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.
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.
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.
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.
There was once a man named Bruce Tegner who spent the ’70s writing the same martial arts book over and over and over then changing the name of the martial art on the cover. He was a shin-kicking, backfisting master of a thing he called Judo, Aikido, Jukaido, Tai Chi, Ju-Jitsu, and sometimes Savate. He was also deadly with most weird sticks. And some of his techniques were so lethal they could only be trusted in the feet of the pure-of-heart like the intended audience for this Punching Day’s topic: 1976’s SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD.
You’d think this would be a survival guide for children in an increasingly dangerous world, but the stakes in SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD could not be lower. This is not a book about kidnapping prevention or pedophile identification. It teaches you how to fuck up a different 10-year-old and nothing else. In fact, I can prove it’s a weak ass book for bitches because look:
This copy was previously owned by a Karate school with a leaky roof run by someone named “Slendl Srbltrrp” who warned readers “DO NOT REMOVE FROM DOJO.” Well, I’m holding the book right here, Slendl, far removed from your dojo, and I’m intact as fuck.
Still not convinced this book is for pussies? Let’s zoom in on some of those accolades. Looks like CHRISTIAN HOME & SCHOOL called this manual on beating up children a “very readable little book.”
That’s the cruelest taunt I’ve ever seen. I fucking dare someone in Christian home school to say that shit to me. Leave “this was a very readable little article” in the comments and see what happens. I will pull so much of you apart your organ donor card will become a dark punchline for the man collecting your remains in a shop-vac. And the judge at my liquefaction trial will say, “You were right to do it, handsome liquefaction defendant! I sentence you and a guest to four nights at the Wailea Beach Resort in Maui!”
The book goes over a lot of the attacks you’ll see from your fellow third graders, like, for instance, a bare-handed strangulation from behind. By the way, the defense to this is turning around and kicking them in the knee. You might think it’s asking a lot of a child to decide when they should escalate playful roughhousing to full-on maiming, but you can take some comfort in knowing anyone who is taught to escape a choke by just kind of leaving and throwing a close-range sidekick will never hurt anyone with their Karate for as long as they live.
That’s not to say all of the attacks in this book are unlikely and pathetic. Some of them are absolutely overpowered. Look at this one:
Those are moves 53 through 59 of the same ass kicking. For dozens of pages, this kid unleashes a single unbroken combo against his opponent’s face, neck, and shins. And here’s a fighting tip for youngsters: if you’re queuing up hit #35 of a 59-hit combo, your classmate has been dead for some time. Oh, this seems like a good time to mention all of Bruce Tegner’s fighting techniques work best on attackers who announce they are attacking you and then stand very still for 20 minutes.
I should also mention Bruce Tegner always includes a weird chapter in his books on how to deal with pests. Not violent bullies or muggers, but everyday annoying people. In this one it’s called “Section Four: Annoying & Humiliating Actions,” and it’s at least the 7th time I’ve seen Bruce explain to his readers this secret technique for escaping a friendly lean. Here’s what you do, and follow these instructions carefully: if someone is leaning on you, fucking karate chop them with one of your hands. To his credit, it’s not NOT a fun idea.
It’s a lot to ask of a child to know when to unleash the full force of their deadly arts, but Bruce is expecting much more from the children of the reader. He’s expecting your kid to identify incoming foot attacks and react with different defenses for each one. His idea to block a kick by kicking it is optimistic, but I think most fighters would agree putting a leg between you and a kick is a way better idea than using your arm. But Bruce’s idea of waiting to see if a kick is going to be a knee and then ducking down into it to brush it aside with both hands– that’s nuts. It’s what I would act out if my charades clue was “Man Who Has Never Even Seen a Fight.” I know these techniques are 44 years old and developed during a time when the government listed ninjas as “Very Fact,” but authors should at least try to knee one kid in the head before they declare themselves an expert on it.
This is from the section on GROUND KICKING. There’s always a few parts of a Bruce Tegner book where the reader can’t be sure if they’re supposed to be the good guy.
Like all self-defense authors, Bruce Tegner believes you, the victim, are in an intellectual arms race with your attacker. If they find out you know how to duck into knees to nudge them aside, they will throw brain chops. If they know you know the defense to brain chops is spin-screaming, this will almost certainly be a feint. For well-trained children, all of these calculations happen in the blink of an eye. If you truly study SELF-DEFENSE For YOUR CHILD, the chest cavity of any kid who leans on you will be shattered before your brain has even caught up to your Karate.
KEEP IT SECRET!
A lot of you are probably thinking, “This is a readable little book, but I’m often facing off against multiple fourth graders. Are there any techniques for me?” Oh, shit yes. You want to see how to beat up two children at the same time? Scroll down zero inches.
Shin kick! Shin kick! Twist your legs for a crossover double shin kick! Shin kick them until one of them is hurt and use them as the shin kick! This is going to be the most important secret you and I will ever share, but the only defense you need is shin kick! Steps 1 through 213— shin kicks! If your enemy has shins and trouble with cursive Qs, your kick is where their bitch ass journey ends! Now get out there and defend yourself against some children!
This article is brought to you by Hot Dog Supreme Patrons Neil Schafer, Nick Ralston, and Eric Spaulding who have never met and never knew until now they could merge to form a giant panda.
There are exactly two categories of human on this earth: Those who can recite most of the 1986 Sylvester Stallone film Cobra by heart, and those who only know it as, “That movie where Sly eats a piece of pizza with scissors.”* I believe what I have to say here will be of interest to both groups and will be a valuable addition to modern Cobra discourse.
*You’ll occasionally run into someone who claims they haven’t heard of this movie, but there’s no reason to engage with them; we don’t platform Cobra deniers here and will not be doing so in the future.
There is a point where cinema becomes so iconic that all context and nuance gets lost. That’s why most people under 30 only know The Godfather as that movie where a fat guy in a tux says, “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” while stroking a cat. It’s tragic that they will never understand what significance that scene holds in what is universally considered a masterpiece (that “the offer” Marlon Brando is referring to is the peanut butter he intends to smear on his balls to get the cat to lick them). So my goal is to make the beloved pizza-scissors scene from Cobra fresh to your eyes, to explain how it defines who I am as a person and who we are as a society in 2020.
First, for those of you too young to have experienced the 1980s in person, you should know that Sylvester “Sly” Stallone was the most eighties of action heroes and Cobra is widely believed by experts to be both the Stalloneiest and eightiesest action movie ever made. To convey the subtle genius at play here, let’s take in the poster, which seems straightforward on the surface:
But what’s that, on the grip of his .45?
“A cobra, like the title of the movie!” you say. Sure, but have you ever seen anyone store a handgun this way, so that an act as simple as carrying a laundry basket will almost certainly result in a hollowpoint-exploded scrotum? No, look at the careful arrangement of the symbols at play here. Do you see it? I’ll just draw you a diagram:
Normally I would cite this as an example of beautiful synergy between prop designer, costumer, screenwriter and star, but considering that we already know Stallone wrote the screenplay and mostly directed this movie, I believe we can thank exactly one man for making sure Cobra appeared at all times to have a cobra-headed dong peeking out of his jeans. “Wait, is Cobra saying Cobra’s dong is a cobra? Or that his gun is a cobra? Or that his gun is a dong?” Yes.
So, just to set the stage for the pizza scissors, the plot is that Marion “Cobra” Cobretti has to protect a beautiful model, Ingrid (Brigitte Nielsen) from a massive underground army of serial killers. He’s part of a team of supercops called the “zombie squad” and I know what you’re thinking: “With an assignment that dangerous, I bet he’s a real stickler for playing by the rules, since they exist to keep everyone safe.” But here’s where Cobra is already toying with our expectations: This cop actually doesn’t play by the rules.
Ingrid is in danger because she briefly witnessed one of the serial killers doing a crime. To silence her, the army of psychopaths lays siege to the small town where she’s holed up, presumably creating thousands more witnesses in the process. Cobra kills all of them in a series of car chases until he finally confronts the serial killers’ king in a lava factory and impales him on a giant metal hook. This was all pretty standard stuff for the era, and also for the movies made in the era.
The iconic pizza scissors scene comes just a few minutes in. We first meet Cobretti in the act of outwitting an unstable hostage taker in the opening action sequence (his strategy involves loudly and repeatedly telling the perpetrator that he is going to kill him, and then killing him). Cobra then heads home for a brief scene intended to establish what this man is like when he’s off the job. He rolls up to his oceanfront apartment in his police vehicle (a nitrous-boosted, custom-modified 1950 Mercury Monterey) to find some minorities are in his favorite parking spot on the street.
Cobra would literally rather see the whole world reduced to ash than settle for his second-favorite parking spot, so he uses his bumper to push the Latinos’ car out of the way…
… at which point the enraged owner steps out, shouting, “That’s my car, man!”
This exchange ensues:
(Literal translation, “Your mother would not approve of this behavior, cobra-dong!”).
I should note that approximately 60% of the comic relief scenes in 80s action movies depict what would now be classified as a hate crime and the other 40% were some form of felony sexual assault. Also, the most popular YouTube upload of this scene is titled “Best Scene from Cobra [1986]” and the description is, “This is the most hilarious and enjoyable scene from the 1986 Sylvester Stallone movie COBRA. Enjoy,”.
Once inside, Cobra walks to his freezer and withdraws a pizza box and an egg carton, then carries it over to the area he’s converted to a home crime lab (including a computer setup with access to all case files) …
He opens the pizza box and inside finds a single slice of presumably-frozen pizza. “Does he put it in the microwave?” you ask, because you’ve never seen an 80s action movie before. You have to understand that Reagan-era tough guys weren’t just bachelors, they were a unique breed of ultramasculine hyperbachelor. Microwaving that pizza would be a type of cooking, an act as emasculating to the hyperbacherlor as literal castration, or performing oral sex on a woman. Instead, Cobra picks up a set of heavy shears from his desk and uses them to scissor off a small, frozen triangle of pizza …
…and pops it into his mouth. “Then what in the hell is he going to do with the eggs?” you ask, growing nervous. “He can’t even swallow them raw like Rocky, these have to be frozen solid! Is he going to bash them to powder with a hammer and snort them like cocaine?” No, remember, we’re seeing the habits of the fictional character Cobra here, not the actor, Sylvester Stallone. Instead, he opens the egg carton to reveal a gun cleaning kit…
… and, while still wearing his gloves and sunglasses indoors, begins cleaning his gun while chewing his little triangle of frozen pizza. It’s so surreal that it’s almost Lynchian.
Look, great art should be about questions, not answers. “Why does Cobra store his gun cleaning kit in an egg carton? Why does Cobra store that egg carton in the freezer? Why does he snip off that little hunk of pizza before eating it, instead of just taking a bite out of the slice itself? Why does Cobra keep those huge shears on his desk?” You might be tempted to think that Cobra offers no answers to these questions, but it totally did, in the previous scene. The answer to those questions, and all questions that begin with “why”, is to rip off your shirt and tell you to clean up your act.
“Actually,” some of you are saying, “I kind of can’t get my mind off the casual hate crime this off-duty cop committed on the way in, are there seriously no consequences for that?” Oh, sure. Later in the film, Cobra again approaches his apartment and, once again, the Latino man is parked in the spot Cobra has decided is his. This time, at the sight of the approaching souped-up Mercury, the man jumps behind the wheel of his car and pulls forward, making room. He nervously waves at Cobra as he walks past and Cobra says, “You’re a good citizen.”
See? Everything is fine. Cobretti simply had to show the man who’s boss, that’s all. To put him in his place, if you will. The threat of violence corrected the behavior, as it always does. I don’t even know what you were worried about.
“Okay, I’m one of the readers who hasn’t seen this movie and I’m confused. Is this a comedy? Is Stallone making fun of these action movie tropes and the glib, casual horrors of the era? Or fully embracing them? The way you’re describing them doesn’t make it clear.” I assure you, watching the film will leave you equally confused. No one involved with this production knew the answer. The most important thing to understand about the 80s is that cocaine chemically inhibits the human brain’s ability to process irony.
The closest I can come to a modern comparison is 4chan. You know how the kids there used to make “Hitler did nothing wrong” memes as a form of shock humor? Then, a few years later, some of them started attending actual Neo-Nazi rallies and buying assault rifles, with no idea as to whether or not they were still doing a wry in-joke? Well, we were all 4chan back then. The year before Cobra, Stallone made a Rocky sequel in which he punched a Russian boxer so hard that it ended the Cold War and to this day, no one is sure if he meant it.
This, kids, is why people my age are the way we are.
Before we go, here are some additional thought-provoking details that you can bring up with your children when it’s time to sit them down for the Cobra discussion:
1. As you can see in the screengrab above, Cobra already had his gun stuffed down the front of his pants when he stood up out of his vehicle — meaning he keeps it there while driving. If you have a penis and access to a Colt .45, try sitting in a car with it in that position while wearing some vacuum-sealed denim like Stallone’s. Congratulations: you now have a permanent gun-shaped dent in your scrotum that will give the emergency room staff a funny story to tell later.
2. When Cobra first enters his apartment, he casually walks past a telescope that is pointed at a neighboring building. This is never seen or referenced again.
3. That apartment, with zero renovations, would sell for approximately $10 million today.
4. In addition to the shears, Cobra has scattered around his home crime lab some other old-timey tools — I see an antique manual drill and what looks like a scythe leaning on his window.
“But why?” you might ask. “Is he secretly Amish? Are those murder weapons from cases that he stole from the evidence locker, ruining the chain of custody? Are they the tools Cobra uses to murder minorities who inconvenience him? Are they what he eats tacos with? What could he possibly … HEY! MY SHIRT!”
5. The first time we see the model Ingrid at work, she is doing a photoshoot around some robot sculptures. They gave this one on the left a tasteful little robot wiener:
6. Incredibly, Cobra is based on a novel, A Running Duck by Paula Gosling. No, the novel does not contain the pizza-scissors scene, I checked. In fact, Stallone rewrote the script from scratch, apparently using story elements he had originally developed when he was cast in Beverly Hills Cop before he walked away from that project and changed the entire trajectory of blockbuster cinema. Even more incredibly, A Running Duck would get a second adaptation a decade later, as the 1995 Cindy Crawford/William Baldwin bomb Fair Game.
I have also written a novel, called Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick and I have in fact sold the film and TV rights to those characters via the first book in that series (really). If Stallone were to get involved in the project and rewrite it entirely into Cobra 2, I would do everything in my power to get onto the set, to try to have lunch with the man at least once. I would insist on pizza, then I would just sit back and watch, holding my breath.
