Netflix Review — Rocko's Modern Life: Static Cling (2019)

Despite the flagrant pro-trans message, this is one wholly unnecessary ‘90s nostalgia cashgrab that actually has more things going for it than working against it.

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Comic Review: Marvel's "The Toxic Avenger!" (1991)

In the early 1990s, the house Spidey built ran a comic based on Troma’s flagship character for 11 issues … and surprisingly, it wasn’t half bad.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

I know I’ve said this before, but it absolutely BLOWS my mind that somehow, someway, The Toxic Avenger — a no-budget splatter movie whose highlights include children having their heads squished by drunk drivers and morbidly obese men having their intestines yanked out of their stomach cavities — was transformed into a children’s property, complete with Nintendo games, a toy line from the same people behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and, of course, a short-lived cartoon on Fox Kids. To this day I have no idea how such an arrangement came to be, with seemingly the only reasonable explanation being “cocaine, and a whole lot of it.”

But no siree, the kidification of Toxie didn’t stop there. The Toxic Avenger also managed to land not just one, but two different Marvel Comics series. While the second was based upon the Toxic Crusaders cartoon (and thus, was naturally inclined to be a little more subdued, thematically), its forerunner was based explicitly — and I mean that in more ways than one — on the original Troma film trilogy.

Millions of fans? That seems like
a bit of an overestimate, don't
it?

Penned by veteran comic scribe Doug Moench (who is probably best known for an insanely long run on Master of Kung Fu back in the day), I think it’s safe to say expectations for the series were pretty low. But as it turns out, the 11-issue run isn’t bad at all … in fact, I’d go as far to say that it’s actually a pretty fun and inventive take on Troma’s marquee character that somehow manages to stay true to his cinematic roots even without all of the copious violence and nudity.

With artwork supplied by Rodney Ramos and Val Mayerik, the series looks WAY better than you’d expect. And while the comic does play it fast and loose with the official Toxie canon, that’s not to say it didn’t get away with some pretty risque material. Indeed, for a comic published by Marvel in the early, pre-Image 1990s, it does push the boundaries pretty far, complete with a few uncensored swear words sprinkled in with the exploded limbs and gruesome zombies whose skin is so rotten it’s practically gelatinous.

The series does a pretty good job of keeping Toxie’s personality aligned to the movies, even if his created-for-the-comics catchphrase “omgowa” feels really forced and out of place. After recapping the character’s origin — it’s close enough to what we see in the first movie to avoid any complaints — it doesn’t take long for the comic to start blazing its own trail, introducing a new central antagonist — a devilish CEO named simply “The Chairman” who has two demonic dragons flying in and out of his mouth — who immediately begins plans to take over Tromaville using a bevy of toxic waste-spawned atrocities.

And admittedly, we do have some pretty cool original villains show up. The first couple of rogues are by-the-numbers goons and thugs with generic mutation gimmicks, but things pick up considerably when The Chairman contaminates the health club from the original movie with a toxic juice that turns all of those hardbodies into undead killing machines. And once Toxic has made mincemeat of them, The Chairman ups the ante by digging up the graves of the dispatched mutants and patchworking them into a ten foot-tall, hulking anti-Toxie called Biohazard … which is actually a pretty badass villain, if just in terms of aesthetics alone.

Of course, showing a body explode into a shower of limbs and appendages is just peachy as long as no bloods or innards are visible ...

But really, the highlight of the series has to the the “Souvlaki Sewer Syndrome” two-parter in issues seven and eight. In this mini-arc, The Chairman concocts a wild plan to turn half of New York into irradiated, sewer-dwelling zombies via tainted souvlaki, with the hideous creatures eventually pooling together into a mammoth wad of rotting adipose tissue. As I said earlier, for Marvel in the early 1990s this is actually some pretty edgy stuff, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find the artwork here at least partially unnerving. For me, the zenith of the series has to be when Toxie gets devoured by the souvlaki monster, and he has an internal dialogue about how oddly serene it is to be sloshing around inside it as it rampages through New York, as if he was peacefully gliding to and fro in a rotting womb. Yeah, the way I put it is really unartful, but trust me, the execution in the book itself is WAY better than my crappy description.

Unfortunately, "The Toxic Wigger"
just didn't have the mass appeal
Marvel hoped for.

Unfortunately, the series is all downhill from there. The ninth issue is definitely a “jump the shark” issue, as the issue completely abandons the ongoing story arc for a one-and-done yarn in which Toxie gets abducted by aliens and, inexplicably, raps his way through the whole story. Issue 10 resumes the normal story arc, and while it is fun watching Toxie kvetch his way through half the issue while stuck in a stockade, it’s pretty obvious that the writers knew the whole series was about to get cancelled. Hence, why the 11th and final issue feels like such a rush-job, complete with a very anticlimactic end to the whole Chairman and Apocalypse Inc. storyline. Granted, it has its moments, but it’s clear the folks behind the comic were just phoning it in — as obvious by the series’ final panel, in which they get all meta on us and have disembodied naysayers scream “higher sales!” at Toxie. Get it, because the book itself wasn’t selling enough to keep Marvel happy? Man, now that shit is clever.

Still, on the whole, I’d say The Toxic Avenger is nonetheless a better than average tie-in comic, especially for Marvel in the early ‘90s (anybody remember their series based on Pirates of Dark Water, Bill & Ted and even WCW by-god ‘rasslin?) While it doesn’t perfectly mirror the attitude or spirit of the Troma films from which it’s based, the writers did a pretty good job translating the material into PG-reading, and I thought the artwork was just plain snazzy.

I wouldn’t call this a “great” series by any stretch, but it’s certainly better than it had any right to be. Granted, I haven’t checked out its spiritual successor in the Toxic Crusaders follow-up, but if that one is at least half as decent as The Toxic Avenger … well, actually, that’s pretty much what I would expect it to be, I suppose.

Regardless, this is a fun, moderately overachieving series anchored around a seemingly impossible premise. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s a way better take on the character than what we saw in The Last Temptation of Toxie. Sigh, if only it lasted long enough to give us that long-awaited crossover with Robocop we had no idea we both wanted and retroactively needed …

Kudos my hero, leaving all the best ...

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VHS Review: 'Our Friend, Martin' (1998)

Revisiting one of the most ubiquitous Black History Month video cassette staples in the annals of American public education (and yes, it does indeed play fast and loose with the historical accuracy, in case you were wonderin'.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

I don't know how you folks spent your Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but if you ask me, there's only one proper way to get our collective Kangs on - and that, of course, is with a screening of the 1998 straight-to-video cartoon Our Friend, Martin.

What, you've never heard of Our Friend, Martin before? Well, if you grew up in elementary school America between the years 1999 and 2005, odds are your local public escuela/indoctrination factory made you watch it at least once a year (if not to commemorate MLK Day, than certainly as filler come Black History Month.) Now, I was in middle school and on the verge of entering high school when the straight-to-video offering was initially released, so I just missed out on this particular early aughties phenomena. But judging from the way the Millennials talk about this 'un on Reddit and 4chan and YouTube, I'd feel pretty comfortable labeling Our Friend, Martin as their generation's The ButterCream Gang - that weird piece of ubiquitous pop cultural ephemera that not only is inextricably tied to one's public education experience, but seems to only exist within the vacuum of elementary school nostalgia.

Even now I'm not sure exactly who bank rolled this thing, or what they're agenda was, or if they even suspected the damn tape would become a VCR staple in every primary school in America for at least half a decade. Whoever it was, though, they had to have had quite a bit of loose change to throw around, considering the staggering number of A-and-B-list celebrities lending their vocal talents to the production. Ed Asner, Angela Bassett, Danny Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Samuel L. Jackson, James Earl Jones, Ashley Judd, Susan Sarandon, Jon Travolta, OPRAH - hell, they even got Urkel to show up for a day or two in the recording studio to voice a teenaged MLK. It's undoubtedly a star-studded production, and the fact that this thing never made it to TV (or even basic cable, to the best of my knowledge) makes its existence all the more perplexing. I mean, you'd think PBS, if nobody else, would've tried to wrap their mitts around this one, but no - apparently, Our Friend, Martin went straight to video and - for all intents and purposes - just stayed there until YouTube and DailyMotion came along.

And if you've never seen it before, well - consider this in-depth review/analysis either a late MLK, Jr. Day gift or a really early Black History Month present.

The film begins with a title screen for DIC Entertainment, who is best known for producing half of every cartoon made in the 1980s (Nelvana, obviously, did the either half.) Some organization called I.P.M. gets secondary billing, but I have no idea who or what they are. And no, a quick Google search turns up nothing of use, even when you use "Our Friend Martin" as a Boolean assistant. We get this really, really cheesy R&B song as the opening credits rolls, and even better it's called "When We Were Kings" because fuck, sometimes the universe just makes things TOO easy for us.

No, this is the film at its absolute subtlest.

The movie begins proper with these two black kids standing in front of rubble that magically transforms into a fully built house. Oh, and one of them transforms into Martin Luther King, Jr. after entering the Stargate, so there's that.

And because this shit isn't late 1990s enough, we have ourselves a secondary title theme performed by Salt N Pepa, which sounds more like something to bump uglies to than something befitting of a children's animated program. From there, we are introduced to our antagonist, Miles, a precocious black kid who idolizes Hank Aaron, has a nasty ass bedroom and calls his mama "a slave" because she actually wants to work overtime at the office. (Oh, and as an aside, we never see Miles' father in the cartoon. Yeah, that revelation shocked the shit out of me, too.) Then she tells him if he doesn't get his grades up, he won't be able to play baseball and become rich like Barry Bonds and will probably end up slangin' crack down at the Waffle House down by the I-285 interchange. By the way, this kid's house is NICE - we're talking two stories, stairs, a basement, an attic, the fuckin' works. As a matter of fact, one might even call Miles - dare I say it - privileged?

In the next scene Miles is accosted by this fat blond white boy in a purple belly shirt. Eventually the bully, named Kyle, grabs hold of Miles at the bus stop but the old white bus driver almost runs him over and Miles is just barely able to escape. "See you, wouldn't want to be you," Miles says, which, for the record, was an antediluvian phrase even by 1998 standards. So Kyle's dad - voiced by John Travolta of all people - has to drive him to school. Which, fittingly enough, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. From there, we're introduced to the rest of the cast. There's this skateboarding kid with a country accent (voiced by the little kid from Sling Blade, if you can believe it) and this stuck up Hispanic bitch who considers herself "Madame Curie" and the rest of her cohorts "The Three Stooges." Miles' teacher (whose race is a complete mystery - she could be Dominican or she could be Irish) then tells him she's worried about his slipping grades and he blames it on baseball season. Then he says the only way for a black person to make money in this day and age is through sports or entertainment, and then the teacher says something about Colin Powell and tells Miles that if he doesn't do a good job on his book report about Martin Luther King, he's going to be held back a grade. 

So anyway, the kids go on a field trip to MLK's birth home, and Whoopi Goldberg is the tour guide and the country skateboarder kid LITERALLY asks her if MLK had magical powers. Then Miles sees a photo of MLK as a kid playing baseball and Miles says "why the fuck NOT steal a revered civil rights leader'  baseball glove?" But as soon as Miles puts it on, Wish Kid-style, he and that country motherfucker are magically transported back to the 1930s. Sure as sugar, they run into 12-year-old MLK, whom Miles describes as "major magic time," which I have to admit, does roll off the tongue rather smoothly. Oddly enough, even though it's Atlanta in the Great Depression, black kids and white kids are playing baseball together, which, I don't know, seems like a bit of a stretch to me. But then a white woman calls Miles "an uppity colored" and tells the white skateboarder kid that if he doesn't clean up his act he'll get fucking lynched.

Miles slips on the glove again and this time around the kids wind up on a train with a teenage Martin Luther King, Jr. King explains how he spent the summer humbly picking tobacco in Connecticut to pay for college, which - to put it mildly - isn't exactly a 100 percent truthful interpretation of what King's ACTUAL youth was like. Then MLK talks about how "whites and coloreds" couldn't associate with one another in the South, while ominous music plays over stock footage of segregated water fountain signs. Then the kids eat dinner with the rest of the King family, and Daddy King is voiced by James Earl Jones, because of course he would. "Don't you think it's cool he's always doing nice things for everybody else?" Miles comments.

Hey, it was either that, or Wayne Williams Junior High.

The kids time-skip once more. Now they're in Montgomery, Ala. for the bus boycott in 1956. And now MLK is voiced by Levar Burton, and we get the NARRATIVE APPROVED Rosa Parks story (which, of course, never brings up the fact that Samuel B. Fuller was already in the process of BUYING the Montgomery bus system), and then we get stock footage of MLK's house getting firebombed. Then a character voiced by Samuel L. Jackson starts rallying the black community to use violence against the honkeys, but MLK tells them to be more like Gandhi instead ... which, uh, means he wants them to hate Africans and sleep with their naked nieces on top of them?

Well, before we can fully digest that peculiar visual, the kids time hop again, and now it's time to relive the Birmingham riots, complete with a montage contrasting cartoons and real people having Dobermans bite their ball sacks and getting hit in the face with fire hoses. The kids end up getting transported back to the modern day, and the next day they watch ANOTHER video about the sit-ins and "Bull" Connor, who is pretty much depicted here as a cross between Hitler and The Penguin. And that's our cue for even MORE footage of black people getting power washed, complete with the very, very debatable suggestion that MLK and JFK formed a partnership for racial justice.

After school, the kids go back to MLK's birth home and convince Whoopi Goldberg to let 'em go back inside and fuck around with the time-space continuum some more. The fat white kid and that know-it-all Hispanic bitch decide to trail 'em and what do you know, all four of them wind up getting sucked back in time to the March on Washington. Oh, and hilariously, the "I Have A Dream" speech is dubbed over, because the King estate actually TRADEMARKED it and make people pay to use it now. That said, you can still have a lot of fun with the scene subbing in your OWN music. Might I suggest "Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)" by W.A.S.P.? Anyhoo, the kids run into their future teacher at the rally, and she talks about MLK representing the "power of one" and "affecting change in everyone we touch" and a whole bunch of other hippie dippie bullshit. 

Then the kids hop forward in time and find newspaper clippings about King's death and act like it's the first time they ever heard he died before and decide to head back in time and STOP MLK FROM GETTING ASSASSINATED. "Sorry, that's way past my curfew," MLK tells the kids when they ask him to travel with them to 1999. But after name dropping Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall enough times, MLK finally decides to travel to Miles' time alongside the rest of the chirrens. Except when Miles and MLK get there, the King birth home is just rubble on the ground and the two white kids are best friends instead of being antagonistic towards each other and oh shit, black kids aren't allowed to ride the school bus anymore. Cue stock footage of KKK marches and "colored only" park benches and MLK starts asking Miles some serious questions about why he thinks *his* timeline is so great again. Now cue MORE stock footage of burning crosses and masses of black people weeping. And, then when the kids get to the middle school, all of a sudden it's been renamed "Robert E. Lee Middle" and the water fountains are segregated again and the principal keeps telling them to "git out" and chides the teachers for being "stupid women." And, oh, that Hispanic girl from earlier? Now she's a street urchin who doesn't know English and polishes floors for a living and Miles' mama is a MAID and he's all pissed that he don't have a Nintendo 64 no more.

So Miles and MLK have to sleep in bags on the floor and then MLK sees his daddy's ghost in the clouds and right then and there he decides he has to go back in time and DIE and keep the continuity loop a goin' as originally planned. And holy shit, they actually SHOW MLK getting shot in Memphis. Well, you have to give 'em some props for having the cojones to put THAT in a children's cartoon. From there we segue to footage from King's funeral, but again, since it originally used quips from the "I Have a Dream" speech, all we have here is just dead audio. Anyway, with everything corrected in the space-time continuum, Miles is able to come back to the modern day and yep, everything is back to normal. And after Miles gets an "A" on his assignment, the kids decide to go feed some homeless people and join Jimmy Carter's Habitats for Humanity and hug crippled black women in wheelchairs while a cover "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" plays in the background. And that, my multicultural brethren, is all there is to it.

Hooray for government-mandated inclusionary policymaking, which totally can't be subverted into civil liberties-eroding power grabs the same way government-mandated exclusionary policymaking was!

Well, I guess that is what it is, isn't it? I guess you don't need me to tell you the historical accuracy in this one was hit and miss, and you REALLY have to question the cartoon's rosy - if not downright messianic - depiction of the good Rev. Dr. King. I mean, it's not like they were ever going to show the alleged homosexual drunken orgies or bring up the fact that a lot of MLK's mentors were avowed communists or anything like that, but they could have at least tried to make the guy seem a little more relatable. After all, the REAL MLK smoked, packed heat, and boned at least one white woman, didn't he?

I suppose in hindsight one may consider Our Friend, Martin one of the great pioneering texts of the ongoing "white guilt" complex in American society - especially for Millennials. Remember, this was shit children were seeing every single year throughout elementary school and junior high, and let's face it - the big, central message the cartoon gets across (rather intentional or planned) is that a.) MLK was so great that everything he said most be taken as the literal social gospel and b.) left unchecked, white men will enslave you again and call your mama bad names. Even if that wasn't the filmmakers' desire, that's just the way hyper-literal children think, and when you have that pounded into your skull over and over for nine years, without a single adult explaining the movie's takeaways in a more nuanced form it can and will leave an indelible stamp on one's psyche - and no amount of factual evidence is likely to surmount the pure emotional pull one has felt since he or she was in kindergarten. The filmmakers may have thought the key idea children took away from the movie was that you shouldn't treat people unfairly because they're different, but instead the central theme they're walking away with is "holy shit, white people were EVIL as fuck back in the day, and if we don't do everything MLK tells us to they'll start treating minorities like doo doo again." Just read the comments on this YouTube upload - virtually none of the top comments are about racial reconciliation, but various shades of the old "boy howdy, the whites sure were MEAN towards blacks back then, and you know what, the probably still want to enslave us" chestnut. Planned, or unplanned, that's the major takeaway easily impressionable children got out of this movie - don't judge people by the color of their skin, except for the white ones, because goddamn, look at all the evil shit they did back in 1950s.

As a history lesson, it's pretty much just brazen hagiography for the ankle-biter set, leaving out all of M.L.K.'s more regrettable character traits and pretty much attributing the entirety of the Civil Rights Movement to his doing (that there isn't a companion video chronicling the animated exploits of Malcolm X is a rather telling example of omission by design.) As a morality play, it's pretty humdrum as well, but come on - it's pro-diversity propaganda intended for first graders. What did you expect? And taken only on its merits as animation, it's passable, but nothing extraordinary. The entire time I was watching the video I just felt like the character designs seemed hauntingly familiar, and sure enough, the IMDB validated my suspicions: it was co-directed by Vincenzo Trippetti, who as fate would have it, also served as a storyboard supervisor for The Real Ghostbusters, Jem and Mummies Alive! Needless to say, if there was ever a production in dire need of a sudden guest appearance by Apep the Snake God, surely it would be this woefully uninvolving cartoon.

As a piece of nostalgic ephemera, I suppose it has its merits. Shit, I didn't even watch the thing when I was a kid and I still smelled my old elementary school's cafeteria and gym mats while I was reviewing it. But more importantly, it stands as a testament to the power of the media - particularly animated programming - as a major social conditioning engineer. Our Friend, Martin is unquestionably a production with the chief goal of dictating morality to its young audience. It has little to do with entertaining them, or even giving them an educational history lesson. Rather, it's a coordinated effort to instill in young viewers the seeds of an adult ethos, one that neatly contours to a particular political ideology and its pre-established dogma.

Is the intent of Our Friend, Martin to encourage children to rebuke collectivist labels and see individuals as precisely that, individuals, or is it meant to goad children into believing a one-dimensional social policy creation myth that clearly paints one half of the U.S. social dyad as born losers and the other half as lapsed ethno-totalitarians?

And if you can't figure out which one, no worries - just show this flick to an eight-year-old and they'll be able to tell you which is which as soon as it's over.

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Revisiting 'The Last Halloween' TV Special from 1991!

A loooooong-forgotten early 1990s Hanna-Barbera production about CGI Martians with a hard-on for candy - starring Carla Tortelli from Cheers and Bull from Night Court, of all people.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

By and large, I don't really care for the usual array of Halloween TV specials. Yes, I loved watching the "Treehouse of Horror" episodes of The Simpsons and the annual All Hallows Eve installment of Roseanne when I was a kid, but stuff like The Great Pumpkin and Garfield's Halloween Adventure never had that much appeal to me. Shit, even the Halloween-themed episodes of shows I normally loved - Pete and Pete, Ghostbusters, Family Matters, etc. - never really struck that much of a chord, and that's coming from a guy who absolutely, positively fucking loves all things Halloween more than any adult person ever should. In fact, I struggle to name ten Halloween TV specials I've seen over the years that weren't connected to some pre-existing television show, and of those - Here Comes The Munsters, I'm looking squarely at you, you motherfucker - were really, really unmemorable. 

So I was cruising around the YouTubes a while back and got sucked into a nostalgia vortex and somehow, someway, I stumbled upon a Halloween TV special I literally haven't thought about in 20-something years. As soon as I saw the little icon picture in the suggested videos panel, something in my amygdala just clicked. "Huh ... why does this thing seem familiar?" I thought out loud. With a couple of minutes to spare, I clicked on the video, and about three minutes in it all come roaring back to me. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: The Last Halloween from 1991. 

This was one of those things I had half hazy and half crystal clear recollections of. I clearly remembered the general premise of the special, and kinda sorta recalled what the aliens looked like, and I remembered one of them made the most adorable sound when it moved, but as for the plot gluing everything together, I couldn't remember doo-doo. That said, I vividly recall watching it one dark and dreary late October evening in the year of our lord 1991, covered up in blankets and being really, really bummed out because I thought the title literally meant there wouldn't be another Halloween ever again in real life. Like, if I focus, I can even recall what the pajama fabric felt like that evening. How the fuck - or why the fuck - I've stored that data in the back of my head for a quarter fucking century, I just can't explain ... especially since I'm pretty sure I fell asleep halfway through the movie. 

Of course, we here at The Internet Is In America relish any and all opportunities to revisit obscurities from days long since gone, and this being the formal Halloween season and all, why the hell shouldn't we revisit the 27-year old Hanna-Barbera special and analyze it through our older, sager adult sensibilities? 

We begin the special with a prologue, narrated by William Hanna himself (and if I'm not mistaken, this is the only live-action TV special with CGI effects Hanna-Barbera ever produced.) He tells us the Martians were happy until, one day, the whole planet ran out of "coobi," which he pronounces dangerously close to "coochie." So they sent four Martians in a rocket ship to Earth to get some more "coobi," whatever the hell that is. Oh, and the day they sent them was Halloween on Earth. And I just know one of you science nerds is going to say some shit about it taking 162 days to travel from planet to planet, or make some snide comment about NASA radar not picking up the craft as it enter the Earth's orbit, so before you do, I just want to say this: fuck you and your mother, you worthless, buzzkilling piece of shit. 

So these two dorky kids get off a school bus and talk about the local candy factory closing down and being so poor they have to wear shitty hand-me-down clothes. One of the kids' sister drops her candy bag and he makes fun of her for wearing the same Wonder Woman-like costume every year, but then he realizes it was made by their dead mom so that makes him STFU real quick. Also, their pet dog is named "Digger," so be careful saying that one five times fast.

So the girl is almost run over by a dude in this old ass car. He gets out and he looks like a white George Zimmerman (funny, because he's played by Richard Moll - i.e., fucking Bull from Night Court.) Then this Cruella DeVille looking bitch in the backseat calls the kids a bunch of yard monsters and tells them to not even think about trick or treating at her place, or goddamn else. And what do you know, she lives in a spooky mansion, on top of a hill, that's apparently a matte painting.

The Martian spaceship lands. The dog finds them. Then we cut to a black dude in a bow tie telling this dude at the candy factory that he can't meet production because the lake keeps drying up and that's what powers the whole fucking operation so it's going to be the "last Halloween" in town. Get it? Because the factory is going to close, and everybody who works there is going to lose their jobs and shit? So the kids enter the picture and grandpa tells them "your mom was the greatest wisher I ever saw" and the kids vow to make this last Halloween the best fuckin' one ever.

OK, I know I've seen that fat yellow guy with the red and blue stripes SOMEWHERE before. Help me out, readers: who does this motherfucker remind you of?

Then the aliens fall out of the spaceship. They're all CGI characters, which aren't all that terrible looking considering the primitive tech of the day. And here's our roll call:

Scoota - it's basically the baby from Eraserhead wearing a special needs helmet and burp-talking like a black dude. But the helmet is actually something called a "coob-a-meter," which helps him find all that sweet, sweet coobi.

Gleep - this multicolored Pikachu looking motherfucker with a sorta Southern accent that refers to himself as a "quasar-riding flap-dwap(!?!)" whatever the fuck that's supposed to be.

Romtu - the de facto leader, a blue guy in a giant helmet who reminds me a lot of The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones. 

Bing - a giant spring with eyeballs who makes the most adorable squeak every time it moves. I fucking love Bing and want him to live with me, and if any of you assholes ever say anything bad about him I'll fucking cut 'ya.

We return to the kids. After a brief cameo by a kid in a Fred Flintstone mask, the Martians introduce themselves to our sibling protagonists. The boy lays his plastic sword down and says he comes in peace and Rontu (who sounds just like he's saying "scrotum" whenver he mentions Scoota's name) gives them the rundown on all that "coobi" stuff and the girl says they are free to take as much broccoli from the planet as they want. Interestingly, for a super-intelligent alien race that understands English perfectly, the idea of "mothers" is a totally new concept to them, and Bing asks if he can go "probing" for a mom of his own.

Well, as it turns out, "coobi" is what we Earthlings call "candy." The kids explain how trick or treating work and the aliens start collecting free chocolate. A black woman pulls Rontu's head off and she laughs, thinking it's just an elaborate costume. Man, she is dumb as fuck. Then the nerdy boy at the bus stop from earlier comes out wearing a fairy costume and Bing thinks he is its mom. Oh, the 1990s, back when we still knew what the fuck "gender" meant.

We cut back to the old bitch from earlier. She's trying to find a cure for old age by experimenting on bugs or something. She's making some sort of contraption that's drying up the lake to power her experiments, and she asks her sidekick to go out and find the biggest bug he can get his hands on. 

"How many domiciles have we approached?" Rontu asks. The kid tells him he's worried about his dad's factory. Then he tells Rontu how wishing works and shows him how to skip rocks. Bing, unfortunately, winds up hopping all the way to the old bitch's house. Then her retard sidekick finds him, thinks he's a giant bug and puts him in a burlap sack. The boy learns the old bitch is the one stealing all the town's water. The girl falls down a chute and the retard butler apprehends her. Her brother slides in on a hook and rams a table right into the retard's pelvis. The old bitch then promises to treat the kids to "a trick they'll never forget," but they escape down a sewer drain before she can lay her nasty ass hands on 'em. Then the sidekick guy pours bug extract slime all over his head, because he's a stupid piece of shit and you shouldn't feel sorry for him for any reason. 

Then the boy tells his dad about the old bitch stealing water, and in direct defiance of made-for-TV kids' Halloween special conventions, he actually believes them. The Martians then find the candy factory and go fucking ape-shit, literally taking everything in the facility. Then the cops pull up at the factory, and the old bitch and her servant (Or is it her son? They never really make their relationship all that explicitly known) have already been arrested, entirely off-screen. So, uh, hooray for budget restraints, I guess?

Bing still thinks the little girl is his mom and he thanks her for helping them get all the candy and she gives him her tiara. Then the Martians give the boy some sort of Martian rock and the aliens say they'll come back every Halloween for more coobi. Of course, the dad shows up so the aliens have to vamoose. The kid makes an unstated wish on the alien rock and throws it into the lake. "Guess I need more practice," he lugubriously states.

BUT WAIT ONE GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKIN' MINUTE, YA'LL. The rock starts bouncing around like a ball of light, and it causes the lake to magically replenish itself and re-power the factory! All the townfolks come out to watch the miracle as it happens, as they all celebrate the notion they might still have jobs come Monday morning. Of course, since those Martians took literally their entire inventory, they'll probably go under anyway, but who knows - maybe the Martians refilled the factory with candy when they re-electrified it. Don't you just love it when the producers leave you to fill the plot holes in for 'em?

And we end the whole she-bang with a final quote from Hanna. "Whenever you begin to lose your way, stop and close your eyes. It may be hard to find, but a place where magic still exists is waiting when you let yourself believe." Uh, is that supposed to be about Jesus or something?

Holy shit, do I love me some Bing. So freakin' adorable! <3

So all in all, that was a pretty fun little trip down memory lane. It's amazing how minimalistic the whole thing is, in hindsight. There might be maybe a minute of action in the entire 21 minute movie, and the rest is characters simply exchanging dialogue - good luck doing that with today's ADD-addled young-uns.

Considering how weird some of the edits are, though, there has to be an extended director's cut out there somewhere. That, or else these guys were so poor they couldn't even film the part where the villains are brought to justice, which is a distinct possibility given the (probable) fact that 95 percent of the budget went towards animation costs. I kinda' sorta' think Hanna-Barbera expected the TV movie to pull in huge ratings and be popular enough to warrant a sequel, but to the best of my knowledge the movie aired just once and that was it. And according to the Internet hoi polloi, the thing never made it to VHS, so unless you had a recorded copy of the special in your possession, there was no way to ever re-experience this one. Thankfully, the wonderful advent of YouTube has empowered a legion of nostalgic sorts to violate all sorts of international copyright laws to bring this one back to life, and I, for one, applaud them for their brazen disregard of the intellectual property safeguards of others.

The movie was directed by Savage Steve Holland, who previously directed the John Cusack vehicle Better Off Dead and also created the animation for the Whammy on Press Your Luck. After this movie, he didn't really do shit for a decade, but then he directed a couple of Fairly Odd Parents movies, thus giving this guy quite possibly the single weirdest directorial career in the history of anything ever. It was also executive produced by David Kirschner, whose pedigree includes a fucking who's who list of Halloween-time staples, including Hocus Pocus, The Halloween Tree and ALL of the Child's Play movies to date. He also apparently produced a Monster in My Pocket animated special from 1992, which sounds like the kind of thing I should definitely get around to reviewing at some point.

As for the cast, it wasn't until I hit up the IMDB that I realized the evil old bitch was played by Rhea Perlman - i.e., that one ho from Cheers who also married Danny Devito, which is hilarious because every time I think of Danny Devito fucking anything all I can think of is that one scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he made a home movie version of Lethal Weapon 5. Oh, and the guy who played Grandpa was Eugene Roche, who is probably best known for playing "The AJAX Man" in a series of commercials nobody reading this is old enough to remember. In case you're wondering, the kids in the movie were played by Will Estes (who grew up to play some dude on the TV show Blue Bloods) and Sarah Martineck, who doesn't have a single IMDB credit after 1996, so it's probably safe to assume somebody PizzaGated her and ruined her interest in the craft of filmmaking. But, uh, don't quote me on that, please. And lastly, pulling voiceover duties for the movie are Paul Williams, Don Messick and Frank Welker. Really, you're either the kind of person who already knows who those people are or people that don't give a shit they were ever born, so I suppose there's no need to trudge up their respective careers.

I really don't have a continuum in mind for grading the quality of Halloween TV specials, so I can't give you a decent qualitative verdict on the movie. At barely 20 minutes in length, however, it's not like you're wasting that much of your life catching it on YT, so even if you hate it the upfront investment wasn't that bad. I guess it's a historically significant film for the CGI characters, but story-wise, there isn't necessarily anything here you haven't already seen a trillion and a half times before. The Last Halloween isn't good, it isn't bad, it just is ... well, what it is, I suppose. There are better Halloween-themed slivers of pop cultural ephemera out there, and there are certainly worse; but hey, at least it has that whole obscurity factor working in its favor, don't it?

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Mighties Kiwis Are Fucking Terrifying

The same people who brought you Cuties oranges thought they had created they next adorable fruit mascot. What they created instead was the ultimate experience in supermarket horror.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

You may ask yourself what inspires a man to write an entire article about the mascot for a plastic tub of kiwis. The answer - as often the case in life - starts off innocuously, then transmogrifies into bone-chilling terror.

It was a rather routine weekday afternoon. I was just ambling aimlessly down the aisles at Kroger, trying to determine who I wanted to fuck more: Joanna Gaines from Fixer Upper or Jedediah Bila from The View. With no apparent solution in sight, I mindlessly waltzed out of the off-brand soda aisle and into the fresh produce section.

And it was there I stumbled upon it ... one of the most horrifying discoveries of my adult life.

Now, odds are, you don't think about kiwis that much - if it all, for that matter. In fact, I'm guessing 98 percent of the people reading this have never eaten one in their lives. No matter how hard Big Agriculture tries to convince us otherwise, they're always destined to be a "C-fruit," like kumquats or a starfruit. Their appeal will be niche at best, and any efforts to take the things "mainstream" are destined to falter.

But that didn't stop Sun Pacific from making a - well, woefully misguided - attempt to do precisely that. If you've never heard of the company before, they're a Pasadena-based fruit producer/distributor that handles all the usual stuff - grapes, lemons, tomatoes (and yes, tomatoes are fruits because they have seeds in 'em, you unlearned motherfuckers.) Their big seller is a brand of Clementine oranges called Cuties, which has a double-fisted marketing hook; the products themselves are super-duper easy to open (apparently, getting through traditional orange rinds was a bigger consumer deterrent than I would have assumed) and, of course, their brand image is downright adorable. You've got this super cherubic anthropomorphic orange zipping itself out of its rind - it's simple, it's clean, it's cute and it does a great job highlighting the product's primary branding hook (you know, that they're easy to open and shit.) It looks very smooth on stickers and as four-foot tall cutout displays and is so easy on the eyes you really could imagine it doubling as a Florida minor league baseball team logo. In short, it's a marvelous way to market a product that, quite frankly, has otherwise limited appeal to the fat-ass utopia that is modern America.

So Sun Pacific decided to go the same route with its brand of kiwis. You know how they call their oranges Cuties? Well, they decided to call their kiwis Mighties, with the sub-marketing moniker "the amazing furry fruit."

Alright, everything sounds pretty good in theory, right? Well, all that shit goes out the window when you see what the official Mightis Kiwis mascot looks like ...

Holy goddamn shit, is that thing spooky or what? It's like something out of Five Nights at Freddy's, or the cartoon sequence in Twilight Zone: The Movie - a highly unsettling mixture of the absurdly adorable and the absurdly threatening. An anthropomorphic orange doesn't really look like anything other than an orange with eyeballs and a smile, but this anthropomorphic kiwi looks like some sort of long extinct megafauna. 

Three things immediately jump out at me here. First, the furry texture on the mascot makes it look WAY too much like its a living creature. It looks less like a fruit than it does a really, really spherical bear or beaver, and that just feels all kind of icky. Secondly, who in the hell thought it was a good idea to replace the cartoon character's teeth with a slice of exposed kiwi meat? Depending on which angle you choose, it either looks like the mascot has an emerald-colored whale baleen plate - perfect for devouring krill and other creatures without even having to bother chewing them - or it looks like the monster has extreme gingivitis, lost all its teeth and now has to make do with its gross, mushy green gums. And I don't know about you, but the idea of being gummed to death by a monster seems even more ghoulish than being torn asunder by razor sharp incisors. And then there's that spoon. Look carefully, folks - the mascot is standing atop a pile of freshly scooped kiwis. Since he's holding a feasible murder instrument in his/her/its hand, what kind of conclusion would you naturally leap to? Hell, maybe it's even weirder and the cartoon character used the spoon to scoop its own face off, like that one dude did in Hannibal. Regardless, you really can't draw anything but bad vibes from the packaging, but I assure you, that's just the beginning of the horror. 

I suppose we might as well try to give the Mighties kiwis a fair trial in the grocery store court of law. IF you can overlook the unbridled horror of the wide-eyed, mush-mouthed monster mascot, I guess you could consider the fruits themselves pretty enjoyable. We'll get to the taste of the things in just a bit, but first, how about we let the producers of Mighties give us their best elevator pitch as to why we should all shove these hairy green testicle looking motherfuckers down our respective gullets? 

Well, the marketing language is pretty straightforward. Per whoever signed off the packaging lingo, these here kiwis have more potassium than bananas, more vitamin C than oranges (jeez, way to cannibalize your market share, dinguses!) more vitamin E and K than avocados (I guess that explains the aesthetic resemblance) and more fiber than, and I quote, "the leading cereal brand," which the eye test would lead you to assume is Corn Flakes. Granted, that's a 1:1 serving-to-serving comparison, which is a little misleading, since these guys consider two kiwis a full serving and most cereal brands consider three spoonfuls of their stuff a full serving, but you know what? Nobody reads this site for my musings on the inconsistencies of nutritional labeling data, so onward we go with the obscure references and curse words.

Apparently, "kiwi" is one of those weird words that represents both its own singular and plural form. But I'm going to keep calling them kiwis, because I can, gahdammit. Interestingly, I noticed the brand has really gone above and beyond to abstain from referring to their product as basic-ass kiwis, which I guess is a pretty decent advertising ploy. No, we don't sell kiwis, any old motherfucker can do that, we sell MIGHTIES, you no-count son-of-a-bitch, it's a fuckin' SUPER FRUIT and if you don't like it to hell with 'ya. Which, uh, I guess would be a pretty ineffective marketing campaign literally, but INDIRECTLY, we know that's PRECISELY what this hyper-confrontational packaging WANTS to tell us. Anyhoo, the nutritional info speaks for itself, I guess: each kiwi is only about 45 calories, which makes it a great snack for dieters, anorexics, and dieters who don't know they're anorexics. Also, just one of these fuckers has 115 percent of your daily recommended allowance of vitamin C, which makes me wonder if its possible to O.D. on it. Which, according to the Mayo Clinic, actually IS possible, only instead of killing you by shutting down your liver functions, it just makes you shit a lot. Well, nobody loses there, I reckon.

And now, we come to the fruits themselves. They say sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, and I reckon this one says at least 1,001. There's really no genteel way to put it; the things look just like giant beaver testicles. They're brown, they're furry and at first glance, I would assume these things to be about a million and a half different things before "an edible fruit with a lot of vitamins and shit in it." If you saw these things in bunches just growing out in the wild, I'm guessing most folks would think they were sleeping hedgehogs or something. Regardless, these things are pretty much the LEAST edible looking things ever, and to say that slightly works against the product is kinda' like saying 9/11 was bad publicity for the Muslim folks. 

But hey, at least they DID manage to slap a couple of collectible, tradable stickers on them! In addition to the soccer playing beaver testicle on the left and the cannibalistic gingivitis monster on the right eating his own skin for breakfast, I found a couple of other ones in my two pound plastic tub of kiwis. There's a baseball themed one, and another of an anthro-kiwi holding a green flag in one hand and what appears to be a pickax in the other. Yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell that one's supposed to be about. 

Surprisingly, just slapping a mini-sticker on the things does very little to negate the intrinsically unappealing aesthetic qualities of the kiwis. I mean, even with a happy cartoon character's beaming face on it, that really doesn't do anything to make it look any less like a hairy brown monkey testicle. Yeah, I get the basic idea that the fruit itself is kinda' like a miniature coconut crossbred with a lime, but nobody's ever mistaken a coconut or a lime for a balled up sleeping otter or the severed sex organs of miscellaneous mammals. Jeez, what I wouldn't have given to have been in the boardroom meeting when these guys discussed ways to work around the fact the products they've been paid to advertise look like orangutan testes... 

I swear, the more you stare at the thing, the more horrifying it gets. Just look at the formless, faceless abyss. You know, you really don't have to have too much of an imagination to envision these things as the little tumbleweed space rats from the Critters movies, or maybe even one of those intergalactic space eggs from Alien that has the vagina-faced scorpion mouth-rapist in 'em. And let's don't pretend that wide-eyed, wide-mouthed cartoon monster in the background doesn't make the whole thing a million times more terrifying, because it totally fuckin' does. 

But the thing that unnerves me most about Mighties, I suppose, is what they look like on the inside. For starters, kiwis take a lot of fucking effort to eat. You can't just bite into 'em like an apple or rip 'em open like a Cutie. You need at least two eating utensils, plus a space that's safe to drip all of that fruit juice everywhere. So basically, you're supposed to cut the things in half, then you scoop 'em out and eat them with a spoon. Sure, all this sounds nice and dandy in theory, but in practice? Hoo boy, the process is a LOT more demanding than any of us prolly expected...

I hope you can see all that glistening fruit jizz, because these kiwis are just soaking in it. Seriously, as soon as you halve the things, a good three or four ounces of extremely acidic juice starts dripping out of it, just like the blood of them insect monsters in Aliens. Even better, the goop is a bright green hue, pretty much the same color as the Ah-nold chasing monster's in Predator. Additionally, I can't be the only person just mildly concerned that there's so many fucking seeds in this thing, am I? Most oranges have what, one or two? Well, this one has about two to three dozen per kiwi, and of course they all look like sentient black parasites just champing at the bit to take up residence in your lower intestines like in The Thing. Go ahead, take a good, long look and just TELL me you can't envision some sort of flesh-eating alien chimera living inside one of these things. Because you can't, and we all know it.

Shit, just take a look at the remnants of this discarded kiwi rind. As soon as you spoon out all of the fruit, all you're left with is a hairy outer shell with a super waxy interior that looks just like a gigantic booger cocoon. I've got a pretty strong stomach, but the more I look at that thing the sicker I get. It just looks so unnatural and artificial, like some sort of lab-made womb for half-vegetable people; sorry, but there's no way I can be anything OTHER than suspicious when chowing down on something that voluntarily chooses to live in something that looks like that. Sheesh. 

Now, as an objective food reviewer, I did think the Mighties tasted pretty good. They're not too tart and they're not really sugary, so basically, it's what happens when you cross-pollinate a lemon with an avocado. It's mushy but not too bland and spicy without being too acidic, which is a real boon to people like me with penchants for really, really flavorless things. So, yes, as a routine munchie or quick snack, these things are quite decent. But as aesthetic commercial goods, though? Folks, you may never agree to put anything in your mouth as terrifying as these motherfuckers ever again ... 

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