Category: PUNCHING DAY

Street Fighter the Animated Series

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 12/01/2020
12 Comments on Street Fighter the Animated Series

You know what the easiest thing in the world is to write? A film adaptation of a fighting game. We explore a bit of each character’s background, and then they fight. Because there’s a fighting contest. They have enlisted in this fighting contest, and that is why they want to fight: Because they have already agreed to do that by, remember, signing up for a fighting contest. That’s it! Stop fucking overcomplicating it! You just Madlibs Bloodsport and you got yourself a movie. None whiff this extremely simple setup more consistently than the Street Fighter franchise, who are desperate to introduce the world to their Street Fighter concept but are certain the world does not want to see any Street Fighting. Street Fighter has failed in every direction, but today, we’re going to talk about the first episode of the 1995 US animated series:

Because this is the US version, Guile is obviously the main character, being the most flat-topped white American male of the group. And he travels the world using the international fighting circuit to conceal his mission as head of an elite squad of crime fighters, with the code name Street Fighter.

Why do you do this? Do you think people don’t like fighting? A Dragonball Z season is two minutes of exposition and then 600 hours of screaming and powering up and we watch it every time because we know there’s a punch at the end. The only thing we like watching more than two people fighting is two people fucking, and yet Hollywood still calls me a monster every time I pitch Fucksport. Cowards. Cowards!

Street Fighter does a few other things boldly wrong, immediately: Blanka and Chun Li are the only other ones named in the intro, meaning that’s our main trio. Ken and Ryu, the protagonists of the game and driving focus of its plot, are not mentioned.

They really just wanted to make the Guile show, huh? Guile is the shitty middle child of Street Fighter. Guile is nobody’s favorite. Guile was a crutch used by emotionally damaged children so they could learn why hiding in a corner and lashing out at anybody that gets too close is a bad strategy. Guile is boring. If you mained Guile, your favorite show is the news and you masturbate to Playboy. You’re the margin for error in the census. You are a human NPC.

The show almost seems to know this. Guile is somehow both plain and fantastically stupid. Like for his first mission, the commander tasks Guile with investigating a dangerous new virus discovered in the Amazon. This is that actual exchange:

For backup, they research other Street Fighter operatives. Chun Li is available, and mercenaries Ken and Ryu are also in the area. At the mention of the actual protagonists of the source material, Guile groans and says “not them!” The commander wishes him luck and Guile says “with Ken and Ryu? I’m gonna need it!”

That’s right: Ken and Ryu are our wacky comedy relief.

They’re both voiced by idiot bros, they bicker incessantly, and they’re only in the rainforest because they heard rumors of native treasure. So the show doesn’t just sideline Ken and Ryu, it recasts them as dipshit criminals targeting indiginous people. It doesn’t seem like they just want to do their own thing with this show; it seems like they actively hate the source material. It’s like adapting Uncanny X-Men and making Jubilee the main character, then reworking Cyclops and Wolverine to be scumbag amateur porn stars who spraypaint native petroglyphs.

When we finally see those natives, they’re referred to as “Incan mystics,” and they’re wearing ponchos and headdresses. I don’t know much about the aboriginal people of the rainforest, but I’m like 70% sure that’s racist in a very strange and archaic way. It’s like talking about rural Egyptians today and then smash cutting to a bunch of slaves building a pyramid. It’s time travel bigotry. The Incan Mystics are having themselves a good ol’ fashioned inscrutable ritual when soldiers step out of the brush and attack them with sonic weapons that fire bitchin’ guitar riffs. It is the most ‘90s thing I’ve seen since X-Files pogs.

It is unquestionably rad.

Then Blanka explodes out of the temple! It turns out the Incans were keeping him imprisoned, but he’s… mad that they’re being taken away?

So Blanka was consensually staying in that dungeon, could break out at any time, and loved his captors who dressed like archaic ethnic stereotypes? Cool, super cool. I just wanted to verify that we meant to feature racially charged psychosexual monster bondage in our children’s cartoon.

He’s too late, anyway: The soldiers escape with the mystics in tow, and soon Blanka meets up with Guile and the rest of the Street Fighter crew to get them back. Well, most of the crew: Here’s where Ken and Ryu peel off to raid the abducted natives’ home for “treasure.” In case you thought Street Fighter was going to keep the colonial crimes politely implied. But oh no! Ryu runs into a pig and catches the virus!

I’m not even kidding, that’s what happens.

Haha, what? Why didn’t you just have Ryu fucking that pig? You guys clearly despise him. How did Ken and Ryu wrong you, writers of Street Fighter? Did somebody’s big brother pin them in the corner with endless fireballs? It goes jump, block, jump, block, then pause to bait him into a shoryuken and there’s your opening. There’s simply no need for this elaborate, undignified revenge!

Anyway, the rest of the team figure out it was Bison who kidnapped the mystics, so they raid Bison’s compound and this is about how it goes:

Nobody has lost this immediately and this humiliatingly since that pig revoked Ryu’s consent. Actually, knowing what gets him off, Blanka probably shame-came while gently spinning in that magnet grasp. Bison makes his escape as Blanka cleans up, and the Street Fighters come to realize that not only had Bison abducted the Incan Bondage Shamans, he was also the one who kidnapped the missing scientists! You see, he wants to use the virus as a targeted weapon, but for that, he first needs control of the cure. To speed up research, he means to infect more people. As Bison zooms away on a very stupid hovercraft, he explains that he’s put the virus into a balloon which will pop when the timer runs out:

Putting a plague into a pinata is so stupid that I can’t help but love it — really adds that festive element that biological warfare is missing — but you know how the rest of this goes: the Street Fighters are going to catch the deadly virus and have to fight through the illness, and since this is the ‘90s, the Incans will whip up a cure made from pure uncut rainforest. For the rainforest, you see, she is the woman who has everything.

That’s what you think, huh, idiot? Well, you counted the number of fucks Street Fighter gives wrong. You thought it was greater than one. It is not.

Holy shit!

The plot of the VERY FIRST EPISODE of the Street Fighter cartoon hinges on unethical scientists infecting aboriginal people with deadly viruses to research a cure for use in the civilized world. That uh… that kind of thing actually happened, Street Fighter. A lot. A lot of native peoples were subjected to dangerous medical experiments so the “real world” might have a cure. It is actually a form of genocide. Are you sure — are you absolutely sure — that you want to tackle it in the pilot episode of your children’s cartoon about punches and, if there’s time, kicks?

Now, to be fair, Street Fighter pulls back just shy of the line, and doesn’t actually show colonial genocide. Instead Blanka jumps in and takes the viral moneyshot like a good sub. But to everyone’s surprise, he wakes up just fine and his blood turns out to be the cure. Let’s check in once more with the character we had to restructure the entire game’s plot to focus on, our daring and charismatic frontman, Guile:

Good stuff, Guile. You deserve this spotlight.

Chun Li and Blanka join Guile, forming the Street Fighter squad. While our actual main characters, Ken and Ryu, leave the show sans native gold, and head to Tierra del Fuego for “killer waves.” But that’s not important. What’s important is that you know the pilot episode of the 1995 cartoon adaptation of Street Fighter was about ethnic cleansing. That way you can tell this anecdote to people who talk to you, so they can stop talking to you.

Tags 2020, cartoons, Free, Video Games

PUNCHING DAY

Self-Defense Aerobics 🌭

Mixing two concepts together has been a part of our life since an industrious australopithecus invented Murder Stick Murder Rock, but the terrible power of one-thing-plus-a-different-thing was never fully felt until 1985 when Joe Corley, karate champion and world famous instructor, created Self-Defense Aerobics. You know that dull terror you feel when you read the news of Man and worry civilization is in a decline? It is. We peaked in 1985 when karate champion and world famous instructor, Joe Corley, created Self-Defense Aerobics. Hi, hot dog readers. I’m Seanbaby, karate instructor famous world champion, and there has never been a more perfect fighting system for eliminating an attacker during a barely contained state of arousal. Let’s get this out of the way right now, Self-Defense Aerobics: 10/10.

Self-Defense Aerobics proves art doesn’t have to be clever. If your fighting system is perfect for fitness and the office, you can say that with a picture of a lady sidekicking at the gym and then later at her accounting firm. It’s what photography critics call “Gasp, perfection.” The minimalist design is broken up by an extraneous, composition-destroying clutter of office supplies, as if the artist wants us to dread the chaos that comes from hiking up your business skirt and kicking a lobby intruder through a window and into the street. “Looks like you’re trying to take my job,” jokes security guard Gene as your attacker’s head is crushed by a taxi, long removed from your eyeline and interest. It’s art that says, “Self-Defense Aerobics is fucking stupid in the good way. And white-hot erotic.” It’s art that belongs in a museum.

The video begins with Joe Corley introducing no one, including himself, and instead explaining the very basic concept of exercise. He and the girls run in place, and if you think there’s something better than ’80s leotards mixed with a horny cameraman, congratulations on being the wrongest dumbshit.

After running in place for a few seconds and doing several burpees, we learn Cindy and Donna’s names after Joe asks them if they’re breathing. Like all good instructors, Joe assumes you have escaped fully-formed from a cloning pod knowing only hunger. For instance, in the next part of the video he introduces everyone to “jump ropes.” As he explains, and I quote, “The idea is to get this little skinny rope under your feet.” Donna is just terrible at this, but it fills her with a joy that’s almost obscene in a karate setting. She is so wonderfully happy, very wet, and if you had to pick only one thing to look at for the rest of your life, Donna sucking at jump rope would be a very good choice.

With only a half hour to teach you self defense, Joe dedicated ten entire minutes to explaining girl push ups and toe touches. I cannot stress enough how little martial arts there are in this video. Any viewer who walked away from this VHS tape thinking they could defend themself is either dead from poor judgement or extremely dead from attacks. But judging by the camera work, I don’t think the main goal of Self-Defense Aerobics was birthing mighty warriors.

The camera work in Self-Defense Aerobics is powerful and engaging. It looks like full creative control was given to a stranger who listed “Special Skills: Poontang” on his resume. It looks like a producer said, “I can tell by the boner you get what we’re going for here, kid. Follow those instincts and go to work.”

After 13 minutes, Joe teaches the ladies their first punch. A punch critic might notice a flaw here and there in Joe’s instructions or Cindy and Donna’s execution, but as far as winning smiles go, these are five star haymakers. Maybe you were way ahead of me on this, but I am just now realizing I have a weird hot girls doing bad karate thing. And I am not alone.

The word “gratuitous” gets thrown around a lot when a camera cuts to jiggling cleavage in the middle of a martial arts workout for the 17th time. But are pointless karate boob closeups “not art” simply because they were photographed by a moist leotard-sniffing pervert? Thirteen minutes and fifty five seconds ago I would have said, “of course.” Now I say, let’s see that footage you’re talking about, right away if possible.

Look at Cindy and Donna just fucking wrecking enemies from every direction. My gut still tells me it’s pornography, but it’s also lethal or worse martial arts. Can you imagine getting hit by one of these backfists? With human bones? Psh. Dead. Your friend too. And you again.

After four short rounds of punching, Joe teaches the girls karate’s greatest weapon and fitness’ fittest exercise– twenty or so low blocks. It’s honestly irresponsible to put this much power into the hands of someone when all you know about them is they own a VCR. If you watch this video more than three times and try to change a diaper, you will tear that baby’s legs clean off. That’s awful, I’m sorry, but my brain is doing everything it can to compensate for all my sexual impulses firing at once.

I swear I’m not exaggerating when I say the entire last third of this self-defense video is Joe, Cindy, and Donna laying down and gently kicking from the floor. The cinematographer, having trained his whole life for this, captures many generous closeups of Cindy’s groin and crotch. Cindy could send this tape to her gynecologist and save herself a trip to the health clinic. If you showed me the bumps on the head of Cindy’s newborn, I’d say, “Hey, I recognize those shapes.”

The video ends with a brief cooldown where Cindy and Donna, and I want to make sure I’m explaining this correctly, lay down on the ground as if they were dead. Joe explains this technique in slow, painstaking detail, stroking each part of Donna’s body as he names it. He has been wedged between these sexy women for a half hour of soaking wet, filthy karate and he’s by far more horny than you or I have ever been. As his fingers slide up Donna’s leotard, it is legitimate, edge-of-your-seat suspense when he starts to get near her titty. Scientists could calibrate their electron microscopes by how close Joe comes to groping this model in the middle of her workout cooldown.

So now we’ve learned what fitness is, sort of punched, very blocked, barely contained our boiling desires, and taken a nap. All that’s left to do is thank the people who made it possible…

… obviously with titties. What a perfect video cassette. Happy Punching Day, everyone!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, NickH: The slow pelvis touch of Nicks.

Tags 2020, Free, VHS, workout tapes

PUNCHING DAY

Malibu’s Mortal Kombat Comics 🌭

Post author By Robert Brockway
Post date 11/17/2020
6 Comments on Malibu’s Mortal Kombat Comics 🌭

Back before comic books and video games were taken seriously, the lowest form of either was the video game comic book. Absolutely nobody looked forward to reading all 17 pages of the gripping origin story of Bonk: Headbutting Cavebaby. But if there was a dollar to trick out of a sad nerd-child, Malibu Comics was there. It might surprise you to learn that Malibu somehow got the rights to the Mortal Kombat franchise, since Malibu’s company car was a bus transfer good until an hour ago, and they considered a power lunch to be one with food. But if it seems like Mortal Kombat should be out of Malibu’s league, that’s because you’re thinking of the games now. Back when Malibu first secured the rights for it, Mortal Kombat was just a shitty Street Fighter ripoff for problem children. And that was prime Malibu territory, son.

Now, I know that all fighting game plots are utter garbage. They’re exceedingly complicated nonsense there to explain why two people who entered a fighting competition want to fight each other. So I will try not to give Malibu too much shit for the story of Mortal Kombat, which is kind of like Lovecraft doing running commentary on a bathroom fistfight at DragonCon. That might legitimately be the story of Mortal Kombat, but the only way to verify it is to listen to some dork who cares about the Mortal Kombat story, so we’ll never know.

Malibu gets a pass on a lot of this shit, even though I’m pretty sure Sub-Zero doesn’t have a business card, like he sells ninjitsu door-to-door:

And I don’t think Sonya’s dad was really Herman Blade, no matter how hard it makes me laugh:

And it’s super crazy that their little trading cards list everyone’s legal status, like the organizers of Mortal Kombat are as worried about evil trees as they are about ICE raids. Especially considering that like 80% of Mortal Kombat fighters are ghosts from another dimension, or the soul of a guy possessing a ninja, or just the front half of a centaur.

Maybe that’s all canonical Mortal Kombat horseshit. So we’re not going to pick on Malibu for the story… not when we have their hilarious art to mock!

This is the cover of their very first issue with a hot new property, and Malibu hired their little brother who is great at abs but can’t do poses yet. Sonya’s giving firm grumpy mom energy, Johnny Cage and Liu Kang look like they’re fully cooperating with the Fist Inspector, while Raiden just heard the opening chords to “Y.M.C.A.” only he’s not entirely sure — it could be “Do the Hustle.” Just… nobody has any idea what to do with their hands here. It’s like a 6th grade school dance. It’s like the opposite of a crowded Japanese train.

It is frankly amazing how much trouble Malibu get themselves into:

Why do you fuck yourself so violently, Malibu? Can you not channel your self-hatred into drink or cutting? Why must you torture yourselves with your own art? You chose what to draw here! Why did you try to pull a bunch of cool tricks with perspective when you knew you couldn’t deliver on any of them? This doesn’t scan as “Goro is reaching out at you,” it scans as “Goro has three big hands and one small one, like a Chinese Rolex.”

This cover of, again, the very first issue of a spin-off series about Baraka…

Looks like it was drawn in the margins of a science test that somebody’s stoner friend definitely failed. It looks like it was colored by a meth addict who dreams of being a tattoo artist doing the very best they can with the shitty crayons they give children at Denny’s.

Apparently even Malibu got frustrated with this whole drawing business, and they asked the most regrettable question of the 1990s: “How hard could this whole computer thing be?”

That looks like a good first try at ReBoot fan-art. It looks like you made a racist meme with Garry’s Mod but the punchline got muddled because you’re more of a text racist. That’s the kind of art they proudly display in those for-profit Design College ads that run at 2AM.

A Malibu artist draws like they just found out a family member died halfway through every panel. This one forgot most of a dude in a panel featuring three dudes and nothing else.

Never ask a Malibu artist to draw something as complicated as a face. Sometimes Liu Kang looks like a stoned Asian guy, sometimes it’s bee-stung Keanu Reeves, sometimes he looks like a face you can kind of see in a potato if you squint, and sometimes it’s all three.

Here’s sexpot Sonya:

Looking like she’s transforming into the guy next to her. She looks like a Mad Magazine caricature of the guy who played the T-1000. Good job finding an excuse to not draw a background, Malibu, but what did you use that time for? Brainstorming six new Wolverine rip-offs to capitalize on the runaway success of The Ferret?

Also maybe don’t ask a Malibu artist to draw something as complicated as “environments.” Set a scene in a rainstorm and you’ll get…

A bukkake explosion inside a cocoon. You still won’t get a usable face, either, seeing as how Sonya has a Lego head and Jax looks like Handsome Quasimodo.

Here’s Baraka after they kidnapped his adopted daughter, which I’m sure seemed like a powerful emotional moment in the script…

But in practice it looks like Voltron mid-transformation when the little head just starts to pop up. These are fangs drawn on a paint can. Did Baraka anger a witch doctor? This guy gave Baraka flying squirrel flaps, ab-tumors, and 1/3rd of a head, and Baraka gave him the greatest gift one can give a Malibu artist: an excuse not to draw feet.

I’m not picking on a single artist, or even a single era. Malibu did Mortal Kombat adaptations for decades, and they never did find somebody that has seen human bodies before, and is aware of how they do stuff. Here’s Sub-Zero looking like a breakdancing crab.

And here he is with a backwards arm, a sideways leg, and missing half his torso.

If you can’t draw a jumpkick without committing an atrocity just ask to be reassigned to Malibu’s Deep Space Nine adaptation. Nobody ever jumpkicks and if you fuck up a face you can just say it’s Odo.

This total inability to remember what a human body looks like or does is most apparent when Malibu artists try to get sexy with things. And because we’re talking about comic books and video games and the ‘90s, we will be getting very needlessly sexy with things. Well, we’re going to try.

Here’s your favorite Mortal Kombat character, vampire Pamela Anderson, proudly displaying both her taint and one giant ogre foot.

A Malibu artist can draw up to two things, as long as one of them isn’t a face and the other isn’t a background. So you’d think they’d nail the comic book softball: masked woman doing sexy jumpkick through void.

But no, in their absolute desperation to get both tits and grundle into this shot they have obliterated that poor woman’s spine. She looks like she’s being wrung out by an invisible giant. If there’s some kind of human dishrag fetish, I assume somebody is cumming to this right now.

Here’s a fun optical illusion! Study this image and tell me which leg is doing what.

Oh wait, my bad, I actually do have an explanation for this one:

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Doug Redmond: Who has never had any problem getting both tits and grundle in the same shot.

Tags 2020, comic books, Free, malibu, Video Games

PUNCHING DAY

Pressure Point Karate Made Easy 🌭

Post author By Seanbaby
Post date 11/10/2020
5 Comments on Pressure Point Karate Made Easy 🌭

You already know this from all the times you’ve accidentally killed someone by misunderstanding tango instructions, but the body is lined with “pressure points,” or invisible buttons that control organs with magic. It isn’t much more complicated than that, but George Dillman still makes it easy in PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY.

Fifty years ago, George Dillman was “U.S. National Karate Champion” four times, whatever that means, and he’s husband to a woman who wears pajamas to Karate Book Picture Day and tells photographers, “No, I’m good. I ran a comb through it a few days ago.”

Before we start, let’s talk a little bit about George Dillman. This book was published in 1999 which came at a unique point in George’s Karate journey. It was six years after the debut of the Ultimate Fighting Championships, which as you may know, suggested the hilarious inadequacy of Karate when the other person is allowed to do non-Karate. This forced people with careers in traditional martial arts to pivot from “WE’LL TEACH YOU TO KILL WITH YOUR FUCKING HANDS” to “we will watch indoor children at affordable rates.”

Instead of starting daycares, some insecure Karate masters tried to rebrand themselves as wizards. George did both. His Karate evolved from punching potential muggers to teaching kids how to poke a body’s forbidden death spots. Long story short, this combined with his narcissistic personality disorder to convince himself he could knock people out without even touching them. And six years after he published this book, he was so deep in the delusion he seemed genuinely unprepared for it not to work in front of a National Geographic film crew. George stammered out a series of excuses about how the test subject who resisted his mightiest Karate waves must have had his toe or tongue in the secret force field spot. Karate analogies are not an exact science, but this was like a mechanic guessing your engine light came on because of un-journaled dreams and reading your confusion as a signal to put his penis in your husband’s hand. George unleashed such a profoundly embarrassing string of lies, the exact quote takes up half his Wikipedia page:

“The skeptic was a totally non-believer. Plus — I don’t know if I should say that on film — but if the guy had his tongue in the wrong position in the mouth, that can also nullify it. You can nullify it — you can nullify a lot of things. In fact, you can nullify it if you raise those two big toes! If I say I’m going to knock you out, and you raise one toe, and push one toe down… I can’t knock you out. And then, if I go to try again, you reverse it. If you keep doing this, I won’t knock you out.”

What George did here was incredible because the thing about martial arts is they don’t have to work. If you’re the shittiest Karate master in the world, the worst thing that can happen to you is a second Karate master has a different opinion about how you should kill hypothetical ninjas. And yet in an industry where there is no fail condition, George Dillman managed to do it. So as we read, keep in mind that after sixty years as a Karate celebrity and author, what the writer of this book is mainly remembered for is how his Karate doesn’t work.

Meet an eagle! He’s an unnamed Karate eagle who appears every few pages with a very stupid person’s idea of wisdom. Here he’s saying, “You want to BE a black belt, but are you willing to BECOME a black belt?” This intimidating message is a bit undercut by the picture of two little girls who seem to be saying, “We come here after school and wait for our dad to finish his Karate job. He said these belts normally cost $84, but he gets them for sixty. What? Seventy four? My sister says he still has to pay seventy four.”

Now that PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY has set the bar you need to clear at “mightier than a full-time sixth grader,” it’s time to learn Pressure Point Karate, easily. Well, not quite yet. A lot of this book is George Dillman’s personal photo album. And I don’t mean recent or relevant photos, but random vacation pictures and every single time he’s met a movie star. It seems indulgent past the point of sanity, but you don’t want to buy a book on combat acupuncture and find out on page 30 the author has never even met Billy Blanks.

The Photo Album section eventually ends, but George keeps including giant, pointless pictures of himself long after he’s started talking about Karate. Here he is going on about the philosophy and history of his once secret style of karate-jitsu and he can only fit one full paragraph on the goddamn page because he dedicated 3/4 of it to a glamor shot of him pulling some guy’s hair. Looking good, George. If this is your ancient style of fighting, it explains why 12-year-old girls excel at it.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone so unphotogenic force this many pictures of themselves onto the world. He has the features of a baby who kept a vow to never let his bones change shape and the figure of a baby without a funny second thing.

After this instruction book opens with twenty seven pages of instructionless narcissism, the Karate eagle appears to tell us “Real masters don’t brag! They are too busy learning more.” It’s right under a caption written by George Dillman explaining how George Dillman is one of the most respected and sought-after martial arts teachers in the world. This fucking guy looks like Estonia tried to make their own Gremlins 2, but as real master of comedy, Seanbaby refuses to mock a mentally ill person’s appearance. He is too busy crushing ass.

Finally, some pressure points! Here’s the chart for death-touching your enemy’s right arm. Want to shut down their large intestine? Okay, there are ten spots that do that. Number seven is “halfway between the elbow and the wrist” and it must be pretty big since there are starting points to start measuring from either of those locations. You can tell this is a real thing and not made up because of all the times you’ve seen volleyball players receive a serve and die there on the spot, blasting shit out of their mouth and pores.

Not all of the pressure points are meant to destroy organ function or cause cramps. Some of them are more like puppet strings? For instance, if you rub the Triple Warmer #11 up and down, it will make your enemy straighten their arm. This is great for after you kill someone and need their body to wave as if to say, “I’m fine! No one has killed me!” Anyway, I think it’s great this man who teaches children has created an elaborate fantasy world where he can kill with his fingers and, maybe unrelated, control exactly how bodies move by rubbing them.

The book limply tries to convince the reader that this is a special kind of Karate with practical combat uses, and the reason the old Karate never worked is because of a conspiracy to teach school-children bad Karate intentionally to keep them safe. This is what the rise of mixed martial arts did to the brains of Karate teachers. George almost certainly believes this because the alternative, that he’s spent his entire life learning a style of fighting he can’t use in a fight, is unthinkable.

There’s not even an internal logic to this shit. If school-children aren’t safe around effective Karate, why is your job teaching it to school-children? What changed your mind about putting the power of life and death into the hands of kids? You could have cut twenty pages of your photo album to explain why you were a part of this century-long conspiracy. And it seems outrageously irresponsible not to include a chart of which states allow you to shut down someone’s liver with your finger.

Here’s a great example of karate-jitsu, the secret style finally available to hopefully-not murderers. If an attacker grabs you by your elbow, put your arm four inches to the right and wait for them to run away and trip. When they say “EASY” in PRESSURE POINT KARATE MADE EASY, they mean you’ll be facing opponents who lose control of their nervous system near gently moving children.

I’m not saying this is a bad fighting move. I’m saying if scientists grafted Stephen Hawking’s cells onto chicken DNA to make an eyeless wad of feathers and all it could do was scream, it would instinctively respond to an attack more effectively than this karate-jitsu move. I’m saying if every government on the planet required its citizens to dedicate a year of their life to mastering this maneuver, all human life would end before it knocked over a single person outside of George Dillman’s beginner’s Karate class. If I saw this happen I would assume that guy stepped on his own tampon string.

Not all of George’s moves are as well thought out as “maybe just kind of throw your elbow-grabber with your elbow?” Here he demonstrates how to force one of your students to give you a footjob after they kick you in the dick. Karate eagle says, “The less handsome the Karate student, the less they’ll expect it!”

This is the kind of move two gentle brothers would invent when they’re six and eight, and love each other very much. I don’t think you need to be a champion kickboxer to know that if someone kicks you in the leg and you give theirs a cute hug, they got the better end of the deal. And now each of you is hopping on one foot for reasons George never explains. This isn’t the set up to some second sweet move– it’s just George not wanting to waste a super sweet picture of himself from his hairline’s good side. Plus, hang on a second– if a little girl can throw you into the ground when you’re attached to her elbow, imagine how far a grown man is going to send you flying with his whole leg. If karate-jitsu is to be believed, this is basically loading yourself into a catapult.

George reminds the reader many times how karate-jitsu is the good kind of Karate unlike karate-do, which is a trick played on children by long dead Okinawans. And as I mentioned earlier, it’s not like anyone can prove he’s wrong. He’s betting his career on how no one will ever do a blind study where they beat the shit out of kids to see which Karate instructor was right.

Fun Fact: That watchful man whose name George misspelled is Bob “Pit Bull” Golden. He helped develop this fighting style from “pressure point touching” to “no touching at all.” So if you were wondering how any of this could get any dumber, that’s how. These dumbshits invented “The Force.” Which brings me to my main point: there is no place on Earth more safe than directly in front of George Dillman after you’ve made love to his wife through the hole in her pajamas.

The Karate eagle has an “important secret of self-defense” here about how you can bend your own elbow. George doesn’t really make it clear how that’s helpful, but if you go into a kidnapping armed with the knowledge that bendable elbows are some kind of secret weapon, it will be your second unpleasant surprise of the day.

After a few pages listing general areas you can tickle to take command of someone’s organs, and a few almost sarcastically bad Karate moves, George forgets what the shit he’s doing in his own book. The entire last third, forty fucking pages, is taken up with a step-by-step kata. Not a modern karate-jitsu take on a kata, but the exact same imaginary fist fight our grandmothers performed to earn their yellow belts and then took to their grave without ever meeting the specific man it was choreographed to defeat.

Look at that fuck. George Dillman looks like something Willy Wonka would point to and say, “Here’s one of our finest soldiers guarding the peppermint brook from ghosts,” and then lean in close to whisper, “THERE ARE NO GHOSTS, BUT THAT OOMPA LOOMPA’S SKULL IS TOO SOFT FOR SLAVERY.”

Let’s go over what we’ve learned: several questionable battle techniques, which ’70s kung fu stars are actually really nice in person, and which dots on a woman’s body controls her elbow. George suggests you now know more than some black belts. This dork really thinks his badly edited photo album of children he failed to kill is his magnum opus. He thinks he’s given you a new future in this dying industry of grifters and nerds. Then, after finally wrapping things up, he adds one more thing. It’s, of course, a full-page glamor shot of himself pulling someone’s hair.

Okay, now, after finally wrapping things up and adding one last full-page glamor shot, he adds that same full-page glamor shot again, and I’m not kidding:

This time he’s really done, and the Karate eagle’s closing statement is “Some people say, Practice makes perfect. They’re wrong. Practice makes permanent; perfect practice makes perfect.” And speaking of, what a perfect thing to say after forty pages of a disgraced liar showing you still photos of how to practice fighting against an opponent whose moves you know ahead of time, who can’t give you feedback, and who also doesn’t exist. This is like Billy Blanks’ barber putting up a sign that says “Subtlety is an angel’s soft kiss; all hair should be very round on the top.”

…
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Doug Redmond: Who is both Billy Blanks Flat Top 2 and 6 – the most powerful flat top duo in history.

Tags 2020, books, Free, how-to, karate, Martial Arts

PUNCHING DAY

Karate Blazers 🌭

Gamers love to nostalgia-wank about the good old days of gaming, back when everything was bits and women weren’t interested so it didn’t even matter that they weren’t allowed. I’m not immune to it, myself: I adore pixel art and I’ll always remember where I was when I first found out ninjas kidnapped the president. Games weren’t better then. The good ones were, and still are great — and if you have anything bad to say about Chrono Trigger I will pick up my best friend, who is a frog with a sword, and throw him at you. But there was also so much forgettable garbage that you, perhaps understandably, have forgotten about.

Let’s talk Karate Blazers.

104% of all games in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s were just reskinned arcade brawlers that the developers knew you would never beat, if only out of disinterest. They weren’t designed to be good, they were designed to bilk you out of seventy-five cents because Super Hang-On was busted. And Super Hang-On was always busted. It was the McDonald’s ice cream machine of the arcade. Here’s the secret: There’s no such thing as Super Hang-On — it’s just a demo screen and a plastic motorcycle, there to lure you into the arcade where you’ll settle for Day of the Punch or some shit.

Karate Blazers is the perfect example of that mindset. It actually starts kind of awesome, before it becomes quickly apparent that the game does not want you to play it.

Look at this amazing cast of characters in the intro screens:

Okay, not Mark. I honestly forgot about Mark, just like the casting director of Degrassi Junior High did when Mark was up for his dream role: “boy in background.” Mark is a cunning design trick: He’s a quarter-burner. Sometimes you’ll panic while hitting continue and accidentally pick Mark, and then you have to kill yourself as quickly as possible to pick someone cool again.

Hell yes, that’s better. Glen’s got a flat top, thunderous fists, total invincibility, and flat top again. You’d be an idiot to pick anybody else.

Oh. Oh, but you didn’t know about Gil! What’s justice, to a man like Gil? I didn’t have that question in my heart before, but now that’s all there’s room for. What is justice, to Gil? Is it a righteous wave that does not break early? Is it a crowded, sandy handjob in the back of a VW Bug? Is it some kind of conditioner? Gil is a question, and my quarter is the answer.

Good god, this is Sophie’s Choice. The only thing I like better than an unkillable flat top or a mysterious himbo is an idiot ninja. You can’t make me choose between these three amazing warriors and also Mark — it’s just not fair!

If Karate Blazers is skimping, it’s not on characters. It’s not story, either. In the early ‘90s, a video game was only as good as its story was short. If you needed more than two sentences of plot, you were making a Kojima game. And even Kojima only got four sentences back then. Here’s the story of Karate Blazers, in its entirety, and I promise I’m not leaving anything out:

I did not omit a single screen, I didn’t crop out any text. The story of this game is “girl has scrolls, then bad guy, then no scrolls and girl glows.”

You must stop him! Rescue her! Or wait, rescue the scrolls and avenge her? Hmm. That glow is suspicious. It could be rescue her from the power of the scrolls. Listen, all of these questions have the same answer: Uppercut.

But hold on, let’s go the wikipedia page that this game hilariously has:

Oh, so… yeah. “Girl has scrolls, then no more scrolls and girl glow.” Actually a pretty good way to convey that story, Karate Blazers.

Incidentally, Karate Blazers only has a wikipedia page because some of the characters later make a guest appearance in a better game. A fitting legacy for Karate Blazers, also known as “they moved Final Fight two spots down and I didn’t notice in time.”

Shit, I forgot the most important test. Before we go any further, we have to make sure this is a proper ‘90s brawler. Where is the racist Jamaican caricature we beat up?

Oh okay, cool. It has to have at least one Jamaican or it doesn’t count as-

A-all right. Well, it can have more than one Jamaican so long as-

Well, dang. I’m wrong about everything. This was actually the best ‘90s arcade brawler. It had the most racist Jamaicans to beat! That’s the law, I didn’t make it!

I suppose we should get started talking about the video game I’m talking about.

Here’s Mark again. Haha, you forgot about Mark already didn’t you?

I got as far as seeing Mark’s walk before I restarted the game for anyone not Mark.

He walks like you’ve only ever told him about walking, but he’s never seen it done before. That’s what an AI thinks walking is, if you only feed it photos of people fighting diarrhea. Mark, there was no test, you offered no answer, and somehow you still got it wrong.

Let’s go with Glen:

Mark, watch this shit, are you watching? This is how you fucking walk:

Glen walks like he’s practicing for tits. It’s kind of a sexy werewolf prowl. If you saw that motherfucker walking towards you like that, you’d have no idea what was about to happen to you, only that you did not properly prep your holes for it.

Here’s how Glen jumps:

In Karate Blazers your only jump is also an attack, so every time you want to jump — and you will want to jump a lot — Glen does that fucking mental air-plank thing. Every one of his fights looks like documentary footage of a salmon going up a waterfall.

Once again, I do not understand how you’re possibly going to beat what Glen is bringing to the table. But we owe Gil a shot.

Here’s Gil’s walking animation.

This is not off to a great start, Gil. We’re barely registering above Mark levels here, and Mark levels are what we use to calibrate the scale. How about that jump, buddy?

That’s almost a normal jumpkick, you beautiful idiot. Gil, unless you summon a giant neon hair scrunchie and hula-hoop across the battlefield right now, thi-

That’s Gil’s super move, and I didn’t mention Mark and Glen’s because they were nothing. I didn’t bother recording them. Mark did a jumpkick that shot out force waves, and Glen punched the ground which glowed a bit. There was simply no precedent for Gil to turn himself into the spokes of a glowing hair wheel and drive across all who oppose him.

This is it: This is what’s justice to him.

Akira, that is a tough act to follow.

Look, you’re clearly awesome. You’re both a dipshit and a ninja. You’ve got purple jeans and you’re wearing pantyhose for a shirt. Torn pantyhose. But Gil brought Magical Girl energy to a Double Dragon clone. This walk better be something else:

Akira! You walk like a crab trying not to wake up the kids. You walk like your underwear is around your ankles and you’re trying to fuck something that’s only slightly faster than you. Are you trying to guide an invisible, drunk bear toward freedom? That’s what happens on Fun Fridays when the physical therapy nurse asks patients to try the Running Man. This walk alone easily puts Akira in the lead. But let’s see that jump:

Pretty funny. It’s not “nature is telling Glen to spawn” funny, but it’s up there. That’s not a double jumpkick. That’s how modern dance communicates the joy of spring. Keep in mind this is an attack, so all of Akira’s battles…

Look like the theater kid snapped. There are six racist caricatures in this gif and one of them is wearing Prince’s laundry-day outfit. Whatever’s happening here is clearly a hate crime, but which one? Or rather, how many?

You may have already noticed that Karate Blazers has like four enemies, and its secret is putting eighty of them onscreen at the same time.

Quick, how many Andrew Dice Clays do you see here? Three? You’re wrong twice: There are six, and they’re all Joe Piscopo.

This isn’t just lazy, it breaks the whole game. When all 17 of the same guy converge in the same place, there’s no way to tell their attack animations apart. You can’t time a counter when one punch is actually ten punches, so you end up just getting mobbed by more minority hunks than a Lindsey Graham wetmare.

But the game isn’t hard. It’s just cheap. There are a lot of leather-clad dudes, but they’re only dangerous when they gang up on you, and they’re all dumb as shit. It’s like fighting an Idaho biker gang, or 4chan.

Like check out this guy, who spends an entire boss fight pee-dancing behind a box.

Here’s that boss, by the way.

He is disappointingly bland. He’s got kind of a wrestler open-mic night vibe going on – like he’s really just trying out some new material on Thursday to see what’s worth bringing into the ring on Saturday. “Eyepatch? Is it eyepatch, you think? Eyepatch and rave hair? Surely not eyepatch, rave hair and dick board. Two out of three. What do you think?”

But it’s just the first level. The bosses are the only place games like this really get to shine. They’ll ramp up as we go. They must!

Anyway, here’s our next gang: The portly weebs.

Their main and only form of attack is attempted handshake:

And when the game puts thirty of them onscreen at the same time it looks like a Limp Bizkit mosh pit.

It looks like a teenage employee trying to survive a Wal-Mart Black Friday. This is every Juggalo meetup when the girl arrives.

There’s just no elegant solution to this game’s terrible combat. Well, not mechanically elegant:

Welp, here’s the next boss:

I guess it scans that the boss of the portly weebs is just the portliest and weebiest. Dressed in a skimpy Mai Shiranui costume and so dedicated to his craft that he rolls everywhere like a fat Katamari.

Please meet your fourth enemy type: eight hundred robots.

And that’s… actually pretty cool. I really did not see robots coming into this mix. So what are they gonna do different? Laser eyes? Plasma swords? Rocket cocks, which I call Cockets? No? Nothing? Just ordinary mobbing and punching? Here, you know the words. Sing along:

You know, I’ll give you this one, Karate Blazers: The best way to defeat robots is actually through interpretive dance. They understand neither love nor art, and Akira’s battle frolic is both.

This is getting old fast. Let’s just air-sass our way through the robot level until we get to the boss, which is probably some lame scientist or something.

Wesley Snipes!

Holy shit, Karate Blazers, this is legitimately awesome. I never would have thought to put Wesley Snipes in charge of the robot army — in all my books, he fights the robot army. Wait, what’s that you say? There are actually two Wesley Snipes standing in the same spot? Fuck. Yes. Has somebody been reading my screenplay, Passenger 114: Always Bet on Double-Black?! But I was told it was unfilmable! That Wesley Snipes had too much dignity! That I was misunderstanding the basic tenets of both movie-making and roulette!

Surely, there’s no way to beat the Multi-Snipes.

Unless…

Honestly, the rest of the levels after this were a letdown. How could they not be? It’s just like the tagline for Passenger 114 says: “Once you go double-black, you can never double-back.”

Let’s skip right ahead to the final boss of the whole game. Eyepatch Dickboard wasn’t very good, and Dinner Roll: King of the Weebs was directly terrible, but Karate Blazers gained a lot of goodwill with Blade II: II Blades. I’m pretty amped to see what form their crazy final boss will take…

It’s Eyepatch Dickboard again???

Karate Blazers truly never thought anybody would get this far. They never thought anybody would want to get this far. Who would waste sixteen dollars in quarters just to hit the prance button all afternoon?

This guy!

And that’s Karate Blazers. There were five enemies sixteen thousand times, you beat the end boss at the very beginning, and from start to finish the only move that worked was a war jete. I burned a solid day romping through pixel stereotypes just to bring you this ending, which I present here in its entirety:

Again, I did not omit a screen. I did not crop out text. You and the boys are giving the casting director of Cats your best sex-yowl, and then there is girl.

Wait, also scrolls!

Nevermind, this ending works.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, toasty god: who is now serving six consecutive life sentences for Prancing With Intent to Kill.

Tags 2020, arcade, beat em ups, Free, games, karate, Video Games

PUNCHING DAY

Karate for Snakes

“Take this book! It’s too late for me!” screamed the man who leapt through my window. I nodded, mistaking these for the words of a dying man. Instead, he remained alive, saying many, many more things as the night turned into morning. Along with the book, he gave me his life story and several apologies for the window before he left. Still, I’d like you to imagine how chilling and mysterious it would have been if he had thrust this book into my hands with his last breath.

Tags 2020, books, Free, how-to, karate, Martial Arts