Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: The Laws of Eternity! 🌭

Brockway: It’s Anime Week and this may sound crazy, but did you know not all anime is healthy? It’s true! The pure of heart may only use anime to say sweet things about penguins and age of consent, but some people take the medium that’s seen more shredded child panties than Jordan Peterson’s dentist… and they see the potential for evil! 

Let’s talk about the cult that uses anime to recruit the kind of sad nerds that would join a cult. 

Seanbaby: An anime made by a cult is actually good news for me. Part of why I don’t like Japanese cartoons is the confusion. I never know if they’re weird for artistic decisions or pervert confessions. However, if a cartoon explicitly means to indoctrinate viewers into a cult, that gives me a way to judge it. I can measure its success strictly by how much I want to join! Soon I will either hate a thing (great) or will have given my light over to a prophet who makes little cartoons (greatest).

Brockway: Happy Science, or The Institute for Research in Human Happiness if you’re nasty, is into some pretty standard cult stuff. They think there’s only one god, El Cantare, but he’s been reincarnated as the god of every other major religion, which is why those poor chumps are so confused. And hey, wouldn’t you know it? His latest incarnation just so happens to be the leader of Happy Science, Ryuho Okawa. 

Seanbaby: You can’t teach this kind of graphic design. It can only be cursed upon you by a typography demon. If I killed a room full of people, I would hold this up and shout, “Are you wondering how I knew? The second I saw this card I knew I wasn’t on Earth anymore and none of you were real.” I’m not saying I’m a hard no on this cult, but I’m worried they’re going to see “Bachelor Degree from Unaccredited Art School” on my resume and they’ll make me Exalted Vicar of Pamphlet Layout forever.

Brockway: You put a Drop Shadow on that book and you’re second in command, for sure. Anyway, standard cult gibberish applies here: Happy Science believes everyone must follow the four principles of happiness, all of which can presumably be found at the end of Ryuho Okawa’s cock. There’s some goofy shit about reincarnation, biblical angels and demons, aliens, the segregated levels of the afterlife – if you’ve ever had an extended bus stop conversation with a man wearing suspicious sneakers, you know where this is going. The only thing that really separates Happy Science from other, more boring cults is their recruitment method: Producing weirdly high quality anime movies.

Seanbaby: “High quality” is a weird way to describe this. I’ve been watching it for forty minutes and a Jesus guy has been levitating to voiceover the whole time.This feels like something a small Missouri church would throw together to recruit the town’s new Burmese family.

Brockway: What? Are you talking about Thomas Edison? Did you just describe Thomas Edison as a Jesus guy? Nobody has ever said that except for probably Thomas Edison, all the time. To be clear: We’re watching The Laws of Eternity, a 2006 anime by Happy Science that actually marries cult recruitment nonsense to anime nonsense in a shockingly compelling movie. 

Seanbaby: Wait, holy shit, your anime has a Thomas Edison? Oh no, I see what I did. I didn’t read your whole email. I just Googled “cult anime,” and watched something called Chouetsu Sekai by a cult named Aum Shinrikyo. 

Brockway: Ooh, you need to duck out of that immediately. Anime Week is dark, but it’s not that dark.

Seanbaby: What do you mean? There’s apparently more than one cult who made recruitment cartoons! We have to talk about that, you do yours and I picked the one by the guys… who did… oh no, the Tokyo subway sarin ga– you know what? Let’s do yours.

Brockway: The Laws of Eternity opens in the near future. Ryuta is our main character who has a destiny instead of a personality. With him are Patrick, the waifish blonde skeptic. Roberto, chubby and black and therefore comic relief. And Yuko: Girl. We find them at the New York Thomas Edison museum eagerly discussing Thomas Edison – like all the coolest teens! 

Thomas Edison didn’t just invent IP theft and a solution to the elephant problem, he also invented the spirit phone – a thing that doesn’t exist and could never work. 

“But what if it did, and could??” Asks this anime…

With the mouth of an old Native American woman possessed by the spirit of Thomas Edison. 

Brockway: Thomas Edison slipping inside a Native American woman is traditionally covered up by a blackjack and a friendly contact at the police station, but this time it’s a smokey teepee. In New York City. Don’t question it! This is a cult movie: It’s for you to practice not questioning things. 

Thomas Edison needs your help, Japanese teens!

He needs them to build the spirit phone, which they do through light banter and a montage. It’s how MacGyver would build a compass out of desert plants, but two minutes of sparks and drawing on a chalkboard are all it takes to breach the barrier between life and death. They dial the underworld, and somebody named God Eagle answers.

SPIRIT TIP: If you dial the underworld and somebody named God Eagle answers, do not trust it! You are plucky teens in a JRPG and you just met the first form of the villain. 

Seanbaby: “Children! It is me! Your 2nd president, Thomas Edison! Okay, listen. I need you to find an elephant and then hook it up to these car batteries so I can settle a bet with fucking Tesla’s ghost. And when you’re done, obviously don’t trust God Eagle, you dumb shits!”

Brockway: But they do trust God Eagle, and his voice guides them into the spirit world. He takes them to the Fourth Dimension, which just looks like a Midwest downtown. Skeptic waif Patrick freaks out a bit at being trapped in the afterlife, and in a fit of rage he crosses a line by saying comic relief Roberto has “an easygoing face.” It seems like a nice way to compliment a dog, but judging by how Roberto responds, this is a racially charged statement in Japanese. Instantly, a door to hell opens beneath them and they are both deservedly sucked into it for the respective crimes of: 

  1. Saying somebody has a casual face.
  1. Minding your casual face being pointed out.

Luckily God Eagle is here to save the day!

And he flies the boys straight out of hell like a Meatloaf video. He’s actually a kind of an ancient Inca hawkman, which one could have guessed by the name. But these teens are fucking floored by God Eagle’s true form. We make fun of Golden Age secret identities a lot, but if you’re surprised that somebody named God Eagle is a winged Inca, you’re the type of dude who squints at the screeching copyright attorney in the next office and says “so you think Hawk Manning is actually Hawkman, eh? I don’t see it!”

Seanbaby: I made God Eagle’s business card to clear up any confusion about what his deal is and how focused I am on this cartoon.

Brockway: It turns out this city is actually a kind of purgatory, a place for the dead to accept they’re no longer alive, which explains why it looks like Cincinatti. God Eagle becomes the teens’ spiritual tour guide, and he walks us through Happy Science’s wacky beliefs. 

They journey through a field of golden flowers to a movie theater which shows a soul their entire life in front of a judging audience. I’m pretty sure this cult stole its beliefs from an Albert Brooks movie, which is actually Step One for tricking me into a cult. 

Seanbaby: God Eagle has watched everyone fuck, every single time they’ve fucked. Look at him. They should have known from the second they talked to him on Thomas Edison’s ghost phone. If someone named God Eagle picks up the phone, they’ve been watching you fuck.

Brockway: God Eagle casually mentions that over half of all people go to hell, but considering that Roberto and Patrick dropped down there within their first three minutes, and it was for the crime of observing a facial expression, I’m betting he fudges those numbers.

Seanbaby: If you consider how their souls are being weighed, a very long movie being filmed from their eyeballs, anyone who spends too much time looking at lame ass Roberto would be judged pretty harshly. God Eagle would be like, “Here is where you watched Roberto finish a pizza. And here’s you searching for ‘pizza messy xxx’ later on bing.com. So you can see how my hands are tied here.”

Brockway: I actually assume all teenagers are going to burn in hell, I’m just saying it’s nice to see a cult actually show it. They’re really nailing my demographic.

Hey, speaking of: Next the group travels up to the 5th Dimension, the Realm of the Good, which looks a lot like France but there are biiiig cucumbers. 

Seanbaby: “Hello, God Eagle, and cursed souls! We pull the luscious shafts of nourishment peeking from the underbrush! Like the handjobbing of our great leader, Ryuho Okawa!”

Brockway: This is definitely mental priming. This is what cult leaders call “brain lube” and Interpol has a special anti-propaganda division to combat it with pictures of withered eggplants. 

Let’s leave the Throbbing Plane for the 6th Dimension, which is unlocked by your dreams and ideals. It’s specifically for inventions and full of nerds who love working, so your goal here is definitely to be the kind of happy firm-gripped dipshit who lands in the Cucumber Dimension.

Seanbaby: So they just left a bunch of nerds in an Invention Dimension with unlimited resources and Thomas Edison’s ethics? There’s no way they don’t bomb that farm dimension out of existence with cucumber-seeking poxrockets by the next Comet Phase.

Brockway: That would crash the handjob economy, you fool! 

Let’s burn right past the Nerd Floor. At the 7th Dimension, we start getting exclusive: Ryuta and Yuko must cure ten seriously ill people before entering, while Patrick and Roberto aren’t allowed at all. It’s just like Corey Feldman says to every lost young woman at the Burbank Greyhound station: The VIP floor is for angels only, and to become one, you’re going to have to do some very sick things.

Seanbaby: It’s funny you say this, because a being of pure light just handed me this:

Brockway: Patrick and Roberto aren’t missing much. See, the 7th Dimensional angels are really all… successful businessmen.

Hey, maybe I missed the part where the dude who started Toyota walked with Jesus and cured a dozen lepers, but he is specifically called out by name as being up here. This level of heaven is only for CEOS who have contributed to Japan’s prosperity, like Thomas Edison.

Don’t question things! Questioning things is how you get the Green Therapy. 

Seanbaby: I was wrong about this making more sense coming from a cult. I have no point of reference for how to think about any of this. I feel like a French Lick prom queen getting off a bus in Burbank and being grabbed by the driver who tells me, “I’m Corey Feldman. I’ll pay you 30 bucks to play bass guitar in your underpants at a bowling alley tonight, take it or leave it.”

Brockway: Oh, you’re in trouble. Those were the grounded parts. You need to roll with this or you’re going to have an aneurysm. For example:

Yuko meets a were-swan. 

This is heaven, you can be whatever you want! So live your best life…

Seanbaby: Did that fucking swan just say, “I’m Hellen Keller?” This cartoon rules.

Brockway: Hell yes it does! Let’s check back in with Patrick and Roberto…

Haha back to hell, boys! If you ever have a negative thought, no matter how innocuous or petty, you go straight to hell. And I mean STRAIGHT to hell. Pratfall trapdoor screaming right into hell. Heaven is not safe. You are never safe in heaven. This entire afterlife is just the Twilight Zone cornfield with sparkly anime paint. 

Seanbaby: Are we sure this is from a transgression? Helen Keller might have laid an egg on the trapdoor button.

Brockway: Yet another reason to love Helen Keller and her delicious eggs. 

All right, back to Ryuta, exploring Business Heaven with Thomas Edison. Here’s some fun facts they don’t teach you about Thomas Edison in grade school…

Thomas Edison is every inventor in history, and personally came up with everything from the gramophone to written language. Uranium refinement? That’s Edison. The rotary engine, lava lamps, faxing? Edison, Edison, and weirdly enough, Alexander Bain (Alexander Bain was Thomas Edison). Hey. That little Rubik’s Cube snake thing? This is gonna fuck you up: Thomas Edison.

Seanbaby: “My child, I was even the Shamwow guy who attacked that lady. In fact, that’s usually who I appear as on the ghost phone, but I was in a Thomas Edison mood the day we talked. Anyway, could you let everyone know that is not what I had in mind when I invented what you call toilet paper?”

Brockway: Thomas Edison has a problem: Without him doing all of science by hand, the field is growing stagnant. Can you believe, for example, that we’re not burning ghosts for fuel? Purely a for-instance here, but it is crazy that we’re not mining the spirit world for clean energy! Maybe you could use a hypothetical to understand this problem: Imagine we were not drilling for ghost crude when aliens showed up. They would think we’re ridiculous. 

In fact, if the modern world doesn’t wise up and start trapping ghosts in bottles and shaking them to power our blenders with their spirit-screams, Thomas Edison is going to destroy all of science. 

Seanbaby: “Spirituality and science are two faces on the same coin,” is something a Republican state senator would say to explain why he’s making it illegal for blacks to own cats. Decades of religious insanity have been boiled down to what we’re looking at here.

Brockway: See, these cult recruitment spiels always start off kinda reasonable – there are four pillars to happiness, there are themed tiers in heaven, one of them is business and the other is cucumbers. Don’t have negative thoughts. Whatever. But it’s always the same: At the midpoint turn in the second act they threaten to bomb technology unless it invents a ghost turbine. And then, once that first little bit of true raw crazy has slipped out, it’s like a cascade failure in a dam.

Seanbaby: Speaking of extinction-level-event infrastructure failures, it’s about time we trace this cult’s lineage back to some kind of ancient but advanced civilization.

Seanbaby: There it is. Pour that stupid wet bullshit into my mind, Happy Science.

Brockway: Your brain is as primed as it is ever going to be, so it’s time to just vomit nonsense on you and see if you wanna call the cops or are maybe game to live in a yurt. Thomas Edison explains that Thoth, Osiris, Buddha – all of them are actually Happy Science’s god, El Cantare. All gods are the same, like all inventors are Edison. Only this god lives in the ninth cosmic dimension, and we can’t go there. But we can still see eight if we hop in the spirit elevator Thomas Edison invented to move between realms, so let’s hurry up and hit Door Close because Toyota is coming this way.

Seanbaby: “Guys, hold the door! It’s me! Toyota! I adapted the automobile into the sensible, affordable product you know tod– awww, they must not have heard me.”

Brockway: *faint snickering moving upward*

Up to the Eighth Dimension! Which is also for nerds! Turns out when you let a nerd invent heaven a lot of it is bully-free. Here, Ryuta meets Einstein. Now, Einstein is a little coy about it, but eventually he does admit what we all suspected: He has the power to shapeshift and duplicate endlessly into a ghost army of Einsteins. 

It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve already dropped into the Seventeenth Dimension of hell (Always Phone Calls) just for thinking that. Hey, speaking of: Patrick and Roberto have been abducted by demons! The rest of the movie is a classic high-stakes anime fight to save them! Fuck yes!

Seanbaby: They don’t show it, but I’m certain that whenever Einstein breaks up into infinite Einsteins, they have to battle to the death until only one remains again.

Brockway: Oh, assumed. And the remaining Einstein absorbs all of the other’s power. Einstein is nobody’s bitch. You are his.

Okay, where were we? Right, unsettled by a heaven that is made up of interlocking Lego Einsteins, Ryuta and Yuko drop into the levels of hell. First to the World of Strife, a kickass metal lava apocalypse for murderers and anybody who raised their voice.

Seanbaby: Like all awesome neighborhoods, it’s only a matter of time before this place gets gentrified. Because if my theory is correct and my math is sound, this place will be mostly Einsteins by the next Pulsar Sequence.

Brockway: If you’ve ever envied people or tried to get a promotion, you go to the inescapable data center where you have to work forever for no pay. I’m not sure how this is different from the entire future of anybody under 30 today. 

Seanbaby: So to get the best chance at one of the good afterlives, you should invent something that kills someone, but not anyone at work. That’s good news, because from bigfoot traps alone, I’ve probably done this many times.

Brockway: You can have Nerd Heaven. Because The Hell of the Bloody Pond is for anyone who likes to fuck. 

Maybe a lot of folks will be unhappy living in the crimson fuckpond, but if you can name three Gwar albums this is just your ideal waterpark.

Seanbaby: This isn’t really anything. It sort of feels like Great Leader Ryuho didn’t know what to do with the Fuck Hell.

Brockway: Demons live below all of that in a hell that looks like Greenland. And that’s where Patrick and Roberto went, for the crime of two seconds of low-key sulking. Where they are being tormented by that infamous demon…

Friedrich Nietzsche. 

He’s insufferable! Can you imagine having to hang out on some rocks with fucking Nietzsche forever, talking about existence and the abyss until you’re just like “fuck! Nietzsche! Have you tried drinking water and taking a walk because it’s usually that!”

Seanbaby: I bet when Nietzsche arrived in this miserable place everyone was like, “Save it, Fried. We all know the kind of shit you’re going to say.”

Brockway: Also Hitler is here. And they say you can’t take it with you, but Hitler did take his giant demonic war elephant with him.

Seanbaby: “I’m Hellen Keller, but the times she accidentally grabbed a titty,” reveals the beast.

Brockway: Hitler and Nietzsche pilot Helen Keller the kaiju together with the joint power of their minds. You probably already knew that. Back at Cracked we wrote a lot about the telepathic battle mammoth that Hitler and Nietzsche timeshare. 5 Beasts You Didn’t Know Decided WWII. 6 Mammoths You Won’t Believe Were Hitler’s. 5 Baffling Mental War Pachyderms History Doesn’t Want You to Know About. We’ve learned all about it, but here we are doomed to repeat it anyway – once again at the mercy of a ruthless German’s elephant. 

And Nietzsche’s so pumped about this he starts shouting his catchphrase, “God is dead!” over and over like he’s trying to get the club to join in, but they’re not feeling it.

Seanbaby: “God is dead! God is dead! God i– oh, we’re not doing that? Fine. We’ll Nazi elephant rampage in total silence, I guess. Such is the relentless despai– oh, we’re not doing that either? Guys, what the fuck. Why am I even here then?” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Brockway: Don’t despair, have you forgotten our heroes have the clean-burning energy of the spirit realm and, oh yeah, THE RIGHTEOUS POWER OF THOMAS EDISON’S ANGELIC FIGHTING MECH ON THEIR SIDE?

Yeah, haha. You forgot, didn’t you? That Thomas Edison keeps mason jars full of battlemechs like a dieter might keep a selection of homemade soups in the freezer. Yep, Thomas Edison just cracks open a jar labeled ANGEL X-1, and then his mech blasts into hell to do battle with Friedrich Nietzsche and Adolph Hitler’s tandem psychic war elephant. 

Seanbaby: So from the perspective of the cult, did this already happen? Or is this something they’re worried about? I love that I don’t know. But here’s something I do know, Hitler: you don’t bring an elephant to a Thomas Edison fight.

Brockway: Oh, never count a good Hitler out! By absorbing the evil thoughts of his damned soldiers, Hitler powers up to unleash his patented Flaming Elephant Hitler Blast!

Seanbaby: Once again, this cult leader inadvertently wrote a really good sales pitch for the bad guys. “Join me and I’ll take your darkest thoughts and turn them into kaiju fireballs! That’s the Hitler Promise.”

Brockway: Drop that beat, Nietzsche!

Seanbaby: You suck so hard, Nietzsche.

Brockway: This is an anime, so you know the power of friendship is going to save the day. You probably knew that. But this is a weirdo cult anime, so I bet you didn’t call that Yuko would use the spirit energy of Helen Keller to summon a mystical robot shield. 

Look, I don’t know how to explain it, but I understand this. If Hellen Keller were a type of magic in an anime, she’d be an energy shield you summon by yelling “disappear!” She was completely blocked from the world by the lack of two major senses, and she was largely abandoned by medical science at the time. Helen Keller Disappear Magic Robot Shield. I get it, maybe I’m just being brain-groomed by this anime cult, but I do get it. 

Seanbaby: “It’s Hitler! Everyone get behind Helen Keller!” – Ryuho Okawa, Professional Cult Leader

Brockway: The power of Yuko and Ryuta’s bond summons a blazing sword for Thomas Edison’s Angel Mech so it can obliterate the psychic war elephant, which creates a mental feedback loop that banishes Hitler and Nietzsche. I’m not saying you understood why that sentence exists, but you did understand that sentence – you followed the progression of those words in that order. Which means you need to be very worried, because you’re being brain-groomed, too. 

Seanbaby: I was on board the second I saw that swan fly in. I said, “I swear, if that bird turns out to be Helen Keller, I will stand behind her, any time, any Hitler fight.”

Brockway: The kids escape hell in the hands of Thomas Edison’s battle mech, which has to be a metaphor for the importance of education to inner city children, but in doing so they punch a hole in the floor of heaven, which lets the demons out. Ah, see? Gentrification. 

Seanbaby: This is the worst thing I can imagine. A gaping hole in a private club for the wealthy elite where dirty people who fuck can crawl through. It’s exactly what Hitler wanted all along!

Brockway: They’re fucked. Our heroes are fucked. 

Nothing could save them now. 

Doom.

Despair.

Except you forgot again, didn’t you? 

You forgot about Infinite Einstein.

Seanbaby: Oh, right! The unlimited floating Einsteins– the 158th most insane thing in this movie. I did forget about them.

Brockway: God Eagle directs the power of heaven’s shapeshifting multi-Einsteins, and with it he blasts a mountain (there are mountains in heaven because mountains never have negative thoughts) and drops it straight on the demon army. 

Seanbaby: Ha ha that’s it? The unlimited power of the wealthy elite killed them all with a display of unlimited force? Problem solved?

Brockway: Problem solved. 

You’ve done well, Thomas Edison. You lent your giant spirit robot to Japanese teens so they could thwart a German philosopher. The prophecy has been fulfilled. You can rest.

Seanbaby: It’s really lucky those sinful kids died at the perfect moment to see all this.

Brockway: I guess vaporizing Hitler with Thomas Edison’s sword isn’t just the finale of National Treasure 3 – it was also the secret to unlocking heaven. The Ninth Dimension is available to Ryuta and Yuko now, though they risk obliteration by traveling there. 

If you know anything about story structure, you probably predicted the ending. If you strip away the setting and characters, it’s the same basic plot as Casablanca. Our heroes fly away in an energy pyramid to be consumed by the holy void, saying goodbye to centaurs and mermaids while a ghost sings about their invisible souls, then they meet Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton in the golden universe, where El Cantare the omni-god blasts them with Atlantis rays so they can remember the lost knowledge of man. 

Like if Ryuta gave the “hill of beans” speech right as Isaac Newton powered up the Atlantis Ray, they would be identical endings. You get it. The centaurs are America. 

Seanbaby: Hell yeah they are. We’re the centaurs, those mermaids are Korea, and it’s time for tensions along the 38th parallel to heat up.

Brockway: Now, clearly me and Seanbaby are sold. We are all in on joining this cult and Ryuho Okawa, the supreme incarnation of El Cantare, has earned all the blowjobs he wants with that Nietzsche war elephant fight. But it’s not all sunshine and Thomas Edison laser blasts: Ryuho Okawa might channel awesome dudes like Jesus and Nostradamus most of the time, but he’s also been known to channel Donald Trump, who is the spiritual opposite of a Nietzsche war elephant fight. 

Seanbaby: God damn it, that guy ruins fucking everything.

Brockway: Happy Science fiddles with nationalist bullshit, too: They’re all for denial of Japanese war crimes, remilitarizing Japan, and going nuclear. At the start of the pandemic they also sold “Spirit Vaccines” to cure COVID-19. They did not work, and Happy Science had to hide behind a legal loophole, like Thomas Edison’s battlebot might hide behind a Helen Keller energy shield, to avoid prosecution (Hitler’s flaming elephant blast). 

Seanbaby: But we still get the blood lake and the mermaids, right?

Brockway: I’m not saying don’t join the cult! By all means let’s join this cult. You’ve seen the anime. It rules. I’m just saying let’s play it slow here and, at least at the start, stick to handjobs for Osiris.

Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: Elden Ring 🌭

Seanbaby: Like the rest of the world, Brockway and I are playing Elden Ring. And like the rest of the world, our experiences are wildly different. FromSoftware basically made a game the same size as our actual planet and let you go off in whatever direction you want without any explanation or backstory. Your character’s statistics are Savvy, Gardening, Pep, Robustness, and Fingermancing, and none of them do or change anything. Each individual weapon requires 3 weeks of training to properly operate. The tutorial covers 1% of this, doesn’t care if you’re listening, and is located in a cave you’ll run past. The entire world agrees (and is right) when it says Elden Ring is the fucking best.

Brockway: Elden Ring is maybe the best game I have ever played. It’s beautiful, terrifying, enormous, and every inch is dense with atmosphere. And that’s coming from me

This cannot be overstated: I don’t just hate FromSoftware games, I think they indirectly ruined gaming for the last decade. If I were given one corporation-killing bullet and sent back in time to eradicate a game company from pre-existence, I would file as an S-Corp and blow my brains out. It is impossible to pick just one video game developer that deserves destruction. But FromSoftware would be on the list – not because they made edgelord no-compromise games full of hateful bullshit (they did), but because every single company saw Dark Souls and thought they could do it, too. They could not. I started this game personally angry at it, and now I love it so completely I’m going to write one half of an article about how I don’t understand it. That’s how fucking good it is. I’d say I’m about to eat crow but I’ve literally been eaten by a crow several times in Elden Ring so I think they anticipated this turnabout.

Seanbaby: Anyway, I’m a bit further along than Brockway, so I decided to write him this walkthrough and explainer for the hit game Elden Ring. Hopefully it will be useful to you too.

Brockway: Holy hell, your character looks like that? Here’s mine:

She looks like an anemic schoolgirl dressed as a lost sock for a Halloween party whose theme is Sad Things You’ve Forgotten. We are already not playing the same game.

Seanbaby: To start, let’s explore! Pick a point on your map that looks like it has something and head there. This is easy because every corner of every room or landmass has something. A crucial item, a hilarious sudden bear, at least once an entire lost continent– the people who made this game are maniacs. There are more lootable remains and dungeons in this than in Steven Seagal’s Russian home. If you’re used to games like Grand Theft Auto that will render 6,000,000 square miles of woods to hold one health pack and a .0004% chance of Bigfoot, Elden Ring will feel like an hour long orgasm, or as it’s probably called in the gaming community, “mommi 5pr0inging.”

Okay, so once you find your destination, ride that way on your ghost horse. This won’t work since the landscape is a maze of impassable mountains and unsurvivable chasms. 

Brockway: I pointed toward what looked like a lovely tree and I fell down a well into a city beyond time and now I’m hiding from ghost cavemen. Is this normal? Is this the normal first level?

Seanbaby: No problem, just put a vague description of what you’re looking for into Google until you find a Reddit thread where someone is trying to get to the same place. You’re almost one tenth there!

Brockway: I looked up “ghost cavemen” and I just get a Scooby Doo episode. Here’s the thing: There are exhaustive guides for every part of this game because it’s the biggest thing in the world right now, and every single human being on Earth is currently putting 600 hours into it. But you will never find one cohesive place to reference that information, because there’s too much missing. I would argue that is the gameplay loop of Elden Ring: You don’t know shit, try to survive it. 

Just read through all 40 pages of the IGN guide on the Poison Swamp? Too bad, you were actually looking for the Blighted Wetlands, which are behind the Poison Swamp – if you see the Rotten Delta, you’ve gone too far. Check out Polygon’s guide on the Bog of the Unclean, but don’t just rely on that or you’ll miss the entrance to the hidden dungeon (an invisible wall beneath a dragon’s ass) containing the Grandsword of Fervent Sundering, a weapon which splits the world in two with every swing and is vital for beating the sub-tenth secret megaboss of the Udderdark. Sean, I am barely making this up. What the fuck am I supposed to be doing and please hurry, I just saw a spectral neanderthal squat by my bush and sniff.

Seanbaby: The place you’re looking for is named something like Hargoth’s Fingerless Sorrow, and to get to it you need to have first ridden Majesta’s Carousel into The Moist. You’re going to want to Google one of those next, but by now you’re going to run into a second problem. Because Elden Ring doesn’t exactly have a story so much as a random series of very strange events happening in a different order for everyone, telling anyone about anything is a spoiler. For instance, I shouldn’t have ruined your first hilarious sudden bear death, and I’m sorry. The point is, if getting to a location involves riding past a pretty waterfall, smaller-than-normal man bat, or unexpected bear, people aren’t going to want to tell you about it. Plus, you can’t even get to The Moist until you’ve taken the lesser pubic bone from Moff Torment the Key Pubis.

Brockway: Oh, is that what that’s for? I accidentally stole it from those guys (he’s eight men fused together at the pelvis) after I missed a jump to a rooftop and fell into a whirlpool that did kill me – oh, how it killed me! – but in a way where I then woke up in a special realm of slughell that is only accessible by dying in that exact fashion.

Seanbaby: Okay, I know where that is. Search for “lavaslug +maze -scooby” and you’ll find a map someone made. Not of that cave, but keep following the different wiki links outward, some of which will be empty placeholder pages by SEO clickbait sites, until you get to the second of eleven optional questlines leading there. You did the 13th, which is not recommended. Okay, you’re going to run into some trouble along the way, so let me talk you through Elden Ring combat.

Brockway: Jesus Christ, thank you. I thought I could take the ghost of this giant because he was chained up, but it turns out he just uses that chain in horrible ways and he punted half of me over a mountain. I still woke up in hell though, because you can’t leave hell until all parts of you find the exit roughly at the same time. Gimme some tactics.

Seanbaby: No problem. When I come across a sounder or shrewdness of enemies, I use my small laser spell against them. I think it’s called Glintsparkle Fingerburst, but Sparkleblade Virginurge should work fine. Getting the drop on them is easy because Elden Ring creatures can only detect shapes four feet in front of them, and no noise at any range. Here’s where you have to be careful, though. After the first guy dies, the others will carefully and slowly decide to ignore it, giving you barely enough time to kill any number of others.

Brockway: This looks familiar! I also use that and only that magical rock on literally everything I see. It’s the most powerful spell in the game as far as I know. I actually saw a clip of it before I started and it made me giggle, so I made my character a magical girl from an anime, figuring I’d find a little sailor outfit at some point. And I did find a little sailor outfit, but it was made from little sailors. 

Hey check this out, I was really proud of the way I barely killed these hideous children who live in a shrub with my magic rocks.

Seanbaby: Oh, you’re doing it the hard way. You want to shoot all your star pebbles at them before they form a child tornado. If they’re leaping around like this, run fifty yards away and wait a few seconds before they forget about you and take naps. At its core, Elden Ring is a stealth game. And by stealth, I mean flinging noisy laser frisbees from across a small room. You must be the unseen frisbee vengeance of The Shrub Child Woodlands. If there’s an afterlife in this game, and there’s definitely at least seventeen named things like Darkroost of the Forgotten, I sent 70,000 souls there and they’re all wondering what killed them. Oh, but be careful! Not all enemies are normal-sized! If you come across a big enemy, switch to the big laser. I think I use Moontinkle’s Astral Lubricant, oh, but be careful again! Some of the enemies will get all the way turned around and give you a heartbreaking look before they die.

Brockway:

I don’t have that laser. I have Magical Rock, and Three Magical Rocks (Worse). I can merc a whole camp of sleeping peasants doing their best, but if anything moves my Plan B is to find a safe place to die. Is there literally anything else you can teach me about combat?

Seanbaby: No, that’s all you need to know for combat. Oh wait, sometimes you’ll run into a fast boss who jumps out of your laser before it’s done melting him. When this happens, do a somersault and then laser again. Refer to this paragraph later if you’re having trouble with a boss.

Brockway: I found this really cool spell that’s Three Rocks (Purple) and I tested it out on this fucked up moth and he showed me what rocks are really all about.

We are not playing the same game.

Seanbaby: Yeah, powering up is important in Elden Ring since your Glintfaith damage is determined by your Verve and Beekeeping. 

Brockway: Fucking!! I specced fully into Platitude and split some points into Dogma for extra Principles Regeneration. How do I get more runes? Like, I save a good amount to level and then the Dread Children of Maura Tierney eat me from the knees up because I got off Femur Grover’s Hayride before the Bridge of Soft Regret.

Seanbaby: The fastest way to do this is at the Cliffside of Cranky Emu. Ride past the, spoilers ahead, awesome neon skeleton, to get on the ridge overlooking a swamp of fussy emus on the other side of a bottomless canyon. Equip one of your 70 bows, I like Prince Giggle’s Bonestinger, and drop an arrow onto the nearest bird’s head.

Brockway: I have one bow. It is called ‘a bow.’

Seanbaby: Search online for how to upgrade that to Har Danal’s Creamshot, but you’re going to have to really wrestle with the advanced search settings. Anyway, after you’ve done that, here’s how the plan works: these birds hate with a fury irrational even for birds, and they will charge you with no thought to the certain death between them and you. They will fluff and bluster right into the void and they’re worth 11,000 experience points. That’s the Elden Ring equivalent of a three year community college program. And this game doesn’t care if a bird died from your laser or its own stupidity– all of those points go to you.

If there’s an afterlife for birds in Elden Ring, and there probably is called Duskwind’s Eternal Aviary, I sent 2,000,000 emus there who will spend eternity agreeing that they are all just so goddamn fucking pissed.

Brockway: Okay, but how do you get past the Blood Ocean? Because I keep dying in the Blood Ocean. You see the Blood Ocean in your gif, right? That’s where I live. That’s my house. I opened a treasure chest and it moved all of my stuff into the Blood Ocean. 

Seanbaby: You can leave, but it takes three tarnished on three cross-platforms to summon a Blood Raft, which reminds me: If you’re really having problems, you can try teaming up with other players. To do this, you can’t invite them using a sensible interface. Instead, you use a Wet Finger item to draw your name on the floor. If the Elden Ring servers are online, which are only available between the hours of 25 and 7, this might work after several tries, depending on the number of fish in your inventory. Other players can then use a Grave Melon to witness your Fingershard and Maidencall you into their Tarnishrealm. Depending on the Poise of your armor load, this will tell a number of people, “Unable to summon golden collaborator” before you are pulled into a world with one boy who has abandoned his Playstation and another who wants you dead. To streamline this process, it only works in certain areas, and also doesn’t work.

Brockway: You literally need to use all of these fingers in a nuanced and undocumented order just to play multiplayer. True story: I had to explain this process to my 74 year old father. We play games together and he wanted to check out Elden Ring. I think the design bible of FromSoftware should be updated with the mandate “you must be able to explain this to your 74 year old father.”

Seanbaby: In Japan, they have a whole holiday based around explaining a sack of fingers to an elderly man. It’s another tough thing to Google, but speaking of explaining, be sure to watch out for messages from other players! Notes can be placed anywhere, especially stupid spots, which means the world is graffitied with mean-spirited pranks, people tattling on the pranks, and I’m done listing things. Every four inches of cliff has a note urging you to jump off, but in a high fantasy code. Because Elden Ring didn’t give players the ability to type to each other– you have to MADlibs messages together from Game of Thrones speech templates and Narnia keywords. So a cliff might say…

… when what it really means is:

Brockway: I get what you’re saying, but three of the times I committed a trust-fall suicide, it turned out to be the only way to open a portal to a secret cabinet full of Agony Ghasts who, once defeated, gave me a four-handed axe that apparently casts something called The Hungering Hurricane every time you swing it (I can’t use axes).

Seanbaby: Yes! Some people will wallglitch back up from the depths of The Ghast Wardrobe just to help other players find the hidden entrance. It’s madness, and you never know when something is a helpful hint or The Dire Sanctum of Yarg’s most pointless prank. Every single dead end has a note that says “try attacking” right in front of one that says “liar ahead” right ahead of one that says “plump but hole.” You have no reason to believe anyone, so you have to hit every wall. Plus, I wasn’t kidding earlier when I said those lunatics hid a secret hidden in every place. There’s no such thing as a hallway that ends without an item or an invisible door in Elden Ring. Besides, what’s the harm in telling you to punch a wall? You’re poking around for extra skeleton chunks in a spider cave– those three seconds weren’t precious to you. But here’s the thing– while I was writing this, a video went around of a secret door you have to hit like 50 times to open. That’s a nightmare. Think of the chaos that level designer put into the world by telling nerds, “Oh, some of these walls only open if you hit them for a half hour. Enjoy your new life. LET ALL JOY DIE HERE IN THE INFINITELY POINTLESS STABS OF YOUR SISTERMILF KATANA +7.

Brockway: Oh I have that, but I don’t have the Perspicacity to wield it. I dumped too many points into Sobriquet thinking it would let me use whips, but it turns out there’s only one whip and it’s a joke reference to a Japanese folklore character that appeared in a spin-off Souls rhythm game that didn’t see western release. It took me several hours of research to get that joke, but it’s pretty funny. First you have to understand that desire resides in the butthole and anti-desire, which also resides in the butthole, are paired concepts that-

Seanbaby: I’m not sure what’s going on or why we’re killing so many emus, which isn’t unusual for me since I’m a cutscene skipper, but the only cutscenes Elden Ring shows me is when a boss pulls a part of himself off to reveal more tentacled version of himself. Wait, sorry, spoilers– every guy in this has half a Resident Evil octopus living inside him, and you don’t have a maiden which seems both very important and not something that has any effect on anything you do. There are some people you can talk to, but most of them are sad ghosts and don’t seem to care whether you’re paying attention.

Brockway: And yet, and I’m dead serious here – I love it. Hardly anybody talks about anything and they make no sense when they do, because all dialogue is just for atmosphere. The actual storytelling seems to be done just by exploring an area. 

Here’s my favorite example: I wandered up a hill and then went completely insane and died. 

“Huh,” I thought, “that was weird. I don’t remember eating a bunch of insanity. I wonder what happened.” 

Three madness deaths later and I had it figured out: There was a tower on a distant mountain flaring an intermittent insanity star. By dodging and rolling between cover so I never looked at the crazy sun, I circled around and climbed atop the tower. There were fifteen starving maniacs and the burning star of lunacy flared with the rhythm of their screams. I managed to slaughter them all in between bouts of explosive sky mania, and broke the curse of the random hilltop! 

That picture isn’t me, it’s somebody competent enough to use a melee weapon – I can’t go back and take a screengrab because I fucking beat it! That’s the best sidequest I ever played, nobody gave it to me, nobody said a word, and nothing was ever explained. Later, I killed a village of starving maniacs (who had not synced up into a choir and therefore manifested no lunacy star), and found a note that was like “the king of madness lives at the bottom of some city.” I don’t know what that means or where it is, but I do know I’m suiciding off of every ledge until I find his cabinet – me and that motherfucker maybe have some unfinished business, I guess?

Seanbaby: Anyway, let me know when you hit the guy who has the unbound star axolotl inside him and I’ll tell you the best laser to use against him.

Brockway: Okay I’m at that guy, and I hope this makes sense, but now I’m him? Like I think I’ve become him and it is definitely a punishment. I can’t save until I betray something dear to me and oh – oh no. Somebody’s somersaulting into the room. Seanbaby, you didn’t use The Fingerous of Tarnation did you? That was not my Realmsign! Sean, I’m so sorry, I feel the revulsion growing inside me and it tastes like Axolotl – you cannot dodge my Glitterstar Vomitblast! The Swampwitch lied! Charge your Virginous Nightlaser!

1-900-HOTDOG is America’s last true comedy website, featuring new articles daily, as well as free articles and podcasts weekly. Check out the totally free archives here, or join the Patreon now to unlock – holy shit, this can’t be right – hundreds upon hundreds of posts, each scientifically proven more hilarious than the last. 

Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day – Celebrity Guide to Wine

Wine: you’ve heard of it, you don’t understand it, you’re possibly scared of it but you want to keep your enemies close. How do you even go about getting it? Is there a communal wine tap at Williams Sonoma? Are there wine boys, who carry around measured wine doses and must be summoned by a playful series of claps? What are those claps, which pattern do you clap to summon them, and which alerts them of ATF raids? To answer these questions and more, we’ll need celebrities. They’re more right than normal people, because you’ve heard of them. This is the…

Brockway: It’s a complete beginner’s guide to wine presented by people who seem to have heard of it somehow, are mostly uninterested in it, and may be able to read a cue card about it but almost certainly not. Here they all are, pretending as though you popped into existence after a teleporter accident.

Brockway: Robert Loggia is a sun-damaged hobgoblin most famous for playing disapproving fathers in hour-long tv dramas. Our older readers probably remember him from Big, while our younger readers probably don’t exist.

Seanbaby: This looks like it was filmed during that magic hour right between saying, “Hey! Robert Loggia!” and getting chased out of Robert Loggia’s backyard.

Brockway: Shelley Hack is a replacement Charlie’s Angel, which sounds like I’m making a snap dig at her generic good looks but is actually the reason why she’s famous. She is immediately the drunkest woman at any party, and if you try to deny her service she will drink from the bar’s spillover mat.

Seanbaby: Hold on, is every celebrity in Celebrity Guide to Wine not quite sure who is filming them or why?

Brockway: It is very possible this was the celebrity version of a timeshare scam. Each received a note promising them a luxury spa weekend and then eurotrash thugs pulled their distributor caps until they said something, anything about wine.

Brockway: Whoopi Goldberg is most famous for doing exactly this: being in anything for a short amount of time in exchange for $2000.

Seanbaby: “Cut! Whoopi, let’s take it again and this time make it look like we’re just some tourist with a camera bothering you during brunch, that’s perfect YES.”

Brockway: Dudley Moore was a comedian, I guess, whose entire schtick was that he was about to die from alcoholism. Although he did eventually die from alcoholism, so maybe we just all really fucked up. He’s kind of like his generation’s Amy Winehouse, but a little more Hobbity.

Seanbaby: “Waaiine? Dorf mand iffai doo,” zings funnyman Moore. “Prgblb ersk ME fr divorce… trb dith drb fart?” he quips through heavy tears. You know, there’s a decent chance this was originally called Dudley Moore’s Guide to Hosting a Star-Studded Dinner Party and they had to rewrite it around his performance. The same thing happened on the production of Stopping a Knife Rampage with Gary Busey, which of course was originally called Untitled Dog Training Project.

Brockway: Herbie Hancock was an actor, musician, and film composer, but we mostly knew him as a guy who liked to fuck. Now, everybody likes to fuck, but nobody likes anything as much as Herbie Hancock likes to fuck. If he’s not fuckin’, then he has just fucked and I assure you he is making more plans to be fuckin’ soon.

Seanbaby: Again, from the intro it looks like these celebrities aren’t “in this” so much as they were “alone for a moment at Alf’s wedding reception.” Which is good news for us because it means we won’t have to watch them stumble through a bunch of wine skits.

Brockway: We’re out of credits, and into our first skit. You dumb son of a bitch! Of course there are skits! This is how we learned things before the internet: All supplementary education was a supporting role from Magnum, P.I. telling a puppet “my name isn’t Sid, I’m here to talk about SIDS.”

In our first skit, Robert Loggia is putting ice cubes into his red wine-

Seanbaby: Oh, looks like Robert Loggia is making himself a Cool Herbie on the rocks.

Brockway: He’s putting ice cubes into his red wine, so a nearby caterer tries to divetackle him. It is nowhere in Robert Loggia’s contract that he will accept a divetackle. You can try it, everybody does, but he’s always ready.

Seanbaby: “Good evening, Mr. Loggia. I loved you in Kojak, Gunsmoke, Bionic Woman, Starsky and Hutch, Hawaii Five-O, Falcon Crest, and The Six Million Dollar Man. Can I get you something to drink? We have red wine, but if you want it with ice it comes with a fucking ass whooping.”

Brockway: This is the one and only inexplicable stunt in Celebrity Guide to Wine, and it’s our cold open here to sell the dire stakes of wine education. It’s hosted by Bernard Erpicum, a name which I surely made up just now. No? That’s actually his name. Okay. It sounds like the noise Robert Loggia makes before saying “steak’s fightin’ back” and pouring himself a digestive whiskey. But okay.

Seanbaby: “Greetings, I am B.E.R.N.A.R.D. E.R.P.I.C.U.M. B.ionic E.nergoid R.obot N.o A.rr R.ggh D.on’t E.ngage R.obotic P.enis! I. C.U.M.!!!”

I have to be honest; I almost finished several anagrams about this guy being a robot with a really slow boot time before it got away from me. Somewhere along the way he became a premature ejaculating robot and I’m not sure how. Maybe I should let you describe Bernard.

Brockway: Yeah, I’ve studied him intensely. I have this. Let’s go:

Bernard is a freshly activated animatronic from a theme park built to mock the French. There’s no way that’s his face, and he talks like DJ Screw remixing Gerard Depardieu. 

That is a crazy reference. 

Let me go again: He looks like a merchant from Oblivion hiding a dark secret and he talks like a drowning Frenchman approaching the event horizon. 

Fuckin’… come on, Brockway. 

One more: He’s kind of like a skinless european knock-off of Teddy Ruxpin running out of batteries. No! Again! He talks like you shrunk Andre the Giant a little and gave him enough horse tranquilizers to kill a normal-sized Andre the Giant. Dammit! He’s a backwards-played message at the end of a Parisian trip-hop record that encourages children to do nitrous. 

Fuck! I don’t have it!

Look, I need to sell you on the otherworldly presence of this man because fully half of this article consists of the surreal four-second short films I made of him failing to be human. Let’s drill down on that credits sequence. What is he doing here?

Brockway: He’s holding his wine-tasting medal to the camera.

Sideways.

So you can’t see it. 

Also that’s a GIF. It’s not, but you would never know if I didn’t tell you that.

Seanbaby: Maybe he holds it that way so the wine can see it? The same way you might menace a chicken with your barbecue sauce medallion. It’s so fucking weird– absolutely the choice I would make if Robert Loggia asked me to play Alien Bronze Medalist in the film Ski Buddies.

Brockway: The promise of this movie is that Bernard and his celebrity friends will “stop you from worrying about those hard and fast rules of wine,” like never while driving, or always through the mouth. But it will also “stop you from being afraid of wine mistakes,” like thinking that it makes you a better boat captain, or always through the butt.

Seanbaby: Hey, Bernard, when you learn how to hold objects like a human maybe I’ll let you tell me which butts I chug my wine with.

Brockway: Bernard’s speech closes by assuring us that “wine is simply a good tasting beverage, meant to enjoy,” which would be more believable if it didn’t come at the end of a ten-minute introduction to an hour long movie about the proper way to enjoy it.

Brockway: Here’s provably human Bernard again, doing the traditional human elbow salute and telling us: “Aye loaf why, aye loaf ze tastee why, hand ze whey eet goose wit foo.” I don’t think it’s cool to make fun of accents, except for French ones, but this is something else. It’s like he’s swallowing every word and trying to use internal air pressure to blow it back out through his eyeballs. I’ve already built a kind of mental decoder ring for most of Bernard’s gulps and bellows, but I legitimately don’t even have a guess what that was supposed to mean.

Seanbaby: I don’t know what they mean either, but when Bernard uttered these words, I swear I heard a baguette in my kitchen answer.

Brockway: After the Bernard troll is done stalling adventurers with its language puzzles, we launch into one of many short informational films that are somehow both childishly simplistic and also stunningly pedantic. We’re told that grapes can be grown in almost every state, but a lot of wine comes from California. We’re told many French wines are named after the regions they come from, but those regions don’t exist in California. I’m not sure who this is for – some kind of agricultural idiot savant? Like a Lawnmower Man but for grapes, who does understand which varietals are grown in the Burgundy region, but doesn’t understand that some places are different from other places?

Seanbaby: Hear me out: I think you can learn everything you’ll ever need to know about wine in five minutes. More than enough about both colors of grapes, pairing, whatever. And every single moment you spend studying wine after that only makes you a bigger asshole except to people aspiring to also become giant assholes. Wine knowledge is the NFTs of old fruit, and I apologize to anyone coming back and reading this in 2023 who doesn’t remember what the fuck NFTs were.

Brockway: Let’s segue out of this to a Dudley Moore skit. Bernard, can you give us a real quick human point? A point, with your finger, like humans do?

Brockway: Excellent, excellent. You are six thousand space crickets pulling levers inside a corpse, fantastic.

Seanbaby: “Wine alert, priority two. B.E.R.N.A.R.D. detects Dudley Moore whimsy at sector… vrrrp… seven point three alpha.”

Brockway: Dudley Moore orders “wine” from a snooty waiter, and is unprepared to specify further. So the premise of this skit is that Dudley Moore doesn’t know enough about fancy wine to order a bottle of it, which actually jives with his character, who always wears a tuxedo but would happily drink wood alcohol out of a hobo’s asshole. The skit tries to do that hilarious thing where Dudley Moore mumbles the choice and hopes things work out, but he’s also visibly wasted so it comes across less like a comedy sketch and more like a waiter politely trying not to overserve a drunk woman’s ventriloquist dummy.

Seanbaby: In this same situation, Robert Loggia would say, “I’ll take a bottle of your coldest red,” and fight his way out.

Brockway: The alpha release of Bernard Bot is idling in a darkened wine room, waiting to assure us that you don’t have to know anything about wine to order it. Then he explains the 11 things we need to know about wine to order it.

Seanbaby: “I’ll take two of everything with a splash of Sprite and anyone you got in the back man enough to stop me,” Robert Loggia would say. But back to Bernard, he really does move like he was raised by marionettes. He has the body language of assembly line stock footage.

Brockway: At one point he is programmed to smell a peach, and I swear to god he’s making fun of the way humans are always ‘enjoying things.’

Seanbaby: Speaking of sniffing peaches, Herbie Hancock.

Brockway: What a gross and gross oversimplification of Herbie Hancock. He’s more than an erect penis and a patented system of thrusts and gyrations guaranteed to satisfy any unhappily married woman. Let’s actually see what he’s up to before you go judg-

Oh. Herbie Hancock is at a pre-threesome picnic, himself and two ladies carbo-loading to generate enough fluid for the next six hours. He quickly introduces himself, saying “I don’t know much about this wine thing… but like my friends say, go with the flow.”

Okay, this is definitely about fucking.

You can just smell that screengrab, right? It does not smell like wine.

Seanbaby: “I don’t even drink wine, but the glasses are a great way to visually demonstrate the things Herbie does to panties. Isn’t that right, ladies? By the way, what are you guys filming?”

Brockway: Whoopi Goldberg is here because this tape was released in the ‘90s, back when Whoopi Goldberg was legally contracted to be in everything for at least 45 seconds. Whether she wanted to or not. True story: Whoopi Goldberg tried to turn down a role in Theodore Rex, and the producers sued her until she agreed to be in it. And it worked! Whoopi Goldberg was in an entire movie against her will, and it broke her. From that point on, she agreed to be in everything for no more than an afternoon. For Celebrity Guide to Wine, she wouldn’t even fully leave her car, she was so afraid of being abducted by another production.

Seanbaby: Whoopi Goldberg was once roasted by her boyfriend, Ted Danson, while he was wearing full black face. She has been in over 3000 insane movies, at least two of them about undercover nuns, and she was just kicked off TV for for saying the holocaust wasn’t racist. But if she finds the cure for death and lives forever, “sued to remain on a dinosaur buddy cop movie” will always -always- be the first thing I think about when I see her. If a movie studio took you to court to force you to act alongside a tyrannosaurus cop, go ahead and sleepwalk through the rest of your life. You’ll never top that.

Brockway: And she’ll never try. You can see her mentally counting down the contractually obligated seconds as she launches into a little skit with the first thing they hand her: Some crabs. She does wacky crab voices while wandering absolutely no more than two steps from her car at any point, until she realizes she doesn’t have an impromptu punchline about crabs, so she throws them in the trunk and talks about wine instead. I’ve never seen anybody give less of a shit about anything and I’ve seen me, watching this video.

Seanbaby: If you paid Bruce Willis, today, $20,000 to let you deepfake him into a wine video, he would put in a more sincere effort than Whoopi “Sued to Remain on a Dinosaur Buddy Cop Movie” Goldberg did in 1990’s Celebrity Guide to Wine.

Brockway: Shelley Hack is here to educate us about Chardonnay, which she drinks instead of talking to her husband about the state of their marriage. Shelley positively gushes about her love for Chardonnay and I changed my mind – I believe Shelley Hack loves Chardonnay more than Herbie Hancock loves two chicks at the same time.

Herbie Hancock: Did somebody say “gushes?” I brought my measuring glasses, baby.

Brockway: She is prime Hancock prey. Herbie Hancock sees her and his eyes turn into little cartoon diaphragms. 

Wait!

Another skit: A car screeches up, it’s an emergency. Kelly LeBrock enters, looking like she’s playing Greed in a 1986 porno called Seven Deadly Skins.

Brockway: She’s panicked, she knows she fucked up bad and is terrified of the consequences, apologizing profusely to somebody off-screen…

It’s Steven Seagal. Looking how he always does: like he just ordered something billed as The World’s Largest Chili Dog and he knows from life experience that it’s a lie.

Seanbaby: Steven Seagal hasn’t said a word or even moved yet, and you really get the sense that Kelly LeBrock is in terrible danger. He’s often criticized for his acting ability, but when you put him in the right role, his performance can be almost hauntingly believable.

Brockway: She kisses him. He’s too furious to acknowledge it. Why is there a skit about domestic violence in this wine video, you ask? No, you’re reading it wrong. This is erotic roleplay, and Kelly LeBrock is Steven Seagal’s Special Little Bottle Slut.

Seanbaby: Oh, is that what they’re going for? In that case, this acting is quite bad.

Brockway: “Same as usual?” Kelly LeBrock breathes.

“It’s right there,” he nods down, and you think it’s his dick.

No! Don’t be vulgar.

Kelly LeBrock gives a bottle of wine a handjob.

Seanbaby: This has all the eroticism of Robert Loggia doing a spit take and asking Herbie Hancock what the hell was in that glass. There’s an element of crotch and fluids to it, but it’s way closer to becoming a fist fight than sex.

Brockway: “This better be good,” Steven Seagal chunkily whispers at his disappointing chili dog woman. 

“With me it’s always good,” Kelly LeBrock says, and awkwardly struggles to open a bottle of wine while the director screeches “more like it’s a penis! Kelly! Kelly. A human penis!”

Seanbaby: “Oh, like how you wipe it down with a chamois and blow the dust off it? Or are you thinking something more like this? Quack, quack! Let’s balloon you to your dentist race, Senator Wine Penis!”

Brockway: She pops the cork. It means cumming.

She pours the wine for Steven Seagal. He sips her wine ejaculate.

“You’ve done well,” he says, only the meekest approval. Like the chili dog may have been a lie, but it did have the decency to be filled with cheese.

Seanbaby: I can’t fucking believe this scene isn’t disappointing. You see Celebrity Guide to Wine starring Steven Seagal and you can’t help but get your hopes up. But here he is, making a wine corking into this deranged ritual of inhuman confusion.

Brockway: “I hope that was as good for you as it was for me,” Kelly LeBrock croons, infuriating the unseen director, now showing her the proper way to masturbate a bottle off-screen.

Kelly LeBrock gathers up her things. She’s leaving! This was not foreplay. The sub/dom wine ritual is complete, and both will leave delightfully frustrated.

“If you need your bottles opened, you know who to call,” she says.

“Maybe I’ll whistle,” Steven Seagal adds, completely misreading this classic exchange. The whistle-blowing, you see, is meant to be a woman tastefully implying that she sucks dick. If you’re the one offering to whistle, Steven Seagal, you are offering to suck Kelly LeBrock’s dick, which is cool. Cool. I do not think you understand that, though.

Seanbaby: “MAYBE I’LL WHISTLE,” Steven Seagal growls, in the same tone he might say, “It’s going to be hard to swim when I tear your toes off, Saltano. But that’s what you’ll have to do, because you just fell in the shark tank. And blood is in the water. Me: Jake Blood. And the Jake is silent.”

Brockway: “Y-you do know how to whistle, don’t you?” Kelly LeBrock says, having been volunteered for the wrong part of a sexy knock-knock joke. 

MMM-HMMM” Steven Seagal hums, trying to be Mommy’s Naughty Little Wineboy but coming off more like he’s demonstrating to a conference of helper-monkeys that choking doesn’t always look how you think.

Seanbaby: This is a professional actor who had to pretend to have chemistry with legendary sexpot Kelly LeBrock while she was also his wife at the time, and you’d swear he was phoning in the role of Alien Who Didn’t Like the Soup in Robert Loggia’s Ski Buddies.

Brockway: Let’s see what Bernard’s up to…

“WHAT wine is aPOOSHamated for eez fweshnizz,” he says, now clearly drunk but how on Earth would I ever prove that?

Seanbaby: Buddy, this is America. Either learn to poosh the fweshnizz right, or get the hell out.

Brockway: “NOT AGAIN!” Whoopi Goldberg quips! 

I didn’t leave something out. This is in response to nothing, and about nothing. I even left the bookends in there so you could see how jarring and contextless this was. Some producer just knew this film needed some pizzazz-

“We’ll have Whoopi Goldberg sass something funny, like ‘not again!’”

“That’s great! But what’s the start of that? Like ‘not again’ in response to what?” 

“We’ll figure that out later,” he replied, and pinned all his hopes on his future self. It hurts the worst, when you let yourself down.

Seanbaby: Somewhere there’s a tape of unused Whoopi Goldberg lines like “Are you talkin’ for real?” or “Jump back, kemosabe!” Wait wait, holy shit, what if she recorded one of those in 1985 and people have been using it ever si– oh my God, I think this explains Whoopi Goldberg! This is it! This was the missing piece in the puzzle of Theodore Rex! My life’s work! Brockway, don’t ignore this! This could be the key to Bordello of Blood! Sister Act 2: Back in the Ha– everything!

Brockway: Hey, Robert Loggia, something about wine?

Brockway: “Grahhh,” Robert Loggia grumbles, “Cabbaneh sobinyin goes wit any red meat suchis lamm beef, even veeeeel an’ powahk.” He slams the bottle down. He stabs a steak and slaps it onto the barbecue, inexplicably furious.

Seanbaby: Robert Loggia’s agent told him this would be a “wine thing” which he took to mean a few cold reds at his Malibu place. He did not expect to lose a Saturday explaining how to swallow goddamn drinks alongside clips of Whoopi Goldberg shouting “who farted!?”

Brockway: This skit is eight seconds long and it runs ten seconds longer than Robert Loggia’s patience.

Seanbaby: The emergency doctors will never forget the day that would go on to be known as “The Time Robert Loggia Lost it and Stuffed Wine Bottles Up All Those People’s Asses.”

Brockway: Bernard tells us more about wine, probably, and drinks a lot of wine, definitely. He’s doing okay though, because Dudley Moore is way more tanked at the same party and taking all the heat off him.

Brockway: Together, they slur that merlot is a girl about eighteen times, and at one point they describe wine, a liquid, as “damp.” If you ever got the sense that maybe wine people are more sophisticated than you, watch two European muppets talk about how damp their little wine girls get.

Seanbaby: I missed most of this because whenever Bernard is on the screen I find myself searching for more of his sideways amulets.

Brockway: A good call. They’re his spies. They’re like the balls from Phantasm

Brockway: Whoopi Goldberg shows up to reiterate what foods pair well with red wine again, because Robert Loggia’s bit was supposed to be 46 seconds long but he killed a grip with a barbecue fork and drilled murderholes in his trailer so none could approach. Whoopi goes through a series of child’s drawings of friendly animals you’re supposed to eat, then points at a nearby woman and says “did you write this? You’re fired. White women! You can’t control ‘em!” 

It is the only genuine laugh I got in this movie, and I do not think she was acting.

Seanbaby: Brockway, you can cut this, but what’s crazy is Whoopi originally recorded that line for a reverse slavery movie called The Blunderground Railroad after she misheard almost every part of a 1987 phone call with Mel Brooks.

Brockway: I’m going to leave it in because by the time they figure out why it’s a problem, we’ll already be back on the stickbug piloting a man-ship that is Bernard.

Bernard tells us he’s a Pinot Noir freak and I have no reason to doubt him. Especially not when he describes a Zinfandel as “pleasant, intense, and attractive,” and Robert Mondavi as “thick and mouth filling.” I hate this, but he tells us not to drink Beaujolais aged, as it’s “meant to be drunk very young.” Then we throw it to Very Young Expert Herbie Hancock at his sticky picnic so he can coo the exact same thing but with a filthier emphasis on “very.”

To drive it home he pulls out a tiny one-handed synthesizer that he keeps in his picnic basket, clumsily picks out an offkey tune, exclaims “HA!” and then waits for the camera to leave. Takes longer than you think.

Seanbaby: This is magical. Exactly, to the tiny synthesizer, how I picture Herbie Hancock ending every interaction.

Brockway: To explain Zinfandel, we need Shelley Hack. She starts the skit weirdly sexually aggressive, because it now occurs to me that this is a fetish tape, but ends it mowing through a pizza while slamming Zin straight from the bottle.

Seanbaby: “Where’s my mark? Fuck it, I’m partying,” glugs the charming and beautiful Celebrity Guide to Wine standout, Shelley Hack.

Brockway: You know what? Shelley Hack can hang. The next time we see her she’s Hasslehoffed on the stairs, drunkenly hammering a wine opener into a champagne cork and I’ve never seen a more relatable and attractive woman on television.

Seanbaby: I think I finally get wine.

Brockway: I’m in love, but that’s the end of the skit. This is the only vignette with absolutely no informational value. It’s just Shelley Hack wrapping up a Tuesday.

Seanbaby: I bet Robert Loggia is going to be even more pissed when he finds out he could have just ignored the cue cards and gotten smashed.

Brockway: “Champeen! Awyneuf seebrasion, eegunce, a dreeee!” The broken Bernard-Bot slurs, locking its arms in forklift position. 

Brockway: I legitimately have no idea what this was supposed to convey. This entire section is totally incomprehensible. He might be speaking French, but I don’t think there are this many hiccups in French. The director understands there is no time for second takes, though – soon Bernard will be on the roof again, his dick stuck in a Reisling, trying to explain grape breeding to passing clouds. Shelley Hack will be topless-dancing to Fleetwood Mac, Whoopi Goldberg will be at home four hours ago, the paycheck already cashed. Dudley Moore will be sprawled in a fountain, giggling at the funny noises the bubbles make as his brain shuts down.

Seanbaby: And Robert Loggia will be calling his charcoal a no good son of a bitch after it refuses to light a third time. Me? I’ll be here doing what I’m always doing: not expecting Robocop.

Brockway: 

SURPRISE ROBOCOP.

Brockway: It’s motherfuckin’ Peter Weller, walking from a spaceship and into a saloon to say, and I’m not fucking with you here, this is the actual quote.

“Hello, I’m Peter Weller and you might know me, amongst other things, as a big metal cop. But one thing you don’t wanna have happen, is to have that guy or any other policeman for that matter pull you over for driving while intoxicated. EVEN ON WINE. So please be responsible for the safety of others as well as your own, don’t drink and drive okay Bernard?”

That is the correct punctuation. It’s so phoned in he does not finish the sentence before asking if that shit was good enough to leave. It accidentally comes across like this whole thing was a warning specifically to Bernard. Micless and from three rooms away, Bernard shouts back “OK PETER THANKS.” 

Peter Weller has this to say in return:

Nothing. Just a slow smile full of strange malice, staring at a man we can’t see after threatening him with his role as a cop he’s not allowed to legally name.

Seanbaby: What a perfect ending. For anything, but especially for a celebrity guide to wine. Magnificent. Well worth the cost of Dudley Moore.

Brockway: And now, for the craziest part of this entire film – Bernard crops up one last time, surely being held upright by sticks and tape, to explain that the great thing about a video is you can watch it as many times as you want. He thinks you’re going to watch this again! And then he warns you against it! 

Remember, before you push that rewind button – the right wine is the wine that you like.” 

Seanbaby: What!? This is like getting to the end of the Bible and finding a chapter called “Or Maybe Not? I Don’t Know, Science Makes Some Good Points.”

Brockway: We cut back to revisit every celebrity in this video solely about the rules of wine, explaining in their own words that there are no rules to wine.

We check in with Robert Loggia, spitefully dunking ice into his red even though it’s wildly insensitive to that stuntman who died earlier. We hear Whoopi deliver her last line, never fully leaving her car for this entire shoot. We say goodbye to Dudley Moore, possibly for the last time ever, as was always the danger with saying goodbye to Dudley Moore. We wave goodnight to Shelley Hack, who is definitely going to be knocking on our door three hours later, too drunk to positively consent so we’ll tuck her into the tub with couch cushions and a spare blanket. Herbie Hancock is finally ready to seal the deal with his picnic bitches-

Seanbaby: These poor women have been trying to have sex with Herbie Hancock for seven weeks.

Brockway: And back to Bernard one more time, who would like a final chance to prove he was human all along and there is no need to call the army.

Brockway: So remember! Those were the rules to wine. This was all pointless. There are no rules to wine. You can watch it again. A wine DUI is only 2/3rds of a real DUI. DON’T WATCH IT AGAIN. Goodbye! Wine!

Seanbaby: I have nothing to add other than a second unexpected Robocop.

Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Hot Dog Year in Review: The Very Best Teamworking Days of 2021 🌭

In 2021, we formed the ultimate Tag Team to take down some of the mightiest comedy material. Material too dense and terrifying for one comedy writer alone, material that would rapidly age and destroy any one solo comedian who dared approach it with fear in their heart. But all of this magnificent material fell easily before our patented combo attack: The Crotch Stomp (x2). Please enjoy the very best of our Teamworking Days, all free!

Cocktails

Ron Merk had a dream: To bone as many San Francisco bartenders as he could, under the guise of making a show about them. Then a better idea came to him: A drama about the San Francisco gay club scene that quickly spirals out of control, encompassing serial killers, mimics, street samurai, and the actual devil! That dream was called Cocktails, and now we all dream it. Every night. Nothing else.

Dirty Tennis

It’s like nothing else that has ever been made– a guide to playing tennis obnoxiously for aging actors with unlimited budgets and no shame. It’s a tiny fraction of a bad idea stretched across 33 earth minutes and probably made at gunpoint. Dirty Tennis stars Dick Van Patten alongside Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner, and humankind called it “an unthinkable betrayal; we will not forgive you.”

The Thrilling World of Men Showdown

The concept was madness. The finished product was insanity. We drafted story titles from ’60s man magazines and battled them like pet monsters in a game with loose rules and even looser women. Get your eggs ready to fly down our stacks, because we are bringing back the Bitch of Bingh Kan.

Couch Potato Workout

We got through Dirty Tennis only to discover it wasn’t the only “parody” anti-instructional VHS out there. So set your burgers to cheese and fart your wife’s meatloaf ready, couch fans! It’s fart for Couch Potato Workout!

Photon

Among the stars, flower perverts and sentient poop clash in battles of laser! Photon was a game! A television program! A book series! A horror immediately forgotten by history! It’s the reason 1984 landfills were mostly safety helmet: Photon: The Ultimate Game on Planet Earth*!

* It wasn’t that or there

Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: Covenant Eyes

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon at $5 or more
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.
Categories
TEAMWORKING DAY

Teamworking Day: Marville, Part 2

To view this content, you must be a member of 1900HOTDOG's Patreon at $5 or more
Already a qualifying Patreon member? Refresh to access this content.