Nerds! Others! Come listen to EpiSSoDDe FiVVe of The Dogg Zzone 9000, the official podcast of the popular jokes n’ fun browser-page, 1900hotdog.com. Seanbaby and Brockway are joined by gentleman bastard, Brendan McGinley, comic expert and author to help explain the insanity, awesomeness, and goddamn stupidity of comic books.
From the Golden Age, Brendan brings us The Puppeteer, a gentle carver of puppets who works as a Puppeteer selling puppets of The Puppeteer, yet he hides a secret– he is actually the crimefighter and falconer known as The Puppeteer!
From the Modern Age, Brockway takes us on a journey through the mind of a tortured, moronic comic writer trying to make sense of his own script as he tackles organized religion using the best tool to do that — a teleporting elf! It’s one of many things inconceivably written by the comic’s disgraced and dumb-as-fuck author, Chuck Austen!
And from the Bronze Age, Seanbaby talks about the greatest story in the history of literature: The Time All the Avengers Died and Had to Fight Each Other and Also Dracula for the Fate of the Universe.
And of course, Dogg Zzone Ffans, Brendan and Brockway face off in the high-stakes world of SeanBBaby’s BOOk GGame. Who can plan the saddest meal for one in their Microwave? Their instincts, along with the recipes of tragic culinary fishwife, Sonia Allison, will decide! They’re doing battle inside MICROWAVE FOR ONE!
In 1982, Pac-Man was so popular one genre of book was “something, fucking anything, about Pac-Man.” This perfectly describes THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. It’s a deconstruction of the entire concept of “something.” This is Plato’s Cave if the shadows on your wall were Pac-Man and everything behind you was Pac-Man. In fact, Plato should have called his stupid allegory “the cave adaptation of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK.”
I talked about this book once before in a Cracked article, but never stopped thinking about it. There is not a single sane page within it– not one coherent riddle or joke. This is a decapitated head trying to add the sounds “pac” and “dot” to words with the last of its escaping brain blood.
This one is only to help ease you into what you can expect in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK. I don’t have a joke about how Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King” changed the name of a different video game to make a vague reference to Pac-Man’s own video game. Or maybe I do? Let me try. It’s sort of like if a Star Trek joke book said Captain Kirk’s favorite movie was Star Wars but they meant a star like you’d see in Star Trek, not the “Star” from the title of Star Wars? No, no, I was right. I don’t have a joke about this.
This is the least fun thing I’ve ever seen from the least functional fun delivery system. It is almost suspiciously exactly what I would put in a Pac-Man riddle and joke book if all I wanted to do was hurt children. We all knew what we were getting into, but try to imagine the disappointment of a bright-eyed 1982 Pac-Man fan. They opened this book for joy and saw the inventor of the pasteurization process, punned three different ways with the same word, illustrated by an artist any physical therapist would call, “My quadruple amputee who draws like he’s also missing a fucking mouth.”
Winni-Pac Canadot? More like “Dot-phisticated word-plac!” What’s it like getting annihilated like this, Canada? This is devastating– a masterclass in the power of satire. No matter our politics or beliefs, every lie we tell ourselves gets laid bare once we see something sacred to us get words from Pac-Man mashed into other words.
Nobody tags a joke like Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King.” Look how he assaults you with his sense of humor. You’re still reeling from “Pac-Pong,” and he adds that, in addition to the pun, you should consider how Pac-Man’s known attributes of eating things and nothing else means he’s bad at the sport name he’s lampooning! There’s not really an industry term for this kind of hilarity combo. It’s the kind of comedy you normally only see when someone says something in Tagalog you can’t understand and then a nurse translates, “The doctor, he say both bullets in your liver. You die here in the Philippines.”
I wasn’t expecting “Pac-Man Goes to the Dentist” to be funny, but I definitely wasn’t expecting the dentist character to immediately reject the joke’s conceit. Why are we here if he doesn’t have teeth? Why would, in a universe where Pac-Men go to the dentist, this not come up until this stage of the dental appointment? This is like saying, “Welcome to the 72nd annual World Fart Championships! I’m Burp Peppers, and thanks for sticking around after the 73rd annual Chili Cook Off!” and having your friend respond, “What? No, I think your name is Frank something and this is an improv show in a bookstore! And it’s not even really that because the guy who screamed ‘fart contest’ is your co-worker! You’re both cops and I’m only here because my parole officer, the fart contest guy, said it would be a bad idea for a convicted child molester to also be an unsupportive friend. So here I am! Do you want me to come up there and, like, make up a song or something?”
Oh, fun; let’s do this one! Number One has got to be Half-“PAC!” And Four is, oh cute! That’s a back-“PAC!” And number 6 is… oh my god. Sperm PAnC? This is a Pac-Man sperm, right? B-but it can’t be from his balls since he’s made of just this one shape, so are you saying Pac-Man himself is one giant testicle? Are you fucking telling me that if Pac-Man turned his gaping mouth toward us, we would see a gnashing swamp of Pac-Man sper– wait. Rat “PAC.” My bad, I see it now. The Rat PAC with, like, I don’t know… Frank Sin-DOT-tra and Sammy BLINKY Junior? PACter Lawford? Dean… Dean Ms.-Pac-Man? Ha ha I can’t do it. It’s why you’re the tops, Mike! The Riddle King, baby!
I think it’s a bad sign when you see an abomination and you think, “Oh, thank God, this creature is part rat, not all sperm.” But these “What Kinds of Pacs Are These?” quizzes continue through the book and only get more perverse and disgusting.
How is Combover Centaur Pac-Man (5) more disturbing than Hairy Gonad Pecked By Bird Pac-Man (3) and Uncircumcised Pac-cid-Man (2). Combover Centaur Pac-Man is not a riddle– it’s a ritual marker for sex druids. It’s the birthmark on a newborn crawling out of a mass horse grave. If a stranger ever handed me this filthy thing…
… I would immediately start fighting for my life. And God help the cursed traveler who finds it on my dead body. My final words to you are these: You have five days to tame The Stallion and his frothing has already begun.
This isn’t all the way “racist,” but it’s as close to the line as I think a Pac-Man riddle book should get.
Here’s the, I guess, official Pac-Man origin? It seems like in 1982 they let writers do whatever the hell they wanted. I’ve written for some big IPs in my career and it’s absurd how many days I spent going back-and-forth with creative directors and their bosses about whether Dolph Ziggler would eat a human heart or if we could make it so Salacious Crumb has three spear-like penises that penetrate anywhere on his lover’s body like a bedbug. Mike just casually adds to Pac-Man’s canon, “he was formed when, I don’t know, a cheesecake came to life and murdered a waitress? suck my ass who gives a shit.”
W-what? So he’s the moon only… only a-also Pac-Man? No. No, I refuse this. As a representative of this Earth, I reject Pac-Moon. I declare whatever -this- is to be the enemy of my people.
Never at any point did Mike Thaler, the author of THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK, think, “Maybe this one doesn’t work.” If a word had any sound close to “dot” or “pac” in it, it went in. If a word had a “d” or a “p” that was fine too. No thought was given to whether something was funny or clever or appropriate for children. If Mike would have walked past a holocaust museum during the writing of this book, he would haverushed home repeating, “DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, DOTschwitz, don’t forge– is that a new Pizza Hut? Oh my god, more like Pizza DOT! Don’t forget, Pizza DOT, Pizza DOT…”
I’m sort of being serious. The way Mike handles sensitive subjects with zero context and a childlike understanding of puns is grotesque. It’s like he’s trying to show his wild side in a Marmaduke fan letter. For instance, say someone was famously kidnapped and, after a series of sex crimes, forced to commit armed robbery. What’s the clumsiest way you could handle that with a Pac-Man pun? Oh, that’s an insane thing to try? An unthinkable thing no one would ever do?
Boom. This is why Mike Thaler is “America’s Riddle King” and we’re not. You and I think things like, “What a terrible loss it is when a child dies.” Mike Thaler thinks things like, “PAC-iatric cancer? Whooping DOT? Crib DOTh? There it is. Crib DOTh.”
Here’s a fun look behind-the-scenes of a 1-900-HOTDOG article. That joke is the end result of several minutes of wedging Pac-Man puns into tragic childhood ailments. I was all… “DOT-arrhea, small PACs, PAC-io, unDOTagnosed DOT-ism,” and when I stopped at “crib DOTh” I thought, “Jesus, I’ll definitely come back and soften that. I’m not sure a Pac-Man joke book warrants crib DOTh.” But then I got to this page in THE PAC-MAN RIDDLE AND JOKE BOOK where Mike actually published three of my less funny childhood DOT-sease ideas, and then repeated one of them.
So whether you agree with my criticism or not, here is very literally what happened: I tried to think of a joke the laziest, most humorless, pun-loving piece of shit would write about sick children. That was the task I gave myself. And the author of this book, Mike Thaler “America’s Riddle King,” published, word-for-word, three of the things in my maybe pile. So he’s not the worst writer I can imagine– he’s the deleted drafts rejected by that worst writer. And I’m truly humbled he went beyond my wildest imaginations by writing “Chicken Pacs” a second time, separated only by “Small Pacs.” It’s breathtaking. Beyond any wonder I’ve ever seen.
Psssst, children! Children, do you like riddles? You do? Oh, good! Grand!! Wonderful!!! Listen closely now: What. Pac-Man. Was a famous… murderer. Ha ha ha ha ha haaaa!!!
What? No, not Jeffrey Dot-mer, but that would have been good. No, not the Zodi-“Pac” Killer. No, I don’t mean A-“Dot” Hitler. O-or “Pac”mann Göring. Okay, stop, it’s not any of the Nazis, okay? Oh, it’s not Charles Pac-Manson but that’s better. Who’s Coral Eugene “Dots?” No, it’s not “Pac” Kevorkian eith– holy fuck what is wrong with you kids?
As you can see, most of the book is Mike performing the minimum amount of wordplay to legally count as a pun, but he eventually launches into a stream-of-consciousness story about what would happen if Pac-Man escaped his arcade cabinet. This could be interesting, right? Pac-Man is an immortal being of infinite hunger with no remorse or understanding let loose in a world of a silly writer’s imagination! Anyway, I’m not a psychologist, but from among the limitless possibilities available to Mike, the first activity his author surrogate selects is, “SNEAK UP ON A FAT WOMAN AND EAT THE CLOTHES OFF HER.”
It keeps going with Pac-Man eating a kid’s yo-yo, a leopard’s spots, a clown’s nose… if it’s roundish, Pac-Man takes it from you with no remorse or understanding. Each event is completely without whimsy. Did Mike Thaler ask a kindergarten class to name things that look like dots and think, “These fools are writing my entire book for me!” Is it a cautionary tale of what will happen when we unleash artificial intelligence? Is it the pornography of a man with a dotless fetish? Because it is not fucking anything close to riddles and jokes.
It is a relentlessly pointless series of events until Pac-Man eats a fruit stand. The cops had nothing to charge Pac-Man with when he was harassing animals and women, but they absolutely went after him once he started harming fruit. Pac-Man evades justice because he apparently brought arcade escape tunnels with him into this world, a terrifying hint at how the breach between our realities could have more serious ramifications than simple clown mutilation. And sure enough, the story ends the only way it ever could: an unstoppable Pac-Man heading straight for our delicious sun with no remorse or understanding. Have a nice “DOT,” I guess!
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Timmy Leahy: The PACster of his DOTmain whose PACking a huge DOT.
Ultimate Tag is a real show that I did not make up no matter how many times I fact check this sentence. Nope, still real. Are you sure? Yeah, holy shit. This is the world, everybody. We’ve reached stupid critical mass here and any further stupid will have to happen in space.
I know talented artists that have struggled their whole lives to land a show on TV. They practice and study, refine and revise and kill themselves perfecting their craft, sure that one day they’ll be good enough for the bigtime. But that’s not how TV works. That’s not how anything works. Everything in this garbage society works like this:
RICH ASSHOLE: We need a new show. It literally doesn’t matter what it is. Pick a thing.
RICH DIPSHIT: What about children’s games? We do them but with huge children.
RICH ASSHOLE: Adults?
RICH DIPSHIT: Yeah, those.
RICH ASSHOLE: Sounds good, do you want to kill a sex worker and blame a minority?
RICH DIPSHIT: Always!
Anyway this semen in the eyeball of quality is hosted by J.J. Watt and several lower Watts who, as I understand it, are football.
Yeah, those are the hosts this show deserves. J.J. Watt’s brothers look like they’re two different species on the timeline of animals that evolved into J.J. Watt. I’m sure somebody’s going to jump in here and tell me they all give huge kidneys to war orphans, but they look like somebody trying to draw Tom Brady from memory and they speak every sentence like it’s a word puzzle.
Everything you need to know about Ultimate Tag’s atmosphere can be described by their theme song. It’s a little number called Ladies and Gentlemen by a band named Saliva, which critics once described as “painfully unnecessary.” That’s the only appropriate anthem for Ultimate Tag, which seems to less pay homage to the ‘90s than to wildly misunderstand what was charming about them in the first place.
The actual game of Ultimate Tag is exactly what it sounds like: It’s tag reimagined by Mountain Dew. There are special courses and alternate rules but it’s important to remember that, at its core, Ultimate Tag is wussier than normal tag because you’re not allowed to touch each other. You pull flags. Flag tag is the pillow humping of playground games. It’s the game you play when your PE teacher can’t afford another ‘incident’ on his watch. Flag tag is the version the mitten-mandatory kids do at the James Buchanan School For Sexually Bizarre Children.
That got a TV show!
Ultimate Tag courses are mostly just repainted Double Dare sets full of extremely minor obstacles for aspiring Influencers to stumble over. Sometimes they branch out and do some pretty crazy setpieces that still manage to be boring, but in the air.
Ultimate Tag was an idea so bad it wouldn’t fly as a MadTV skit, and it was executed worse than Muammar Gaddafi, a Baltimore traffic stop, or a MadTV skit. Ultimate Tag sucks… but what we’re really here to do is make fun of the Ultimate Taggers.
Yes! They rolled up some American Gladiator characters! To play tag! Holy shit, what a gift for me. Thank you, Ultimate Tag! I take back none of the things I said about you, but thank you for doing my absolute favorite two things in the world: Trusting professional athletes with a creative task, and wildly overestimating the enduring legacy of American Gladiators.
Let’s meet a few of the pro taggers!
This is Horse:
He kind of looks like you accidentally threw away Kit Harington but managed to find him again at the dump, and his persona is that he’s very angry… like a horse? His catchphrase is “you ain’t never gonna put the horse down” which is just patently untrue. They’re like the easiest animal to put down. Half of all animal deaths in pop culture are horses with broken legs. We put horses down if they look like they have a headache. Horses die just to prove cowboys have emotions. We kill horses for emphasis. They’re like the underline of the animal world.
Here’s Flame:
Her whole deal is that she’s a martial arts and weapons expert, neither of which she is even close to allowed to use in this — again — extremely gentle game of flag tag. She acts like a cold and calculated killer, and then they let her loose to do what she does best… which is jogging around a Burbank soundstage for twenty seconds while looking mildly annoyed.
This is Viking:
He seems most committed to his character, which consists mostly of him improvising incorrect facts about viking villages. “In my village,” he roars, “the boys would… you would tend to chickens!” This claim is met with general confusion. “In my village,” he roars again, “we used… wooden swords! We slapped each other with wooden swords!” The vibe is confused, anxious. “Vikings lived in villages!” He roars thricely, “I looked that up!”
This is Beach Boy:
Whose entire persona is “shorts.” He’s happy, none too bright, and you could probably fuck him in South Padre and not worry that he’ll get all clingy and try to start a long distance thing when you head back to Oklahoma. He will giggle at the “homa” part though. Every time.
Meet La Flair:
The mandatory dickwad who used his own real name as his alter ego. Fuck you, you placeholder of a man. You cardboard cutout audience member. I’d say you’re like mayonnaise but sometimes people notice the absence of mayonnaise. You’re the paladin of Ultimate Tag.
Here’s the Iron Giantess:
Her whole deal is that she’s huge and strong but — again — she’s not allowed to use either of those things in this, a game of tag for children who need safety scissors. In fact, both of those traits are significant disadvantages in a game whose only defining attributes are speed and agility. I think the idea was to have her be like what Andre the Giant was to wrestling, but instead she’s like what Andre the Giant was to heart medicine.
It’s The Caveman!
Hahaha, fantastic. I guess his persona is that he’s been unfrozen into modern society and then thrust into the game of Ultimate Tag? That’s a terrible use for an unfrozen caveman! Bring him to the mall and laugh at his antics. Bring him to the airport and watch him freak out about godbirds. Fuckin’ bring him to high school so he can make you popular — you only get one, maybe two unfrozen cavemen in your life. Don’t burn one on Ultimate Tag.
Now it’s time for Banshee:
She’s the show’s wild card, which mostly consists of her making crazy eyes and embarrassing screeches. Banshee claims to lure men in with her beauty and sweet song only to lead them to disaster, which you might recognize as actually a siren. Listen, some people run good and some people read good. It’s true that some people do both, but if you agree to be on the show Ultimate Tag, it’s safest to assume you’re not one of them and just ask for help with your homework.
And lastly, we meet Geek:
He thought Napoleon Dynamite was really funny, and so did everybody else for like four months. That was the last time he understood society. When they asked him to make up a tag persona, he didn’t have an idea, but he did have an old Halloween costume and a desire to belong again.
Anyway, don’t watch Ultimate Tag. There are like three funny minutes in each episode where they force athletes to do improv, and the rest is just watching Crossfit enthusiasts do some light jogging and deal with mild frustration.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Nick Ralston: whose tag persona is Man With Gun and has never been tagged.
Sometimes cross-promotions are successful, like when the Target Dog fought and ultimately killed the Taco Bell Chihuahua. Of course, today, we’re not going to talk about the most beloved dog murder in modern history. We’re talking about a period during the early 90’s console wars when Sega was so horny for synergy they got in bed with a hotel chain who willingly abbreviated their name to HoJo, which sounds like slang for something teenagers do to each other in the back row of movie theaters.
The branded Sega tip videos, which severely missed an opportunity to call themselves Just The Tips, started in 1993. Sega provided Howard Johnson hotels with Sega Game Gear portable consoles, Sega’s version of the Gameboy, and a library of games for kids to play. If they wanted, they could also request the Sega Game Gear tips video, a film fifteen minutes long, and written by someone who clearly hated children.
Watching this video feels like dying. This is something that your brain does to inform your body that something has gone horribly wrong. The premise of the video is a lie in every way. The only “tips” it’s able to choke out are that video games exist, and you can play them while staying at a Howard Johnson hotel. It delivers this information to you through a close up of a man’s face screaming at you while strobe lights flicker.
It feels very threatening, like watching the video has summoned this dude, and if you don’t purchase Sonic Triple Trouble within seven days, he’s coming for you.
The video’s plot is that a lame adult hotel guest is being haunted by a zany long-haired Howard Johnson employee who poses as a waiter, lifeguard, and bellhop to yell at him about Sega games whenever he needs something. It’s positioned as a Twilight Zone-esque nightmare that the SAME MAN has MULTIPLE JOBS, which in the 90’s was spoooOOoooOOOky but now is just called being a millennial.
The strangest moment in this video is when the hotel guest walks in on a housemaid cleaning his room, and the camera closes up on the maid’s butt. Of course, it is not really a pretty lady at all but the same man who has been torturing the hotel guest with his fantastic video game tips all day.
Realizing his mistake, the hotel guest passes out, I’m assuming from the immense rush of blood to his boner after discovering his extremely specific lifelong fetish of having a man in a maid uniform read him a Howard Johnson commercial.
The Howard Johnson promotion went so well there is a sequel to Sega game Tips volume 1, Sega Game Tips Volume 2, which is just the exact same movie with updated “tips.” So, instead of watching a man being driven to madness by a lunatic screaming at him about the Aladdin game, it’s the same thing with The Lion King game instead.
Again, this video is fifteen minutes long, and most of that is one screen showing different video game tips. The amount of text on the back of the box has got to be just about as long as the script, and I know if I call 1-800-I-GO-HOJO I’m getting charged a dollar a minute to have a man in a maid outfit seductively whisper a Howard Johnson commercial to me, and actually, you know what that does sound kind of hot.
Once Howard Johnson was ready to move on, Sega’s wandering eye turned to Post Cereals as a vehicle for delivering their tips. They even reused the hotel employee from the HoJo videos! Jesus, that sounds so dirty, I grew a pencil-thin mustache while writing it.
This time the employee even gets a name! It’s Michael B! I assume with each video they’ll keep giving us information about Michael until the David S. Pumpkins bit they’re doing with him really starts to pay off. I Googled him relentlessly to find out if he’s some kind of professional wrestler who got lost and wandered onto the set, or a talk show host from the 90’s I was unaware of, but as far as I can tell, Michael B. is just Michael B., a regular dude who likes screaming in people’s faces about Sonic the Hedgehog. The strobe lights are…part of it?
The Post Sega game tips video, which was available by sending proof of purchase to Post, features Michael in his kitchen of the future. That means the kitchen has a computer and two TV’s in it, which is not futuristic so much as it is a bad idea. Don’t put all of your electronics in one of the two rooms of your house with the most water.
There’s a lot of aggression toward Michael B. in this video. It’s almost like they rehired the actor but didn’t really want to, so instead of being the impish character who tortures the lame adult, here Michael is tackled by a football player from NFL 95 and blown up by the Sugar Crisp mascot.
Once again, the game tips are all like, don’t forget in Ecco The Dolphin, you need to come up for air, which is just a basic mechanic of the game and not at all a tip. The Ecco The Dolphin section also ends by flashing this quote, which sounds like it came from the day Sun Tzu was really phoning it in.
The third and final entry in the Sega Tips trilogy sees Michael B. replaced by a younger, nameless actor. I like to imagine that he became a real diva behind the scenes and started demanding that they give him a live Sonic The Hedgehog to finish the trilogy.
Lunchables goes a little more meta with their Sega game tips video, showing a kid we’ll call Michael C. going to watch his Oscar Mayer Lunchables Lunch Combinations Games Tips Video. (Video title by George RR Martin).
Michael C. is sucked into the TV by the tape and then enters an Oscar Mayer vault and gets into a Sega branded roller coaster, which shoots him down a tunnel. Following in the video’s grand tradition of doing something weird and vaguely sexual, the roller coaster pauses in front of a group of brown pulsating udders which Michael C. touches and then licks his hand, as any normal person would do when presented with a pulsating alien object.
What does this have to with Lunchables? God, nothing I hope.
Eventually, the roller coaster stops at a sign that says Next Level, and Michael C. finds an Oscar Mayer brand TV that, once turned on, plays for the rest of the video. Hey, this time, at least the tips are actually tips! Like, real cheat codes, and advice for finding hidden stuff in levels!
It took them three videos, two hosts, and several upsetting skits, but they finally figured out what an actual game tip is! I never thought I’d be proud of Lunchables, but here we are.
The video ends with Michael C. safely waking up in bed, finding that the whole thing was a spooky dream, which I hoped would happen to me after watching all three of these movies. Still waiting.
You can try and wake Lydia from her living nightmare on Twitter!
…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Jamie Gordon: Who has always instinctively known to use his sonar songs to get clues from glyphs, and never needed to be told.
Malibu was a slipshod comic imprint that could have only existed in the gimme-gimme-glut of ‘90s comics. Malibu’s entire business model was “mom knows you’re sick so she picks up comics and you appreciate the gesture too much to tell her to fuck herself for buying The Ferret.” And yet, because there is no justice in this world, Malibu did get a TV show out of the deal. That show was Night Man — Batman for people who did not understand what was cool about Batman.
Here’s a real quick breakdown explaining everything you need to know about Night Man:
His name is Johnny Domino and he’s a saxophone player, two things that would definitely get you fucked in the ‘90s and then never, ever again.
He was struck by a lightning bolt while playing saxophone on a cable car and obviously he deserved it. That let him tune into — no shit, the show’s words — “evil radio.” Now he can sense evil, but that’s such a worthless power he also stole a suit that can do anything.
Here he is kicking a guy off of a motorcycle and into an explosion.
Now, it’s not everyday you’ll hear me say that a costumed man kicking a guy off of a motorcycle and into an explosion is not awesome, but that’s because I don’t watch Night Man every day.
Instead of a Batmobile, Night Man drives a Plymouth Prowler.
A crude drawing of a Plymouth Prowler is how you say ‘erectile dysfunction’ in hieroglyphics.
Basically Night Man sucks and everyone knows it except for Night Man, and he will never listen no matter how urgent or well-reasoned your arguments are. The whole show is a manifesto about why we must never allow the ‘90s to happen again, but I want to focus in on one episode. The rollerblade episode. You know: The one where Night Man fights a gang of super rollerbladers who have rockets on their skates.
This is because every ‘90s show was required to have a rollerblade episode, and they all drew the same conclusion: Rollerblades are definitely the coolest, but they can only be used for evil.
From Prayer of the Rollerboys to Hackers, pop culture loved to depict rollerblades as, at best, the tools of misunderstood criminals. This particular shot of dangerous teens rollerblading in formation was everywhere:
Hollywood genuinely thought that shot was terrifying. They thought you’d turn and flee if you saw that on the street, rather than gently inquire if they were training to display the pride flag in a synchronized sucking competition.
It was a crazy thing to do – depict this slightly novel method of conveyance as inherently evil, or at least bursting with the potential to be. Pop culture saw the very first pair of rollerblades and immediately thought “how will this affect the world of crime?” That didn’t happen with anything else: There was no wave of segway movies where roving gangs used them to encircle frightened seniors. There was no flurry of hoverboard villains immediately cracking their skulls open and ending the film on a downnote. But somehow the three primary fears of every old person in the 1990s were: Brightly colored gangs, carjacking, and different ways to make rollerskates.
This, then, was supposed to be horror:
It was bold of them to cast a young black man in the role of ‘racist old white woman.’ Right down to-
And all this because the gang really wanted his… Jeep Grand Cherokee?
Nobody wants a Jeep Grand Cherokee. It’s the least stolen car, right behind active-duty police vehicles and the Power Wheels Jeep Grand Cherokee. Kelley Blue Book lists the average retail price of a Jeep Grand Cherokee as “[heavy sigh] yeah I guess I’ll take $200 and a dog for it.” That’s depending on condition. If the paint’s faded, you won’t even get the dog.
Anyway, that driver was Johnny Domino’s best friend because — as I mentioned — Johnny Domino sucks and takes what he can get. He’s on the case of the stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee when I’ve already solved it – they used it to drive to a better car and then stole that. They left it in an Arby’s parking lot because it blends in.
Johnny’s keen detective skills take him to… the first rollerblading shop he sees. He basically just asks the clerk if he solved the case:
But no. No is the answer.
Luckily the nerd friend uses computers, because no plot advanced in the ‘90s without somebody saying “the computer!” After computering it, the nerd sees an old coworker’s name crop up.
Man, I do not know what to tell you If you blow all your cash on rollerblade contests. That is a firm commitment to not surviving the ‘90s. If you met a person who sucked dick to buy Slap Bracelets from KB Toys, they would use the brief respite between cocks to question the longevity of your investment plan.
Anyway, that’s why Night Man has to enter a rollerblading competition. Here’s the teenager that signs him up for the contest, and the actual dialogue that stayed in the script despite desperate margin notes that read, “please change this, I have been beaten up by every teenager I have ever met for asking if the word ‘cool’ is a sex thing, and even I can tell you this is not how teens talk.”
Johnny Domino of course gets his only friend — the one who still flinches when Johnny refers to them as “the Best Pals Club” – to rig up a Good Rollerblading device.
And yep, you guessed it: The sign-up kid — the one who talks like surfers making fun of the way old people impersonate surfers — turns out to be the villain. So no, the very first rollerblader Johnny Domino ever met did not turn out to be evil. But the second one did.
Here we see the gang with no name, so I’m going to call them The Rollerbuds, using their elite technology and futuristic weapons to….
Rob one of those chintzy crystal stores in the mall. The ones that sell like, jumping dolphins and pegasus statues to ten-year-old girls.
They actually steal the pegasus statue! It is worth eight dollars! And only because that’s what Stephanie will pay for it!
Here’s the villain, whose name I forget so I’m just going to call him Billy Bitch-Storm, badly lying to the new recruit in his teen gang — 37-year-old Johnny Domino — about how fast they are:
We see many shots of these rollerbladers going all out. It’s like half the episode. It should be noted that even with altered footage, their top speed seems to be about twenty miles an hour — a speed easily achieved with just normal rollerblades. Their main adversaries are any car or bicycle. Their only weakness is moving aside suddenly so they run into a stationary object.
I’m not joking. That’s how Night Man defeats the villains of this entire hour-long episode.
Only Billy Bitch-Storm remains, and now the writers found themselves penning a tense standoff between a guy they’ve established is bulletproof, superpowered, flies, and fires lasers… and a guy with skates that are up to 20% faster than normal skates. I really have to give Night Man credit here. The fight goes exactly how you’d expect.
And so ends the episode, wherein Night Man proved that at least half of all rollerbladers are evil, rollerblading is so super easy that even the olds can do it, and anyone can beat up a rollerblader. In short: Perfect accuracy.
Many years ago, I put a thing on the Internet called “Seanbaby’s NES Page” which featured a section called “Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess.” It was about weird letters fans wrote to Nintendo Power magazine which they somehow chose to print. And here’s something fun: That’s what we’re doing today!
Before we start, I want to update you on the main character from the original. You might remember Mark Discordia, a Connecticut plumber who loved Mario so much he asked people to give him the nickname “Mario!” He wrote in to brag about his Milon’s Secret Castle score and to say how he encouraged local children to be the best at video games by staying drug-free!
I ridiculed Mark, which anyone familiar with the word ridiculous would agree: was fair. But Mark did not have a sense of humor about my bullying, so he sent me a series of hate mails. The main theme of them was that he was wealthy, a frequent drug user, and just crushing ass, so in fact, he was the bully in the situation. I guess I can’t prove he was lying, but he told Nintendo Power about a Mario shirt he made, wasn’t handsome or smart, had a violently short temper, and spent his days unclogging toilets and volunteering as a video game coach for children that weren’t his. For him to take the angle of “You nerd, I fuck more than you,” is like a man biting into a dead rat and challenging anyone to bake a more, aiiieeeee, a more delicious pie.
For the record, ladies, I confidently rate the legacy of my sexual conquests somewhere above the winner of “New England’s Least Desirable Middle-Aged Mario Cosplayer (Plumber and Under Division).” Anyway, as time passed, me-readers emailed Mark to offer kind words or to ask for Mario tips, and he responded to all of them. He sent back deranged insults which, over the course of many different people, turned into death threats which turned into accusations of sexual abuse. Eventually he settled on a story about me getting arrested for an underage girlfriend in Seattle, a thing that didn’t happen in a state where I didn’t live, but it’s hard to be sure since the details were half-formed and spread across emails to all these different people. So my point is, if it looks like everyone who writes in to Nintendo Power is psychologically troubled, that’s because they absolutely are and I have proof. Let’s get started!
At first glance you might think, “Is this what it was like to live in the late ’90s?” No, for most of us, it was not anything like this. This is really stupid. This is the opening line about a movie where a warpdrive sends a ship into a dimension made entirely out of stupid. This is a letter you would write to a parole board to prove to the state you can’t be held responsible for marrying a horse. This guy wrote a letter to a magazine hoping it would get selected for their reader mail section months later so he could get an opinion on the difference between two websites, one of which was free to the world while the other was available on a service whose free trial was included with the purchase of literally any product at any retail location. This is like putting “Should I try the new gordita crunch?” in a bottle and throwing it into the ocean.
Think how lonely Edward must have been. He didn’t have a single person in his life he could ask to look up “Nintendo” on America Online? That means all four of his grandparents were dead. It means every single one of his classmates said, “I already told you to get out of my life forever, Edward.” And when this Nintendo magazine, the closest thing he had to a friend, finally responded to him, they said, and I quote, “NOAGeoff, our online honcho says: ‘We’ve recently revamped and jazzed up our Web site… Zip to WWW.NINTENDO.COM!'” So after all this waiting, hoping against hope his question would get noticed, this piece of shit asking a simple question about the Internet gets told to go check the goddamn Internet. This is the tragic legacy of Edward LaRusic, Nintendo Power reader.
Mike Gallagher isn’t here to ask questions– he’s here to give warnings, and he only has one: don’t poke random “unlicensed products” into your Super Nintendo! Warning! Warning! Warning! Not everything inside your electronics is meant to be poked by “unlicensed products!” Warning! Warning! Do not have sex with the Official Super NES-brand Game Pak entertainment port! Warning! My used (VG+) Nintendo game system is broken, dripping! Gooey! Warning, this is less important, but I’ve damaged my mint-in-box penis as well! Warning!
One of the best things about the Nintendo Power letters section is when they checked in with the winners of their weird contests. They would send kids on fantasy dates with celebrities with a high potential for disinterest like golfers or NASCAR drivers. In this one, they sent three children on a Hudson Hawk scavenger hunt, based on the rated-R action comedy of 1991 starring Bruce Willis and Danny Aiello!
Some movie characters endure forever. We all remember how Indiana Jones hates snakes, how James Bond can never turn down pussy, and of course, how Hudson Hawk is always looking for a cappuccino! “Hey! Where can we get a cappuccino?” says Nintendo Power, referencing our collective love of Hudson Hawk always wanting his favorite drink! Terrific!
▲ “Who’s Handsome Hawk?” asked contest winner, Ross Moskowitz, as he walked right past the first clue in his once-in-a-lifetime Grand Prize Hudson Hawk’s Da Vinci’s Lost Treasure Scavenger Hunt Adventure.
◀ “Why would anyone do this?” asked contest-winning Ross’ father, who told Nintendo Power he had to use three unpaid sick days to fly out for this amazing experience. He raved, “You’re telling me with all that Segasonic Hodgemonster money I’m payin’ for, you couldn’t afford the licensing fee for something more kid-friendly like Barbra Streisand’s Prince of Tides? Maybe they don’t cover this in video game magazine school, but you can’t feed fuckin’ kids cappuccino! I’ve never seen the boy this bored with anything and he was once accompanied by me to a screening of Hudson Hawk.”
▶ In the end, the lucky team didn’t manage to solve the mystery or decipher a single clue about Da Vinci’s lost treasure! Better luck next time, contest winner Ross Moskowitz! Hope you at least managed to get that trademark cappuccino!
I actually worked in video game media for many years, so I can say with some expertise that printing a picture of a young child holding up a magazine by a wall of human remains with the expression of a hostage’s proof-of-life is fucking crazy. I’ve also read enough issues of Nintendo Power to know their response of “We’d much rather see piles of creepy bones than the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre or something really ho-hum like that,” is a very specific FUCK YOU to young Raymond Camarillo from San Jose, California who mailed them this photo:
▲ Nice skeletons, Raymond. Oh, there aren’t any? That’s why you look like a little asshole.
– Nintendo Power
Another theme of Nintendo Power contests is having celebrities come to your home and try out mediocre games their agent sold their likeness to. And if there is a way to make sports stars look like they’re having fun getting their ass kicked at SNES games by a teenager, Nintendo Power never found it. Charles Barkley looks like he’s suffering through a Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt safety orientation. He looks like he’s saying, “Good game, Mamp. But jokes on you, Monty, because I bet your mama $18,000 you would beat me. Ha ha. I’m not playin’, Melt. Go get your mama’s checkbook, or some people gonna come in here and break both our legs.”
From the darkness came a cough followed by a wretched, pathetic voice. “Please… give me free underpants, I have included a drawing of them.” Seriously, Nintendo Power, what the hell are you doing? You can choose not to print some of these. The section editor didn’t even bother to respond to it. They just let this weird idiot in West Virginia’s request for free boxer shorts fall there without comment like the leader of a tour group calling out, “I don’t need to tell anyone here what awaits us at the end of our Officially Licensed Hudson Hawk Scavenger Hunt…
…
…
…
…
… that’s right! A… cappuccino!”
Nintendo Power often called for Top 10 Lists, but not about anything specific. It was only the format that was important to them, and they had no editorial standards when it came to publishing them. Deranged, neglected children from around the country would mash together vaguely video game-related words and Nintendo Power proudly shared them all. Was the theme of your Top 10 list just “crime?” Okay, Karl Warsop of Gastonia, North Carolina. Was one of the “jokes” in its entirety just the name “Secret of Mana” except “Secret of Murder?” Fine. Did it open with a parody title referencing the World Trade Center bombing? Jesus fucking Christ, Karl.
This is a magazine about the whimsical and exciting world of Nintendo games and they printed this brain vomit from a future serial killer. If you handed this “Top 10 Crime Games” list to the creative director of a Laffy Taffy knockoff for death row inmates, he would say, “It’s a no. This is actually the kind of lazy shit we’re trying to get away from here at Bitchkiller Sour Chews.”
Ugh, Debby, this is worse than the kid listing felonies next to partial video game titles. Did “Someone took it” make the Nintendo Power editors laugh, or were they only trying to finally give a voice to Surinamese children writing jokes about stealing from Blockbuster Video?
10. My machete says Best of the Best: Championship Karate is now mine, coward.
9. Eat this shit instead. My life of hardship does not reward honesty or kindness.
8. Outer space aliens took it!
7. Bouterse’s soldiers are here in my home.
6. They are asking questions for which I have no answers.
5. They do not believe m
4.
3.
2.
1.
Is there a single coherent play on words in any of these? Hey, Ben Salinas from McAllen, Texas, did you learn English from the inside of a Hong Kong shipping container? You write Top 10 lists like the copy on an OK Fun-System Supergame 2000 (19.99 $USD). “16 bits of quality! It is not Sega!” You should be ashamed of yourself.
And look at what you’ve done, Joel Self from California. These aren’t “parodies.” This is nonsense. Did you really fucking write down, “Porthole Kombat: Adventures on the High Seas” and send it to Nintendo Power? I spit on the inbred Santa Clara bloodline that spawned you. I wouldn’t write that cursed series of words on the grave of someone named Porthole Kombat who died feeding flood-displaced refugees with his non-profit, Adventures on the High Seas, Inc.
I think I need to move on to letters with a happier tone than these miserable Top 10 lists Nintendo Power used to fill space between maniacs posing with human remains or asking for free underwear.
No, that’s not what I was thinking. At all. But speaking of AWESOME TWOSOME, this article is one! Come back this Upsetting Day for Part II of Dear Nintendo, My Life is a Goddamn Mess!
…
This article is brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Mike Stiles, who only writes to Nintendo the normal way: Erotically.
