It’s a good thing we’re not even naming that son of a bitch or this would be libel.
Craig Stormon’s mortal enemy this week is a cowardly penciller named Dick Bonk. There’s no way that man exists outside of Craig’s own quivering brain. This is definitely a Split situation. When co-writer Paul Birch walked into the office one day to find the walls smeared in shit and Craig Stormon introducing himself as Dick Bonk Pencilman, he knew better than to question it. That’s how you get a Stormon Bite, and those always get infected.
It gets overshadowed by the mad fury reserved for his own pencilsona, but Craig also throws digs at the painter of this issue’s cover, promising that all future issues will be MUCH better than this shitty one. That’s the kind of burn that doesn’t fully land until Craig Stormon cancels the whole title, ensuring there will be no future issues.
Hold on, Craig Stormon is not done clawing at the walls and cursing at the unrelenting sun.
Craig knows what you’re worried about: You think he’s too afraid to say “FUCK.” Well, you little dick bonk, he’s not! He’ll say it, plus any other word. Butt! That’s just an example. BUTT AGAIN.
I’m not sure what he means by listing other books he’s worked on before they got “too scared of competition.” Wait, I am sure: He got fired for hunting the other artists like Lance Henriksen in Hard Target.
The (Devil’s) Workshop is a comic book for ADULTS… who are also children brain-zapped into huge bodies and doing their best in a society full of loud noises. It’s about hardcore stuff like sex, drugs, and satan worship! It’s all so pure and naive. By sex Craig means looking at a butt, by drugs he means the stuff he learned about in elementary school puppet shows, and by satan worship he means the stuff he learned about in home school after he attacked the puppets.
Let’s meet our first character, a drug addict, handled with all the skill and sensitivity of a man who shoots nutria for sport.
Finally, Craig Stormon has found his voice, and its a hollow-eyed Maine fisherman’s suicide note. Hey Craig, real quick, why are all the dogs slaughtered at sunrise? Does that happen every sunrise, is it one of those brutal English aristocrat things, like fox-hunting or Royal Knockout? Since you felt the need to specify, I have to ask: Craig Stormon, do you think dogs howl in salute to you? Is that why you always howl back, you slavering fucking madman?
We’re looking for a live child in an apehouse if we’re looking for empathy and understanding in a Craig Stormon title. Maybe he does better with the female characters-
Most of the women in Craig’s comics are horny extroverts who get what they deserve. But that’s only to show us how the special one, Windraven, isn’t like the other girls. She’s not overtly sexual. She doesn’t want to be the center of attention. Yes, she has her whole butt out the first time we meet her, yes it’s in the same panel where she explains she’s not making an exhibition of herself, but contradiction and exposed asses are how you create deep characters.
Now that we’ve established our primary themes – junkies, dog slaughter, Indian butt – it’s time to break the whole comic for a three page flashback to the events of L.I.F.E. Brigade, which are not relevant to this story and will not come up again.
Here’s the only important new development in those pages:
In a two panel yadda, all of Craig Stormon’s “sexy women” get chrono-blasted across time, just like his own fragile child brain. This accomplishes three things: It lets him set the story in a more relatable modern-day world, it gets rid of all the gross unsexy men, and more butt.
What a butt! Like all the best butts, it’s two water balloons hanging from a back. Like only the greatest butts, it looks like Gleep and Glorp doing the Bump. Like only the most sensual of ladybutts, it’s a top down view of two pachycephalosaurs fighting.
This being the mid-90s, Craig has to strike a delicate balance. Every edgy female character has to be super horny for sex, but she also has to attack any man trying to have it with her.
The physical storytelling here is so bad I’m not sure what’s happening. I guess Shandazar magnetized that man’s cock so his best friend’s wedding ring was inexorably drawn to it? Otherwise I have no idea why that man took a plasma blast to the junk and his buddy started juggling his balls while quipping “what a quaint old British custom.” It might be a Monty Python reference. Wait, this is the art’s fault – that means this is Dick Bonk’s doing. The son of a bitch! Dick Bonk slipped a dick bonk in here!
So far we are missing the trademark Craig Stormon dyslexia blitz, but don’t worry- it’s coming.
He crowded that last word bubble so hard it overran its borders, only to spell the word he screwed it all up for wrong. He spelled “damn” with a B, then basically called his main characters a couple of cubts.
It’s worth pointing out Craig’s one attempt at a running joke – he named this team of all sexy lady warriors the Iron Cupcakes, then decided they hated it. That’s actually pretty funny until you realize it’s a tragic metaphor for Craig Stormon’s entire comic book career.
There are two plotlines running parallel in The (Devil’s) Workshop. One is this: sexy ‘90s women with prehensile butts lusting for and then attacking dong, and the other is a junkie for satan learning the cons of buying smack from the devil.
Yes, the drug dealers here are literal zombies and demons, obviously led by-
A woman’s crotch.
This is our main villain, and if I told you anything about her before posting the proof, you’d never know if I was joking. For example, if I said she deals drugs brought up from hell to save enough money to post the devil’s bail and her name is some fedora-tipping shit like M’Lady Doom, you would laugh, but part of you would secretly think Craig Stormon could actually write that.
Sometimes a pearl-clutching Satanic Panic scare goes so hard it comes back around to awesome again. M’Lady Doom rules. She’s just, she’s the baddest.
It turns out Murphy, the junkie every dog salutes as they die, has been skimming the devil’s hell heroin. M’Lady is a ride or die gal for Satan, so it’s good that Murphy is incredibly ready to die. He was practically bursting with mortality.
M’Lady injects him with battery acid and he curses her, vows zombie revenge, demands euthanasia, and then untucks his shirt to fire his guts at her like a lizard – all within the span of three panels. There’s no way her entourage was prepared for this dude speedrunning death like that. If they didn’t inject him with battery acid he would’ve died two seconds later spitting vile curses at a nearby rusty nail. He was a shaken-up bottle of Diet Flesh Coke just waiting for his Acid Mentos.
Meanwhile, across town at the sexy ‘90s butt rave for chaste women, Windraven’s barely named friend made the mistake of going out for a cigarette. Because Craig Stormon’s brain is a whirlwind of howling ghosts he can never escape, this means she deserves to get kidnapped by a satanic cyborg drug dealer.
There’s a lot to deal with here: The reiteration of “damb,” which means that wasn’t a typo earlier – Craig Stormon really thinks that’s how you spell it. Do you think he pronounces the B? There’s the slutty cutouts on her already short skirt that make it look like she has a spare butt. The fact that she reacts to killer cyborgs like Helen Keller walking into a sprinkler. But I like the little details: Hell’s Robocop is so bad he bought a Bic with a little skeleton on it. I think I had a hackeysack with that exact logo on it, and ironically enough I traded it for cigarettes.
Whoever this lady is, she’s so irrelevant that her friends, the main characters, never actually realize she’s been abducted. Even after her kidnappers nearly run them over. Man, I’m starting to get Stormon’s enmity. Penciller and Enemy of the People Dick Bonk’s only reference for “big tittied woman diving” is a vampire lunge-
He really bonked this dick up.
Finally we see the titular workshop (devil’s). It’s the vicious dungeon where the blood of 13 innocent victims must be spilled to free Saragar!
From jail! Hell jail! The demon judge set Saragar’s blood bail at 13 victims! And he’s almost free. He’s so close! Saragar is trying to spend the last of his commissary fund on erasers and tic tacs, because he’ll be damned if the hell prison is keeping a penny of his baby momma’s paycheck!
The barely named friend is sacrificed nude and upside down, forced to stare up the very cooch of her captor as she dies. In fact, she’s beheaded at that exact moment – so the last sight her brain imprints as she spins up eternity is a pap smear of the devil’s girlfriend.
Across town, her best friends sleep as all women do – full makeup, same bed, tits out – totally unaware of the satanic drug orgy being held in honor of her death. The devil’s cyborg uses her skull for a gag to a non-existent camera while a caped man spit takes through a handjob. Everyone’s college roommate, a guy named something like AJ, gets head from one of the devil’s concubines, just happy to be gettin’ some.
Fucking AJ, man. He’s not even a satanist. He’s a registered pastafarian, he has the bumper sticker and everything. You could call him out on his hypocrisy but you know he’d just say “head’s head, man!” and spill bong water on the carpet while going for a high five.
And that’s it, somehow that’s everything that happens in this comic. It’s way too much and not nearly enough. A woman gets beheaded by a Chick tract while her friends sass up a ‘90s rave, and every single one of them shows their whole ass, especially Craig Stormon.
I’m pretty sure Craig even writes the ads in the back, because if not, he has found his people:
RAW Comics is so anti-establishment they’ll shun Valiant, which I think was an MLM knife scam that got out of hand and accidentally turned into a comic book press. RAW’s tagline is “COMICS THAT BITE BACK!” which sounds edgy until you think about it, and then it just implies they’re so stupid they eat comic books.
And then there’s this full page splash for GEOFFREY’S COMICS, where Craig Stormon drew a custom character named Captain Greed shaking and then punching the head off a child for shopping at a rival comic book store.
So are we rooting FOR Captain Greed here, Craig? It’s good and right that he’s rocketing the faces off children for capitalism? Oh hey everybody it’s Bone Daddy, the contextless janitor hermit! Tell your local comic book clerk Bone Daddy sent you, and get a free kidnapping! It’s how you tell a total stranger “I have no family to care if I’m found in a bathtub full of ice later.”
There’s no way Geoffrey Comic knew what he was getting into when he took out this ad space. Craig Stormon promised him something tasteful and then sent him this page covered in barbecue sauce and ants. I don’t know if Geoffrey complained, but we’ll find out in the next unhinged editorial starring Craig Stormon’s brain mites.
Craig’s final note is one of baseless optimism undulled by ten straight years of self-inflicted failures and invented enemies. It’s a teaser page for issue 2 of The (Devil’s) Workshop.
“12 women, no blood, no heads. Who’s 13th? The future at stake,” Craig Stormon writes.
“That’s great!” His neurologist says, “we’re getting some fine motor coordination back. The words will start making sense eventually when we teach your speech center to reconnect with your hands. Trust the process, you were lucky to survive that tractor accident.”
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Craig Lemoine, the original Bone Daddy, now a proud Bone Granddaddy to two little Bone Daddies and one Bone Mommy.
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Nerding Day: Susie Q
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Nerding Day: Vibrations 🌭
Before the Wachowskis grease-orgied techno into irrelevance in The Matrix Reloaded, Hollywood gave us one bona fide masterpiece about it. That’s right, we’re talking about the 1996 straight-to-video classic, Vibrations…
… a.k.a. CYBERSTORM. It was a movie with no idea what it was or how to market itself. Its taglines ranged from “Redemption Is The Best Revenge!” to “FEEL THE LOVE… FEEL THE MUSIC… FEEL THE ENERGY.” It was every genre at once made to cash in on the 11th most popular kind of music.
Vibrations stars James Marshall – best known as the ambulatory leather jacket in Twin Peaks – as wannabe rock star TJ Cray. He’s got it all: a supportive cop dad, a sexy girlfriend, and both hands. We know he’s on the hot track because, in a valiant attempt by the filmmakers to “show don’t tell,” we see a newspaper headline exclaiming “Local Band on Hot Track.”
They’re the sound that locals are looking for! Assuming they’re looking for an opener for George Thorogood at the Pennsylvania State Fair. TJ has a big gig tonight, and there will be an A&R rep in the audience ready to offer the band a predatory contract they’ll be paying off for the rest of their lives, but what does our Pomeranian-haired protagonist do? He fucks his girlfriend for the rest of the day. They fuck so long he’s late to his own show. To be fair, said girlfriend is played by Paige Turco – April O’Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II, III.
While speeding to the gig, he gets behind a pickup truck filled with drunk maniacs who decide to stop him. They swerve around, preventing him from passing, and he honks his horn so hard his entire car breaks down. Maybe. It’s not exactly clear why anything or anyone is doing any of this. The men bash his car with crowbars, pipes, and human feet until one of them steals a nearby piledriver and starts industrially pounding holes into TJ’s car, a cinematic callback to the previous scene.
TJ, silently and with little expression, stays in his car with his hands on the wheel, unable to come up with any acting choices that would make sense in this situation. When the piledriver finally pierces through his roof, TJ waits patiently for it to crush his hands off. “Aiieeee, DUR HUH huh,” he literally says from off camera.
It was quite an overreaction. By the random strangers, not TJ. TJ reacts the same way to everything: just barely not a nap.
So now TJ’s hands live only in future piledriver operator safety briefings. Doctors offer to strap Temu sex toys to his stumps, but how is he supposed to rip out white-hot blues licks to the top of the local hot tracks with these?
Now, a weaker hero would fall into a depression spiral, run away to New York City, and develop a drinking problem while sleeping on the streets and panhandling. But not ours, who has the drive and strength of will to – oh, wait, that’s exactly what he does.
We’re already through the first act of this afterschool special about the dangers of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, and there are no signs of Vibrations, much less a Cyberstorm. We have 25% of a George Thorogood missing 100% of his hands. But suddenly, while passed out in a box in a rave hovel’s basement, he awakens to the inspirational sounds of 1996.
He stumbles upstairs into the bright lights, moaning lady samples, and tragic fashion of a full-blown techno party where he bumps into none other than Christina Applegate, a working actress who definitely turned down other parts to be here. “My character’s name is Melissa, but you can call me Anamika, which is Sanskrit for Person Without a Name,” she explains, while probably thinking, “I could have fucking been in Coneheads.”
They have a meet-cute where he saves her from sexual assault by catching a knife in his rubber hand, and she takes him back to her place. She lives in a magical New York brownstone filled with one-dimensional characters from all three walks of life. Let’s meet them!
First there’s Geek, whose name will save everyone a lot of time. He invents super devices, like a mega subwoofer beyond all audio science, and speaks fluent Computer.
Then there’s Simeon. He’s wearing a sleeveless flannel pullover, steampunk goggles, shin-length shorts, and what appears to be a glove on his head. He says “you’re creating a negative energy zone,” within moments of us meeting him. He’s meant to be a free spirit, but in the ’90s that meant charming sex pest.
They also have a sassy landlady named Zina with the best New Yawk accent someone from Michigan could come up with. She’s the classic independently wealthy welder archetype. “Get this goddamn piece of trash animal out of here,” she says about the handless wino Christina Applegate brings home.
Anyway, there’s a long sequence of TJ hitting rock bottom and realizing he needs to dry out because this movie knew techno fans would want to see a solid hour of misery before the cyberstorm hits. So with nothing left to lose, TJ finally lets Simeon explain techno. And he does so beautifully.
Now we’re neutronically mutilating the cosmos. TJ wants to get in on the Sound of the Future. But how? His hands are Troma props. So he gives up for the 5th time in this movie. But then inspiration strikes when he sees a player piano! Maybe he could make music again! Aw, if only he had a tech genius and a master welder t– OH MY GOD.
Together, the team invents CYBERHANDS, which look like something Elon Musk would call “Cyberhands.” Except these filmmakers thought of something Elon Musk would never consider: can you fuck in CYBERHANDS? Oh, fuck yes, you can.
We’ve been on this journey with TJ for over an hour. We’ve seen him at the top, we’ve seen him at his nadir, we’ve seen him use his robot fingers on Christina Applegate. It’s all been building up to this: his creative rebirth. His shedding of his frail human form into a being of pure synthesizer! With all the inspiration of vibes and all the power of Generation X, the generation without a name, TJ is reborn as DJ CYBERSTORM.
Maybe you’re like me and you were wondering how this movie, a film where the lead actor wears one expression and nine wigs, could afford this absolutely fucking sweet rave cybersuit designed by special effects legend Stan Winston. Well, the reason is simple: the producer had it in his basement. He’d commissioned it for a horror movie in the ’80s and wanted to get some more use out of it! That’s actually the origin story of this project! A man with James Marshall’s phone number remembered had a robot costume! Everything that led us here was even dumber than you could have possibly imagined!
Anyway, DJ CYBERSTORM is an instant hit, and that means it’s time to bring Neuromancer Live on the road. He heads out in a van to tour with the real-life bands above, and if you recognize any of their names, click here to qualify for senior rave discounts.
Cyberstorm’s name rises up the tour poster lineup as his popularity builds, the normal way to communicate success we’ve all agreed upon, and what do you know, his scrappy international techno tour is scheduled to stop in his podunk hometown! What a perfect way to wrap up the lingering plot threads from Act 1 and introduce a jealousy subplot between Christina Applegate and Paige Turco. This is immediately abandoned because remember those easily identifiable maniacs in a describable truck who crushed TJ’s hands in a world where police exist? The screenwriter suddenly did, and they’re working security at the concert tonight.
This forces our hero to make a difficult decision. Cyberstorm or Revenge? I’m sure TJ, now that he’s cleaned up, made friends, found love, and discovered a purpose in life (the same things he had at the beginning of the movie), will make the right decision. And he does. He chooses both. He decides to murder them in cold blood… as Cyberstorm.
This is when we discover Vibrations is not the Save the Last Dance of rave movies. It is the Halloween III: Season of the Witch of rave movies. Remember Chekhov’s subwoofer from earlier? Here’s TJ’s elaborate trap: he wheels a speaker next to the basement green room, connects the subwoofer to it, lures these Beavises and Buttheads inside with the promise of snacks (a powerful siren call indeed), and barricades them inside.
It’s even shot in first person like a slasher movie. During his set, while he’s fingerblasting the audience with tranducing primal vibes, DJ Cyberstorm triggers the subwoofer, and shakes them to death with those block-rocking beats. It’s exactly how Freddy Krueger or Jason would have killed concert security guards, only updated for Generation X, the generation without a name.
Fortunately, the criminal justice system is spared the indignity of having to coin the term Mobycide when he sees his dad and Christina Applegate in the audience and arbitrarily decides, nah, maybe he won’t commit multiple murders today. The Ted Nugent roadies get arrested, he lives happily ever after, the end. Nobody learned anything!
By any standards, it’s a violently pointless series of unrelated events scored by Lithuania’s most affordable Herbie Hancock impersonator. But amazingly enough, this wasn’t Michael Paseornak’s first movie as a writer. He has script credits on Meatballs III which is not the one where an alien helps the hero win a boxing match, but the one where a dead porn star gets one last chance at Heaven if she can go back to Earth and help the hero get laid. Michael also contributed to the scripts for the Lorenzo Lamas action classics Snake Eater and Snake Eater II: The Drug Buster. But this, Vibrations, was his first solo writing credit. It was also his first time as director. And obviously his last in both capacities.
In a normal world, he would have sunk into obscurity like a rave DJ with a no-hands gimmick. But this is not a normal world. Michael Paseornak went on to become President of Lion’s Gate Film Productions. He produced John Wick 4, The Hunger Games, and Madea’s Witness Protection. He went on from this embarrassing excuse to fill an old robot suit with James Marshall sweat to become a gigantic success. It seems like there should be some lesson to take away from that, but, just like in Vibrations, there isn’t.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Eric Rion, who also has cyberhands BUT HE DON’T USE EM FOR RAVING! You know what we’re sayin’, ladies! (He uses them for knitting tiny novelty sweaters.)
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Nerding Day: Bots Master 🌭
Set in the far-future year of 2025, The Bots Master presents a world where humanity has invented a legion of roboslaves to cater to our every whim. These machines are the cybernetic creations of Ziv Zulander (ZZ for short), robot wunderkind and all-around radical dude. Or as Toolzz explains in the intro,
“Yeah! Well he can’t fade us!
He forgot about the Boyzz and the guy who made us!
Ziv Zulander, master of Boyzz bots!”
But it turns out that his boss, Lewis Leon Paradim, isn’t happy with being the richest person on the planet. LLP wants to rule the world, to be worshiped and beloved by all. His evil plan? Use a new kind of computer chip to make the global population bend to his will. Ah, the wild premises that cartoons came up with in the ’90s!
The brainchild of DIC head, Jean Chalopin, and Toy Biz CEO, Avi Arad, The Bots Master sees ZZ and his kid sister “Blitzy” wage a secret war against his ex-employer to prevent him from using his “Krang chips” to take manual control of every robot in the world. It’s weird because like, they built all of those robots anyway, so if that was their plan all along you’d think they would have just included that functionality to begin with? I mean, it’s also weird because they’re called “Krang chips,” which sounds like something Shredder would eat in the Technodrome.
Also, the show was directed by a guy named Xavier Picard, whose mother named him after the two bravest men she ever knew played by Patrick Stewart.
So: a teen genius fights against an evil megacorporation with his army of wisecracking robots — it’s a solid premise, but it needed something else to set it apart. “I’ve got eet,” Chalopin, a then-43-year-old white Frenchman, thought, “we will include le hip hop!” Seriously, the theme song opens with two rollerblading robots saying “greetings from the street boyzz” and then rapping about corporate sabotage and man’s unlimited lust for power.
This influence pervades the entire series. It was 1993, ok? Executives everywhere were trying to be hip with the kids by slipping rap-inspired aesthetics into their entertainment products. Remember Rappin’ Mike? The Ninja Turtle figure with this bio?
I’m sorry for putting you through that. But it gives you some sense of the relationship mainstream white culture had to hip hop in the early ’90s. That is, it didn’t understand it at all and also wanted to suck the life out of it for sustenance. The Bots Master was essentially mandated by law to have a black rapping robot who rollerblades and sounds like that one Transformer from the Michael Bay movies. Come to think of it, I’m not actually sure whether the rapping robot actually being painted black makes it better or worse than like, a gray or yellow robot. At least the Asian robot isn’t painted yellow, I guess? Yes, of course there’s an Asian robot.
Can we talk about these robots, though? ZZ allegedly invented them to be “young playmates” and named them the “BOYZZ” with two z’s, because the ’90s were a hipness arms race that drove all parties involved to extremes that would horrify contemporary observers. BOYZZ is allegedly an acronym for “Brain Operated Young Zygoetopic Zoids,” a series of terms that sounds like it would get you placed on an FBI watchlist if you Googled it.
The BOYZZ are all fully self-aware and autonomous individuals, yet were constructed to perform exactly one function. One of them plays golf. That’s his whole thing! He was made to be a golfer. He has one arm, and it’s a golf club. He is incapable of doing anything besides playing golf, yet he has the personality of a human male.
Is it torment, to have a sense of oneself as a unique being yet be constrained to the narrow design of one’s creator? Or is it bliss to revel in the fulfillment of one’s obvious purpose for existence? That’s a question I leave to the robotheologists.
Anyway, back to the BOYZZ. Some of them are construction workers, some of them play sports. One of them is a doctor. One of them is a cook that didn’t even get a name, he’s just called “cook.”
A bunch of them are disembodied heads built by another robot, whose entire existence amounts to sitting on a shelf and watching TV.
In one episode, ZZ invents a mother robot called Momzz the Mother BOYZZ. Besides having an extremely bizarre name, she looks like this, has a personality based on the DNA of Napoleon Bonaparte (because that’s a thing they can do in the future), and dies almost immediately.
But the absolute worst of the bunch is D’Nerd. He’s an extremely puntable robot with a TV screen for a head whose gimmick is that he always gives the dictionary definitions of words.
It’s unclear whether he likes doing this or can’t help himself, but either way, he makes Alpha 5 from the Power Rangers look like Joe Cool. His existence, like that of unknowable deep sea horrors, stomach cancer, and Ricky Gervais comedy specials, is proof of a not merely uncaring but actively sadistic creator.
None of the BOYZZ were built for fighting, except for Ninjzz, who has a lightsaber and is the only robot in The Bots Master that ever gets to do anything cool. The rest of them were just sort of drafted into ZZ’s guerilla war against RM Corp. That means we get a lot of tennis robots spiking grenades and construction robots dismantling their opponents, but it also means ZZ has essentially drafted an army of robo-child soldiers.
And just who are their opponents? Mostly they’re soulless robots voiced by the old text-to-speech program Dr. SBAITSO (“PARITY ERROR”). And what’s weird is that their creator and the archvillain, LLP, is just… nothing.
He’s barely ever involved in the action and almost never gets to do any fun monologues. He’s more of a hands-off kind of guy, I guess, leaving things up to his lieutenants Doctor Hiss and Lady Frenzy. Doctor Hiss is… well, just look at him. You can probably figure out his whole deal just from that.
I’m kidding, of course. He’s a by-the-numbers Starscream, not a rampaging pervert. It’s not like I could show you a screenshot of him fucking a giant robot dog to the astonished glares of onlookers.
As for Lady Frenzy, she’s a sexy evil lady. It’s a tried-and-true archetype, and one that has no doubt planted the seed for femdom kinks in many young minds throughout history. But Evil-Lyn, the Baroness, and their ilk have absolutely nothing on Lady Frenzy. Her voice actress, Janyse Jaud, sounds like a phone sex operator who suffers from a psychological condition where discussing her nefarious plans makes her uncontrollably aroused. Maybe that’s why she’s doing evil stuff all the time.
She’s insanely horny for ZZ and isn’t afraid to use her smoking hot body and absurdly breathy voice to advance her goals. In one episode she bribes an old bank manager and all but promises she’s going to fuck him until his heart explodes if he does what she wants. And she’s genuinely annoyed when the guy turns her down because his heart belongs only to money.
Lady Frenzy is a particular type of fictional woman, one that never achieved the heights of a Shego from Kim Possible or a Poison Ivy from Batman. But though her name may not be as well known as those objects of forbidden noid-doodle desire, she has inspired a truly impressive level of devotion amongst millennials who can’t really draw but desperately want to see her in a diaper. Google Image Search “Lady Frenzy” and there are multiple results for this kind of thing on the first page by different people. It was enough that it made me wonder if it somehow came up in The Bots Master proper, but the closest I got was an episode where ZZ gets a mind-controlling necklace that hypnotizes her into working for him.
There’s also one where the robots kidnap her while she’s asleep as a “present” for him. You know, normal kids’ TV stuff. You couldn’t make this show today, because of DEI. DEI, of course, stands for DIC Entertainment Industries, the holding company sitting on The Bots Master IP.
You’d think this one would be one of those shows that got maybe twelve episodes, but believe it or not, they made 40. That’s more than Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling, Kissyfur, ALF: The Animated Series, Captain N, and Hammerman, the cartoon where MC Hammer is granted superpowers by a pair of magical talking shoes. Jayce and Wheeled Warriors got 65, though. Good for him, the little bastard.
The big gimmick for The Bots Master — aside from an endless parade of acronyms — is “lazer time.” Of course it’s spelled “lazer,” because they sure as fuck weren’t going to miss any opportunity to shove another z into this show.
When ZZ calls out those two special words, viewers were supposed to put on the 3D glasses that came with the Bots Master toy line. Rather than the classic red-blue ones, these are basically single lens sunglasses and work with the Pulfrich effect. That means that these segments thankfully don’t look like blurry garbage if you’re not wearing the glasses, but for it to work it requires constant lateral movement — so for five minutes in every episode, the world starts whirling by like the background layers in an early ’90s Sega Genesis game programmed by someone who’d just discovered parallax scrolling.
In fact, the Pulfrich effect was also used in the video game Jim Power: The Lost Dimension in 3-D in the very same year. Jim even kind of looks like ZZ…
The game was made by a French developer, too. What was in the water in France in the ’90s? I’ll see if I ca– oh, apparently they had a Mad Cow outbreak in France around then, so maybe, uh, that. Now we just need to figure out the Lady Frenzy diaper thing.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ken Paisley, the robot designed solely to enjoy Skyline chili. Torment!