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 Malibuâs 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 Malibuâs league, thatâs because youâre 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. Theyâre 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 weâll never know.
Malibu gets a pass on a lot of this shit, even though Iâm pretty sure Sub-Zero doesnât have a business card, like he sells ninjitsu door-to-door:
And I donât think Sonyaâs dad was really Herman Blade, no matter how hard it makes me laugh:
And itâs super crazy that their little trading cards list everyoneâs 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 thatâs all canonical Mortal Kombat horseshit. So weâre 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 canât do poses yet. Sonyaâs giving firm grumpy mom energy, Johnny Cage and Liu Kang look like theyâre fully cooperating with the Fist Inspector, while Raiden just heard the opening chords to âY.M.C.A.â only heâs not entirely sure — it could be âDo the Hustle.â Just⌠nobody has any idea what to do with their hands here. Itâs like a 6th grade school dance. Itâs 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 couldnât deliver on any of them? This doesnât scan as âGoro is reaching out at you,â it scans as âGoro has three big hands and one small one, like a Chinese Rolex.â
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 somebodyâs 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 Dennyâs.
Apparently even Malibu got frustrated with this whole drawing business, and they asked the most regrettable question of the 1990s: âHow hard could this whole computer thing be?â
That looks like a good first try at ReBoot fan-art. It looks like you made a racist meme with Garryâs Mod but the punchline got muddled because youâre more of a text racist. Thatâs 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 itâs bee-stung Keanu Reeves, sometimes he looks like a face you can kind of see in a potato if you squint, and sometimes itâs all three.
Hereâs sexpot Sonya:
Looking like sheâs transforming into the guy next to her. She looks like a MadMagazine 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 donât ask a Malibu artist to draw something as complicated as âenvironments.â Set a scene in a rainstorm and youâll get…
A bukkake explosion inside a cocoon. You still wonât get a usable face, either, seeing as how Sonya has a Lego head and Jax looks like Handsome Quasimodo.
Hereâs Baraka after they kidnapped his adopted daughter, which Iâm 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.
Iâm 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. Hereâs 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 canât draw a jumpkick without committing an atrocity just ask to be reassigned to Malibuâs Deep Space Nine adaptation. Nobody ever jumpkicks and if you fuck up a face you can just say itâs 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 weâre talking about comic books and video games and the â90s, we will be getting very needlessly sexy with things. Well, weâre going to try.
Hereâs 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 isnât a face and the other isnât a background. So youâd think theyâd 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 womanâs spine. She looks like sheâs being wrung out by an invisible giant. If thereâs some kind of human dishrag fetish, I assume somebody is cumming to this right now.
Hereâs 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.
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 â I don’t know if I should say that on film â but if the guy had his tongue in the wrong position in the mouth, that can also nullify it. You can nullify it â 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.
Gamers love to nostalgia-wank about the good old days of gaming, back when everything was bits and women werenât interested so it didnât even matter that they werenât allowed. Iâm not immune to it, myself: I adore pixel art and Iâll always remember where I was when I first found out ninjas kidnapped the president. Games werenât 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.
Letâs talk Karate Blazers.
104% of all games in the late â80s and early â90s were just reskinned arcade brawlers that the developers knew you would never beat, if only out of disinterest. They werenât 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 McDonaldâs ice cream machine of the arcade. Hereâs the secret: Thereâs no such thing as Super Hang-On — itâs just a demo screen and a plastic motorcycle, there to lure you into the arcade where youâll 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: âboy in background.â Mark is a cunning design trick: Heâs a quarter-burner. Sometimes youâll 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, thatâs better. Glenâs got a flat top, thunderous fists, total invincibility, and flat top again. Youâd be an idiot to pick anybody else.
Oh. Oh, but you didnât know about Gil! Whatâs justice, to a man like Gil? I didnât have that question in my heart before, but now thatâs all thereâs 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 Sophieâs Choice. The only thing I like better than an unkillable flat top or a mysterious himbo is an idiot ninja. You canât make me choose between these three amazing warriors and also Mark — itâs just not fair!
If Karate Blazers is skimping, itâs not on characters. Itâs not story, either. In the early â90s, 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. Hereâs the story of Karate Blazers, in its entirety, and I promise Iâm not leaving anything out:
I did not omit a single screen, I didnât crop out any text. The story of this game is âgirl has scrolls, then bad guy, then no scrolls and girl glows.â
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, letâs go the wikipedia page that this game hilariously has:
Oh, so⌠yeah. âGirl has scrolls, then no more scrolls and girl glow.â 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 âthey moved Final Fight two spots down and I didnât notice in time.â
Shit, I forgot the most important test. Before we go any further, we have to make sure this is a proper â90s brawler. Where is the racist Jamaican caricature we beat up?
Oh okay, cool. It has to have at least one Jamaican or it doesnât count as-
A-all right. Well, it can have more than one Jamaican so long as-
Well, dang. Iâm wrong about everything. This was actually the best â90s arcade brawler. It had the most racist Jamaicans to beat! Thatâs the law, I didnât make it!
I suppose we should get started talking about the video game Iâm talking about.
Hereâs Mark again. Haha, you forgot about Mark already didnât you?
I got as far as seeing Markâs walk before I restarted the game for anyone not Mark.
He walks like youâve only ever told him about walking, but heâs never seen it done before. Thatâs 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.
Letâs go with Glen:
Mark, watch this shit, are you watching? This is how you fucking walk:
Glen walks like heâs practicing for tits. Itâs kind of a sexy werewolf prowl. If you saw that motherfucker walking towards you like that, youâd have no idea what was about to happen to you, only that you did not properly prep your holes for it.
Hereâs 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 youâre possibly going to beat what Glen is bringing to the table. But we owe Gil a shot.
Hereâs Gilâs walking animation.
This is not off to a great start, Gil. Weâre barely registering above Mark levels here, and Mark levels are what we use to calibrate the scale. How about that jump, buddy?
Thatâs 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-
Thatâs Gilâs super move, and I didnât mention Mark and Glenâs because they were nothing. I didnât 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 whatâs justice to him.
Akira, that is a tough act to follow.
Look, youâre clearly awesome. Youâre both a dipshit and a ninja. Youâve got purple jeans and youâre 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? Thatâs 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 letâs see that jump:
Pretty funny. Itâs not ânature is telling Glen to spawn” funny, but itâs up there. Thatâs not a double jumpkick. Thatâs how modern dance communicates the joy of spring. Keep in mind this is an attack, so all of Akiraâs battles…
Look like the theater kid snapped. There are six racist caricatures in this gif and one of them is wearing Princeâs laundry-day outfit. Whateverâs 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? Youâre wrong twice: There are six, and theyâre all Joe Piscopo.
This isnât just lazy, it breaks the whole game. When all 17 of the same guy converge in the same place, thereâs no way to tell their attack animations apart. You canât 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 isnât hard. Itâs just cheap. There are a lot of leather-clad dudes, but theyâre only dangerous when they gang up on you, and theyâre all dumb as shit. Itâs like fighting an Idaho biker gang, or 4chan.
Like check out this guy, who spends an entire boss fight pee-dancing behind a box.
Hereâs that boss, by the way.
He is disappointingly bland. Heâs got kind of a wrestler open-mic night vibe going on – like heâs really just trying out some new material on Thursday to see whatâs worth bringing into the ring on Saturday. âEyepatch? 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?â
But itâs just the first level. The bosses are the only place games like this really get to shine. Theyâll ramp up as we go. They must!
Anyway, hereâs 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.
Thereâs just no elegant solution to this gameâs terrible combat. Well, not mechanically elegant:
Welp, hereâs 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 thatâs⌠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, Iâll give you this one, Karate Blazers: The best way to defeat robots is actually through interpretive dance. They understand neither love nor art, and Akiraâs battle frolic is both.
This is getting old fast. Letâs 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, whatâs 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, thereâs no way to beat the Multi-Snipes.
Unless…
Honestly, the rest of the levels after this were a letdown. How could they not be? Itâs just like the tagline for Passenger 114 says: âOnce you go double-black, you can never double-back.â
Letâs skip right ahead to the final boss of the whole game. Eyepatch Dickboard wasnât 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. Iâm pretty amped to see what form their crazy final boss will takeâŚ
Itâs 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 thatâs 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.
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“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.
Basically every hobby I have is either problematic in nature, or quickly becomes problematic because of the way I do it. Take memes: I canât just enjoy them and move on; I have to dig into them. I have to research them. I have to hunt them to the ends of the earth until I finally corner them, having already taken everything away from them, leaving them only animal desperation. That moment — when a once civil thing becomes feral? When you can see intelligence die in their eyes, to be replaced by fear and fury? Thatâs what gets me off, but with memes. Do yâall know The Most Dangerous Game? Iâm going to Most Dangerous Game this meme. Hereâs the Karate Rap, a third tier viral video that did around a million views back in 2012.
We open on Sensei Dave, whoâs got kind of a sexy stepdad in a sitcom thing going on. Thereâs definitely a Patrick Duffy That Fucks vibe. Letâs call him Patrick Muffy, and move on.
He looks at the camera and the first words out of his mouth are âkeep training, youâll get it!â
Then the camera spins around to show him talking to a sleepy ten year old who came here to learn how to Crane Kick bullies, but his parents paid for a whole month so they wonât let him quit now that he knows real karate class is just Sensei Dave hitting on moms. Yes, somehow this video actually has the balls to take place in a strip mall karate dojo full of 9 year olds with anger issues, making it the most realistic depiction of karate ever put to film.
Sensei Dave really goes through the rolodex of â80s karate shit. He meditates and then glows with energy as he ascends to another plane where karate is relevant:
And he throws mild punches to the camera in between extreme zooms on his kiai face.
Itâs right about now when Sensei Dave starts rapping, a term I use generously. The chorus — âIchi, ni, san, shi, come on everybody train karate! Karate: train your body!â — will stick with you until the day you die. But Sensei Daveâs flow is somewhere between Debbie Harry and grandma making fun of your music after too much wine.
Next we meet Karate Girl.
Iâm not being sexist. She is.
Thatâs how she introduces herself:
Iâve trained karate around the world
Iâm known all over as Karate Girl
Iâm witty, Iâm pretty, got the female smarts
So listen to our rap about the martial arts
Iâm not going to touch âfemale smarts,â and Iâm also not going to touch Karate Girl, since sheâs sultrily lounging around on the foot-sweaty mats like she only gatewayâed on choking and now nothing less than a full shoulder throw gets her going:
The video really does seem to think karate is sexy, a logical fallacy nobody has made since Van Damme. Here, enjoy Karate Girls bending over in their formless white gis to show what might be formless white asses.
Then Sensei Dave brings in his mistress to show them how itâs all done.
As is the way with all karate instructors, the childâs dojo soon gives way to grander delusions. Now Sensei Dave and Karate Girl dress up in Meat Loafâs bathrobes to rap with a backup band whose every member is competing to be the first asked to leave the costume party for poor taste.
They go full â80s as hard as they can and in every direction. They shift transparent over a nighttime cityscape like theyâre in the credits of a sexy detective show:
Sensei Dave channels that Top Gun energy to break boards with the band and high five, while Karate Girl only catches part of the message and kicks the bass player in the gut.
They even slip in a few quick seconds of that most â80s musical moment: The flirtatious conversational duet.
Sensei Dave: âIâm a black belt!â
Karate Girl: âMakes my heart melt.â
Again, nobody has been this turned on by a white guy doing martial arts since Jean Claude Van Damme got to star with himself in Double Impact.
You know whatâs especially crazy about this? They actually had some kind of budget. When Sensei Dave fails to rhyme âI train in my carâ with âIâm a nin-ja!â we cut to…
Those were cutting edge effects back in the day!
Here Karate Girl briefly changes her name to Samurette – the only martial-arts themed self-burn more dismissive than Karate Girl — just for this sweet sword slice cut.
Thatâs actually what worried me about this video. The budget was too high for something of this caliber. It was filmed too well. And there were moments like…
That black belt over the excessively tiny towel? It feels too self-aware. I get that they intend a bit of silliness here, but that feels like the moment in a parody where you stop laughing because theyâve taken it too far. And this is before Karate Dog, with his Karate Bone:
This is the internet. You know the rules: Weâre not allowed to laugh at somebody if they want to be laughed at. For this to be truly funny, they had to have meant this video in earnest. At least a little bit.
And so the hunt begins.
Jump down to the YouTube comments and youâll find multiple people claiming to be in this thing:
But the concept of internet points combined with anonymity have turned every commenter into that kid who told everybody he was the basis for Boy Meets World. We all have Canadian Girlfriends now.
Still, this is a positive start. Next we find out if Karate Rap has an IMDB page. Thatâs not a high honor — I have an IMDB page and fans regularly message me on Twitter to tell me they loved me when I was Robert Evans.
But it does help legitimize the date: Karate Rap was made in 1986 – well before we invented irony!
More importantly, Sensei Dave has his own page! His name is David Seeger, and he went on to direct music videos for the Mickey Mouse Club and daytime soaps. So he actually specializes in making short films so shoddy they leave you questioning their legitimacy:
Now weâve got a name. This is the part in the hunt where I kneel down to touch some spoor and crumble it between my fingers, looking to the horizon and whispering âheâs near.â
You hear me, Sensei Dave? I have fondled your spoor!
On one of his pages, Sensei Dave posts a little explanation of the Karate Rap, which is thus: His kids found out about their parentsâ embarrassing past and wanted to post it on YouTube for Canadian Girlfriend Points.
Another page clarifies their intent in making Karate Rap: Yes, they were serious. They meant it as a demo reel to kickstart a career in music videos. And it worked! Sort of! Disney saw it and thought âthese people look like they work cheapâ and that happens to be the exact and only requirements for working on a Disney live-action show.
Please note I have switched to âthey.â Because now we have learned that Karate Girl was actually Sensei Daveâs wife, Holly Whitstock Seeger.
Please also note the repetition of the hilariously false claim that MTV wouldnât touch rap in 1986 (theyâd been playing it since 1984), with the twin implications being: Thatâs the real reason MTV wouldnât play Karate Rap even after the Seegersâ many desperate submissions, and also that the Seegers were actually pioneers in rap and it might not even be a thing without their important work.
Sensei Dave was serious about his karate, too. If you hadnât already guessed that from lyrics like âIâve walked the streets, I have no fear — I always know my karate is near!â
In Karate Rap, he variously claimed to be a ninja, a shogun, and a samurai, but he is actually a 9th degree black belt, which qualifies him for one free pretzel (with purchase of child-sized drink) at any Wetzelâs Pretzels in the greater Davenport area. Heâs rocking that mall ninja lifestyle to this very day with his fanny pack full of shurikens and, presumably, hard candy snacks for the grandkids.
Heâs also a Knight of Malta! Somebody please just introduce Sensei Dave to Dungeons & Dragons; it is a much cheaper way to get people to call you cool pretend titles.
David Seeger also started Samurai Studios Inc., which has apparently pivoted from making â80s videos that look like 2000s videos making fun of â80s videos, to making 2000s websites that look like theyâre making fun of â90s websites.
Wait, holy shit – Sensei Dave actually inherited the legacy of making âmedia thatâs hilarious because somebody triedâ from his father, Hal Seeger, who you might know from one of several cartoons you definitely donât know:
A legacy which Karate Girl is tragically optimistic about!
This is an entire family based around the rapid-fire production of D-list media to be made fun of by internet comedians. Seriously, every single one of his siblings also pursued careers like âfrequent extra on CSI showsâ and âstaff writer for sitcoms that last four episodes.â
This is too much. Iâve gone too far. You stopped rooting for me six paragraphs ago. Iâm not even the anti-hero anymore. Iâm just the bad guy. And now Iâm hunting this poor meme into its den. Iâm coming after its children.
Thatâs not a metaphor.
Thereâs a small, almost shy little subheading hidden in the About section of one of their production studio pages. Itâs called âItâs a Family Affair.â Sensei Dave and Karate Girl have many children. And those children have also gone into making media you laugh at for the wrong reasons.
That is three generations of an entire family dedicating their lives to making stuff for us to make fun of! Each new baby, with their first breath, inherits a storied legacy of crap! Theyâve been churning out pop culture corn syrup since the 1930s — nearly 100 years of Hot Dog material!
I may be the only person in nine decades to say this: Thank you, Seeger family. I am a fan of your work!
Road House is not the Citizen Kane of bouncer movies. Citizen Kane is the Road House of newspaper movies. This is my third and possibly final column in the series I’m calling, “How The Eighties Convinced Men They Could Murder Their Way To A Bigger Cock, Inadvertently Causing All Of Our Problems Today” (1, 2) and let’s just say there’s a reason historians refer to the eighties as the Road House of decades.
Road House, for those of you who’ve never seen it and thus have a hole in your personality in the exact shape of the movie Road House, is the 1989 Patrick Swayze action movie in which he plays a famous bouncer in a universe in which that is apparently a thing. It co-stars Sam Elliott, the Road House of actors, and takes place in Missouri, the 1989 of American states.
The plot isn’t particularly relevant to our discussion today; it’s a standard Western, adapted for the era by upgrading the Stetsons to porntacular feathered mullets …
… and instead of beauty shots of frontier vistas, we get lingering close-ups of Patrick Swayze’s nude ass. Swayze’s bouncer character, James Dalton, rides in to clean up a bar in a small town that is living under the thumb of a sadistic tycoon. Before it’s over, there will be two massive explosions, a monster truck rampage and Dalton will have murdered six men with his bare hands.
“But what does this have to do with the American male’s chronic dong insecurity, aside from literally everything you just described?” Here’s where you have to understand the Swayze-specific context for this film: he was coming off a starring role in Dirty Dancing, an international sensation so popular with women that writers kept referring to it as “the Star Wars for girls,” because that phrase didn’t used to bury an author under an avalanche of death threats from anime avatars.
This, of course, was a problem for any actor with action star aspirations. A guy like that needs male asses in the seats and no insecure teenage boy would be caught dead watching something as gay as a movie about a man who has sex with women but also dances. So, Patrick Swayze teamed up with a director named, no shit, Rowdy Herrington to reclaim his masculinity with a film that would launch with the tagline, “The dancingâs over. Now it gets dirty.”
To achieve this mission, Road House masterfully executes a 7-point plan:
1. Establish That Dalton Has Reached The Apex Of The World’s Most Heterosexual Profession.
Road House literally opens with the title superimposed on a woman’s ass:
One minute later, we get a close-up of some titties, just to drive the point home. “This one’s got plenty of spank fuel for you and your girl! Hell, there’s even a little something for Mom later.”
We’re in a huge, upscale bar where our hero works as the lead bouncer. The first trouble Dalton witnesses — and see if you can detect the subtle symbolism here — is an unruly patron suddenly kicking a woman in the vagina:
The vulva-punter then pulls a knife on Dalton. He, like everyone in this universe, knows Dalton by name and reputation (“I’ve always wanted to try you! I think I can take you, Dalton!”). But Dalton only smirks and walks away, knowing he’s thrashed bigger men than this on his way to thrash some even bigger man.
Dalton sustains a knife wound in the encounter, so he retires shirtlessly to the restroom to sew himself up. Note: We are still in the opening credit sequence.
He is soon interrupted by a man in a suit who says he owns a bar in Missouri that is just lousy with brawling thugs. He wants Dalton to come clean the place up, because he’s the best bouncer in the world. Dalton says that another bouncer, Wade Garrett, is the best, but the man wants Dalton and will pay any price.
“Five thousand up front,” says Dalton, “five hundred a night, cash, you pay all medical expenses.” I did the math and this is the 2020 equivalent of $400K a year. Just to drive the point home, we see Dalton take off toward Missouri in a brand new Mercedes 560SEC, the shirtless Patrick Swayze of cars.
2. Make It Clear That Dalton’s Badassery Has Somehow Earned Him Nationwide Fame.
Dalton arrives at the bar, the Double Deuce, and within seconds a waitress starts hitting on him:
WAITRESS
If you need anything — anything — you just let me know.
DALTON smirks and turns away, knowing he’s fucked hotter women than this on his way to fuck some even hotter woman.
WAITRESS
You got a name?
DALTON
(Gruffly)
Yeah.
WAITRESS
Well, what is it?
DALTON
(Spins on her in dramatic fashion)
Dalton.
The WAITRESS GASPS IN SHOCK, then GIGGLES.
WAITRESS
Oh my god! Shit! I’ve heard of you!
Keep in mind, there were almost certainly bars in 1989 Missouri where the actual actor Patrick Swayze could still go totally unrecognized. But James Dalton, who works as a bouncer 1,200 miles away, is so well-known that he doesn’t even have to give a first name. Two minutes later, we see the waitress say to a fellow employee, “You know who that is? Dalton.” In response, the man’s head snaps around like he’s been told that his absent father is at the door and that it’s David Lee Roth.
He then goes to another employee and says, “The guy at the end of the bar is fuckin’ Dalton, man.” Yet another employee, when face-to-face with Dalton says, “I heard you had balls big enough to come in a dump truck.” This is a universe in which children dress as Dalton the Bouncer for Halloween.
3. Hammer Home The Fact That Everyone Is Desperate To Fuck Dalton … But He’s Saving Himself For That Special Someone.
Soon after this, the Waitress invites herself into Dalton’s barnyard apartment early in the morning, to find him sleeping fully nude. He stands up:
And she orgasms in her pants:
He still shows no interest in her, because cold indifference was the most sexually desirable trait in the 1980s male.
Later, when Dalton endures yet another stab wound, he is tended to by the hospital’s sexiest blonde doctor. He refuses anesthetic (“Do you enjoy pain?” she asks, to which he replies, “Pain don’t hurt”). He then reveals that, despite what he just said, he has a degree from NYU in philosophy. This bouncer then invites the doctor to come visit him at his bar that night. She readily agrees, not because class differences don’t exist in Road House, but because this is a universe in which any doctor would be flattered to be seen with a prestigious bouncer like Dalton.
That night at the bar, a different blonde walks up to Dalton and says, “What do you say we go back to my place and fuck?” Again he responds with smirking indifference. It will turn out that she is the girlfriend of the tycoon antagonist, Brad Wesley. She is roughly hustled away by Jimmy, a Wesley henchman who Dalton will murder later. Dalton then walks outside to find the sexy doctor waiting for him. “Looking for someone?” he asks coldly, even though he literally invited her. “You,” she coos. He silently deems her worthy of penetration.
Oh, and it turns out that the sexy doctor is the villain’s ex-girlfriend. Indeed, women are but the proverbial battlefield upon which the men proverbially joust with their literal boners.
4. Give Dalton A Tough, Manly Friend With Cool War Stories.
Wade Garrett, the Jordan to Dalton’s Lebron, shows up to help. Did you ever have that one Halloween where you were the only one who turned up to the event in costume? Well, Sam Elliott is the only guy here who showed up looking like he actually works in a dive bar.
Also, after Road House, his next appearance was in the masturbation fantasies of millions of middle-aged housewives. Garrett gets a compressed version of Dalton’s introduction: First, the other workers in the bar express awe (“Holy shit, that’s Wade Garrett!”) and then he immediately confronts a giant, hostile man. This exchange ensues and, again, I’ll leave it to you to parse the symbolism:
GIANT HOSTILE MAN
You wanna fight, dickless?
WADE
Well I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick.
He then punches the giant man RIGHT IN THE COCK.
He later joins Dalton and the sexy doctor on a date. The two bouncers share stories about brutalizing drunks, to the delight of this physician who can only fantasize about achieving similar heights in her own field. Wade offers to show off one of his scars. Here we see Elliott is again dedicated to authenticity in a way that the rest of the film is not. “I’m a bouncer?” he presumably said to director Rowdy, “so when I’m not at work, I’m drunk and showing my pubes in a family restaurant, right?”
The sexy doctor sees the scar, grins and inexplicably says, “A Woman?” to which Wade replies, “Boy, was she.” No further explanation is requested or given.
5. Give Dalton A Dark, Mysterious Past Full Of Fucking And Killing.
By the 1980s it was understood that real men are brooding and haunted, because smiling is apparently also gay. It’s thus revealed that Dalton has a dark backstory: He killed a man in Memphis by ripping his throat out with his bare hands, but got off on self-defense grounds. What could drive Dalton to do such a thing? Garrett, in an effort to reassure Dalton, says,
“You know that fucking cun- that girl, never told you she was married, did she? And when a man sticks a gun in your face, you got two choices: You can die, or you can kill the motherfucker.”
Here we learn that the fact that every woman wants to fuck Dalton is his burden and his curse, especially since it often intersects with him being nature’s ultimate killing machine. Side note: Let’s have a round of applause for the defense attorney who sold the jury on throat-ripping as an act of self-defense.
To further hammer home the fact that no man can escape the long shadow of his past, the heroic Dalton rents an apartment next door to the villain’s mansion, then proceeds to pork the villain’s ex-girlfriend on the roof while he watches from his porch.
When you’re Dalton, this exact situation is literally unavoidable.
6. Create A World In Which It’s Impossible To Distinguish Sincerity From Winking Innuendo.
At one point, Wesley enters the bar and says to the band, “Fellas, play something with balls.”
On another occasion, he taunts Dalton with, “I see you found my trophy room, Dalton. The only thing missing is your ass.”
Near the climax, Dalton has a shirtless battle to the death with the main henchman, Jimmy, who snarls, “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”
It turns out, by the way, that this is Dalton’s trigger phrase. He flies into a berserker rage, first by kicking the man’s testicles so hard that somewhere in the future his terrified offspring started fading from reality…
…and then ripping out his filthy, blasphemous voice box with his bare hands.
7. Demonstrate That A Man Can, In Fact, Murder His Way To A Better Life For His Penis.
As I mentioned, Dalton kills five more people (most with his bare hands, one gets a knife) and is an accomplice in the murder of a sixth when the villain Wesley succumbs to his one weakness: four point-blank shotgun blasts to the torso.
The shotgunning is done by the oppressed townsfolk and no one suffers any consequences for this whatsoever, so it’s not totally clear why they needed Dalton at all. Nonetheless, Dalton earns the love of the sexy doctor and in the final scene, he frolics nude with her at the lake. Because Dalton can only get hard when a lesser male is observing in sexually frustrated silence, they force Cody, their blind musician friend, to listen from the shore.
The film is not subtle about its lesson: Bouncers don’t just protect bars, they protect the world. Society needs more bouncers, and men who think like bouncers. It is our duty to make sure they’re lavishly rewarded. “
And I suppose Swayze’s Dirty Dancing to Road House pivot somehow encapsulates America’s decades-long masculinity crisis,” you say, since you’re now familiar with my only column template. It sure as fuck does! But understanding the hilarious tragedy of it requires even more context. You see, from the 1930s to the 1950s, like half the movies made in Hollywood looked like this:
And the posters looked like this:
Those lavish song-and-dance epics were enjoyed by millions of heterosexual males, men who’d survived mustard gas and a great depression, men who’s earliest childhood memory was seeing a fieldhand get torn apart in a thresher accident. On Movie Night, those men were equally happy to watch John Wayne shooting cattle rustlers or Fred Astaire gliding across a ballroom.
“But if you claim we’re hardwired to enjoy dance, how could we so easily swear it off?” We didn’t, we just asked the performers to tweak the choreography ever so slightly so that the dancers would appear to be fighting.
That’s how elaborate fight choreography imported from Hong Kong cinema slid in to fill the void like James Dalton sliding into the woman of a rival male. Jackie Chan, the Jackie Chan of actors, didn’t learn to brutalize a roomful of opponents with a lawn chair by spending years in a secret school for warrior monks. He was trained in dance and acrobatics at the Peking Opera School alongside other fight movie legends like Sammo Hung. While Bruce Lee was mastering Wing Chun under Yip Man, he was also training to win the 1958 Hong Kong Cha-Cha Championship. This is because, and I think Lee himself would have told you this, being a good dancer makes women want to bang you.
So Dirty Dancing and Road House are, at heart, the same genre. The prep for both movies involved performers working with a choreographer to memorize moves in a way that would plausibly win the heart of a woman. It’s just that by the 1980s, males were making it a point to establish two things as loudly as possible:
A) Their manhood was the bedrock upon which their entire personality was built;
B) That manhood was so dainty and tenuous that if they stopped signaling it for even five minutes, it would shrivel up and go farting into the distance like a released balloon.
So, sure, their idols could dance now and then. But that dancing, along with all sorts of things they would otherwise enjoy, had to be slathered in layers of goofy and violent masculine posturing, like hiding a dog’s heartworm pill in a wad of cheese.
Of course, it’s 2020 and that all looks ridiculous now. Hollywood has taken a much more nuanced and mature approach to the subject, which is why in 2015 they announced a gender-flipped reboot of Road House starring Rhonda Rousey. It was quietly dropped the following year.
