Category: NERDING DAY

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: M.A.S.K.

Children’s television in the 1980s was utter garbage, because there was never any need for it to be better. Executives figured out early that kids were stupid, writers were always named shit like Terrence and said obnoxious stuff about act breaks, and satisfying story-arcs don’t sell toys anyway – fucking Real Grappling Hook Action sells toys, Terrence. Writing for a kid’s show used to be a punishment job for somebody’s shitty nephew. But see, it turns out adding total apathy to greed with no second drafts doesn’t just give you trash, it gives you an inside look at the raw madness of a money-poisoned brain worrying at the edges of creativity. 

God, it was my favorite era of television.

Today we’re looking at M.A.S.K., a show which had one very simple mission: Give kids another transforming vehicle thing. Please remember, as we go through the episodes – that was their only goal in writing this show: selling a child of the 1980s a plastic motorcycle with guns on it. It’s the easiest thing in the world to do. With no further context, if you just set out a display of new gun motorcycles in a 1985 KB Toys, the morning rush would be so brutal you’d have to build a median out of Lite Brites to keep the toy aisle from becoming a Killing Sluice. 

And yet the writers of M.A.S.K. tried so fucking hard that they went completely insane from it. 

We start off with some standard 1980s cartoon nonsense:

Something about meteors – a villainous plot to steal maybe a meteor, I guess, those suckers gotta be worth something. A third of children’s TV from 1982-1997 was this episode. TVTropes calls this Steal the Meteor and the page gets shockingly racist toward the end. But that’s how M.A.S.K. began, by nakedly aping the nonsense their kid babbled about the plot of a GoBots episode. 

We probably should’ve listened to 1980s Children’s Programming when they kept writing episodes about greedy villains using television to hijack our brains and steal our money.

M.A.S.K. quickly ran out of money to rent G.I. Joe tapes for inspiration, so they started freestyling. This is the beginning of the prime era – we wound up with some wild episodes that, to this day, would get you a high five in a Nic Cage pitch meeting. Maybe even a Thank You T-Rex Skull after.

“What if stage magic was real?” That was a very important question to the 1980s, and one they answered in every single show for 10 years. We didn’t take it lightly. There was a two-part Very Special Episode of Punky Brewster where Punky botched the Disappearing Cabinet trick and wound up locked in a fridge. Each week on The A-Team they’d rescue a roguish magician whose tricks were all totally lame until the last ten seconds of the episode, when he disappeared in a cloud of sparkles so we could freeze frame on B.A. Baracus wondering
 is there magic in this world after all? 

But remixing it so that stage magic is unquestionably real and used for villainy? That’s M.A.S.K. territory, baby!

Hell yeah Kubla Khan’s treasure is hidden inside the Great Wall and only I know the wall’s weakness: Giant scorpions. I’m telling you right now: You get me in a room with Nic Cage, six Chinese investors, and one faulty translator app, and this movie will flop in America but take home $600 million internationally for reasons nobody can ever explain.




Nic’s people passed on this one.

V.E.N.O.M. started off as M.A.S.K.s version of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and man my right index finger is sick of typing this article. V.E.N.O.M. began as an elite agency of evil, but as the show spiraled they were more like if you gave a toddler the keys to a van that transformed into a van with a flamethrower.

No real plans, not even necessarily evil in intent, but the tantrums did result in some war crimes. 

Yeah, of course. Get revenge for your childhood with an earthquake machine, I mean, who hasn’t?

Yeah, of course. Run for haha, run for Vice President of the Netherlands with an earthquake machine. I mean, who hasn’t? Not president though, don’t shoot for the big dog’s seat, that motherfucker’s an incumbent with a volcano ray – he’s got this term on lock.

You got this cynical throw-it-at-the-wall writing from every toy-line TV show in the ‘80s. But only with M.A.S.K. did you also get a glimpse at the psyche of the creators. A real insight into the brains of the shitty nephews of Hasbro executives who got banished to writer’s rooms. M.A.S.K. writers had experienced so little of the real world that even the normal parts of their ludicrous synopses were ridiculously disconnected.  

Let’s find that mummy, Professor Hillary! Professor Tiffany, you’re on Wolfman Patrol!

It truly became art, watching six brains that had never thought of any part of a story before get forced under deadline to communicate to a demographic they had nothing in common with and no respect for. It was a wonderful mix of condescension, desperation, and the confidence of the very stupid.

“Oh man, what if money got sick with a virus that made it not money?” Some 26 year-old Hamptons Disappointment told a roomful of interns who dutifully wrote that down without a single comment.

M.A.S.K. broke every once in a while to do a comic relief episode, but it was totally indistinguishable from every single other episode they ever did.

Like “Oh no, panda bears are on the wrong island!” can’t be your bar for wacky outlandish premise, when here’s a real one


“All right, we’ve had enough serious drama with Dutch Earthquake President and The Curse Of Professor Hillary’s Mummy Lover – time for a fun one! Terrence, give me something wacky.”

“S-shit, something about
 like vikings. Ships? Sails. V.E.N.O.M. steals every sail from one of those viking countries and they play parachute with a whole city. I don’t know! I need this job, papa said if I don’t leave the house for three hours each and every week he’ll freeze the trust!” 

Wait, no, sorry. That’s a serious one. I’m sorry, I’m having trouble finding the line between wacky and sincere episodes in this show where somebody named T-Bob finds Irish treasure at the end of a rainbow.

One weirdly M.A.S.K. specific obsession: Esoteric high-society theft. This is pure Terrence-brain, right here. He really thought kids would understand the stakes of somebody’s prized Lippizaner Stallions going missing:

But of course there’s no consistency. V.E.N.O.M. would spend one episode stealing some kind of billion dollar turbo horse, and the next stealing blankets and mesh. 

Terrence did not know what poor people valued! It’s like he got yelled at for being out of touch after the horsey episode so now he’s swinging at the wind, “poor people like
 quilts! Mesh! Wait! They love doors!”

Stay tuned next week, kids, when V.E.N.O.M. strips the copper wiring out of a disused community center! They find a ping-pong table with only major water damage – in your face, M.A.S.K.!

Who could forget the thrilling episode where an entire villainous agency got together to steal the ashtray change from a babysitter’s used Saturn?

The stakes vary so wildly: It’s either replacing all of the planet’s water with Lipizanner Stallions or it’s stealing Billy Meyers’ new retainer. V.E.N.O.M. seems less like an evil organization, and more like aliens who got brain damage from a crash landing and now they’re trying to relearn basic morality in a world they don’t know they don’t belong to.

But don’t worry. M.A.S.K. found its footing eventually! It didn’t take them long to hit their Eureka moment. Of course! It was there the whole time! This show about cars that kind of transform is really about
 protecting indigineous people across the globe! From themselves and their own ignorance!

Damn, that’s a good shenanigan in that thumbnail! That’s worth a zoom and enhance.

God, I can taste that freeze frame. Some dude named B.U.C.K. or Laser Hound says like “Oh, Professor Demolition – he’s made a monkey of you!” And then they laugh and we’re out, having earned it. Having earned our ending.

The problem with M.A.S.K. proclaiming themselves protector of indigineous cultures both living and dead was that the writers weren’t willing to research anything about anything. Normally, that’s actually fine


Better, even: Kids are stupid, they don’t know you’re making up a race. And you don’t have to take wild guesses at the delicate history of an aborginal people who really don’t need to show up in a cartoon for latchkey suburban kids that have every good GoBot already. It’s a win-win.

But M.A.S.K. does not stick to fictional anthropology. 

And that means every ethnicity other than White Protestant is actually magic, but so fucking bad at it they also need a truck with wings to save them.

“Every culture is hiding a secret treasure!” Is one of those cute lessons to teach kids, but it loses some charm when you stop, look them dead in the eye, and say “no really, it’s there. Let’s go get it. Let’s go take it from them and god help them, Margaret, god help them if they try to stop me and the flamethrower I mounted in the back of my station wagon.”

Hey you know what Native Americans need to see more of, in pop culture? White people rolling up on the reservation in battle wagons! 

Ah, shit. I’m sorry, this is so easy to do: Slip into applying modern morality to past media. This was the 1980s – if you got out of any action show without the team going undercover as natives, that was a win. There was a Very Special Punky Brewster episode where she got trapped in a fridge and hallucinated a rapping devil played by Andy Gibb in blackface. It was a nightmare decade. This show is mostly harmless.

I didn’t want to bring M.A.S.K. to condemn it, I wanted to bring it because of its childlike naivete about the world: Sure the natives of fictional Mongo Pongo have never seen a plane before and they tried to feed their children to its engines to calm its fury. You, the writers, invented them. You can say whatever you want. Also the Inca don’t care that you’re using their sacred temples as a set piece for a Cadillac with a harpoon-gun to fight a Fiat that’s half-boat. They’re too busy being dead and their priests are chasing Scooby Doo through a hot dog stand. 

But like
 

Those superstitious Singaporeans? I was a dipshit kid watching this. I had no reference for Singapore. I probably did think it was an island where they threw spears at helicopters. But here’s Singapore in 1980:

I know Terrence was a thin-skulled child and was never allowed to leave the poolhouse for his own safety, but he has a job writing children’s shows now. You need to let him use the encyclopedias even if he gets so excited by the topless aborigines that he has a trademark Vanderburg fainting spell. Look, I know I just made that up but holy shit, wouldn’t that perfectly explain everything about M.A.S.K.?

Freed from the tyranny of basic research, M.A.S.K. starts getting wild with ethnics that need saving. We got unfrozen caveman ethnics


Zoom and enhance. The artist calls this work “The British History Museum Dilemma.”

We’re unfreezing ancient Incan priests one episode, and the next we’re zipping across the world to raid MacGuffins from the very real aborigines of New Guinea. 

Somewhere around the 30th episode I get the feeling M.A.S.K. is just fucking around with us, seeing what the limits are. How far they can get out into the garden before the shock collar goes off. You think that’s a dog metaphor, but no – that’s still Poolhouse Terrence.

Haha, incredible. It’s been 37 episodes and they’re so out of ideas that it’s every idea. Frightening aborigines! Flying rocks! No! Holographic projections of flying rocks! Those idiots! They think it’s god! Their god, Mimi! Who has a secret treasure! But don’t worry, at the end Brad saves the day with his hocus pocus mask. Brad with his guitar!

No, come on.




Is that scene exactly what I think it is?

Yes, it is exactly that.

Every M.A.S.K. plot starts with two things too many and then adds eight more, trying to overload the Buy Center of a child’s brain with confusing and contradictory information. It’s a classic CIA Fake and Break technique.

Then the writers rush out half a draft, set it in a “primitive” village like Portugal, and count on the failure of the American Education System to get them to Season 2. And it worked! I had like eight M.A.S.K. toys and I do not know where Singapore is. 

Haha! 

That’s the best episode yet. 

It brings up such a clear mental picture, doesn’t it?

You can see it in your head: 

Some ‘80s jerk with a villainous mustache- 

Those big chunky Ray-Bans- 

The natives flee in terror-

As he pulls off some wildly offensive Ooga Booga mask –

To be like “the fools!”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Batman/FaZe Clan 🌭

In the Bronze Age of comics, it wasn’t unusual for a superhero to suddenly change everything about themselves and their universe to sell you a pie or teach you about smoke inhalation. They were stupid, disappointing, and infantalizing, but it’s kind of fun to look back on them. Which is what we’re doing today! We’re revisiting the ridiculous crossover where Batman teamed up with a group of real life video game players all the way back in two thousand and twenty tw– **RECORD SCRATCH** wait, this happened last week!?

I don’t know if this was Batman’s attempt to cash in on the huge popularity of whatever FaZe Clan is, or if this was esports’ attempt to cash in on the huge popularity of whatever the 17th monthly Batman spinoff is, but it seems to take place in Batman’s world which also contains the actual professional esport athletes so famous you’ll obviously know which of these I’m making up: B00tJeff, jeffmilker_8, JeffsUX, Depression_Jeff2, and xxFuckYouJeffxx.

Anyway, the Riddler’s video game is controlling the minds of Gotham City’s gamers. Robin wants to call his favorite gaming clan to help, but as they’ve discussed many times, Batman thinks it’s a bad idea to deputize children for a murder investigation. Which is not the first time in this comic where you’ll see Batman not act like Batman.

Batman drops through the ceiling of the Hollywood FaZe Clan HQ to tell them about all the Gotham people trapped in a video game. “My guys, Batman is here!” one of them announces. Another idly asks what the shit they’re supposed to do about it while continuing to lift weights. Another walks right up to Batman and says, “This is a gamer issue. Batman’s a dinosaur.” The point is, these are all very strange reactions to the Dark Knight suddenly appearing in your game room.

Not a single line of dialog seems to have anything to do with any of the others. It’s like seven deaf people on a phone call and they’re all dicks. The writing process seems to have been asking these gamers to say one mysterious thing about Batman and then putting them together in a random order. In one chaotic page, they greet Batman, insult Batman, tell him they’ll help him, tell him they can’t help him, ask him for help, give a recap, and ask for a recap. “You can suck my dick,” said language itself after it heard the plot. “I was not invented so you could use me to describe Batman teaming up with some Counter-Strike guild.”

“Sheesh!” says one of the gamers after he hears the plot explained for the third time. It is genuinely weird. The writer, Josh Trujillo, is a competent professional, so I don’t know what happened. If I had to guess, he has no idea what’s going on and he asked each of these guys, “What would you say here?” and then pasted in their terrible fucking answers verbatim.

Anyway, in comes everyone’s favorite, Rug.

Rug is drawn like someone found his 7th grade yearbook and has been trying to hurt his feelings ever since. He arrives like a real cyber influencer of today– carrying a stack of pizzas and pitching a vlog prank. You know old Rug, always making that classic group living mistake of not checking the room for Batman before pitching a vlog prank. And in a zany turn of events, Rug realizes his vlog prank isn’t important and leaves. Sorry Rug fans, that’s all we see of Rug.

Batman brings four of the gamers to Oracle’s secret hideout to plug them into the evil mind control video game and hope for the best. Robin is a huge FaZe Clan fan who totally knows who these guys are, and you can tell because when he meets one of them he calls him “FAZE CLAN!” It’s not like it matters. By this point the plot is complete gibberish. Robin could have walked up and said, “Thank you for Congo Bongo, Rug Doctors,” and it would have been exactly as reasonable and authentic.

Oracle gives everyone Bat-VR headsets and plugs them into the Riddler’s domain. They have done nothing to prepare for this other than be good at different video games. Their plan is “fuck it,” and their training is hearing “BE READY FOR ANYTHING!” after they’ve already been sent to their certain cyber death.

FaZe Clan looks around Riddler’s ultimate genius cyber realm, a lazy recreation of the Blade Runner set. They don’t see anyone, which seems strange to them, since as gamers they know players are supposed to spawn at the final objective. “ANYTHING? MORE LIKE NOTHING!” says one of them two word bubbles too late to make any goddamn sense. Like vlog prankster Rug might say, get your turbo cringe on, Congo Bongo!

Not everyone reacts to the empty streets the same way. Batwoman sees the lack of enemies and decides they’re going to need some serious firepower. One of the gamers says, “Have you seen my clips? We got this.” So to be clear, the survival of all of Gotham’s gamers lies in the hands of a man so delusional he assumes Batwoman has seen edited highlights of him playing video games. And he is using those unseen video game clips to leverage his side of the argument which is, “You’re wrong, Batwoman. We’ll be fine without weapons.” There is just no way these people could have ever predicted starring in their own Batman comic would make them look like such stupid goddamn assholes.

Oracle takes Batwoman’s side in the argument– she thinks they shouldn’t face off against Riddler’s super Matrix army with their bare hands and licensed FaZe Clan t-shirts and hats available now. She upgrades them, another important part of the plan she has kept secret for no reason, and they gain the powers of HEALER, TANK, ARCHER, and MAGE. Like the rest of this, it’s stupid and silly, but just wrong enough to sound inauthentic. In sports terms, this would be like assigning them the powers of a PITCHER, SHORTSTOP, LEFT HANDER, and DOMINICAN.

After getting character types for the wrong setting and genre, they all shout aggressively unrelated catchphrases. “MY FAMILY WOULD LOVE THIS!” says HEALER. It’s a deep cut reference for true FaZe Clan fans who know this is the one with a family. “DAMN, I LOOK GREAT!” says the one who got bitch ass level 0 starting robes.

The team splits up to attack the four quadrants of the cyberzone, each protected by a different Batman villain boss, and I finally have no criticism. What a perfect sentence I just typed.

The first quadrant they go to is Two-Face’s, which is just him and two bombs. He hits them with a brain teaser of a puzzle– one of them isn’t a real bomb!

“Okay, let me think carefully about this,” says the world’s greatest gamer as he tries to slow things down. “Fucking fuck it,” thinks the world’s greatest boy detective as he shakes the shit out of one of the bombs. Whichever one was real explodes, and I’d say this is probably the worst case scenario caused by attacking the problem in the dumbest possible way, but it works!

Cyber Two-Face has been obliterated and they acquire his token! “HUH?” says the world’s greatest gamer who is sort of right? Let’s go see how the next team is doing in Quadrant Two against the Mr. Freeze simulation.

Amidst all this sloppy insanity, “DID BATMAN REALLY THINK A GAMER COULD STOP ME?” is a pretty funny thing for a video game enemy to say. He’s saying it like it’s a racial slur, like Gamers are genetically predisposed to be bad at video games. Anyway, the FaZe Clan guy uses his l33t strats to walk directly into Mr. Freeze’s attack and one-shots him with a hammer. There’s a lot of talk about these being great players, but so far the villains have been defeated by stupidity and stupidity, respectively.

After Mr. Freeze dies, they win a snow globe of his nude wife, and I can’t stress this enough: it’s a snow globe of his nude wife.

I feel like we can skip the next one. Scarecrow is too scary for Batwing to fight, but not too scary for him to give an inspiring pep talk to the FaZe Clan guy… 

… who closes his eyes and launches an arrow that bounces off everything until it one-shots the boss. This is trash. A human writer shouldn’t be capable of putting ideas together this poorly. If a gorilla said this to me in sign language I’d tell it, “Shut the fuck up, dumbest ape. Worst ape.”

Next up, Nightwing and the mage face off against The Joker in a “maze” of mirrors!

After smashing a few mirrors, there seems to be nothing they can do other than smash several more, but then they get an idea: a heartbeat scanner! Wait, no, what?

Okay, so this video game Joker simulation has a functioning heart, and it pumps loudly enough you can detect it with a phone. Fine, I buy it. But then the mage says, “YOU PLAYED YOURSELF,” and I have a real problem with this. Sure, it’s a turn of phrase appropriate to these people and their culture, but something about it rings false. Is it because maybe The Joker didn’t “play himself” by having a cardiovascular system? Do you think that could be it, FaZe Clan? This is like killing someone with a banana and telling them “You CAN haz cheezeburger.” In any other comic this dipshit would have been BLAMPHing into a death trap, but in this one he farts on The Joker’s head, posts the wrong meme, and takes us into the finale.

You probably didn’t expect a comic about hyper-competitive narcissists to climax with Giant Super Riddler underestimating the power of friendship, did you? Well, congratulations, you played yourself. 

Look, I get how weird it would be if this comic was good. But to recap, Batman flew across the country and into the wrong universe to recruit the four best gamers for a special mission. They won by watching Robin knock over a suitcase nuke, one-shot three bosses who would be too easy for an Elmo Wheelchair Racing tutorial, and then throw the whole plot away to swarm the main bad guy with a bunch of ordinary non-gamers. You can’t write a shittier thing than this. Batman FaZe Clan was adapted from a woman asking her grandchildren what “Roblox” are. This is the non-Bruce Willis parts of something called More Dangerous Die 3000.

The only thing that could make it sadder would be if it ended with these useless fuckers sitting around eating Rug’s pizza and wondering if Batman liked them.

In the only shocking plot twist of the story, Batman does like them! He sends them a gamer Friend Request!

DarkKnight27 is accidentally the perfect joke Batman username. Twenty seven is not his age, and February 7th is not the day his parents got killed. He is the 27th player who named himself “DarkKnight.” On an average Gotham night, dozens of maniacs are escaping Arkham Asylum or pulling citizens into manholes, and Batman is in his cave cursing at a title screen that tells him, “Username DarkKnight is unavailable. Username DarkKnight1 is unavailable. Username Vengeance_Jeff is unavailable. Username SecretBruce is unavailable.” In any other Batman story he would already have the username TheBat and emerge from the shadows to say, “Hh. I camp on the coolest names on every online service. Not all crime is fought in the streets.” But after only thirty pages with these clowns Batman is reduced to, “hi rug! my name is DarkKnight27! plz add me lol! I main SHORTSTOP!”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Rain Vargas, FaZe Clan’s official Jeff Wrangler.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Legends of the Superheroes! 🌭

Hello, and I hope you’re enjoying all the new apocalypses since we last spoke. Personally, I feel both Doom Cloud and “Codename: Alecto” got shorted by the Lindsay Lohanaissance, but I hope you’ve been able to find your own favorite eschaton.

The one I don’t want you to worry about is a madman extinguishing all life on earth with the push of a button. You see, we stopped him in 1979’s Legends of the Superheroes: a two-part special airing on NBC, in which DC superheroes defend the globe from Mordru the Mystic and sundry supervillains. And we did it without superpowers.

Legends was deliberately corny, a barrel of silly fun that remains one of the most faithful comic adaptations I’ve ever seen. It’s unbelievable that a comedy showcase hosted by Ed McMahon is loyal to costumes and continuity with more accurate detail than 7 out of 10 of the Spider-Man movies released last year. It’s so accurate to the comics that Huntress is introduced, then immediately forgotten.

The only character this show can’t detail in its two-hour time limit is the evil wizard Mordru, whose backstory is “Eternity.” All you need to know is he’s the personification of chaos, can’t be vanquished, and dresses like the thunder god of any country that still suffers at least one goat-related dueling death a year. 

He’s a lame-ass villain fit only to challenge the Legion of Superheroes, and this show is proof of why I am wrong to say so wait WHAAAAAT?

We open on your parents in aerobics gear, plotting the end of the world:

Dr. Sivana’s doomsday machine will go off in one hour, “killing every single living creature on Earth.” How? They don’t say, which is a tacit admission it’s oligarchic capitalism. You’d think they’d save penguins, pizza ingredients, and people with strong sex moves, but nope: all life except these six dudes and a woman hyper-evolved from a zoo ape. Game on.

The villains taunt the heroes with clues, and you are completely forgiven if you blame The Riddler for this part of the plan. But he complains that he’s been given no notice to craft his clues. Mordru had literally forever to plan this properly but still didn’t give his generals time to prepare.

Meanwhile, here in this great hall of justice, the superheroes are toasting Retired Man, a.k.a. Scarlet Cyclone. He’s an original character who was a two-fisted pulp slugger in the ’30s, and it’s fine if you want to confuse him with Red Tornado. 

–and they’re off to scour the earth up to 30 miles from the studio lot. Black Canary kicks ass, as per her character sheet.

Mordru puts a magic hat on Solomon Grundy that disguises him as a regular human gas station attendant. Personally I can’t remember the last time I was at a gas station that didn’t have a methed-out Grundyface stealing aluminum, but I guess the ’70s were a more innocent time, when only attractive people huffed leaded fumes by the roadside. 

The ruse collapses in seconds because Grundy is a swamp toddler, but he hands Batman his bat-ass and sends him packing. 

Playing the role of DC’s version of The Watcher, Roz from Night Court gives the best running commentary from a phone booth. It’s emblematic of how great this adventure is, and adults mocking children’s entertainment will always be America’s highest form of humor. Upgrade your subscription to 1-900-HOTDOG today!

Sinestro disguises himself as a fortune-teller to distract Green Lantern from ending this chase in seconds. For this, he gets knocked ass over giant noggin in as much power-ring SFX as this film can budget. Yeah, the 2011 Green Lantern film is looking pretty good now, isn’t it? 

But imagine you were just having a picnic and saw a superhero laserblast an elderly lady? You’d have so many questions you’d join a monastery or something. And God wouldn’t answer you. What you thought you saw never happened. Is anything real? 

Weather Wizard pretends to be a used car salesman to delay Batman & Robin. He tries to sell them a lemon, but billionaire Bruce Wayne only carries $50 because it’s all he can afford to lose. That’s objectively funny, but I was distracted by the first canonical appearance of bat-nipples on a costume:

Harried to pick a vehicle, Batman browbeats the importance of responsible purchases into Robin 40 minutes before the end of the world. Despite that, the strange rules of this universe say the villains are only allowed to prankishly stall the heroes. It’s almost like none of these lunatics really wants to get into an extinction event and they’re subtly undermining their boss’s awful plan with calculated failures. 

Meanwhile, Grundy is stacking bird-themed B-listers in his garage like he’s lining a nest.  

Captain Marvel follows Riddler clues that suggest he subconsciously knows where the machine is. (Wisdom of Solomon, I guess?) Desperate for a psychiatrist to crack open his noggin and spill out the juicy thought-meats, he settles for Riddler actor Frank Gorshin taking us on a walking tour of accents he can do. 

Where’s Flash? The show gets around the problem of his being a god by not using him. He’s in one very odd bit before he loses his speed, and he doesn’t even do that part onscreen.

But how, you ask? Dr. Sivana disguises himself as a child and sells the heroes tainted lemonade that strips their superpowers. All of them hate this twerp much more than they hate the actual mad scientist.

Soon, Gotham’s runaway protectors cascade into the lake surrounding villain HQ. And it is there that we get


Hold on, are you ready? 

We get the greatest visual in DC cinematic universe history:

Yes! YESSSSSSS! This is what it was all building towards! An extra-dimensional wizard who exists outside of time is ripping wicked doughnuts on one of our Earth lakes! 

“Follow me for fun!” he bleats at the heroes, but they cannot hear him over the motor, the waves, and the hydrocube-gleaming. This is the greatest thing humanity has ever done, and somehow Batman is only perpendicularly involved!

Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh shit oh fuckshitfucko shiiiiiit Mordru is so rad! How have I slept on his greatness in more than three decades of nerdology? Look at him ride that steed of the sea! Hahaha, I bet that little hop is when he outboards Aquaman’s brainpan. This is raw propaganda for Mordru’s greatness, and I’m coming back for seconds.

Where do we go from here? Nothing we achieve will live up to this. Let the machine run, and take us out on a high note, heroes. 

Sadly, the powerless crusaders save the day through an ancient technique known as violence. It’s fun, and Mordru gets dragged out by his ankles. But this was not the end! The following week, NBC dropped:

Ed McMahon is your MC, and things are already weird. Ed McMahon could not possibly have read a comic book in his life because Ed McMahon was born 53 years old. 

He introduces Weather Wizard, whose first joke is to list types of extreme weather and whose second is a Johnny Carson impression that probably cost McMahon twenty lashes for permitting it. There is no third joke. 

Hawkman’s mom jokes about how disappointing it is to have a hawkson. This is accurate. People make fun of Aquaman, but he’s amphibious Golden Age Superman plus telepathy. Hawkman’s weakness is not being able to walk straight through doors. 

Ed jokes about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s vainglory, which will always be America’s highest form of humor. Upgrade your subscription again, but higher, at 1-900-HOTDOG today! 

That’s when actor Brad Sanders makes his celluloid debut as—uh
Oh boy. 

Here comes Ghetto Man. 

It goes
not badly? Most of the other comedians’ jokes amount to acknowledging that some things are weather and other things are birds. Ghetto Man actually indicts the heroes’ lack of diversity. The Super We Have Black Friends laugh it off, but you know they’re going to examine their starhearts for ways to decolonize their utility belts. The best comedy is a golden lasso compelling us to speak uncomfortable truths.  

Dr. Sivana does horny crowd work by giving superheroes their physicals. He mashes up on Black Canary’s chest, but does not joke about her being a screamer, and that was in 1979, so I don’t know what battles the feminists think they’re still fighting.   

Retired Man returns with the same jokes, and he’s not leaving. Don’t get me wrong, he’s perfectly funny for a production like this, but did you ever get a bowl of Lucky Charms that’s way too many orange stars and not enough purple horseshoes? Retired Man is that bowl’s oat kibble. 

The Ghost of ‘80s Future shows up in Rhoda Rooter, a gossip columnist covering Giganta’s romance with The Atom. The premise of their conversation: How big girl and tiny man make fucky? 

The answer, Atom smirks, is so hard she’ll be lucky to survive. I would remind you here that Giganta is a genetically modified gorilla. 

Robin confesses that he smashed the Batmobile, and Batman lets his mask slip to reveal the domestic abuser within. Goodbye, your childhood: 

Look, I know things are dark right now and for the rest of our lives, but never forget you live in a world where Solomon Grundy once menaced Ed McMahon. That’s a real moment we can share with our parents and grandparents and
well, let’s be honest, nobody’s in a position to have our own kids. Just enjoy this.

Hey, it’s Sinestro—DC’s best villain! There’s an actual bad guy named Hitler-Devil, but somehow Sinestro is more compelling at being both of those things. Anyway, let’s see him do some stand-up. 

Comic Charlie Callas is a funny guy, but he wrote his material for this gig on the ride here, and his ride was a horse-drawn ice cart. All of his jokes start in Depression-era NYC and end with the punchline “Ring-blast rim shot!” That might fly at orgies, but not here. 

Picture you’re at a dinner club in whatever year it stopped being acceptable to make fun of people’s race but was still okay to mock the intellectually challenged, and you’ve got the gist. I know Grundy’s a petrified mushroom zombie, but he’s still sitting right there listening to these cruel baits.  

Also, Sinestro’s wearing a more comics-accurate costume this week. It’s appreciated. 

Ruth Buzzi shows up as Aunt Minerva, and uses her crackshot skills to threaten the only people on earth to whom bullets mean nothing. Captain Marvel hosts two villains tonight, while Huntress just barely catches enough spotlight to be the butt(?) of a vagina joke. 

And then we come to the end. The big finale. The crescendo. Mordru’s back, baby! And he’s singing “That’s Entertainment” with the lyrics changed to types of misery. He did that two years before The Jam did! 

Mordru, you madman. This show was supposed to be warmed-over late-night jokes and lemonade stand skits. Who is this unstoppable force inventing mod punk and x-treme sports? I thought I’d be writing about how bonkers-fun this odd production was. When did it all go Hot Dog?

He wrecks the set like the rockstar he is! Nobody follows Mordru onstage. Like all tyrants, he must be the best and the final. All hail Mordru, who was never born, and can never die! Lord of Chaos! Emperor of Evil! Mordru! MORDR—

The caped crusader pulls the perfect weapon to defeat tyrants out of his utility belt: a pie to the face. 

Mordru, you loser. You overflexed and it cost you everything. How can you rule in terror when the entire world has seen Batman creampie you on Jumbotron? You can’t. Because the only thing more immutable than an evil wizard is this universal truth: Batman always wins. 

If you want to support a real-life superhero, comic writer David Gallaher has some medical costs after stepping in to protect a 13-year-old girl from violence.

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Yossarian: whom former lovers describe as “like Mordru on a jetski” in bed.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Star Trek Food Review

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon
Unlock with Patreon
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Superhero Stars 🌭

Hi. Have you ever, while walking through the shadows of darkness, found something you hated so much you’d betray your best friend for a chance to unmake it? Hi again, I’m Seanbaby, writing as Todd McFarlane, dark creator of Spawn, to introduce an article about another grotesque John Byrne joke book, 2003’s Joke Busters’ Superhero Stars.

Thanks for the intro, me as Todd. To set this book up, yes, it’s obviously bad jokes about superheroes. But not exactly. John Byrne has created his own zany spoofs of popular superheroes and then made jokes about them. And when I say “spoofs,” I don’t mean satirical takes on tropes or wacky puns. I mean he spelled all their names wrong and nothing else. I’m not exaggerating. Or, as John would put it, “eggs-aggerating” next to a couple eggs.

Unforgivably, “Souperman” has all the same powers as Superman. He does not have silly soup versions of flight or freeze breath or laser vision. If this was a book about Souperman drowning Lettuce Luthor with vichyssoise breath, we wouldn’t be here. This is a “joke book” where some monster added an “o” to Superman’s name and sold it to innocent children.

He doesn’t even have a different secret identity. He’s exactly the fucking same!

You dumb son of a bitch, John. He’s still Clark Kent? You couldn’t make him fucking Clark ConsummĂ© or Cream of Kent? Kal-Eggdrop of Kryptom-yum? That took me twelve seconds, you stupid asshole. And why is Souperman camping out with children on a school trip? He’s a childless grown man. The entire premise of the joke, the punchline of which is spelling “Kent” wrong, requires the most virtuous man in the universe to be stalking little kids in the woods. If there were any laws in place for making bad jokes, the state would chemically castrate you for this and sentence the remaining, non-genital parts of you to twenty consecutive life terms. “Clark tent.” Fuck you.

The fact that Superman’s disguise is only glasses has been a shared joke among the human race for about 80 years. And John Byrne’s take on this, the oldest superhero joke, is using a word with a double meaning and getting one of the meanings wrong. Hey, John Byrne, if someone didn’t want to make a spectacle of themselves, they wouldn’t wear glasses, you dumbass. You idiot fuck, John. Let me show you how stupid you are. This is what a Family Circus cartoon would look like if it was as goddamn dumb as you:

Wait, hold on. Maybe we’re supposed to forgive the dislogic because in Souperman’s case, he would try to be less of a spectacle by wearing more spectacles… no. No, this is war crime apologist doublethink. Luckily, not all of his Souperman gags are as controversial as probably(?) misunderstanding a misunderstood idiom. Some of them are just things happening.

“CONGRATULATIONS, SIR… NOW THERE’S A FLY IN THE SOUPERMAN?” What the hell does that mean? It sounds like Björk wishing a spider happy birthday in a Cameo. Maybe you could try, like, a riddle, John?

Again, I need to be clear: aside from eating a fly out of it in a restaurant that one time, Souperman has no soup theme or abilities. He’s simply exactly Superman with “SOUP” on his chest instead of an “S.” So, I don’t know, his favorite game could be some shit like Souper Mario Bros. or Soupo Wrestling, but expecting the audience to make a connection between “BOWLS” and the soup in his name is wild. It’s like asking your reader to suddenly imagine a situation where a spider is having a birthday and someone bought it a Cameo from Björk. It’s like saying “someone on the plane must have had diarrhea during 9/11.” It’s so much work to give your audience, and for what? Morbid sadness scratching at the edge of whimsy? You’re the diarrhea of 9/11, John Byrne.

It’s already a terrible thing to intentionally misunderstand an idiom for a lame joke. It’s worse to write in a straight man who misunderstands something there’s no reason to misunderstand for a lame joke. If someone in prison tells you they were framed, it’s not natural to respond, “Now to be clear, when you say ‘framed,’ you mean the only thing that could mean, right?” And to do that– to destroy your verisimilitude for this punchline? It’s inhuman. Yes, art galleries have frames, but who would describe robbing one in such a way? If you were a linguist trying to teach a monkey wordplay and they put this combination of words together you would consider it a frustrating setback. The point is, it’s a pretty weak framing device, no matter what frame of mind you’re in!

Here he is doing it again. John is desperately stretching for a joke across three word bubbles and he’s still a full step away from a complete gag. If the first speaker followed this up with, “Of course I mean break out of prison, idiot,” it would almost sound like real dialog. My point is, John Byrne is a stupid, sarcastic dick without the sarcasm– all the unpleasant and none of the wit. It’s like Björk filming a Cameo for a spider’s birthday, but without the Björk. Just a pile of spiders calling a spider on its birthday.

Speaking of spiders and no coherent second concept, John Byrne’s Spider-Man knockoff is Spy-Man, a spidery man with a magnifying glass. Which means his favorite place in the playground is “THE MAGNIFYING GRASS,” a punchline way closer to a Wizards & Warriors powerup than a joke. Spy-Man also seems to have maintained most of Spider-Man’s deal, in that he’s insect-themed and swings around on a web. It’s fucking tragic. John Byrne has a wet smear of chewed gum where an imagination should be. I don’t know how much longer I can watch the neurons in his fading brain limp from one idea back to that same idea with the letters rearranged.

Wait, is Spy-Man’s spyglass a goddamn mirror? John, are you fucking serious? You’re using another misunderstood cliche as the punchline to a totally unrelated setup while also requiring us to reconsider magnifying glasses as mirrors? That’s not a long walk for a short drink of water– it’s dragging a dead body to a dry lake. John, take that pen you can’t draw for shit with and fuck yourself with it. I don’t know if this properly reflects my feelings, but this cartoon is what AIDS would say if it could talk. It’s the embarrassing final words of a research monkey being destroyed in a failed linguistics experiment. Oh, speaking of monkeys:

This one isn’t so bad. It’s the only appearance of Gorilla Man, but he seems to have a coherent theme and John managed to put together a riddle that would make any popsicle stick manufacturer say, “I consider this adequate.” But look at where we are. A Gorilla Man used a mon-KEY to break into a crook’s headquarters and my expectations have been lowered so far I consider it a good try. There aren’t standards by which to judge something like John Byrne. It’s like a flesh eating bacteria asking you to take a moment to rate your experience.

This sells itself as a superhero book, but not much of it has anything to do with superhero activities. For the most part, if you took the masks and underwear off everyone, it wouldn’t change anything. It would just be nude people expressing themselves incorrectly in a miserable impersonation of humor. It’s like John Byrne got 100 pages into something he thought was called “101 Ordinary Put Downs For Unremarkable Pieces of Shit” and his editor called to say, “Tomorrow’s the deadline! How’s the superhero book coming?”

“Come on, John. Think. What’s a joke about Chameleonman’s powers? Superheroes change clothes… chameleons change color. There’s something there. Maybe… that’s it! He can’t catch crooks because he changes color! Take that, doctor who called this ‘the worst head injury he’s ever seen’! Honk honk, I’m a motorcycle!!”

It’s almost heroic how John keeps trying. I mean, he’s seen a joke and has to have thought about how they work. He knows x-rays see through things and he’s heard the phrase “seeing right through you,” but he can’t quite link it all together. John Byrne, if your cartoon requires your audience to create an entire superhero who fakes x-ray vision, maybe the most instantly disprovable of all the superpowers, and then the payoff is only, “well yeah, everyone knew,” you’ve done something wrong. Not only here in this moment, but with your entire life. I don’t have a fun way to describe it. You’re a fake dog poop factory worker who made some dumb shape that didn’t look like poop.

Another character John created is called the Incredible Hunk. I think he tried to draw him “handsome” with the talentless paws he calls hands, but he’s otherwise no different than the original superhero he’s spelling wrong. The Incredible Hunk is a green rage monster. And since he’s green, maybe… maybe something with traffic lights? Do kids run into traffic toward anything green? If they don’t, then holy shit, this joke doesn’t work at all.

“Green is almost the same word as ‘grin,’ right? Come on, John, think! There’s got to be something there. Do wrestlers who also work as crossing guards grin after they lose? Griiiiin… greeeen? Aaand bear it? So he wrestles and loses then greens and bears it, but also punches a wrestling judge? Ha. Listen to me. A cartoonist would have to have absolute contempt for their audience to expect readers to make that kind of stretch. They’d have to hate those goddamn children so very much.”

What else happens to green? Oh! Toddlers bite it!

This is a strange one– an interview with a villain named The Green Gobbler whose zaniness is based on how he enjoys eating? And since he eats so much, he’s green? How? Why? I don’t mean the Green Gobbler’s thing. I mean what happens to the concept of green after it enters John Byrne’s brain? Has anyone studied it? The first neurologist to crack this maniac’s head open will discover an entirely new disorder. John Byrne thinks people charge toward green and babies eat green, but you also get green if you eat too mu– oh my god, it’s tits. Never mind, neurologists, this is only some kind of titty code. Unless… oh damn it, I think he might mean he’s green like he’s nauseous– a cannibal in a kid’s book adorably happy he’s about to puke. I hate that if you squint hard enough and pedantically enough you can exhume the skeleton of a joke concept from some of these.

Not all the Hunk jokes have to do with people losing their minds near the color green. Here John asks what would happen if the Incredible Hunk fucked a rabbit? Here’s your answer: that’s nuts, and he strangles Spy-Man! Oh no, wait. Is the word “cross” here referring to making him mad? That would make the rabbit and the rabbit fucking red herrings, and that’d be– hold on, was the “crossing” in the Hunk joke earlier also about the kids pissing him off, or were they still only running towards him because he was a nude monster the same color as traffic lights? Look, guys, I’m sorry. I didn’t know it was going to turn into this.

I’m not comfortable with how often the people in this book finish a joke by saying “I don’t know the punchline!” and strangling the nearest person. This cartoon is something John Byrne’s wife found right before he appeared behind her and asked, “Why are my private things in your hand, dear?”

And she said, “B-because I c-can’t pick them up with my feet?”

“Can’t pick…? Ha. Ha ha ha HAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!“

Mrs. Byrne slipped out quietly. He was getting worse. She didn’t know how much more time she could buy.

And of course, John has hilarious things to say about how hunks roar and the way superheroes are always lifting up shops. Good luck decoding his thoughts on lasers, though:

This is the Mein Kampf of toast cartoons. Look at it. If they spelled your beloved grandmother’s name “Farts Cadaver” in her obituary, you’d say “that reminds me of the worst thing I’ve ever seen in print– the time all that rotten gas burped out of the corpse of John Byrne’s imagination in the form of a laser toa… no, never mind. Let’s just focus on honoring Farts.”

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ozzie Olin, also known as the Flish (like the Flash but part fish) who responded to the question “how are you doing, The Flish?” With “I’ve BREAM better!” This is our longest dedication ever because that’s how far you have to journey to land a John Byrne joke.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Garfield’s Insults, Put-Downs & Slams

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon
Unlock with Patreon
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.