Category: PUNCHING DAY

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PUNCHING DAY

Punching Day: Karate Rap

Basically every hobby I have is either problematic in nature, or quickly becomes problematic because of the way I do it. Take memes: I can’t 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? That’s what gets me off, but with memes. Do y’all know The Most Dangerous Game? I’m going to Most Dangerous Game this meme. Here’s the Karate Rap, a third tier viral video that did around a million views back in 2012. 

We open on Sensei Dave, who’s got kind of a sexy stepdad in a sitcom thing going on. There’s definitely a Patrick Duffy That Fucks vibe. Let’s call him Patrick Muffy, and move on. 

He looks at the camera and the first words out of his mouth are “keep training, you’ll get it!”

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 won’t 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 ‘80s 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.

It’s right about now when Sensei Dave starts rapping, a term I use generously. The chorus — “Ichi, ni, san, shi, come on everybody train karate! Karate: train your body!” — will stick with you until the day you die. But Sensei Dave’s flow is somewhere between Debbie Harry and grandma making fun of your music after too much wine.

Next we meet Karate Girl. 

I’m not being sexist. She is.

That’s how she introduces herself: 

I’ve trained karate around the world

I’m known all over as Karate Girl

I’m witty, I’m pretty, got the female smarts

So listen to our rap about the martial arts

I’m not going to touch ‘female smarts,’ and I’m also not going to touch Karate Girl, since she’s sultrily lounging around on the foot-sweaty mats like she only gateway’ed 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 it’s all done.

As is the way with all karate instructors, the child’s dojo soon gives way to grander delusions. Now Sensei Dave and Karate Girl dress up in Meat Loaf’s 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 ‘80s as hard as they can and in every direction. They shift transparent over a nighttime cityscape like they’re 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 ‘80s musical moment: The flirtatious conversational duet.

Sensei Dave: “I’m a black belt!” 

Karate Girl: “Makes my heart melt.”

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 what’s especially crazy about this? They actually had some kind of budget. When Sensei Dave fails to rhyme “I train in my car” with “I’m a nin-ja!” 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.

That’s 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 they’ve taken it too far. And this is before Karate Dog, with his Karate Bone:

This is the internet. You know the rules: We’re 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 you’ll 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. That’s 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 we’ve 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 “he’s near.”

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 parents’ 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 “these people look like they work cheap” and that happens to be the exact and only requirements for working on a Disney live-action show. 

Please note I have switched to “they.” Because now we have learned that Karate Girl was actually Sensei Dave’s wife, Holly Whitstock Seeger.

Please also note the repetition of the hilariously false claim that MTV wouldn’t touch rap in 1986 (they’d been playing it since 1984), with the twin implications being: That’s the real reason MTV wouldn’t play Karate Rap even after the Seegers’ 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 hadn’t already guessed that from lyrics like “I’ve walked the streets, I have no fear — I always know my karate is near!”

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 Wetzel’s Pretzels in the greater Davenport area. He’s rocking that mall ninja lifestyle to this very day with his fanny pack full of shurikens and, presumably, hard candy snacks for the grandkids. 

He’s 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 ‘80s videos that look like 2000s videos making fun of ‘80s videos, to making 2000s websites that look like they’re making fun of ‘90s websites. 

Wait, holy shit – Sensei Dave actually inherited the legacy of making “media that’s hilarious because somebody tried” from his father, Hal Seeger, who you might know from one of several cartoons you definitely don’t 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 “frequent extra on CSI shows” and “staff writer for sitcoms that last four episodes.” 

This is too much. I’ve gone too far. You stopped rooting for me six paragraphs ago. I’m not even the anti-hero anymore. I’m just the bad guy. And now I’m hunting this poor meme into its den. I’m coming after its children.

That’s not a metaphor.

There’s a small, almost shy little subheading hidden in the About section of one of their production studio pages. It’s called ‘It’s a Family Affair.’ 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! They’ve 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!

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Bouncing World of Road House 🌭

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.

Note: Jason’s new book IS ACTUALLY OUT NOW. Order Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick or watch this three-minute video that explains everything.

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 dancing’s 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.

This is because it is objectively enjoyable to watch skilled dancers do their thing. Dance turns up in every culture in every era going back to before humans were human. Freaking birds do it. It’s not a goddamned gender thing, you are hardwired by biology to enjoy choreographed, precise movement, vestiges of prehistoric rituals intended to prove to the rest of the tribe that you have the strength and coordination to fight, hunt and fuck with the best. But right around the rise of feminism, males decided that dancing was for girls and homosexuals. 

“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.

You can pre-order Jason “David Wong” Pargin’s book Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick on Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, Bookshop or any place books like this are sold. You can also follow him on Twitter, his Instagram, or Facebook, or YouTube or Goodreads, or any of the many accounts he’s forgotten about.

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

Undercover Grandpa

I normally have a strict rule against watching movies with names that are too close to what their porn parody names would be (Grandpa Under Covers), but I put my principles aside for Undercover Grandpa. After all, it is one of the best action/family/comedy films ever made, in Canada, in 2017, starring James Caan.

Everyone was thrilled when the stars of Undercover Grandpa were announced. Finally, we would get to see actors from two of the most beloved films of all time, The Godfather, and The Unauthorized Saved By The Bell Story, in one movie! And that movie was being written by the genius that shaped the 1998 tour de force about the world of competitive rollerblading, Brink. 

You might assume that everyone involved in the production knew they had a hit on their hands. Yet around the time of filming Undercover Grandpa, James Caan was reportedly strapped for cash due to a messy divorce, his fourth, and was publicly complaining about being forced to take parts that detracted from his reputation as an actor. Obviously, he must have been referring to something like Wuthering High, a sexy updated version of Wuthering Heights he did in 2015 and not the masterpiece of Ass Kickery that is Undercover Grandpa. 

Even though it’s only been three years, a film this classic deserves an oral history now, before most of its cast dies. So, I put one together with just a few caveats: 

*James Caan was not available to be interviewed

*Jessica Walter was not available to be interviewed 

*Louis Gossett Jr. was not available to be interviewed 

*Dylan Everett was not available to be interviewed

*Paul Sorvino was not available to be interviewed 

*Kenneth Welsh was available to be interviewed but I didn’t want to talk to him. 

*Director Erik Canuel was not available to be interviewed 

My primary source for this oral history is a crew member very close to the production who asked to remain anonymous. I’m assuming people are hesitant to discuss Undercover Grandpa because they’re so humble about their great success. 

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. What was it like working with the legendary James Caan? 

“Every day James Caan wore one of those hats with two cup holders on the sides and the left side held a blue slushie and the right side held a red slushie. As soon as filming was over, he would yell, ‘Where is my special hat? Bring me my special hat!’ And if it wasn’t brought to him right away, he would get very upset. If you brought him the hat too slowly or if one of the slushies was empty, he would throw the whole hat at you, and it was very cold.” 

Cool! As we all know, Undercover Grandpa kicks ass. He kicks so much ass there’s not even any ass left when he’s done. It’s just straight back and then knees when Undercover Grandpa is finished with you. How much coordination did the stunt scenes require? I’m particularly curious about the one where Undercover Grandpa beats up that guy in the illegal weapons store with his cane for no reason. 

“Well, that was sort of improvised. It wasn’t in the original script, but James Caan just started hitting that guy in the face. I’m not sure if it was slushie related or not, but if I had to guess, I would say that’s probably it. They made us sign an NDA that said we legally have to tell everyone that James Caan did all of his own stunts, and I guess he sort of did if you really lower your definition of what a stunt is, like, at a certain age walking across an uneven gravel surface is a pretty sick stunt.” 

Everyone loves the lengthy conversation about KFC at the beginning of the movie. Were they a sponsor, or did it just feel organic to the writer?

“Yes, they were a sponsor. In fact, the whole thing was supposed to be a thirty-second long KFC commercial, but things just got out of hand. KFC asked for their money back, but the director refused to give it to them. It turns out he had a rare tropical bacteria that was eating his brain for most of filming. After he shot the final scene, he walked off into the Canadian wilderness and was never heard from again. The whole time he kept muttering, ‘I deserve this’ to himself.” 

I noticed that the cast list on IMDB shows a pretty heft special effects crew. Was that all for the scene where Harry’s walker shoots out electricity and shocks all of the goons to death? 

“No, there was originally going to be a talking dog in the movie, it was a huge part of the plot, but James Caan got jealous of the dog and hit it with his car halfway through filming. We tried to find another dog that looked just like it, but apparently, it was endangered somehow? Like, it was the last dog of its kind, so we ended up having to edit out all of the talking dog footage in post. Sometimes there are scenes where the background is a little blurry, and that’s where we edited out the dog.” 

Dylan Everett’s tears at undercover grandpa’s funeral seemed pretty real. Was that an emotional day on set?

“Oh, those tears were real. James Caan kicked him in the balls right before that scene was filmed. He wasn’t even supposed to be on set that day. Showed up just to kick the kid in the balls and then left.”

How nice! The Russian accents in the film seem very authentic. I mean, I’ve never heard a real Russian accent before, but I’ve seen a lot of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Was there a dialogue coach on set for the Goons, or were those actors really Russian?

“No, KFC didn’t give us the budget for that. The director did provide the guy who played General Komenkho with a cassette tape to study, but it turned out it was just one of those things that’s supposed to hypnotize you into quitting smoking, and it was being read by a guy with a thick New Jersey accent. He didn’t learn Russian, and the tape was so bad it actually hypnotized him into starting smoking. Yeah, that was pretty crazy. I heard he sued the production company for a million dollars after he contracted lung cancer.”

In the early days, some of the critics weren’t kind to the movie. The Hollywood Reporter said that it “Gives grandparents a bad name.” Was that difficult for you to see? 

“Well, we knew that grandparents were probably going to be pissed off about it. A whole bunch of them showed up to picket the set. They wanted the word grandpa removed from the title so as not to associate them with the movie at all. They didn’t want to seem like they were endorsing it. Every day there were tons of crying old people on set, and I’m not just talking about the ones that had to be in the movie.”

Well, as we all know, in the end, the movie won the big awards. It took home the best feature and best actor trophies at the International Family Film Festival, a festival that appears to have shut down shortly after giving out the award. What was the atmosphere like at the award show?

“Oh, James Caan wouldn’t let anyone else from the movie go to the award show. I heard that he tried to put the entire trophy in his mouth, and when it wouldn’t fit, he got super angry. Then he said he was going to donate it to the James Caan foundation for underprivileged youth who need to eat James Caan’s ass.”

Hm, interesting, just one last question, is the movie called Undercover Grandpa because James Caan is both undercover and a grandpa, or because he’s undercover as a grandpa? He really is Jake’s Grandpa, right? But there’s some discussion of his blowing his cover? 

“Look, I won’t stand for this kind of bullshit gotcha journalism; obviously, no one knows the answer to that question. I won’t sit here and listen to you disparage the most important Canadian action/family/comedy that was filmed in 2017, starring James Caan. Good day ma’am!”

Lydia will probably talk a lot more about Undercover Grandpa on Twitter. 

Categories
PUNCHING DAY

The Stunts of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch

Today is my 15th 1-900-HOTDOG Punching Day article, and according to Punching Day tradition, this is the anniversary where I give you, my lover, the gift of Kill Switch. Kill Switch is, of course, the 2008 direct-to-video “action” movie “starring” Steven Seagal. You will fucking hate me for it, which is perfectly in line with our hot dog traditions.

There is no academic framework to discuss the Steven Seagality of a film with this much Steven Seagality. It’s as if a moderator showed a focus group three hours of a fat man taking a nap, asked them to describe what they didn’t like about it, and Steven Seagal mistook their notes for an action-thriller script. Kill Switch is something that would get an Uzbek father to say, “The death of your mother saddens me, but this is an adequate Steven Seagal parody you have made in a weekend, my impoverished children.” Explaining everything hilariously, Steven Seagalably wrong with Kill Switch before the last of our civilization burns down will be impossible, so I’m going to focus on the stunts— the one element in this film that never, at any time had anything to do with Steven Seagal. It might be myopic enough I can get out of here in less than 20,000 words.

You’re going to think I’m kidding, but this movie opens with Steven Seagal, Memphis homicide detective, investigating a woman who has a bomb planted in her boob. He knows the bomber is in one of the nearby apartments watching, so he goes inside it. I’m not leaving anything out. He immediately walks into the unlocked door of the apartment containing the villain. There’s a timer on the titty bomb, so even in the fiction of this universe what he’s doing isn’t possible. It’s like a scene you would write if the only book you’ve ever read was half a Steven Seagal movie. 

It’s so embarrassingly stupid it would land like a mean-spirited joke if the editor chose this moment of peak absurdity to put the “Written by” credit.

Oh, fuck. Oh, Jesus fuck. Do you see what I mean now about how we’re never getting out of here if I’m going to talk about every deranged detail of Kill Switch? Steven Seagal wrote a movie where he plays a genius serial killer hunter. So he walks right in, growls a one-liner too wordy and stupid to repeat, and just beats the fuck out of him. Steven’s stuntman makes his first of many appearances to choke the guy, smash his head into a wall, and fireman’s carry him into generously explosive furniture. This exact sequence of moves repeats, without exaggeration, seven more times. The fight choreographer knew one attack Steven Seagal could do without moving, and two that hid his stuntman’s face, and it’s a true inspiration to the stupid that he was able to fill ten minutes of a fight scene knowing nothing else.

Steven Seagal’s brain is made entirely out of action movie cliches, so in his script, the bomb squad calls him during the fight to say they have the titty bomb wires narrowed down to two. He beats the bomber until he confesses which wire to cut, but Seagal tells them to cut the other one. He was right. He saved… oh my god, ha ha I just now realized the first thing Steven Seagal wrote was the hero, himself, using torture to literally rescue the tits of a nameless damsel character. Ha ha ha that’s so goddamn ridiculous. Ha I just realized how often this happens. Ha ha ha ha noticing shit like this all the time must be why feminist critics are always having so much fun.

Anyway, Steven Seagal goes to arrest the suspect, who we’ve established has no chance in a fight against him, has implicitly confessed to an act of terror, and has already been beaten mostly to death. The writer of this movie, Steven Seagal, decided this character would scream, “Fuck you!” and attack. So Seagal kicks him out the window. I swear, I didn’t edit this animated gif. This is precisely how Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch chose to edit this scene and how it appears in the final cut:

What the fuck kind of filmmaking decision is this? That’s, what, eleven times he went out the same window? Why? For what reason? They only shot it from three angles. Was it a mistake? Is he a time traveler sending Morse code? Did the editor hear “It’s working, but one ain’t seem like enough– I want at least ten of these defenestrations,” when Steven Seagal actually mumbled, “Workin’ on a new blues song called ‘Ain’t Enough, and Dat’s Not De End of Mah Pizza Frustrations.'”

What happens next is maybe more crazy. Steven obviously has to say some kind of one-liner after a thing like this. A man falling out a window lends itself to virtually unlimited wordplay. Guess he had a flight to catch. He shoulda taken the stairs. Cleanup aisle DEAD. You might fuck like Peter Pan, but you sure ain’t fly like him, baby. Sorry, dead guy, but I’m insecure about my age and obesity. Flight pants? More like regular pants, dumbass. But instead of any of these perfectly acceptable choices, Seagal says, and I quote, “Hey. Looks like he got da hiccups. Somebody get that guy a glass of watah.”

So wait, wait. No, wait. He’s referencing the guy jump-cutting back and forth through time? Does this mean Steven Seagal can… see the movie? I know it sounds nuts, but hear me out. After he delivers this exit line, to the amusement of no character or viewer, the scene doesn’t end. The camera stays on him, he looks around in frustration, and he lets out an audible “buuuuhhhhh.” For homicide detective Jacob “Lightnin'” King, recent titty rescuer, it makes no sense. But for writer/performer Steven Seagal, who can see how badly this movie is turning out, it’s a very appropriate reaction.

Oh my god, we’re 1000 words in and we’re only just now starting Stunt TWO? I knew this was going to happen. Luckily, the second big stunt of the movie is the serial killer asking a prostitute to help him put a baby into a car seat when this happens:

For context, this is the serial killer in a battle of wits with Steven Seagal, who is completing some kind of moon ritual with his murders. He taunts Seagal with mysterious astrological codes carved into the bodies, so they call him “The Grifter,” a name not really related to what he does or the things he’s into.

Steven Seagal is the kind of man who writes “EXT. NIGHT– THE GRIFTER bludgeons PROSTITUTE #4 with a toy baby, instantly killing her. She thought it was a real baby, which was a grift, The Grifter’s signature activity.” But he’s apparently also the kind of man who forgets things, so when her body arrives at the morgue, the coroner describes her death, which you’ve seen in its entirety, as a long and painful punishment. Kill Switch‘s writer wisely knew it was a medical examiner’s job to make wild, elaborate conclusions about the personality and intent of an attacker from each of his victim’s injuries.

While he’s at the coroner’s, fucking up the plot of his own movie over the topless corpse of a baby-murdered prostitute, Steven Seagal finds a symbol carved behind her ear. It’s a big help in decoding The Grifter’s secret code, which a nerdy seven-year-old might recognize as a substitution cypher, or the kind of cryptography you’d expect to find on a box of Honey Combs. It’s the codemaster’s equivalent of putting your email in Wingdings font. Still, it lets him finish translating a message in a second, unrelated code he… wait a second. Let’s zoom in on this code.

Are you sure that’s right, Steven Seagal? I only read one of The Da Vinci Code books, but you have “Omega, 9, H Fucking Cantalope, Triangle, M Holding Spear, and another H Fucking Cantalope” meaning both “AT THE EDGE OF” and “IS THE TRUE.” You might want to have your prop guy take another pass at that. Oh, damn it. I thought I would only be telling you “the killer’s outrageously silly murder weapon was a fake baby,” and here I am making fun of Steven Seagal’s code-breaking skills.

Steven Seagal goes to a bar where they recognize him from TV as the homicide detective investigating the murder of their friend. Then they, and I promise I’m not leaving anything out, attack him. Several men take turns trying to punch him in the face which causes the movie to speed up right before they jump into the nearest breakable object. This happens a few more times, in exactly the same way, until one of the guys gets the idea to murder this cop with a broken bottle. There’s only one problem.

He can’t hit him! He’s aiming at a 380 pound target and about 30 of those pounds are rattling pill bottles for his angina, back, reflux, and penis. He stabs and slashes, but can’t seem to get the broken bottle anywhere near the barely moving blob taking up half his bar. It goes on like this forever, and Seagal seems almost bored with it. His jacket pockets contain so many notes from his doctor to stay off his knees he knows a glass knife could never penetrate it.

You might notice the abrupt change in Steven Seagal’s figure and hair when they’re filming him from behind. That’s because Steven Seagal not only doesn’t do his own stunts, he doesn’t even do his own fretting and wiggling anymore. If you have a keen eye you can tell when his double is doing the slight waddling because he’s a third Steven’s size and age, and he’s wearing a Princess Jasmine wig instead of two cans of spray-on hair.

That isn’t to say Steven Seagal has given up martial arts completely. They often edit in shots of him waving his hands or looking cranky into these shots of different men missing each other. For instance, here’s a fight where Steven did his own backhand slap, but had his stuntman perform the much more dangerous elbow strike from a diner bench. No matter what country he’s filming in, there are strict union rules about Steven Seagal performing near food. Bratva Cleanmoney Productions lost an entire day of shooting when Steven found a wedding cake on the set of Killed to the Death 2: Geoff Gets Married.

Even in his prime, Steven Seagal ran like a Tyrannosaurus losing control of its hula hoop. Now that he’s an elderly man hiding his mass under a two-person centaur costume, the idea of filming him in a rush is unthinkable. So whenever he’s hurrying, the film replaces his movement with flashes of him teleporting across the screen. So when he’s in a chase scene it abruptly changes from a film about a cop chasing a killer to a stop motion animation about the ghost of a rock n’ roll pig haunting the dark alleys of Memphis, Tennessee. As with the others, I did not edit this gif in any way. This is from the actual final cut of Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

I did not count the misses in Kill Switch, but it’s definitely a contender for the most inaccurate gun fighting outside of a G.I. JOE cartoon. Steven Seagal and his enemies stand still and empty clip after clip into nothing. Normally the editor puts these shots together one after another to create what any artist would interpret as a brilliant commentary on the pointless, endless cycle of violence. But when Seagal and The Grifter have their shootout, it becomes a dreamlike sequence where two lazy men can’t hit fucking shit with their guns. They miss in hallways where each of them is the only thing for a bullet to go into. Steven Seagal’s bullets are the same as his hairline — fake, and smeared all over the wrong spots by a fat idiot.

The Grifter escapes 200 clips worth of Steven Seagal bullets and hides. After Steven runs past, he knocks him down with a pipe and walks over to give a villain speech. He doesn’t hold him at gunpoint or tie him up, or have him at any disadvantage really, so the movie does something unpredictable — nothing dumb. Steven simply grabs the much smaller man who can’t fight and fucking bashes the face off his skull with ham fists.

He does this for minutes. He is mauling this tiny man, bringing all his weight onto his chin again and again. It is nothing other than twenty fist murders placed end-to-end. A UFC fan watching this next to a wife with two black eyes would be pleading for someone to stop this savage, ceaseless beating. But The Grifter uses the one move Steven Seagal has no defense against — leaving at a mildly brisk pace. Look, I wish we lived in a world that made sense too, but this movie was written by Steven Seagal and his assistant transcribed, “After takin’ 1,000 unanswered super punches from Aikido punchin’ master, Jacob Lightnin’ King, Da Griftah get up an’ he jus’ sorta walk away.“

Don’t worry, though! The Grifter drops his wallet during his casual escape. Plus, Seagal recently learned he managed the house band at a bar where everyone knows him as a local celebrity named Lazarus who opened fire on a cop in front of several hundred witnesses, but with ‘dis wallet? Murda police Jacob King might have what he need to crack ‘dis case wide open, pardnah. You know, I guess I shoulda mentioned by now — Steven Seagal, he be doin’ a Cajun accent ‘dis whole movie, baby.

At The Grifter’s serial killer murder house, Seagal finds a star map that corresponds to Memphis hotspots. With it, he easily predicts his next kill and goes there to slap and shove him for several minutes. I have no idea if you will believe me or even believed me any of those other times, but this is the actual final fight scene from Steven Seagal’s Kill Switch.

There has never been a main character in less danger than Steven Seagal in a Steven Seagal movie, but this villain is especially hopeless. The debris gently brushing up against Seagal’s elbow in that gif is the cleanest shot Grifter lands the entire fight. It has all the tension of a Garfield reader worried the lasagna might win.

Hold on, that wasn’t the real final fight! Billy Joe, the titty bomb guy from earlier is back! The Supreme Court, after twoish days, has dismissed his case because of all the police brutality. I think the writer, Steven Seagal, doesn’t know a lot about court proceedings, and also may have injected some of his personal politics into the story because when his partner hears about the court’s decision he says, “That animal should be put to death!” And then, to prove himself right, he wrote, “BILLY JOE stab his own lawyer to death in da car ride from prison. Dat animal ain’t even wait five minute to kill again. CUT TO: He at Jacob’s house and he stab Jacob’s girlfriend to death too. Lord have mercy.“

It’s weird for Steven Seagal, a known source of sex crimes, to embrace this kind of “Criminals need to be put down” moral objectivism, but anyway, after batting around the serial killer for 40 minutes, Detective King has to spend the denoument avenging his girlfriend’s murder. Sorry I never mentioned her — he barely paid attention to this girlfriend character in two scenes totally unrelated to the plot and 100% doesn’t give a shit she’s dead.

Like each of the other fights, this one features a helpless but durable man getting shoved through things. Jacob breaks every piece of furniture in his house with Titty Bomber’s flying body until he finally pulls out a knife and stands chest-to-chest with him for a gentleman’s stab missing contest. It’s silly beyond reason, but I think this is what it looks like when 2008 Steven Seagal gives a fight scene his best effort. Look at these bobs and weaves!

He is the unslashable. Steven Seagal moves with all the speed and grace of a woman trying to watch Bones with a grandson on her lap.

With ten minutes to go in the movie, there’s a sudden subplot where an FBI agent thinks Steven Seagal is the serial killer, so he leaves town to go back to his… wait — his never-before-mentioned Russian family? So the dead girl in his house… he was cheating on his wife with her this whole movie? Anyway, his sudden Russian wife sends their kids away and strips naked. The whole thing is the flimsiest excuse I’ve ever witnessed to see tits, and I own 17 VHS tapes on how to breastfeed. Did he maybe get a tax break for giving a topless part to Putin’s niece? I guess in a way, beginning and ending your movie with unnecessary titties has a kind of poetry to it. No one gives Steven Seagal, sex criminal, enough credit as a writer.

I know this isn’t a stunt, but I’m not going to make this gif of Steven Seagal nodding at a naked lady and keep it to myself. Please enjoy:

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Yannis Ioannidis: the Steven Seagal’s stuntman of lovers.

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PUNCHING DAY

The Many Certain Deaths of Commando Cody, Part 2 🌭

When we last left Cody, flying Sky Marshal of the Universe, he had taken a bothersome shoulder bonk and was tumbling off a cliff to his certain death!

How is flying Cody, the flying Commando of the skies going to get out of this one!? Can you guess? You have only seconds left to guess!

As usual, Commando Cody’s title card forgets to mention the extreme danger the show left him in, so I’ll remind you: he fell off a cliff. When we left, the flying man was falling! Off a cliff! Do you have your guess locked in for how he survives!? Ready?

As he fell, Cody remembered he could fly. Zero stars out of five. And instead of flying up to kick the ass of the men who insulted him with such a sad murder attempt and finish his mission, he flies away. This continues the trend of episodes opening with a very obvious solution to last week’s problem followed by every character forgetting what the hell is going on and leaving in opposite directions. Hi, everyone! Welcome back to… 

At the end of Chapter Seven, Cody and Ted are, without question, blown to pieces in their plane. Graber and Daly aim their ray gun at the plane, watch as no one jumps out, and then destroy it. It’s fucking over. Cody is dead. Unless he and Ted did something extremely clever, they are wet plane debris and all of this was for nothing.

So here’s how they survived: Somehow, between frames of film, Cody put on his helmet and said, “We should bail out,” the same way you might tell your wife, “Taco Bell is discontinuing Mexican Pizza.” Ted responded with, and I quote, “Okay.” He said it how your wife might say, “I can spread some dog food between two crackers if you ever want one.” It’s mostly bored disgust, but with a touch of whimsy. Ted figured out the rules to this show long ago and he knew the moment he got on he wasn’t going to have to land this plane. He parachutes to safety using the same stock parachute footage as Joan, and then, of course, the bad guys leave.

Back on the moon, Cody and Ted steal one of the moon cars which, as you may remember from Part I, are sweet as shit. Unfortunately, the Radar Men chase after him in a sweet car of their own. Ted forms a desperate plan. Remember those grenades from earlier that did nothing? Ted wants Cody to fly out with one of those and try again. Cody says, and I quote, “Okay,” and flies away.

It’s a bad plan and Cody immediately screws it up by flying the wrong way. Two seconds later he’s nowhere to be seen and the enemy car blasts Ted. This is a show where falling off a 30 foot cliff takes four to five minutes and twelve different mannequins, and here we are with a dead Ted two seconds after the fight starts. And he’s not “dead” like we see a tank explode and next week they show how he climbed out before that. They show him bounce off the wall and get his space suit’s air tube knocked out. They show him asphyxiate. They show him die. And the last thing he ever said was something moronic to the dumbest man in space who ignored him and left.

Cody drops one grenade on the enemy car which does nothing, then flies back and climbs inside the car it’s shooting. Without saying a word, he fixes Ted’s air tube. Through a series of events so insane they’re difficult to coherently describe, we are back exactly where we started before the cliffhanger. It’s like the producer came in and said, “Are the Chapter Eight and Nine pages done? Actually, let me guess– the tank blows up and then we find out, gasp, Cody isn’t in it?”

And the writer said, “N-no! The crisis is Ted! Ted, he loses an air tube, right? A-and Cody can’t help b-because he… he already left! To fight the tank! But here’s the thing: he comes back. To fix: the tube?”

And the producer said, “My god, Ronald. Hot dagnabbit, you’ve done it again.”

Normally if I saw this sequence of events I would assume it was a coded message sent by the  prisoner being forced to write a moon drama, but it’s pretty normal for Commando Cody and his enemies to stop making sense at the beginning or end of a chapter. And while it’s weird as fuck how they got there, we all knew Ted was going to be saved by either A: Cody Plugging The Tube Back In, or B: Just Waking Up. Half a star, you predictable dipshits.

At the end of Chapter Nine, the bad guys shoot their ray cannon at a mountain to drop it on Cody. We know he’s normally pretty indifferent to danger, but this time he is straight-up daring Death to take him. He stares up at the toppling mountain, motionless, for thirty or forty seconds which is nearly 60 seconds in watching-an-avalanche-fall-on-you time.

After some more time, the flying man finally decides his best move is to wait some more and then jog very close to the mountain, presumably hoping the disaster forms some kind of stone igloo over him. It’s strange, even for him, but it seems to be the show’s way of saying, “You thought he flew away. Nuh uh. Here he is, verifiably not doing that. Now who looks stupid, viewer?”

When we last left him, Commando Cody was buried alive by a roaring tidal wave of rock! He’s fine, by the way. And the bad guys had something else to do, so they drove away.

At the end of Chapter Ten, Cody is trapped in a room being filled with deadly gas! Like the resourceful survivor he has proven himself to be, he leaps into action after a long, ponderous silence. He’s holding a pistol and standing by a window leading to fresh air and escape, so naturally he crawls toward the phone in the center of the room and dies along the way. How’s he going to get out of this one? Does he deserve to get out of this one? This feels like they locked him in a room with a key and a sack of poisonous snakes and it says “TO BE CONTINUED” just as he starts emptying the bag into his pants.

He might really be dead this time? This predicament is so serious even the guy writing the title cards calls attention to it. To put that into perspective, he did not bother mentioning the exploding plane, the avalanche, the fall off a cliff, the asphyxiated friend, the exploding car, or the other exploding car. And speaking as a writer, it’s going to be a real challenge for them to write Cody out of this “clearly dead from poison gas” jam he’s in.

I mean this: God bless the Radar Men From the Moon writer’s childlike understanding of all things. The lab Cody and his friends were in had a giant ALARM button next to the phone, presumably in case of some kind of viral or toxic disaster. As is protocol for this type of thing, the alarm sounded until a cop heard it from his car and strolled inside. The officer saw three dead bodies in the chemical lab and took a couple big sniffs of the air. He decided,”Yep! Poison!” and made three trips into the deadly gas cloud to drag the corpses into the slightly less poisonous hallway. I am almost certain none of you saw that coming. If you’ve seen this before you said, “Oh yeah, this is the Cody episode that introduced the poison-proof supercop character.”

Cody, by the way, is still clinging to a pistol as he gets pulled from the room. The cop doesn’t find this suspicious since in 1952, most of science was pouring chemicals on apes to see which ones made them bulletproof. Finding a room full of dead scientists without handguns would be the situation worth mentioning.

It took some time, but the writer is really starting to get a hang of these cliffhangers. At the end of Chapter Eleven, Commando Cody gets shoved into a high voltage prop and the show fades out on him getting fucked in the nervous system by a moon base’s entire supply of electricity.

This isn’t how you leave an audience in suspense. This is how you change the way we think about meal preparation forever. Commando Cody is so beyond dead. The most underpaid stuntman in the world stood in the center of a fireworks factory explosion for such a ludicrous amount of time he probably smelled like a gunfight until the day he died. And in the fiction of this universe, Cody is functionally nothing more than a pot pie. Don’t even bother with next week’s title card which probably says something like “DEATH OF THE MOON MAN.”

You might be thinking, “I know how this show works. There’s no clever twist. He didn’t swap himself out for a robot or put on rubber moon pants. The bad guys are going to walk out and Cody will get up as if nothing happened.” Come on, don’t be ridiculous. They won’t end the series on that.

Goddamn it, Commando Cody.

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PUNCHING DAY

Classic Remaster – Brockway’s MC and Seanbaby’s CYODFMA

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to make enough money to buy the Gymkata zombie village. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

Brockway: This all began when Seanbaby and Brockway got into a drunken fistfight three nights ago over which was the superior Voltron (Seanbaby rightly insisted it was Lion Voltron, while Robert argued for Vehicle Voltron, knowing in his heart that he was wrong). Long story short: Brockway lost so badly that he ended up having to do Seanbaby’s job for a week while Seanbaby, in turn, gets to defile Robert’s most prized creation. Enjoy the suffering of a broken man, monsters!

…

Seanbaby: This week, fellow columnist Brockway has agreed to swap his best-known satirical creation with mine. For comedy writers, this is a lot like giving each other’s women breast exams: awesome and medically revealing. Can Brockway’s testicles withstand the man-pounding action of my Man Comics? Can my brain withstand the psychological trap door of his Choose Your Own Drug-Fueled Misadventures? Will our stupider readers be helplessly confused and send us the wrong death threats? Let’s find out:

…

Brockway’s followup note: Luckily we both said “I wish we could just switch back!” at the same time in front of that magic fountain, or we’d still be trapped in the wrong bodies. Boy, I really learned something about how hard it is to be Seanbaby! No seriously, that comic took me like fucking fifty hours to make. You do not know how hard Seanbaby works. This was such a terrible idea and I regret it to this day.

Seanbaby’s followup note: Giggle!