Category: NERDING DAY

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NERDING DAY

Jokes For Minecrafters 🌭

What is comedy? Is there a learnable architecture to making others laugh? Yes, of course. Comedy is one thing to all people: elements of the game Minecraft scattered without reason among the last words of a dementia patient. It’s JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS.

Michele C, Jordan P, and Steven M Hollow are the three human names given by the swarm of malfunctioning nanobots who spent 172 pages moving letters around without ever accidentally making a joke. There’s no failure condition for a book like this and yet here we are discussing the Hollow Family’s failure. Jokes for Minecrafters is a humorless cough into the mouth of a baby promised ice cream. It is so perfectly nothing more than the grift of talentless hacks hoping to trick uninvolved grandparents into buying a birthday gift for their little Mind-Raft(?) fan. You’re either an idiot or you already knew all of this the moment you heard JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS existed, but it’s so much worse than it has any right to be.

Courageous hotdoggers, let’s look at some of these joooooookes!

Well, sure. He touched lava in a video game. Or touched lava outside a video game. You know we know lava kills you when you touch it, right? You look stupid as shit acting like anyone will be surprised the guy covered in lava got destroyed. A real joke might have been “What do you call a guy covered in lava? Toast! A hearse! I’m not sure, but he’ll never synchronize swim again! Dead Trevor! A volcano getting to second base! Dead Carlos! Hawaiian barbecue! Anything you want; no one will ever know what happened here!” I mean, I’m an internationally recognized genius, but that took me 20 seconds. You’re three entire people, Hollow family. Have some fucking dignity.

This is a small note for something that deserves a full tear-down, but I don’t really think it’s fair to your riddle receiver to give melted rock intent. And nice word choice. “Numerous?” I thought this was a joke book. You sound like a fucking nerd. You could have said buttload. Or tittyload. Can you imagine if you asked the reader “What starts a tittyload of forest fires?” They’d say, “Smokey the Bear’s wife and oh my god, that’s how he always knows where to be.”

Hollow Family, that bullshit you wrote (Lava!) is just sort of an obvious, sensible answer to a deranged question. And no one would bother guessing it because jokes are supposed to have at least some element of irony or surprise. Maybe you’d know this if you’d ever tried writing one bef– hold on, wait. This is at least the 278th joke you assholes have written. How do you not know this? If I was watching the 19th season of a hospital drama, I wouldn’t expect one of the doctors to say, “My job is called a librarian because I steal hamburgers! Welcome to our: the place where grandma died!”

Boy, I tell ya, I feel like I’m looking at a foot in the game Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting after Player One has selected “Chun Li” and used her “Kikoken special move” but Player Two is “Dhalsim with alternate costume” and they stayed very far back and did a “standing FORWARD attack,” because this video game pun is a real streeeeeetch.

Okay, this has the potential for cleverness. I’ll just keep reading, and see where they go wi– oh, there’s no punchline? That’s the whole goddamn thing!? Hollow family, “synchronized swimming” just means people are doing the same water dance at the same time, so no, the others wouldn’t drown. Unless you think they would break their carefully planned routine, ignore the signs of their friend drowning as experienced swimmers, and finally try to copy his movements in real time? Then sure, they would also die. But I think it’s asking a lot of your audience to imagine such a chain of unlikely events.

I feel like the survivors would probably stop their swimming and mourn the loss of their fellow athlete. Is that the joke? The absurdity of death in a joke book during an improvised sport inside a video game? Is the joke picturing a fake computer trying to generate grief three layers of abstraction away from what we know as “real?” That, on a fucking cosmic level, might be the most opposite of a joke that has ever been attempted.

What an inelegant pun. Like virtually any other choice would be better than blurting “I lava you,” while she, what, burns alive? Is destroyed!? And is the illustration showing her calmly existing waist deep in the lava… do you think that helps the shitty, lazy pun land or does it create an entire new element of confusion? Hollow Family, do you see the thought I’m putting into this? This is the kind of effort a professional puts into throwing little girls into lava. You unfunny cows gave up trying after your brilliant idea to fleece 9-year-old Minecraft fans out of $7.99. If I met a kidnapping cartel and the publishers of JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS at a party I’d say, “You guys have already met, right? I figured you would have run into each other during your vile exploitation of children. You fucks. You equally loathsome fucks.”

So you’ve stopped trying entirely, Hollow Family. You simply rested your hands on the keyboard and let your minimal understanding of language, science, and video games flow into vaguely sentence-like word arrangements. And this “joke” is the dim echo of what only the most generous observer would call a mind.

First Hollow Family Member: “Selfie sticks are lightening rods aaaaaand done with another one! Jokes are when one person says something after another person does, right?”

Second Hollow Family Member: “Frog lawyers when you think about it, cowboy pancakes! Aiieeeee!!!!“

Third Hollow Family Member: “Lava! Lava! Lava! Lava! AIIEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!“

Q: Is there anything you can say to prove you’re mentally incompetent to stand trial?

A: If there was a national anthem for Minecraft, what would it be? “I Will Survive!”

So he starved to death like your setup very pointedly led us to believe would happen? Or are you referencing something else? Is “didn’t end well for him” wordplay because there was a well in the cave and he died in it? If that’s the case, and honestly it’s the only thing that would make this anything other than a joyless statement about someone’s death, you forgot to include that part. This isn’t a joke or a riddle or an anything. At best, it’s coy hints on how to play Minecraft delivered to an audience for whom rabid enthusiasm for Minecraft is taken for granted. It’s like finding Michele C. Hollow on Twitter and saying, “Did you hear about the joke with no punchline? It was disappointing!“

She knows! She has to watch the flowers around her die every time she reads one of these to a child!

The lights of St. Neri’s orphan hospital flicker. The last toe falls off the rotting foot of its last boy. Father Opus Hallahan, like he does every night, watches helplessly. Through the pain the child asks, “Father, d-did the Hollow family write another Minecraft joke?”

“Aye, they did. But you’re not one of the dead yet, lad. Rest.” He knows the boy will need to be finished with a silver blade, but he hasn’t turned yet.

Half a world away, Steven M. Hollow dumbly shouts with his stupid fucking mouth, “How’s this one sound, gang: ‘Did you hear about the player who trapped himself? What a noob?’ Guys? Oh, they must be watching blood spurt from the pustules of the damned. I’ll hit save and call it a night!”

Q: Great joke?

A: Great joke!

Sure, that seems reasonable. You know, it’s actually a pretty common joke structure to set up an expectation of absurdity and defy that expectation with banality. If ten of your riddles ended in puns and wordplay and then one ended in childlike bluntness, fine. You’ve technically humor-ed. But if every single joke in your entire joke book is the simplest, most obvious answer to a question, you haven’t made jokes. You’ve transcribed the life of a dull child falling behind his peers in cognitive development. Again, every page of this book is almost specifically the opposite of joy.

I try to imagine three people brainstorming, “Punching trees… there’s a joke there… something about punching trees… punching hmmm… his fists are full of splinters? Is that it? Yes? I think we cracked it!” How irrational is their judgement to think this is comedy? I mean, this family must not even see shapes and colors the same way we do. They are absolutely interfacing with the wrong reality and instead of solving paranormal mysteries they are publishing books no one here can understand. Are they trying to find others like them? Are they trying to send messages home? These simply cannot mother-fucking be jokes intended for laughter.

So few people have ever been this bad at anything without dying. There should be a warning label on every object in the Hollow Family home not to mix words without supervision. You might be a soulless piece of shit if you’re doing the Jeff Foxworthy joke structure backwards and without a punchline. If you forced wrongfully convicted prisoners to write poetry about the day their family stopped coming to visit, it would have a more light-hearted tone than JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS. This book is the struggle of three minds incapable of even the smallest intellectual task. What they are doing is not hard. Jeff Foxworthy’s last living fan could populate a taffy wrapper with riddles, and this family couldn’t put together one coherent joke after hundreds of uninspired misses. If a horse wrote this its grave would say, “Here lies a garbage horse whose book wasn’t even a nice try for a horse.”

Wait, what the fuck? This is a limp yet competent joke, and it’s not about Minecraft? It could definitely use an exploding watermelon, but… you know, I want to check something. Give me a minute…

Jesus goddamn fucking Christ, Hollow Family. Google gave me 92,700 hits on this joke. Every spider that crawls into your mouths while you sleep dies less funny than when it entered. If you typed this entire book in front of a CAPTCHA, it would never be more certain something was a robot. The Hollow Family, in its entirety, contains all the wit and delight of a can of bean dip at an unattended assisted living center orgy. If a second grade teacher said, “I introduced JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS into my curriculum hoping the suicides would reduce classroom size,” it would be the first functional use for this pointless failure the least funny family alive called a humor book.

There’s nothing cute about how not funny this is. It’s troublingly supernatural how not funny this family is. When a member of the Hollow Family farts, their butts just release the sound of holocaust survivors burying their pets along with a puff of whatever the least funny smell is. 

The scent of a turkey wrap being ignored by a Big Bang Theory editor choosing a font for an in memoriam title card? I don’t like how easily that came to me. I… oh God, my brain can only think in the opposite of happiness now. We have to stop talking about JOKES FOR MINECRAFTERS before all my mind can conjure is a tiny Bangladeshi girl’s hands painting G on the BAZINGA shirt of a Sheldon doll. G, again.

Only G.

G, again. G, G, G, her thoughts, G, wander to the failing health of her mother,

 ❡.

Oh no. The assembly line stops. Her mistake was not missed.

S-shit. Is that… how I say goodbye now?

AtinyBangladeshigirl’shandspaintingGontheBAZINGAshirtofaSheldon hrrrkdoll. G,again.OnlyG.G,againGGnoooooGherthoughtsG wandertothefailinghealthofhermother❡OhnoThe assembly linestops.Hermistakewasnotmissed!

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NERDING DAY

ThunderCats Live!

In the 1980s, when spirits were almost as high as TV executives, every stupid concept got its own cartoon, from literal cowboys to eight types of Smurf. And every one of those dumb cartoons got their very own terrible, child-scarring live stage show. In 1987, ThunderCats Live! gave over a dozen drama school dropouts their very first minimum wage job. They held it for almost an entire summer. 

Even ThunderCats Live! had to admit they just didn’t have that He-Man pull. They couldn’t justify the $80 a night to take over a seasonally-shuttered hockey rink with their fanbase alone, so they recruited every other show that did not yet have a foam-headed teenager gently spinning in their name. The event sprawled into an all-star spectacular… if you are very generous about the words “star” and “spectacular.” Also maybe “event.”

The ThunderCats shared a bill with most of The Comic Strip, the series remarkable only for the shamelessness of its knock-offs, and Gumby, who would, in the 1980s, guest star in literally anything because it was dead easy to knock up a slipshod Gumby suit. Plus the inventor of Gumby, Garth Gumbison, would have let you slap his IP on a Pray the Gay Away camp if it would buy him a gas station burrito.

I’m not going to tease you: No video exists for this solid hour and a half of foam-crotched crimes against theater. I promise you that no matter how heartbroken you are, you will never match my despair. But I’ll tell you what: The program alone was fucking incredible.

Right off the bat you can see that we’re dealing with a budget of ‘somebody’s mom was really good at halloween costumes,’ and an enthusiasm level somewhere between ‘new Dairy Queen employee introducing themselves to the rest of the staff,’ and ‘surly teenager posing for summer camp group photo.’

Foam rubber muscle suits just don’t hold up when they’re flesh-toned. It looks like Lion-O is mostly tumor and sass. This is what the melty guy from RoboCop would look like if, instead of being hit by a patrol car, he was hit by the theater bug. 

And now for the least necessary request I’ll ever make of you: Please pay special attention to the crotch area. Notice how his foam-rubber bulge is so poorly fit that it stretches at the thigh, giving Lion-O the saggy, wrinkly, straining groin of a 90-year old man at the nudist beach who insists he’s not too old to join the volleyball game, and tries to prove it by doing a full squat.

Cheetara’s expression tells me she knows exactly how embarrassing this photo is going to be, but honestly, if you airbrushed out the spots and the ThunderCats logo this is just your 1980s mom going to the good Jazzercise class — the one where she kind of wants to fuck the instructor. Meanwhile Tygra, whom I definitely do not remember as “master architect of the ThunderCats,” is the only one in this whole cast trying to sell it. It’s too bad that nobody’s in the market for a Tiger-Man equally as proud of his new bikini wax as he is of his vintage moon boots. At least he has all that CAD experience to fall back on.

And then, oh god, then there is Snarf:

This could have been a puppet, and it would have been fine. It would’ve been a little suspicious that every time Snarf had a line, the ThunderCats had to gather around a convenient boulder, but kids are stupid — they never question a puppet, even if it’s coming from inside a van and it doesn’t know the password. Instead ThunderCats Live! figured it would be less obtrusive to enlarge Snarf eight times his normal size, then give him an inert headpiece with a frozen expression that reads ‘guy banned from FurryCon for entering the normie zones and “forgetting” to loincloth up his seventeen-inch, anatomically very incorrect cockpiece.’

Fuck. I need to fight that thing. Every glance puts me into a fresh attack mode. I think it’s… it’s the gloves, I guess? Or the knees? Look at all the other costumes: They’re cheap and laughable, sure, but there’s some basic effort to make them not look like a costume. They shouldn’t have sculpted Lion-O’s foam codpiece, but somebody did sculpt it. There was effort. Meanwhile Snarf is sharing that same stage in a pajama onesie, dishwashing gloves, and grandpa’s novelty slippers. He’s not even part of the show — he’s just an intrepid stalker who noticed a Snarf gap and is hoping Cheetara won’t question why it keeps trying to kiss her with a mouthpiece that smells like chloroform.

And now we come to Panthro.

Come to Panthro.

Panthro has cancer of the whole head. It’s the first ever recorded case of Skullphoma. Panthro’s actor has decided this embarrassment was the last straw, and he’s finally going to end it all tonight… right at the very second the photographer shouted “now everybody say RAWR!”

No seriously, why did the costume designer do this to him? Did the guy playing Panthro run over her dog in the parking lot? Panthro is just bald. That’s it. That’s his character design: “bald gray guy with Spock ears and Danzig’s bikini.”

Panthro is not, canonically, being attacked by a parasitic fungus. Were the only reference photos left at the library of a panther dying from hydrocephalus? He looks like he’s being attacked by a Metroid. We have bald caps! This was the easiest job, and you whiffed it the hardest. The group project took a vote and said you could just take notes, so you slapped the teacher’s aide and took a shit in the diorama. 

As usual, the SilverHawks suck in a distant and forgettable fashion:

They’re trying for “valiant cyborg space warriors”…

But they’re landing firmly on ‘Tron porn parody.’ You look at that guy on the upper right. You tell me that’s not a costume from Hard-on Drive: The RAM Master.

Somehow the Street Frogs are actually okay:

Maybe that’s because the uncanny valley is a bit shallower if you’re not supposed to look remotely human in the first place. But fucking tell that to Karate Kat.

Who looks like the rest of the Pizza Time Players kicked him out because they couldn’t watch another friend die of an ether addiction.

God damn it, I am so mad there’s no video! 

Fucking there was a motorcycle stunt number!

I would eat an entire man just for shaky bootleg cam of this wondrous atrocity. The best I can do for you, and I know it’s not much, is this modern-day Brazilian dance homage to ThunderCats.

I guess. 

I guess that’s pretty weird. Lion-O looks like a clown in a hurricane and Snarf looks like a clown in another clown… but it just doesn’t compare to the unhappy, bulbous drama hulks of ThunderCats Live! 

Look how easily the Brazilians prance about in their little “costumes”:

If this was ThunderCats Live!, there would be three crotch splits already and only two of them would be costume-related. I mean, I guess it’s kind of funny that sexy Brazil is once again bringing an almost naive fuckability to everything they do. And yeah, it’s pretty silly when Lion-O does his sassy little kicks:

But I just can’t help imagining ThunderCats Live!, and what would happen to their Lion-O’s wrinkled groin bulge if he tried that move. It would be amazing! It would defy physics! His codpiece would explode and send bits of crotch confetti up into the lighting rig where they’d burst into flame and rain down on the audience! Costumed motorcycle stunt riders would be blinded by the dick-napalm and ride into the crowd. It would be glorious! There would be no survivors! 

There’s nothing this Brazilian version can bring that the American version wouldn’t have done a thousand times bett-

Oh. Oh my. What’s-

Holy shit. Brazilian Mumm-ra can get it. I think… I think he already got it actually. I might need a doctor. This is-

God damn, hold up-

No, you can’t do this to me! Not this late in life, I can’t be discovering things about myself I’m-

Great. So now I have a mummy fetish. Thanks, Brazil. That’s a real cool and handy thing to develop in the middle of a fucking global toilet paper shortage.

Categories
NERDING DAY

The Mighty Foes of Iron Fist! 🌭

The Netflix show Iron Fist was about a billionaire kung fu master who did mostly stupid, boring things and couldn’t fight for shit. This wasn’t exactly a faithful adaptation of the comic book where he’s so good at fighting, but only against weirdly helpless idiots. Welcome, reader, to…

EXACTLY ONE HUNDRED WORDS…

ABOUT IRON FIST’S EIGHT MIGHTIEST FOES!

This is a revolutionary comic book character describing format where I’m both required and only allowed 100 words to describe each Iron Fist villain. To explain why, I once wrote an article about six, only six, Golden Age superheroes for Cracked and it was so absurdly huge we had to make it a two-parter (One, Two) and each one was by far the longest article on the site that day. I know enough about myself to know if I don’t have a hard rule in place for when to stop, I will never shut the fuck up about Drom the Backwards Man. And this is a Daily website, not a 20,000 Jokes About Drom the Backwards Man Every Six Weeks website. For instance, Drom the Backwards Man fucks by laying on a wet spot and waiting for a disappointed woman to fall on him and de-moisten. Drom the Backwards Man hates using public restrooms because peeing backwards means just inhaling a quart of urinal water with his dick hole. I mean, look at this nonsense. We’re still in the intro and I’m saying Drom the Backwards Man has to wait for some asshole in the Home Depot parking lot to back out of the dent in his car to figure out why he’s so pissed off.

Scimitar

There are three types of Iron Fist villains. One, a nonsensical thing only a madman could conceive of. You’ll see a couple of those here today. Two, a Chinese guy who knows kung fu, but if you live in a world with nine Avengers teams, two dinosaur islands, and 3,000 X-Men portals and you’re Hop Hsu, Chopsaki Crime Lord, your business card might as well say “Some Fucking Dude, Background Extra.” Three, the most common, is a normal guy holding a weapon and named after that weapon. Scimitar is a man with a scimitar and oh, that’s 100 words.

Montenegro

Montenegro is an evil mountain climber, which sounds like something Vince McMahon would shout at a WWF executive meeting right after the words, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up! I have the next great rivalry! Stevenegro is a good witch doctor and!”

Being a great mountaineer and having your own pickaxe isn’t nothing. If Montenegro was sent to kill a roofer or a family of woodpeckers, that’s a bloodbath. Unfortunately, the first thing he did was pick a fist fight with Iron Fist and Power Man whose powers are “fist fighting” and “immune to all manner of climbing gear attacks.”

Impasse

Impasse was arrested for smuggling and given a choice– jail or be used in germ warfare experiments. He, of course, chose ja– wait, he chose germ experiments!? Haha, okay, Impasse.

After things went very wrong, or maybe exactly as planned, Impasse became infected with a disease never explained. He escaped because the writer forgot freedom was part of his sentencing, and stole a gun that squirted little clouds of his own infectious germs. He basically had the same powers as a farting Charlie Sheen, so all he did was hope you got sick before you were done kicking his ass.

Warrant

Warrant had most of a face and a big gun and he looked like the 1991 winner of The Edgiest Comic Character of Mrs. Bunfield’s Pre-Calculus Class. He was the comic idea equivalent of unbuttoning one button of your overall shorts. He was like a government committee created an X-Man to promote corn whose only power was amyl nitrate awareness. Any nerds reading this will recognize the current sentence as the most vicious criticism any comic character has ever received, but Warrant looked like something that would make Rob Liefeld shriek, “No, mom, no! Don’t look! He’s not done yet!”

Fera

Iron Fist’s origin is he and his parents crash landed in the Himalayas. His parents were eaten by wolves, but Danny found a kung fu city and became their greatest warrior because white supremacy is built into everyth– you know, what? I’m not sure I have room to explain all that.

Anyway, 97 issues into Iron Fist’s comic, someone thought, “WHAT IF THE WOLF THAT ATE THIS GUY’S MOM WAS, LIKE, A WEREWOLF AND SHE CAME TO NEW YORK TO ALSO EAT HIM!?” Also, Fera’s weakness is very specifically Iron Fist’s iron fist making her the most perfectly stupid idea.

Drom the Backwards Man

Drom the Backwards Man is a man who, as a concept, exists backwardsly. The idea was far beyond its own creator, so Drom talks backwards and also decays anything that touches him because I guess that’s the backwards of getting punched? He literally begs, through a language-reversing gadget, his enemies to touch him because they’ll die.

As Drom’s story unfolded, he justified how he could even fucking exist with increasingly strange explanations like a mirror that un-reversed his chronal energy and a special machine that reverses food so he can eat and oh my god I’m at 100 words already?

Gideon Mace

Gideon Mace is a man whose name, hand, and superpower is a mace. And thank God because I still need to explain how Drom the Backwards Man somehow invented a field of science that reversed the timeflow of food and built a prototype machine that actually did it before starving to death. Oh, also, he was born an old man! It occurred to the writer Drom’s condition would cause him to burst from a birth canal as a 170 pound elderly man, then decided no, he should be a baby who then transfo– shit, I ran out of words again.

Discus

Discus, to his credit, owned a jetpack. But otherwise, yes, he was a regular man who threw a discus at his enemies, one of whom was extremely, famously discus-proof. Which leaves me 71 words to try to explain how when Iron Fist defeated Drom, he broke his own incredible chronomirror over his head while he begged for his life. Iron Fist watched the laws of reality mangle Drom into baby form and did nothing while this whimpering, backwards fuck had his shame and agony smeared across all eternity.

Unrelated to this, Discus thought, “I’m going to throw this sweet discus!”

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Symphogear 🌭

I wish I could have friends who love me more than they love schoolwork and boys put together. I wish I could find an enchanted hairband that signifies I’ve been chosen as the new Avatar of Aphrodite. And I really wish I could explosively jumpkick Ultra Jinma, Arch-Queen of Jealousy in a way that exposes both my True Heart and my panties. I don’t know, you guys. I guess I just wish I was in a Magical Girl Anime. But how do you start? By studying, of course. It’s time for…

Still haven’t changed that title, huh? Welp. Gotta be arrested for something, I suppose.

Let’s dive into today’s lesson, brought to you by Symphogear!

Symphogear starts off with some worryingly pretentious text that makes you think you might accidentally be watching a “good anime,” about like historical tragedies or divorce or something else boring. 

Yes yes, I know: All of the islands are in the shape of her tears — the woman who cried so much she became the moon. They say all humans are born with a hole in their heart that can only be filled when they trod on the shadow of their soulmate. The mountains breathed her name 16 times and on the 17th all cats died. 

Pretty much all modern anime has to start with weird poetry or they lose their Educational Tax Credit and won’t have the cash to faithfully render the cocks at the tips of Yggdrasil: The Monster Life Tree’s branches. 

But don’t worry. This is definitely a Magical Girl Anime, which you know because the opening credits feature an overly dramatic naked girl-orb spinning in a void:

That is mandatory. If the credits don’t feature a tortured girl-orb rotating in the space between spaces, just turn it off and maybe watch Revolutionary Girl Utena again. There are two gorbs in that credit sequence, so you know it’s good:

So far this is all par for the course, but Symphogear does do something interesting…

The most high stakes concert I’ve ever been to was a punk show where the bassist fired seltzer bottles from his ass, so I thought dodging bubbly butt-water in a mosh pit was Live Show Master Difficulty. But the world itself rests on this one! Now, I know there is one forbidden concert that will end humanity (Smash Mouth opening for Jimmy Buffet), but I’m on board to find out how a concert saves the human race. 

Ah, I see, it’s your standard “feed the Sacred Ammonite on hyper-dense girl band energy” plot device. That’s a pretty viable anime trope, actually. You see it a lot. Apparently the greatest source of pure green energy in Japan is how much a stadium full of 13 year old girls wishes they were someone else. 

I considered embedding this performance as a video so you could hear the music, but I don’t know how much of our audience suffers from arrhythmia and I don’t want to be a murderer. It is the sugariest JPOP backed by the most frantic beeps this side of a robot hostage negotiation. This is how a DJ tries to warn the crowd there’s a murderer in the club without tipping him off. These songs sound like every noise from F-ZERO happening at once. If you tried to dance to this you’d shatter your legs and then inhale them, dying from Pulmonary Legosis. If these girls are trying to fuel the Sacred Ammonite with the life energy from this concert, maybe they should dial the tempo back from Cocaine Ferret to Annoying YouTube Host, or else- 

Right. 

The liability on this is insane — you ladies are Rhythmically Negligent and you are going to get sued into the dirt unless you find a scapegoat, quick.

Oh shit, our villains are just called The Noise? I-is this the Pop vs. Noise Band battle royale I’ve always secretly hoped for? I could not love that concept more, Symphogear, but I’m torn on who to root for. I do like me some Noise Bands, unless…

They are literally vomitous maggots who spew out jellyfish-sperm and knock-off Tallboy Minions. 

Huh. 

I am as surprised as any to learn which side I’m actually on in the inevitable armageddon brewing between Girl Groups and Pedal Jockeys. But I’ve seen the Pop side’s Magical Girl Transformation Sequence, and they used the power of music to change from perky Idorus into a robot burlesque show…

While the Noise Band Guitarist Magical Transformation Sequence harnessed the power of Montucky Cold Snack to transition from “talented guy onstage” to “bitter misogynist ranting in the smoking area.”

Here’s where Symphogear’s glorious hook comes in. It’s not just about a Girl-Pop duo who secretly fight slugs in cyborg bikinis — that’s practically a cliche in Japan. The hook is that they have to continue singing the entire time they fight:

And the songs don’t even change! Their magical mechano-armor is powered by harried techno bubblegum pop, and holy shit are those robo-corsets powered. These girls warble mildly introspective diary entries and they get so hype about it they fucking chop their enemies in half the long way.

And god have mercy on your glowy lil’ tadpole-soul if a move gets its own splash screen:

These are anime rules: If a preteen Japanese girl shouts a random english word followed by a type of kick, you might survive — you’ll never walk again, and the only thing you’ll ever taste for the rest of your miserable life is the sole of a size 5 Mary Jane, but maybe you’ll keep sucking breath. If everything pauses so ROMANTIKU FOREBAA DUROPO KICKU can get its own graphic? Swallow your tongue so you don’t have to live through the seven-minute sequence of your body being blasted into space while every single part of it explodes individually.

And with Symphogear’s battle karaoke twist, it’s even more degrading. Imagine you’re a huge space maggot-horse. Life is great. You just puked up your astro-sperm, JPOP tweens are dying at your feet, this is a fine Saturday. Then some wispy young girl in Robocop’s underwear runs up and absolutely demolishes you while singing sugar-ballads about how her boyfriend better not miss the next train. 

All of the other space maggot-horses will make fun of you in space maggot-horse hell, which is honestly just like regular space-horse hell, but none of the corpses rot.

Despite absolutely working over these poor Noise Band aliens with her romance-themed typhoon uppercuts, our hero is overwhelmed and has to sing…

Oh shit, she’s going to sing Ginuwine’s “Pony,” everybody step back!

Aw, no, it’s the other kind of climax. I guess every pop idol knows one secret self-destruct song, aside from “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Hey so if that’s not our main character, who is? 

This girl:

She was standing too close to the battle.

So both of our heroes have died, but as we have learned in anime, comic books, and every single season of Supernatural, death is really just a temporary inconvenience so Dean can film a subpar slasher over the spring. 

Anyway, let’s flashback ten minutes and meet our protagonist:

This was her first concert and she is spoiled forever now. Any musical performance that does not explode halfway through, get invaded by acidic alien sperm, and end with her actual death is just going to disappoint. She can basically only go to this, and GWAR shows.

But of course she doesn’t die, and actually inherits the previous hero’s Karaoke Battlemech Swimsuit. Let’s check out her sweet Magical Girl Transformation Sequence!

Hey, you try Magical Girl Transforming on your first day. My first Magical Girl Transformation Sequence, I spun my pants off, tripped on the dog, and wound up crashing through a window while screaming about love. Did you know there’s such a thing as double house arrest? There isn’t. They just extend the first one.

Anyway, after our hero shoots for ‘playful dazzling lightshow’ and winds up with ‘painful Cronenberg organ thrusting,’ she turns into a meek little foxgirl mech, and her very first song is about how much she likes holding hands.

So I guess this was like the first level, where you get to preview all the powers but lose them to some bullshit before you actually start the real game. I’m not fooled though, I recognize problematic powercreep when I see it. It’s cool as hell to start your show off with Pop Idols power-tornado’ing space worms into oblivion, but you have to escalate from there, and things are going to get out of hand, quick. Mark my words: By the third season there are going to be ten of those girls, and one is going to be fucking a sentient asteroid, and another is going to jumpkick god. 

And it’s so important that you know I wrote that joke before I went and looked up the last episode.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Birdman Theater, Episode 0001 🌭

In 1967, Birdman debuted on Saturday morning TV. He was powered by the sun, written by confused idiots, and brought to life by even more confused foreign animators. As a nerd of some renown, I’ve seen over seven cartoons, and the original Birdman is without question my all-time favorite. You are very lucky to be reading the first installment of Birdman Theater, a Pullitzer-eligible series where I describe episodes of Birdman to you, the hot ladies of 1-900-HOTDOG. Now, as soon as I stop fucking around, we can start Birdman Theater Episode 0001: Birdman Episode 03A: The Quake Threat!

Out of respect to the original writers, no dialog will be altered in these Birdman scenes.

Like every Birdman episode, “The Quake Threat” starts in Birdman’s volcano base with him getting an emergency call from Falcon 7. Two important things to know right away are that Falcon 7 is voiced by a man clinically unable to convey urgency and Birdman has no secret identity or hobbies. He is never putting down a book or rushing a woman out of his volcano who only knows him as everyday test pilot “Birdley Mantooth.” The only thing he is ever doing at the start of an episode is sitting here and waiting for his computer to turn on. We have no reason to believe he’s wearing a costume at all. We could very well be looking at his nude body.

Birdman cartoons cram an entire three act structure into seven minutes, so the plot is usually developed by Falcon 7 explaining who the bad guy is, what he’s doing, and what he wants. “The Quake Threat” is no exception. Professor Kairoff has an earthquake beam and he is going crazy with it– just pointlessly making earthquakes. Falcon 7 worries he’ll use it to demand ransom from the world or loan it out to other people who will demand ransom from the world. Birdman has a lot of trouble following along, and Falcon 7 seems pretty cranky that so much of his workday is being spent explaining the downsides of earthquake crime to Birdman. Once he finally understands, it occurs to him:

It’s a criminal madman causing earthquakes for no reason and Birdman’s main concern is him potentially giving his earthquake ray to the wrong person, and this seems like a great opportunity to mention Birdman is stupid as shit.

Falcon 7 has no idea where to find Professor Kairoff, but Birdman figures he’ll just follow the shockwaves and leaves screaming his catchphrase, which is his name. By the time he gets into the sky, the writers realize Birdman can fly and shoot lasers and neither of those abilities allow him to follow the shockwaves of earthquakes. Or, now that they think about it, the shockwaves from a ray that caused the earthquakes? Jesus, what are they going to do? Wait, hold up, Birdman has a “solar band,” a device used only this once during the show’s two year span, which is a bracelet that lights up when you’re going towards the source of an earthquake ray shockwave. Honestly, it’s amazing whoever sold this thing to Birdman wasn’t fucking with him. Real quick, I reverse engineered the schematics:

We are finally introduced to Professor Kairoff who is watching Birdman flying toward his base. If you know anything about old cartoons, you already know he’s got a real-time, full color security camera that can film anyone, anywhere. He knew someone might be coming, so he was scanning sector “Sky,” coordinates “Fucking Middle Of The.” Also, Kairoff is a weird little gremlin in a pink unitard with red panties and he’s been living alone so long he talks to his robots. He lives in the volcano next door to Birdman, and thinks Avenger’s name is Eagle. Most writers wouldn’t risk the confusion of having one main character forget the name of another main character, but Birdman doesn’t give a shit. He’s lucky if he stays the same color for a whole episode.

Notice the evil genius didn’t say, “Oh, shit, he must have traced my earthquake ray shockwaves with some kind of, I don’t know, solar band?” Do you know what this means? It means the writers of this, the stupidest goddamn show, have written a genius villain dumber than themselves! Let’s see if that ever ends up being a problem for him as we continue the story.

Kairoff tells his robot “Gorga” to take two metal men up the elevator to dispose of Birdman. These voiceless “metal men” are automatons so disposable even the writers and animators forget about them several times a scene, but for some reason Kairoff gave this one, Gorga, a name. Why? What makes Gorga special? The answer lies in his schematics:

Gorga and the two metal men he selected using a decision protocol you or I might call “love,” emerge from the mountain and immediately shoot Birdman and Avenger in the heads. To their credit, no one could have predicted their mitten claws would shoot lasers. Also, due to budget limitations, they can only change direction in flight once every six episodes.

I know you’re worried, but don’t be. Both of them are fine. Weirdly fine. It’s almost as if no one involved in this from the writers to the animators to the fictional characters seemed to care if these “force rays” work. I mean, one of them hit an ordinary bird square in the face. Gorga, if your laser can’t kill an ordinary bird, why bother shooting it? Because your best friend asked you to? Gorga, you may be a robot, but here you are teaching me what it is to be human. Anyway, the unharmed Birdman easily obliterates Gorga. Wait, oh no! Not Gorga!!

It might be because I’m having trouble dealing with what happened to Gorga, but this next part is confusing. Avenger is now in the clutches of one of the other metal men. I have no idea why this majestic eagle, flying hundreds of feet above only a moment ago, would dive down in the middle of a battle to nest in a robot’s ray-blasting robot claws, but here we are.

And now I know I must be crazy, because as soon as Birdman sees his amazing partner being used as an eagle shield, he says “DROP THAT BIRD YOU BUCKET OF BOLTS,” and full-power shoots the fucking shit out of his own bird. Birdman will absolutely kill you through a hostage. He loves justice so much he will pay for your robot execution with the life of his own dearest friend.

There’s no reason Avenger should be alive. Eagles are about 10 pounds of hollow bones and feathers and this one has eaten direct hits from two kinds of laser beams in five seconds. I have a theory that one of Birdman’s writers truly hates eagles and he brutally murders Avenger in the first draft of every script, but before they send it off a second Birdman writer comes in and adds “he doesn’t really die” in Korean.

The final metal man grabs a giant boulder and throws it at Birdman, demonstrating an absurd strength less plausible than tension in a story about a laser-proof eagle. Birdman easily catches it and throws it back, a defiance of physics so deranged Gorga and the other destroyed metal man spontaneously reform so they can be killed again.

Please know that two different characters made mention of there being exactly three metal men, so these are not extra robots from off frame– this is simply far beyond the number of things the writers and animators can keep track of. Once more than zero things are on screen, it’s anyone’s guess where they are or which ones died. But I’m sorry to say, this time Gorga really is gone.

Kairoff’s robots, the ones who shot things at our heroes with no chance of hurting them, didn’t work and their remains have already vanished, but the evil professor has one more idea. He turns on his intercom and says, and I quote:

Birdman, in his outside voice without guarding his mouth, says to his bird, who doesn’t speak English or understand the concept of deception:

Birdman, who you’ll remember is so stupid, gets into the elevator which is also a cage and is immediately squashed in a trap. Well, not immediately. First Kairoff makes a joke. Well, not exactly a joke. He laughs while he taunts him. Well, not taunt exactly. More like a welcome, and then the same welcome again, but with a laugh in the middle. Does that make sense? No? Well, then welcome to Birdman. Ha ha ha, welcome… indeed.

Why would he say this? Is he mad from loneliness? Heartbroken after seeing his precious Gorga die twice? Written by careless hacks? However Kairoff came to be, he’s the best. And when Birdman demands to be let loose, he replies with words that seem like they were formed by poking the brain of a cartoon writer during an autopsy.

There’s nothing better than Birdman dialog. It’s perfect. It’s like the producers were throwing cliches together and hoping for mediocre, but got everything a little bit wrong to form a masterpiece no competence or sanity could have created. For instance, Birdman responds to this by saying, “I SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS. AND I’VE BEEN AWAY FROM THE RAYS OF THE SUN FOR TOO LONG. MY STRENGTH… IS… EBBING.”

This is the second act of all Birdman stories– the part where he runs out of solar power. Birdman’s weakness is that he can’t fight at night, underwater, inside, or when it’s partly cloudy, and he never remembers any of this. Here he is once again caught off guard by the very basic premise of his super power. The only thing dumber than a solar-powered hero walking into a dark elevator to battle a villain who can defeat him by refusing to open it is what happens next.

Kairoff turns on his video conference machine to brag to three men about how he caught Birdman who yells to himself:

No they’re absolutely not, Birdman. That’s clearly a reporter doing a story on a ventriloquist who helps the police solve supernatural crimes. Did he call the wrong number? Is Birdman looking at a different monitor? Are the leaders of world nations what everyone sees during the last moments of an elevator crushing?

This is all standard Birdman adventure right here– everything is crazy, and he’s trapped and powerless as a result of his unimaginable stupidity. To recap, his plan was to tell the bad guy, “I’m pretending to be a bad guy,” and lock himself in a cage. Luckily, whenever this happens, Avenger turns into an invincible rescue machine. He knows Birdman’s dumb ass is somewhere needing sunlight, so he rips through an air vent and goes nuts, tricking the “genius” into blowing skylights into his own roof with wild laser gun shots. It would be a weird way to handle a bird loose in your home even if you didn’t have a guileless idiot right behind you loudly narrating how your bad decisions are helping him.

Two seconds of sunlight recharges all the power Birdman lost from eleven seconds of being inside, and he breaks free! Kairoff and his last remaining metal man throw some lasers at him, but shooting at a full-powered Birdman this late in the story is like throwing a teddy bear into an orgy. Maybe it only bounces off, but it’s more likely you’re about to see a soft, helpless thing get destroyed by a lunatic’s violent penetration.

Birdman easily blocks their rays with his solar shield, a tiny energy field no one has ever shot around in the history of television. Then he leaves.

I’m serious. He decided he needs more solar power (while literally bathing in glowing sunlight), so he flew out through a hole in the roof. He called a timeout in the middle of a fight for a plainly unnecessary reason, and then flew right back around. Professor Kairoff was so confused by the whole thing this is what he said when Birdman re-entered:

I guess he figured he wasn’t coming back? He’s a pro, though; so he recovers quickly and grabs a lever. He warns, “ONE MOVE OF THIS LEVER AND I CAN START A QUAKE IN YOUR COUNTRY’S CAPITAL!” This is another strange quirk of Birdman in that it’s very obviously America but they always refer to Washington D.C. as “your country’s capital.” I think they were hedging their bets so if Vietnam won and moved the capital to Hanoi this cartoon wouldn’t age into something ridiculous.

You already know from earlier how Birdman responds to hostage situations. That’s right– double goddamn solar beams. He annihilates this little fucker. Kairoff’s tiny body is ground zero for 200 megatons of solar destruction. You do not threaten Birdman’s nation’s capital, wherever such a place might be, with an earthquake lever!

This isn’t a murder, though. Birdman hit Kairoff with the kind of explosion that only affects solid rock, sex robots, and earthquake machines. In fact, Kairoff seems completely uninjured. What is he? And why? Did a bat crash into a sperm bank? Is he a star vampire? Is he an ordinary Turkish child? And damn it, Birdman, was the secret to beating him just flying in and shooting him this whole time!?

Hold on, Birdman, you don’t have the authority to do any of this? And y-you know that’s the elevator out, right? You’re trapping him in the… Birdman, that’s how you get out of this place. He’s twenty inches tall and can very clearly fit through the bars, Birdman! And you’re leaving? You’re putting him in the elevator he uses to get in and out of his own home and leaving!? To get the same cops who asked you to take care of this guy!? Birdman, y– oh, I guess he’s gone.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Behold: SuperBook

When I first moved out on my own, I was so poor I couldn’t afford both cable TV and Pabst. It was clear that cable had to go. Also food. Sometimes rent. I lived just a few blocks from my local Christian Broadcasting Network affiliate, so that was pretty much all I could get with the bunny ears. I spent many a late night watching Kirk Cameron fight Satan using… the internet? Maybe Satan was the internet? And Kirk Cameron was actually Mr. T? I can barely recall the programming, and I certainly learned nothing of Christianity. But while most of my memories of that era might be smeared across a Denny’s bathroom, I’ll never forget the cartoons.

Let us discuss SuperBook, the very first and quite possibly only Christian anime. I’m not sure if Evangelion counts, because I’m not sure what happened in Evangelion. Let’s say “only.” We’ll stick with only.

I can hear that image. The theme song for the first season was performed by a man who only had music explained to him, but never experienced it firsthand. There follows his two-minute long best guess. He stretches words out in the oddest ways, as though he’s watching someone just outside the booth give him hot/cold signals while he tries to zero in on “human singing.” 

SuperBook wasn’t ‘anime-style’ — it was an actual anime. Written, produced, performed, and entirely confused by Japan. Christian anime! What a hilarious setup for absurdist jokes about what anime thinks Christianity is — “haha, where do they put the robot?”

Right here:

That’s Gizmo the Crusader Robot and don’t worry, it’s not just a name. He will commit ancient war crimes before this article is done. 

He’s there to protect Chris Peepers and Joy Quantum: 

Our main characters, who were named by running a Silver Age Comics Secret Identity Generator and picking the bottom two results. 

So what did Extremely High Young Brockway see in SuperBook? Was it the bizarre retellings of thrice-translated gospels? The weirdly shoe-horned antics of two anime children highjinking their way through Biblical tragedies? Was it the awkward dub that sounded like every voice actor was recording their lines from the bottom of a bricked-over well? 

Yes. 

But mostly it was the pretty colors in the time travel sections:

That is primo early-2000s stoner fodder, up there with Winamp visualizations and scrambled Cinemax. I’m pretty sure Extremely High Young Brockway had some theories about those time travel scenes. I’m pretty sure he’d talk to you about them for 45 minutes before realizing you were his cardboard cutout of James T. Kirk. 

Here’s the premise of SuperBook: Two plucky young children find out they can time travel… but only to bible stories. It’s one of those ironic genie scenarios. A ‘fine print on the devil’s contract’ kind of deal. You get a cool wish, but it’s followed by a really shitty ellipsis. These kids joyride time back several millennia and the first thing they do in every episode is trust the holy shit out of a stranger. 

Here they are five seconds after meeting Gideon, and subsequently following him into his cave:

Here’s how he managed that feat: 

He said, “Hello, I’m Gideon… it’s more pleasant in the cave.”

These children have never met a van floor they didn’t like the taste of. Murderers ask the pair to get into their Ford Taurus and before they can say “I’ve got candy,” Chris is buckling his seatbelt and Joy is stuffing her own sock into her mouth.

Here’s Joy and Chris, five seconds after meeting Job, and immediately following him to his house.

Here’s how Job managed that feat: 

He said, “you must be strangers here, why don’t you come to my house?”

Every single episode starts with these oblivious children following strangely dressed men in order to watch atrocities: 

Don’t pity those kids. Here is, no shit, what Joy had to say about those men above burning alive: 

“The flames are beautiful!”

I think the original pitch for this series was about a Hard Candy-esque time-travelling vigilante squad, but the CBN cut all the best torture scenes. Not all of them, mind you. Just the best. Pity the suspiciously single men of The Bible, who were so sure they knew the face the devil would take. 

Let’s check in on Job’s children, minutes after meeting Joy and Chris:  

That scene caps with ten seconds of Job just brokenly screaming “oh my children!” over and over and over again. I’m not even slightly joking:

Even if these kids weren’t using time travel to hyper-typhoon the families of child-murderers, they are absolutely destroying the timeline just by existing and — oh yeah, introducing everyone in The Bible to a furious robot.

There’s none of that “what a strange looking boy this is!” stuff — Gizmo the Crusader Robot does not give a shit if you know he’s a robot. In fact, if you doubt it, he’ll show you. Here he is just straight fucking up some old-timey guards, firing rockets out of his head and at their faces until they flee screaming “No! NNNOOO! SORCERY!”

Gizmo’s extremely low tolerance for bullshit is why you’re reading this on a jellyfish inside your Magnodome. He destroys timelines like they’re Aramaic sex criminals, and if you even tried to explain the concept of consequences to him you’d wake up tomorrow with tanktreads for legs thinking ‘autonomy’ was the worst swear you had ever heard. 

Let’s check out the Sodom and Gomorrah episode, that’s always my flagship for determining biblical cartoon hilarity, this one’s called…

Oh, n-no! He’s been watching! He’s in my chronology right now. I can feel my history bleeding! Gizmo, I knew not what I did! I wasn’t-