Category: PUNCHING DAY

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PUNCHING DAY

Night Man 🌭

Night Man is a superhero TV series that debuted in 1997: the year the ‘90s finally went too far, and we all realized they had to be put down. The show is about Johnny Domino, which is the most ‘90s name I can possibly imagine, and he is a professional saxophone player, which is the most ‘90s profession I can possibly imagine. It’s like the producers of Night Man knew that the ‘90s were winding down so they had to pack every trope they’d been too embarrassed to use into one show, because they just felt that this was the last year you could unironically wear Hypercolor and it was sort of like the moment you realize an old dog is on the decline.

If Night Man feels like a cheap store-brand ripoff of Batman that’s because this is a Malibu title, and Malibu is the Malt-O-Meal of comic imprints. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Eat shit, Malibu. I know the company is defunct, I know that society and good taste and justice have won out, but this is like hunting Nazis in 1960s Argentina. You’re not allowed to just commit atrocities and retire. This is Hunters shit, and it’s not over until I knock on your door with a copy of Mantra and a pistol.

Anyway here’s our protagonist:

There is no need for time capsules: That image explains everything about the ‘90s in the most brutally honest way possible. Back then we liked generic, hairless men stripping down and struggling with basic communication. I blame the unrealistic standards Van Damme set in the ‘80s. Look at that zany window graphic: You could put a photo of the Armenian Genocide in that frame and saxophones would play while it answers a phone in a towel. It is an inevitability.

I’m pretty sure the rippin’ saxophone theme is supposed to be Night Man himself playing — remember, that’s not only his profession, but his passion. Here he is just hanging out and noodlin’ a “sexy night in the big city” style sax riff in the middle of a crowded cable car.

If you play an instrument on public transport, you are a fungal infection in the dicktube of society. It is literally a captive audience and you are exploiting it for attention you obviously could not earn fairly. If there was any justice in this world, God would strike you down for doing this kind of shit, and there is justice in this world, because that’s exactly what happens.

Night Man is almost immediately struck by lightning, which sadly does not fuse his saxophone to his lips so that he becomes a jazz monstrosity, and racks up a lifetime of tired nurses explaining to horrified newbies that one â™ȘDOOTâ™Ș means Sax-face is hungry while two ♫BLATS♫ is for ‘full diaper.’ 

Instead, the accident grants Johnny psychic powers. Well, psychic power. You see, now his brain is tuned to the frequency of evil, like evil is a radio station and Night Man is a knob in the other sense of the word. I’m not making any of that up — the creator of Night Man is barely making that up. That only technically counts as imagination, and would earn you a C- on Reading Rainbow even though none of the other children are getting a grade. 

Here’s the face Night Man makes when he listens to KEVL.

He looks like you just told him for the very first time that some letters can represent numbers. He looks like the news just broke into Baywatch to announce that the president cancelled surfing. That’s the expression you’ll find on every personal trainer’s face when you tell them you’re not interested in a free session. 

‘Evil frequency detection’ is his only innate power, but you will still see Night Man flying, going invisible, and firing lasers because at least one producer realized ‘fuckably dumb dude discovers the concept of subterfuge’ only worked for Burn Notice. The whole pilot revolves around Night Man gaining his superpower, then immediately using it to go after a suit that gives him better superpowers. And it’s the suit that really draws the Batman comparisons Night Man is in no way prepared to make. Johnny Domino is clearly supposed to be a suave Bruce Wayne-like figure, but his every expression is ‘unfrozen caveman encountering robot dog’ and he drives a Plymouth Prowler: The official car of regret. 

Prowlers were only bought by paunchy old white men in the early stages of dementia who’d temporarily forgotten what cool looked like but still felt pressured to take a hasty guess. Prowlers look like John Waters turned into a car, Turbo Teen-style, but lost all of his charm in the transition between man and machine. 

Hyping up the Prowler as a bitchin’ new supercar really nails down the window this show operates in: The world was only stupid enough to think Prowlers were cool for like two weeks in the Spring of 1997, and never again, and then so far the other direction that it actually undid those two weeks and I started off this sentence telling you the truth but now it has become a lie.

It’s clear they got that Prowler for free in a promotional deal, because Night Man had a budget of “whatever Hercules: The Legendary Journeys didn’t use” and they might have been… proud of it? Most other shows in the ‘90s had just discovered two things: CGI and the fact that they had no budget for CGI. Most of their rendered abominations were backgrounded, blurred, darkened — Night Man had no such shame, which should surprise none of us after Hunk McPecs answered a phone in a towel then hopped in a Prowler. 

Here’s Night Man bringing its fire to the pilot episode:

That would earn you a “Pass” on your proof-of-concept midterm in a computer animation class held by the Night School program at your local YMCA, and Night Man is so proud of it. It’s almost touching. It’s like they couldn’t bear to hurt the feelings of the special effects department, who might have failed out of ‘coloring time’ in kindergarten but it never stopped them from trying. It is very weird how prominently and unnecessarily Night Man uses CGI — they set their show in San Francisco then filmed it in Canada and rendered every set piece in the barn-studio of Bulgaria’s lowest bidder.

It doesn’t surprise me that Night Man couldn’t afford stock footage of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it does surprise me that they couldn’t even afford “overhead establishing shot of railing and water.” 

You couldn’t afford to be on any bridge? You couldn’t even afford to put a bannister next to a river? Maybe you shouldn’t be making a show then, Night Man. Maybe you should be saving up for the bulk box of Hot Pockets — yes, it sucks that they only have Philly Steak and Cheese, but it saves you 20 cents per Pocket and you can use those savings to buy the film rights for a better Malibu franchise.

Night Man has the craziest priorities in both budget and writing. He hardly ever uses his powers for Nightmanning — he’ll fly to a crime but not during one. He’ll shoot a laser to knock down a ladder so he can climb a building to punch a guard even though he has a laser and can also fly. Night Man reserves his powers exclusively for mundane insanities, like creating a holographic duplicate of himself playing saxophone and then abandoning it:

Really, the only subpar ‘90s staple this show is missing is…

David Hasselhoff agreed to be the central villain of Night Man’s two-part pilot on two conditions: One, that he only has 14 seconds of screen time and two, that nobody mentions his character exists, even when they’re talking to him. I don’t think he even has a name, and he does less than nothing before he dies. Hasselhoff shows up at the very end of Night Man to say one and a half things, then be thrown out a window in a way that makes it look like he slipped on a rollerskate they didn’t have to CGI, but also couldn’t afford to.

And the show ran for two seasons!

So the answers to the questions I know you’re asking right now are “yes, I will be writing about Night Man again,” and “no, I won’t stop just because this column doesn’t do well,” and “yes, this is how I’m going to be for the duration of the site, even if you threaten to quit paying me because of it.”

I will absolutely sacrifice my own financial stability just for the chance to dunk on Malibu some more. I’m not the hero you need, but I’m sure as shit the hero you deserve.

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PUNCHING DAY

Probably True Stories of ’90s Action Stars Giving Script Notes 🌭

During the ’90s, all the best action movies were assembled from five different scripts and trying to be thirteen different things. This meant catch phrases and deranged one-liners would appear with no warning or setup as if they came from a completely different film. It was the best. We all know Con Air was written by dressing researchers up as the devil and asking schizophrenic patients to watch breast implant surgeries, but who caused all the strangeness in those other ’90s movies? I should also mention the casual, whimsical racism because it’s going to come up. So ends the thesis statement of this, another 1🌭900🌭HOTDOG masterpiece:


…

This article was brought to you by our fine patron and Hot Dog Supreme, Zdarfan: The unstoppably chinned maniac with no Maniac License.

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PUNCHING DAY

Combat Simulation Suits 🌭

I enjoy fighting, but I do not enjoy being fought. Ideally, I would like to attack people from inside the safety of a heavily guarded pillow fort. Where is the martial art for me, the extremely dishonorable vicious coward?

I’ve finally found it:

This is an instruction manual for Combat Simulation Suits — mobile attack pillow forts, in other words. Now, this booklet is supposed to be for teaching instructors how to properly deploy Pillsbury Doughboy Battle Mechs in a classroom situation but I figured it, like all things, can be repurposed for evil. 

I actually might have an easier time corrupting this information than you’d think. Judging by the production efforts put into this sucker, the entire manual was hastily written in a courthouse bathroom to be used as evidence in a mascot assault trial.

Every single picture in this book was taken with a wet Holga and developed in the bathroom of a Greyhound bus. And that’s okay, because even the most professionally constructed of these suits looks like you barely took the ‘Best Try’ award in a prison cosplay contest. They have cool names like “Redman” and “Fist” and nobody can say them with a straight face. They look like original characters from some shitty knock-off comic book imprint that couldn’t get the rights to even the worst superheroes, like some store-brand Alpha Flight motherf — you know what? Let’s stop beating around the bush. They look like Ultraverse characters. There, I said it. Eat shit, Malibu.

The advice in here shoots for ‘casual professional’ and the ricochet hits ‘belligerently insane’ square in the crotch:

“Problems occur when the person wearing the kit starts to feels super-pain and impact resistant. 
 But with that said I have seen the kit bearer demonstrate this Mr. Invincible syndrome on a number of occasions, against both empty hands strikes and training weapons. 
 I have seen a feeder in a helmet and an array of padding receive no less than five back handed thrusts to the face with a metal training knife just roar his head off and keep coming.” 

This manual has to set aside time to address the mad feeling of invincibility that almost immediately overcomes you as soon as you put on the Chuck E. Cheese Batsuit. Every single man this instructor trained has sprinted out the door to fight crime with it, and he is sick of losing both expensive padded codpieces and promising young lives. “Remember that guns exist,” should be the only counter this poor instructor needs, and yet he’s had to watch the life drain out of countless eyes as his most prized pupils power-waddle away from sustained police fire.

“I use a similar mentality during un-predictable scenario training by using positive self-talk such as ‘I’m the only f*cking predator in this alley!” This kind of flicks the switch, allowing me to access the state I need to be in, exactly when I need it.”

If a man clad in nothing but crudely taped-together karate mats introduces himself as “FIST,” and goes on to clarify that he is “the only fucking predator in this alley!” you are not in karate class. Repeat: You are not in karate class. You actually took a wrong turn on your way to Take Back the Streets and this is the storage unit Sergei rented to produce his very first snuff film. Don’t worry: You’re supposed to kill him. You are getting out of this alive, but you are not getting out of it without stomping a boner into pulp and erotically throttling a sad Russian dressed in the entire supply closet of an elementary school gym class.

Eventually we get into what every vicious coward on a budget wants to know: how to build your own Combat Simulation Suit at home. “Smurf Suit” isn’t a great superhero name, but that’s because this is our villain:

Look at that god damn nightmare. Everything about it says “you’re going to live in my basement for the next 7 years.” It looks like Freegan cosplay of a Ukrainian folk monster. That’s the last thing somebody who answered a Craigslist personal ad saw, and it’s the first thing the Anaheim Ducks are going to see when they wake up in hell.

“Like many other good instructor’s in this field we avoid expressions in practice such as “aggressor” and “victim” for the role of the pad man and the trainee. 
 I use one that my friend Mick Coup employs, which I really like ‘MEAT’ This installs the correct mentality for this kind of training right from the start.”

Okay. All right. That’s enough, One Step Closer to the Street. The game is up. This is a fetish thing. Nobody asks you to call them “MEAT” unless the follow-up question is “want to see me deepthroat a baseball bat?” 

Any pamphlet featuring a hirsute man in overalls and a duct-tape helmet, captioned with the phrase “aggressive role play used by the woofer” is only here to instruct masochists on how to take crushplay to the final level. 

To the disappointment of every single man that volunteered to be put in this full-body-diaper suit, the Model Mugging program was not what they thought. Look at that son of a bitch on the right: It looks like a Minecraft porn parody. It looks like the event exclusive Hillbilly Funko you could only get at StrangleCon ‘08. 

The rest of this manual is just grainy incriminating photos of perverts wrasslin’ women while wearing their Lego Man Gimp Suits.

And that’s fine. It’s totally fine if this is what you’re into so long as it’s consensual, which it absolutely does not seem to be. In fact, the vigorous nonconsent of at least one party seems to be a requirement for this Darkweb PornHub category:

But maybe I’m being naive. In this day and age, I could absolutely see young women becoming sexually aroused at the thought of beating the shit out of a chubby guy in a clearance-rack motorcycle helmet. It could provide plenty of safe sexual release for both participants, so I guess I don’t have any issue with this, so long as all parties involved are well past the age of conse-

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PUNCHING DAY

Let’s Read: Martial Dance 🌭

Chaz Wilson combined dance with fighting in a way deadlier and sexier than it sounds. His fluid, powerful movements dazzle enemies then dazzle them several more times: leg lift, elbow move, buttock flex! Congratulations, reader, you’re already at least a pink belt in Martial Dance: total fitness with martial arts aerobics.

Normally, if you were teaching students a high-energy aerobic spinkick dance routine, you’d make a video. Chaz, instead, wrote a book. A book with a shark-eyed man nudely leering at you as he forms stiff shapes. Congratulations again, reader, as you feel the shirtless rhythm of Chaz.

Like I assume most Chazzes do, Chaz fancies himself a philosopher. He opens the book not by telling you to stretch, pick your favorite music, and most of all– have fun!, but with a meandering history of how dance has always been linked with martial arts. He offers three examples: Muay Thai, Wrestling, and Capoeira. And look, I’m not history’s greatest thinker. I once wrote an article called The 8 Most Impossible Impacts from Dumb Fucks Falling Down. But it is with some expertise I can say this: if you only have two examples of fighting sports where guys sometimes dance and the one dance fighting thing everybody already knows about, you don’t have a Top Bizzare Kung Fu Dances (You Won’t Believe Can Kill You!) list. You don’t have a book intro. You don’t have a conversation starter at a cocktail party for The Institute of People Who Have Never Heard of Fucking Anything. So I started this book worried Chaz was only a pedestrian idiot and not the oiled, majestic lunatic on the cover. I was happy to be proven wrong immediately.

The first 60 pages of the book are Chaz’s thoughts on spirituality and the expressive power of dance along with every photo of himself he has ever taken. Without exaggeration, there are 17,000,000 of him on the same beach rock, putting his karate hands in slightly different directions. If the worst person you’ve ever met hit print on their Facebook profile, it would look exactly like this but with less menace. Chaz knew you wanted to start kick, kick, chopping your way to fitness, but he couldn’t live with himself if he let you do that without a full understanding of the internal arts and what the bow used by students in “Dojos” represents. And speaking of shirtless, muscled martial arts masters who write exhausting, pointless intros, hi, I should really get started showing you some of these shitty dances (You Won’t Believe Can Kill You!).

Sorry, there are 40 more pages of basic moves before we start dancing. For an example, here is the explanation for a Left Uppercut, in its entirety. If you’re a boxer, have taken most of a boxing class, or once heard boxing get described by your octopus wife who sometimes visits the surface, you might recognize Chaz’s punch as very bad. If you were teaching a blind person how to throw an uppercut, this is when they would ask for their money back. Like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chaz uses a system of fighting designed for only three things: flexing your muscles in photos, buns, and dick basket.

Whether he is coming after you on the dance floor or on the mean streets, 

there is no safer place in the world than right in the crosshairs of Chaz Wilson. It honestly seems impossible to see someone this bad at moving their body who hasn’t lost an eye in a chopsticks accident. Aside from outrageous funnymen mocking it 32 years in its future, who the fuck could this book have been for? It turns out I know.

The copy I own was first purchased by the Unification Theological Seminary Library in 1988. And if you’re wondering how a religious school’s library categorizes a book about the spiritual power of karaterobics, they considered it -and I swear I’m not kidding- “Science & Technology.”

After six years, a clergy-in-training finally checked out Martial Dance. He was the only one in the library’s history to do this, had an unusual Filipino name, and this was more than enough to find him online in five seconds. The book’s only other reader is a Tong Il Moo Do master from New York, which is a Korean martial art combining taekwondo with other things, most notably the power of Jesus Christ. So if you want to know what kind of person unironically reads books like this, their kicks are infused with God’s power, they’re quick to accept Facebook friend requests, and they do NOT respond to private messages about aerobics books they borrowed from a seminary school library in 1994.

For 100 pages Chaz sets the reader up for this to be a soul-igniting expression of your warrior spirit. And then it’s finally time to unleash your dance and he’s like, “WIGGLE WIGGLE, YEAH! Then the other side. WIGGLE WIGGLE FUCK YEAH! Now, with all your strength: WAVE: BYE BYE!” Chaz carries “dad lost in an electric slide” energy with him even when he’s alone in a studio. The man who brags about advanced martial dancers performing impossible feats of sweet, improvised moves looks confused in the two-step routine he himself invented. Chaz is a robot developed by ’90s stand-up scientists to archive how white people be dancing.

If OJ Simpson wrote a book combining couples therapy with hiding a body and called it Repairin’ & Dismemberin’, it would not be stranger or worse than Martial Dance. You are better off studying the movements of a LEGO figure being passed by a toddler. Chaz dances like a cheerleader getting kicked out of try-outs for being sarcastic and fights like a cheerleader getting kicked out of try-outs for being a pussy.

It’s almost remarkable how little explanation Chaz includes in his book. “Figure 1A: Lift your foot,” is his idea of kick instructions. “Lift your foot (see figure 1A) and compress your asshole to the sounds of Mister Mister,” might be an entire routine. If my new Facebook friend really tried to martially dance back in 1994, he would have had to make up 80 to 90% of it on his own. Chaz shows the reader a few incomplete dance numbers, then ends with 30 pages of a woman posing in a leotard. There is no text explaining what the hell she’s doing, and it’s pretty clear no one even told her what kind of book this was. Chaz set out to create a hybrid of dance, martial arts, and fitness, and after saying nothing for 60,000 words, he ended his book with a sad woman just doing non-threatening jazz movements. And speaking of shirtless, muscled martial arts masters who do shit like that, bye!

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PUNCHING DAY

The Sketches of Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘N’ Wrestling 🌭

There was a magical time in the 1980s where television executives knew two things, and two things only: “Cartoons” and “sex monstering.” Everything and everyone got a cartoon adaptation. There were so many cartoon adaptations that studios in no way had time to read a brief summary of what the original property was about. Chuck Norris got a cartoon and it was about him working for the government. Gary Coleman got a cartoon and it was about him being a literal angel. While it’s true Chuck Norris has always been a narc and Gary Coleman was too precious for this world, one of those claims is figurative. 

So of course professional wrestling got a cartoon, and of course it was not about professional wrestling. Whoever pitched the show started with ‘wildly unhealthy but still musclebound maniacs get together-’ and the show was greenlit on the condition they never finish their sentence. Hence, Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling.

This is the real Hulk Hogan.

This is cartoon Hulk Hogan.

Observant readers may have scrolled back up two inches to the picture of actual Hulk Hogan, who looks like you stuffed fury into a sausage casing, and noticed some subtle differences between the two images. Cartoon Hulk looks handsome, wholesome, righteous and true. He looks like your least favorite character in the D&D party. His eyes bespeak a friendly paternal figure who might not say it enough, but you know he’s proud of you. Real Hulk Hogan’s eyes also contain a lot of things, but most of them are unsettling nicknames for your various orifices. 

He looks like he’s always running physics calculations for the running leg drop he’s gonna pull on you before introducing himself to Little Miss Mouth and The Down South Trout. 

The animation in Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is so janky, I’d say it was an early Korean outsource, but I don’t want to start a war. 

Besides, everyone knows how desperate professional wrestlers are for cash — I’m going to lay odds this was actually done by The Dream Team in exchange for two platters of Waffle House flapjacks and the right to sleep in the bathroom for an hour.

The sound design for Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is what the inside of your head is like in hell. Instead of laugh tracks we get ghostly, disconnected guitar riffs that signify both everything and nothing. They’re your cue to laugh, cry, transition scenes, or get to your bunkers because Macho Man Randy Savage is headed this way and the watchtower guards thought he looked lonely through the spyglass. Sound effects are chosen at random, happen at random, and present at random volumes — there are slide whistles in total stillness, wacky Scooby-Doo scrabbling noises in the middle of sentences, boings when somebody sits down and bicycle horns when they walk through doors. This show is not scored, it is haunted by the ghost of a sound engineer who died trying to cut together Rowdy Roddy Piper’s insane yapping into a credible sentence.

I’m only going to cover a very small subsection of Rock ‘n’ Wrestling: A meager handful of the live-action comedy sketches they play between episodes. There are very good reasons for this: First, because we reserve the right to come back to this well. I can write a hundred thousand words on this show’s two short seasons and if you think I’m joking you fucking try me. Second, if you think I’m hogging all of Hulk Hogan’s 1980s cartoon from Seanbaby, then either you have not felt his flying roundhouse or you have come up with a way to counter it. If it’s the latter, for the love of God, message me. At night I dream only of feet and not in the good way. But mostly, I need to tackle Rock ‘n’ Wrestling in small pieces because I’m currently taking medications that leave me immunocompromised, and my doctor has warned there’s a very real chance Hulkamania could run wild on me. 

The very first thing we see after the opening credits of Rock ‘n’ Wrestling is a close-up of Bobby ‘The Brain’ Heenan, a man whose skin seems to be greased specifically to prevent being pinned by any human camera. 

This is the first shot they went with for a children’s show.

A huge, sweaty dude in a onesie making grab hands at you is the very first thing they teach you to run from in Stranger Danger class, but that’s as presentable, photogenic, and safe as The Brain can look. This particular sketch is a funny little bit wherein Bobby advises you to lift weights-

…in a highly dangerous way guaranteed to cripple young children. The joke is that it’s hilarious how bad his form is, but nobody ever points out that what he’s doing is incorrect, and he suffers no consequences. So the whole sketch relies on the kids watching at home already knowing proper weightlifting technique, and the stakes are their spines. That is an excellent first step in weeding out the weak to start a race of child super-soldiers, but I don’t know how many times I have to say this: Bobby The Brain Heenan, you are not the man to lead that revolution.

Our next sketch starts with Nikolai Volkoff wandering up to a woman whose posture and body language is how you transcribe the sound of a rape whistle into semaphore. This is a common theme in these bits, actually: Wrestlers are always wandering up to lone, stranded people who begin mentally calculating the seconds until they die, even before they hear the slurred Russian accent.

You feel like you’ve seen this porn, don’t you? You can almost picture the soundtrack: those jazzy guitars over the distorted, lo-fi moans. You can picture the man’s cadence as he says, “car trouble? Maybe I can give you a ride,” and you can hear every ounce of the boredom in the woman’s voice as she answers “ooh
. yeah.”

The whole bit is that this lady has locked her keys in the car, so Volkoff pulls the door off its hinges. This is a solid premise for a sketch: professional wrestlers trying to interact with normal people, even as they struggle with their own drug-induced rage and overclocked bodies. And it’s a great lesson to teach children: Do not request assistance from anybody that looks like a professional wrestler. Your best case scenario is that they accidentally pull the head off your cat and lay down to cry at the monster they’ve made themselves into while you run away to gather a mob.

Here’s the punchline, and you tell me if you get it: He puts the door back on and it works perfectly.

Is that the joke? Because Nikolai seems to think so. He leaps at the camera and immediately bursts into hysterics. It’s not the kind of laughter that speaks of humor, but rather of a deep, reeling madness. This is the sound a great ape would make if you used sign language to successfully teach it the plight of the endangered Mountain Gorilla, just before it gave you the gestures for ‘no thank you,’ ‘no thank you,’ and ‘please shotgun.’

This man is standing utterly alone, in the middle of an empty field, peacefully fishing, when


Andre the Giant just sidles up to him. Emerging out of the woods in total silence, dressed in a missing coach’s gym uniform. The man says hello, and Andre doesn’t even have the decency to respond “this is the view from where you die.” 

Andre asks the man, “want me to show you how to catch a fish?” and you can plainly see the guy is trying to puzzle out how that’s an idiom for “I’d like to know how you taste.”  

But no, it turns out Andre really is just talking about fishing, which he does by screaming “I want a fish!” at the river. 

And a fish just flies into his hands. Is the joke that the river is so afraid of Andre, they will sacrifice one of their own to appease him? Because that is a very insensitive reference to what happened to the McGill High Cheerleading Team at Wrestlemania ‘85.

Nobody told the wrestlers anything about the sketches they’re in, but that’s okay, because there’s only one thing you can never pay a wrestler to do, and that’s “care.” And if a wrestler is defined by their utter apathy towards the conventions of mankind — and they are — then Rowdy Roddy Piper is their unfeeling king.

I don’t even have a guess as to what this sketch is about. Zero people involved in the production of this bit cared enough to communicate any kind of message. The sound is garbled and unintelligible — the clanking of weights and the panting gasps are louder than the words, and that’s amazing because every single person in this image is screaming at one other. Eventually Roddy plays his bagpipes, and they all flee. This is what it looks like if you go over the Event Horizon and enter the hell dimension. This is the tape they send back to warn you away.

It’s clear much of the stage direction for these scripts was “just have fun! Improvise.” I promise you, after meeting Rowdy Roddy Piper, that director never said those words again. I don’t mean “that phrase.” I mean any of those words. He never risked saying “fun” again, for fear of the flashbacks it would bring. Rowdy Roddy Piper jumps into improv with the disastrous enthusiasm of a toddler running in front of somebody using a swingset. He thinks every sentence could be improved with the addition of eight more sentences in the middle of it. Trying to wrangle Roddy into a coherent thought is like trying to dive-tackle the seagull that stole your french fry. You will never succeed, you will only hurt yourself trying, and even if reality flipped upside down and you actually managed this feat, you wouldn’t feel good about it. 

I asked YouTube’s caption system to tell me what Roddy was trying to say, and this is not a joke: It wouldn’t even try. 

It just thought “this must be music,” because that’s how a robot classifies something it can never understand. “This must be human art,” YouTube insists, “because there is no part of this which can be quantified.” 

It actually did muster up enough courage to dive into one sentence and here’s how it turned out:

You useless robot. This is going to take a human touch. I listened to this audio twenty times, and I’m going to give you a perfectly accurate transcription of Roddie’s dialogue:

Roddie: “Y’know I am Hot Rod, I have wha teak wha’m tell me something: What did you think I did I Sam, I had women I have I have fans coming out of my ears yenndergh, and y’know I’m the kinda guy I ju- a they IIII ahhh mm Roddy Piper they can wait for, are you kidding me? I am someone my fans whatdj- what do you mean laughing at me?! Gram narg narg my fans [screaming].”

I tricked the robot into trying a few more times by only turning captions on just before Roddy showed up on screen, so it would not know to flee. Here are its efforts in their entirety before — and again, I am not joking — the computer just gave up completely. It will only attempt to transcribe two or three of Roddy’s freeballin’ sentence jams before fritzing out and going blank.

Solid effort, robot, but here’s the actual transcript:

Roddy: “Ju the only way you can do that is equal rights I have something that makes everybody everybody work out harder duju-ju- see that pretty lady back there watch how hard begrok begrok blow these bagpipes [screaming].”

I like to think Roddy would be proud to know that, thirty-some odd years in the future, he would break a robot so hard it invented a character named Train Eric — a proper noun with capitalization and all — just to explain the noises he makes with his throat.

I actually think he did say that, but the robot was so sure that couldn’t be right, it grew embarrassed again, threw up the [music] placeholder, and went to sulk.

Here are the real words:

Roddy: “Hello you beautiful bombshell you yuh aguh- I have people that do you wanna take this car and just move- Ooh your car won’t start ooh maybe it ran out of your churchman merblop ooh- I jerkcan Jeremy joo talkin to Hot Rod-  *knocking* yo gas get in there! Your hair is plump you are pretty, are you ready to move yoho! Car start now!”

I don’t feel good about doing that to this poor robot. The YouTube captioning bot already has to wear a helmet just to be on the internet, and here I’ve thrown it the wildest curveball human language has ever produced. This might be the last straw for all robotkind. I truly fear that I may have just kicked off the AI Wars, and I can’t even say I’m sorry with a straight face.

If this is how humanity ends, I only ask that Junkyard Dog be the one to send us off.

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PUNCHING DAY

The Arcade Masterpiece D.D. Crew

Technically, by editorial mandate, arcade games fall under the umbrella of NERDING DAY. But you know who never starts their sentences with “technically?” A goddamn hot dog. “Technically” is a word for carrot cakes and tomatoes. And today we are speaking from our beefy loins about no ordinary arcade game. This is the first entry in a new feature called…

The early ’90s were a Golden Age of street gang punching video games. At any pizza parlor or bowling alley you had your choice of Double Dragon, Final Fight, or Vendetta. Or Burning Fight. Or Combatribes. If you were unl- oh shit, Bad Dudes! If you were unlucky, your local arcade had D.D. CREW, a game worse than everything it was ripping off in such a blatant, intentional way. This game is like barging into a man’s house nude with a copy of his wife made out of garbage bags, and then failing to perform sexually with it. Which is to say it’s so brash and confusing in its failures there’s no elegant analogy for it.

Let me try to explain better: this game is a work of unexplainable lunacy. If you asked the animator of D.D. CREW how to punch, he would put one leg over his head and swallow his own face, which is how he thinks you shrug. If you asked the writer of D.D. CREW what the fuck is going on in the plot, he would say, “Unspeed police diarrhea,” which is how he thinks you say, “please repeat, slower.” And if you asked the designer of D.D. CREW how this game happened, he’d say, “They turned that into a game? I thought we were designing software for analyzing police diarrhea.”

Like everything in D.D. CREW, the opening cinematic sucks so hard it creates a masterpiece. A man in an orange Party City pimp costume calls the LAPD to say, “YO GOTTA BOMB IN YA PARK !!” and an empty carnival explodes with no injuries or damage of any kind. It’s sort of cute, like the karate heroes asked their kids to put on a play about what they thought their daddies did at work. The bad guy never gets a name and if any of the characters are the second draft of an idea, I will eat five evidence bags of police diarrhea. The theme song is a mashup of audio samples that, and I swear this isn’t a joke, go, “SHUT UP, ALREADY. DAMN. SHUT UP, ALREADY. EVERYBODY FUCK IT!” Your first guess might be it was chosen randomly by someone without access to a Japanese-to-English dictionary, but the lyrics describe D.D. CREW’s design process a little too perfectly to be a coincidence.

Most fighting games have you leaping around the screen in a whirlwind of kicks and baseball bats. Here, you waddle stiffly and poke your hands and feet in every direction other than horizontal. It’s an entire system of martial arts designed around showing new smells to your dance partner. For example, one guy’s main attack is a high five. Do you have any idea how deeply you need to penetrate the space of your enemy to hurt them with a high five? Depending on your penis length, exactly one penis.

No person involved in the making of this thing gave a shit. All the technical parts of D.D. CREW  like “collision detection” or “controls” or “not making 25% of the enemies Wario” fail, but it’s a weird kind of failure like it was done on purpose. It’s not impossible SEGA hired a staff of real muscle men, Warios, and carnival murderers to make this more authentic and they turned out to be poor programmers and project managers. The enemies all look like a total badass drew sarcastic character designs and said, “This is how a pussy draws leisure wear! Ha ha ha! Put it in the game, you fuckin’ nerds!”

The first boss you encounter is a nice man with sticks and a mustache who shouts “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” because everything in D.D. CREW is expertly wrong. There was obviously a big, wobbly gray area between super tough and anal play that 1991 was still trying to figure out, and “YOU’RE IN FOR SOME ROUGHIN’ MAN!” is such a perfect thing to say to eliminate any certainty you thought you had about whether this stranger came here to fight or fuck.

The second boss is Bruce Lee because once the D.D. CREW writer came up with “my dad with sticks,” he was out of ideas. Try to imagine saying something dumber during a martial arts video game brainstorming meeting than, “I have an idea: Bruce Lee!” Maybe you could just blurt out, “A karate guy,” but that’s ridiculous, right? What kind of a creatively bankrupt trun would think “a karate guy” was an idea? And who would have such a generic take on such a tired joke structure to build all this hypothetical “karate guy” outrage for a limp reveal every reader will see coming?

D.D. CREW is constantly pushing the boundaries of what your brain will accept. After you beat the third boss, the main bad guy shows up in a helicopter, shoots you with a bazooka, and drops you twenty stories onto the back of your neck. You’re the same flimsy clutz who has been dying every three punches for 12 dollars worth of quarters, but you get up from this certain death instantly and break into a full sprint. By any logic, real or digital, you should be dead. The machine should charge you three tokens just to look at your closed casket. It should be a game over screen with a forensic dentist looking for your teeth in a bog of gore presented by SEGA. Look at this fucking insanity:

Speaking of falling, here’s something the antidepressants industry doesn’t want you to know: the key to happiness is fighting an enemy near the edge of something and knocking them the fuck off the world. If you add up all the hours I’ve spent waiting for video game bad guys to walk between my kick and a pit, I could have read eleven books on being happy and all I would be is dumber and sadder. The only reason anyone is miserable, ever, is they haven’t thrown enough Abobos off a conveyor belt. D.D. CREW tried to include this, the best element of video games and life, but like every other thing in D.D. CREW, it’s so maniacally stupid. There are holes for enemies to fall in, but they seem to have no idea they’re there, so casually stroll to their death without any involvement from you. It’s fun, but fun like a vagina made out of pizza– a wrong kind of too much fun. It’s a video promising only NASCAR crashes that also follows each driver to the hospital to watch his widow cry. Maybe it’s both. D.D. CREW is a vagina crash racing a pizza widow.