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Nerding Day: Little ShopđźŚ
The entertainment industry seems totally unwilling to take chances on new ideas these days, content instead to crank out legacy sequels to the properties that the men in charge recognize and have come to associate with the purchase of mansions, yachts, and sex trafficking islands. But this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, huge swathes of children’s properties were based on existing films.
Plenty of these adaptations seemed like sure things. Consider the Hot Dog Matrix of Cartoon Cash-Ins:
Anything in the top-right quadrant is firmly in the Safe Zone. While these cartoons varied wildly in quality, they were at least drawing on subject matter that made sense to air at 9 AM on a Saturday morning. Sure, you can’t have a Ghostbuster getting a spectral blowjob or Beetlejuice making sex jokes — huh, I’m just now realizing that the ’80s were really fixated on ghost fuckin’ — but sand off the edges and you’ve got decent fodder to run in between toy commercials.
Then there were the dicier propositions. I’m still not entirely clear on how Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, originally a ’70s parody horror movie, became a cartoon and a Nintendo game. It was either a cheap get or a wild gamble that somehow paid off.
The opposite of this are those R-rated films that were simply so successful that executives couldn’t not render them into unrecognizable, bowdlerized forms. The Aliens cartoon that never saw the light of day would have been in this category, but I guess monstrous, eusocial space rapists were a step too far even for the kinds of people who greenlit a show about a penis-exploding police cyborg.
That brings us to the last quadrant, a realm of madness. Here we find an attempt to adapt a no-budget film that opens with a bunch of lunatic teens crushing a child’s skull like an overripe pumpkin. That The Toxic Avenger got a cute little cartoon, action figures, and multiple video games — not to mention a modern nostalgia-bait retro beat-em-up — remains an anomaly of late 20th century licensing deals.
Whenever I think I’ve run out of these kinds of cartoons, Haim Saban and/or Jean Chalopin go back in time to 1990 and create a new one. This week, I discovered that the timeline had once again been altered — there was, in fact, a 13-episode run of a Little Shop of Horrors show.
Now, Little Shop of Horrors is one of my favorite films. It combines all of my loves: lavish sets, the puppetry of Frank Oz, Rick Moranis, sexually menacing dentists, songs about killing for personal gain, and Danny John-Jules.
If you haven’t seen it, the film is basically a Faust story except the devil is a giant, man-eating plant from space who tempts Seymour, a lowly flower shop clerk, into feeding it people by promising to help him win over his beloved Audrey. On its face, it isn’t a completely terrible idea for a cartoon. It’s already a musical, it has a fairly goofy tone, and talking plants were a mainstay of Saturday morning cartoons. Just ixnay the dismemberment and dental sadomasochism, and it’s solidly in the kid-friendly and well-known quadrant — as long as we’re talking theatrical ending, not the original.
Let me explain: Little Shop of Horrors originally ended on kind of a down note. Audrey II mauls its namesake to death and Seymour reluctantly feeds his love to the plant at her request. Desolate, he’s about to kill himself when he discovers that some executive wants to propagate Audrey II and sell it in stores around the country. Seymour tries to prevent that from happening by committing herbicide, but Audrey II eats him alive and a few months later, giant plants destroy New York City. It fucking rules, and it’s how the stage musical ended, but audiences at the time hated it.
So, yeah — cut out the violence, make the characters into kids, and boom, you’ve got yourself a cartoon.
Little Shop has a really strange visual style. Seymour is a hideous looking frog boy, and the backgrounds are all these vague suggestions of places, as if god just kind of sketched in reality, threw some flat colors on it, and fucked off to go back to furiously masturbating over the dimension where everyone is Danny John-Jules.
Presumably, the producers took the money they saved on making things look like things and put it into developing multiple musical numbers for each episode. This was 1991, so they were legally required to have at least one rapping character. Audrey II was voiced by the baritone Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops in the movie, so it made sense to have the man-eating plant — here renamed Junior — perform hip hop numbers.
Here’s the really weird part: the raps are actually not bad. I mean, they’re extremely of their time, but the guy voicing Junior is doing kind of a Public Enemy thing, punctuating his lines with Flavor Flav-esque “yeah boiiii”‘s. Say what you will about Haim Saban: he may be a barely-literate, warmongering maniac, but the man could write a song.
There’s a running bit where Junior is aghast at the way humanity treats plants. He doesn’t really eat people in this version, but he’s constantly trying to talk to vegetables and encourage them to rise up against the human race. In the first episode, he performs a song called “Wake Up” in which he urges his “brothers and sisters” not to take it anymore. It includes lines like “power to the pollinators” and “green is groovy.”
Seymour walks in on his black-coded prehistoric sentient plant monster attempting to incite his brethren to throw off their shackles. Fearing that a botanical revolution will cost him his job working in the flower store, he nonetheless listens to Junior’s concerns and comes to realize that his liberation is tied up in that of all oppresse— I’m just kidding, he immediately threatens to turn a firehose on him like a klansman at his day job.
Somehow, the two move on from this and go on to have a series of adventures that revolve around Seymour’s quest to win the love of the career-focused Audrey, while avoiding the bully Paine Driller. Paine is notable as the rare representation of a bully with headgear, which he often deploys to launch Seymour into trash cans or the waiting mouth of his vicious dog using dental elastics.
Jack Nicholson also shows up frequently? I mean, not the actor himself, but a guy that’s obviously supposed to be him. I guess this is a riff on the fact that he played a small role in the original Corman picture, but who is this for?
’90s cartoons were notorious for packing in references to golden age Hollywood and midcentury movies, but that only really worked when it was, say, someone doing a Peter Lorre voice, which was kind of funny even without context. Just putting a guy in dark sunglasses in your 1991 Saturday morning cartoon is an easter egg for no one except IMDB trivia page curators thirty years in the future.
Speaking of, Orson Welles shows up in episode six as a parade commentator. I don’t mean a character like The Brain from Animaniacs, whose schtick is obviously Wellesian. I mean they drew a character named Orson Welles and had someone do a bad impression of him. Honestly, I kind of respect how self-indulgent it is and I bitterly regret that I was too young to get into entertainment in the era where you could kind of just fuck around and nobody could do shit about it.
But hold on. Let’s step back for a moment and consider how absurd the existence of this cartoon is. Little Shop of Horrors was itself an adaptation of the 1982 stage musical, which was, in turn, based on the 1960 Roger Corman film. That means by the time we get to the cartoon Little Shop, we’re talking about an adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation. And if you want to go even further, it’s been argued that Little Shop of Horrors was inspired by an Arthur C. Clarke story titled “The Reluctant Orchid.”
Surely that’s it, right? Ha. Clark’s story draws on the H.G. Wells piece, “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid.” I used to think the existence of a video game called Street Fighter: the Movie, which was a Mortal Kombat-style title with digitized actors from the movie Street Fighter that was a loose interpretation of the video game Street Fighter II, was bizarre. But here comes a new challenger.
So yeah, we’ve been doing the remake thing for a long fucking time. The ’80s and ’90s weren’t this magical period of pre-internet joy, unless you were a child, in which case you probably just miss not having to pay bills or be aware of your own mortality.
But there was one way in which that period was better for a very select group of people. If you made it into the children’s TV biz, you could literally just do whatever the fuck you wanted. Sure, make a cartoon about a rapping plant where Jack Nicholson shows up sometimes. Who cares? Before the time of brutal efficiency, KPIs, and ever-escalating shareholder demands, more or less anything went. Everyone was just killing time until they invented Power Rangers and became richer than god, who long ago abandoned this earth for a better world, a more perfect world, a world of Dannies John-Jules as far as the eye can see.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Dean Costello, who has more than enough blood to launch a hundred animated little shop reboots.
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Nerding Day: Rebel Moon
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Nerding Day: Doom EndgameđźŚ
In 1993, I was a casual video game player just like any child of divorce with almost no memory of his parents before age 6, which makes sense because there’s no way I could have known them when they were that young. But DOOM made me realize video games didn’t HAVE to be the esoteric shit diaries of a madman, like Blaster Master or that cursed Ninja Turtles game. They could also be the RAD shit diaries of madmen, and DOOM nestled snugly into that space in my brain alongside Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter II. The problem with shit diaries is that they’re very difficult to read after the first hour or so. But more importantly, they attract flies. And sometimes those flies are horny science fiction authors. When will I release this metaphor? Never. We’ll die in each other’s arms.
If you recall, DOOM is a game about the Tasmanian Devil tearing a hole through space to punish the forces of hell for stealing the second half of his name. He’s only technically a “space marine” because he wears boots and doesn’t use his teeth until he runs out of bullets. So, you can imagine my surprise when I sat down to read four entire DOOM novels worth of his adventures only to be greeted by a Call of Duty FAQ written by the youth minister with the most dangerous POG collection. The demons aren’t even demons – they’re aliens PRETENDING to be demons. The authors felt DOOM would be way cooler if it were a story about aliens who attacked earth because they’re scared of how much we believe in heaven.
Three people other than me have highlighted this passage! Probably not for comedy articles! The series was written by Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver, two maniacs who refuse to stop pissing on your doorbell until they’ve shared their love of Jesus with you, but it’s a trick. They’re not going to stop. The books were published in the mid-nineties and are still available to read and purchase, although I encourage you to never do those things. I’ve already done both for you – twice, in the case of the first three books. See, I’d read Knee-Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, and Infernal Sky back in the ’90s, but 13-year-old Tom gave up the ghost after that, because the ghost was alarmingly horny and wouldn’t shut up about the goddamn bible. So, in writing this article, I read DOOM: Endgame for the first time, and I’m glad it happened this way, because it is the most despicable book I have ever read. It might be the worst book ever written. If I’d read it as a teenager, I would have given up language. I might have given up sight itself. I genuinely believe reading it aloud will summon a dark spirit into your home to steal all of your panties. All of them. More than one school shooter has been buried with a copy. The Necronomicon wears DOOM: Endgame’s hand-me-downs, is what I’m saying. To read it is to unleash The Horny Dead. And NOBODY wants to see that movie.
I’ve already written about the first three installments, so if you’re jumping in here, that’s weird. You’re doing it wrong. But to recap, the books follow Flynn “Fly” Taggart, a strong, tough, and cool space marine who is so fucking square you could balance a glass on him. It would be a glass of apple juice, because he is so fucking square. He saw a bikini lady on television once and told his mom to ground him. He all but covers his mouth when he says a bad word. We get a glimpse of his terrifying origin in a flashback, during which a young Fly spies on a drive-in porno and fractures his boner so hard it gives him nightmares for 26 years:
He’s the galaxy’s biggest badass, which is made evident by how often he screams, throws up, and is afraid:
But Fly’s primary characteristic is his self-loathing lust for his best buddy Arlene:
They hug each other to sleep, but have no sex. So, Fly fucks the ground instead, while staring up Arlene’s asshole like a periscope:
Fly isn’t afraid to grab that ass when he has to, because as his buddy, Arlene is basically his property:
A weaker person might subject Arlene to constant sexual harassment. Luckily, Fly’s faith is too strong for such temptations:
You’re right, guys. Doomguy IS way cooler if he’s a puritanical sex creep trying to convince us he friend-zoned himself. Let’s continue!
Va-va-voom! I don’t know who Midge Garradon is, but if she’s anything like Jayne Mansfield, she was in a shitty movie that gave the authors 14 sexual awakenings. Anyway, here’s Fly pretending he doesn’t get a crippling zipper-pinch every time he sniffs Arlene’s boobs:
Now, some of you are probably wondering how many times Fly has watched Arlene piss. Well, the answer is PLENTY. But don’t worry! It frightens and confuses him every time:
Fly could totally fuck Arlene if he WANTED to! He’s just too much of a GENTLEMEN. Instead, they sleep innocently next to each other while Fly burns a psychic hole through his cock:
Dude, she’d probably give it to me, it’s FINE.
Even the aliens want Arlene and Fly to fuck, but he can take that ass or leave it, because the authors think a platonic friendship means you have a pet woman:
See? She’s already had sex in front of him and an entire group of her friends and coworkers! Like platonic friends do! That’s not TOTALLY INSANE, nothing more to see there! He CERTAINLY hasn’t recreated that event at home with his G.I. Joes!
Fly is so off-the-rails horny that he can’t risk any DUDES getting in the way, because the collateral damage would make him GAY. And he’s definitely NOT GAY:
After spending three books bragging about how he and Arlene can constantly rub up naked against each other like greased-up hogs and its totally FINE they don’t even THINK about fuckin’, Fly would rather die than touch another human man for any reason lest they accidentally collapse into gay sex before either of them has a chance to react. The authors overcorrect so hard in their homophobia that Fly has less self-control around naked dudes than he does his hot titty pet. Speaking of Arlene! When he isn’t recklessly whipping mind boners around like Professor X with his dick stuck in a vacuum cleaner, Fly is FURIOUS with Arlene, mostly for being a woman within his field of vision:
The authors genuinely think they are the first human beings to wonder what women do when there aren’t any hygiene products available. Check-MATE, broads! Also, this doesn’t affect the plot in any way and never comes up again. They just wanted to remind you what a stinkin’ CHICK Arlene is. Now I know what you’re thinking – there’s no way this square-ass Doomguy fucks. He’s NEVER fucked. He’s never even SEEN a naked woman before, outside of his captive FriendPet. But that’s where you’re wrong. He TOTALLY had a girlfriend back in high school, but she got an ABORTION because WOMEN BE SHOPPING:
We can tell this relationship was particularly traumatic for him, because he waited until the fourth book to mention it. Talk about an Endgame! Also, this is the second abortion in the series, which, again, is supposed to be about DOOM. But as much as the authors CLEARLY hate women, Fly would never DREAM of killing one, so DON’T WORRY, it’s totally not an issue AT ALL:
Occasionally Fly fights monsters, and every so often, one of those monsters is a creature from the computer game DOOM. But most of the time, he’s quizzing the reader on Mormonism and fringe right-wing propaganda like he’s driving us to hockey practice because Dad drank too much on his day off. At the end of the last book, the aliens had mostly been defeated on Earth, so Fly and Arlene decide to take the fight to the alien home world to smash them once and for all. Tragically, the length of their trip means they would never see their friends again. But mostly it means that Fly will never again see Jill, a fourteen-year-old computer hacker whomst he REALLY wanted to fuck. Don’t worry! He’ll get his wish!
Speaking of objectification! When Arlene’s not being ogled, she’s serving as the authors’ Weird Science computer genie, regurgitating every one of their interests and opinions and confirming everything they believe about women, which is really only two things – “Women are stupid. Why won’t they sex me?” They pair her up with Albert, a bone-chilling weirdo who shows up in the second book to neg Arlene with Mormon scripture until she finally agrees to marry him. I wish any part of that sentence was a joke, but I also wish the DOOM novels had been written by guys who didn’t masturbate in view of so many pictures of Jesus. Here’s Arlene reminiscing about all the starlit evenings she spent debating her bro:
Don’t you DARE tell Albert it’s called “faith” specifically because it can’t be empirically proven! Not unless you’ve got the evidence to back it up, pal! You can tell their love is real, because it’s the fourth emotion Arlene feels for Albert, two spots below exasperation. This is the first thing the authors have told me about her that I believe.
When Fly and Arlene reach the alien home world, they find out it’s already been destroyed … by Earthlings! Dirty socialist Earthlings, who turned the planet into a utopia free of wealth and labor in their absence. This is a Planet of the Apes ending, as far as Fly is concerned.
What’s worse, the dirty socialists disgracefully intermarried until nothing of the white race remained. No, I’m serious. The book makes a point of emphasising that none of the socialists are white, and they’re all impossibly stupid.
“But from when?! If he’s from the far future, that means I’m not racist, it’s just science fiction! Those are the rules!” Later, Fly thinks a Black man with straight blonde hair is the most absurd thing in the world, and the authors expect us to laugh too, because they assume we hate race-mixing as much as they do:
The ship’s captain, Tokughavita, knows karate because he is part Japanese. But it’s not a racial stereotype, because Fly respects it:
In America, “dink” most commonly means “dual-income, no kids,” basically a term for wealthy rubes, or couples with disposable cash. For example, you can hear some of the locals talking about the “summer dinks” in Jaws. However, it is EXTREMELY RACIST in other parts of the world, specifically when used to refer to southeast Asian people, which is exactly how the authors of DOOM: Endgame chose to use it:
The authors spiral further into racism until Fly is calling Tokughavita “Tofu” and has befriended a straight-up minstrel pilot named Blinky:
All that “jolly good!” stuff is just “thank you, come again” for British racists!
No, really, the authors are definitely aware of it!
Also, the future socialists may all be mongrel dummies, but the Asian lady is still good at math:
At one point, Fly proudly compares humanity’s resistance to the einsatzgruppen, which is an obscure name for the triggermen of the SS, meaning the Nazis who carried out all the murders:
The Nazis have now been mentioned in all four DOOM books! They appear more in this series than the BFG-9000! That’s weird! I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything! Anyway, those socialist dummies can’t even get uniforms right, because they’re not caucasian enough:
They’re also just SO GAY, you guys:
But despite whiteness being eradicated, everyone speaks Western English:
The Dirty Socialists become terror-stricken at the slightest noise, because two centuries of Woke has made them panicky, knee-knocking idiots:
For some reason, Fly insists this extreme fear of death is the result of socialism’s foul corruption:
Necrophobia is NOT the irrational fear of dying at any moment!
On several occasions, Fly tries to convince us that the socialists can’t understand the concept of being an individual person, but are also so individualistic they can’t conceive of doing anything without direct personal gain. In other words, the authors meant to dump on socialism and all its evils, but accidentally spend the entire book raging against libertarianism, because they are not curious men:
At one point Fly comes dangerously close to realizing that a world free of wealth and labor might actually be a good thing, if only it weren’t inherently evil for some contradictory set of reasons he struggles to articulate.
You’re right, Fly! It doesn’t wash! He also has a weird grievance with the socialists’ command hierarchy, because how can you know FREEDOM unless you have a clearly defined caste of subordinates?
But at the end of the day, is a united socialist Earth even worth saving?
Thankfully, Fly and the socialists can find common ground, on Arlene’s tits.
But plot twist! It turns out that socialism turned Earth into such a bunch of godless heathens that it was conquered by a microscopic race of different aliens, who have been piloting the socialists like Venom symbiotes ever since.
Here’s Fly executing a dirty socialist alien before it can poison Arlene’s ears with its silver tongue:
The symbiotes copy Fly and Arlene’s immortal souls into a computer simulation that is very obviously just the DOOM computer game, but Fly is able to break free by converting all the socialists to Mormonism.
Boy, that Fly sure is the Bomb! May he kill us all with a pure heart, in Doomguy’s name we pray.
Meanwhile, Fly’s digital soul is trapped in a computer game like Matthew McConaughy in Serenity. But Digital Fly fights his way free of the simulation by – you guessed it! – converting the demons to Mormonism.
Even the demons are horny! And honestly, good for them.
Digital Fly and his Bible Camp recruits meet up with Digital Arlene. The two of them conquer the simulation – which, again, is just the computer game DOOM – convert the rest of the demons, and rebuild the simulation world in their own image. In Doomguy’s name we pray.
That last line is an obtuse reference to Brave New World, by way of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The very excellent movie Demolition Man is based on it, sort of. But the problem with a lot of dystopian satire, Demolition Man and Brave New World included, is that it ends up equating socialism with an attempt to legislate morality rather than addressing genuine issues with socialism in practice. And Demolition Man comes to the same conclusion as these DOOM books – a socialist utopia would be bad, actually, because it’d be all weak and stuff. Too many pussies. Not enough Stallones. And Dafydd ab Hugh and Brad Lineweaver are laboring under the delusion that they are Stallones. You can almost see the steam coming out of their ears as they try to reconcile Mormon Cobra into existence. MOBRA. Meanwhile, back in the real world, the supple flesh-and-bone Fly and Arlene return to Earth to vaccinate the planet against socialism with their faith. They cruise into Salt Lake City and nearly collide with the Mormon Tabernacle, which is basically their Camelot, only now it’s over a mile tall and topped with a giant fist. The Mormon church has somehow not only survived but triumphed, despite the authors repeatedly telling us that Socialist Earth’s utter lack of faith led to it being conquered by alien symbiotes. Fly calls it a Tower of Babel like that’s a good thing, because the authors are fucking stupid:
There’s an entire city inside the Tabernacle encrusted in every jewel and diamond imaginable, but wealth has been eliminated so it’s NOT A BIG DEAL, it isn’t weird or gross AT ALL. Socialism doomed us to this glittering palace of literal diamonds! Curse you, socialism!
There’s Arlene DEDUCING THE OBVIOUS again, like some kind WRETCHED WOMAN. Fly descends into the belly of the Tabernacle to claim his ultimate reward for saving the earth and completing his missionary service – a sex doll clone of Jill, which has been kept on ice for him for 200 years in a Sleeping Beauty coffin.
Don’t worry – a hologram version of Jill tells Fly the clone is a present! He clearly also wants to fuck the hologram! This is an OFFICIAL DOOM NOVEL!
They REALLY try to scoot past the statutory poem inscribed on Jill’s tomb with some nonsense about Arlene reuniting with Albert’s mind, but we won’t let them. We won’t let them. Jill dedicated her life to creating a waifu clone of herself for Fly and left it behind in a glass case while his boner festered for centuries. That’s how horny the authors are for this teenage girl. DOOM: Endgame is like the last Sunday school lesson you get before the teacher sends a text from your phone to create an alibi.
God, I hate this book.
Tom Reimann is the co-founder of Gamefully Unemployed, where he has been waiting 200 years for his cyberdemons to smooch. Check out their new show BADICAL, if you’re rad enough.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: TatersTales, who is furiously working on an audiobook adaptation of this series as we speak.