Five Amazing Things In Macaulay Culkin’s Bedroom in Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” Music Video!

In which we pinpoint five pieces of genuine early 1990s ephemera from a music video that would otherwise only be noteworthy for featuring an accused child molester touching himself repeatedly with KKK graffiti in the background.

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Why "Roseanne" was REALLY Cancelled ...

Sorry folks ... "racism" isn't *technically* what cost Roseanne her TV show.

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

More than one reader has sent me an email asking me for my hot take on the big Roseanne reboot brouhaha, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t have a whole lot say about the matter.

But first things first, lemme get something off my chest. I never thought the original Roseanne TV show was *that* good, and that includes all of the much-ballyhooed Halloween episodes (boy, I wonder how Matt from Dino Drac is taking this one? Five bucks says he winds up scrubbing all references to the show from his site by the time July rolls around.)

Anyhoo, going back and watching any episode of Roseanne from 1992 or 1993 just feels painfully outdated, and not even in the hopeless 1990s nostalgic way, either. It’s a boring, uneventful and painfully unfunny program that never had an iota of the pseudo-blue collar charm and humor of Married ... with Children and golden-era The Simpsons, and I’m actually kinda' happy that channels like Logo are probably going to obliterate the show from their film vaults the same way TV Land responded to the Charleston massacre by taking Dukes of Hazzard of the air — a decision that no doubt prevented many a race-related shooting and in no way, shape or form could be construed as desperate, knee-jerk corporate slacktivism.

I wish I had more pneuma underlying this whole Roseanne becoming persona non grata thing, but frankly, I just don’t give a hoot. Yeah, on one hand the First Amendment absolutist in me feels philosophically peeved, but then again, ABC cancelling her show isn’t a form of state censorship, but privately held corporate censorship. It’s the exact same deal as the whole NFL national anthem flap — it’s not the gubbernment telling somebody what to do and think, it’s a private sector employer telling an employee what he or she can and can’t do if they want to keep getting a paycheck from them. Simply put, if you’re outraged about “but muh freedoms!” over one of these topics but not the other, you sir, madame or transperson, are indeed a hypocrite of the highest caliber.

But it does seem interesting that ABC — a subsidiary of Disney(*), the most powerful pop cultural conglomerate in history — would yank the plug on the show after spending an entire half year patting themselves on the back over its ratings and, sigh, topical significance. I recall watching segments on Good Morning America in which the spokes-prostitutes praised their own network for “raising important questions” about Islamophobia and trans rights through the reboot, thus hitting the TV line-drive double of championing their owners social engineering agenda while simultaneously stealth advertising their own prime time lineup.

(*) As an aside, it’s nice to see Bob Iger and Channing Dungey publicly congratulating themselves for taking the moral high ground on something — especially while Disney continues to use teenage slave labor in Bangladesh to sew together Olaf dolls.

And by that same token, we saw the same network try to sow a little sociocultural discord by asking itself if the show went too far by making jokes about Black-ish and Fresh Off The Boat pandering their intrinsic ethnoracial thematics to white audiences even though the shows themselves were contextually and conceptually identical to any number of similar sitcoms about Caucasian family dynamics.

Well, if Walt Disney wanted some faux controversy to drive more pupils to the program, they certainly got more than they wished for when Roseanne — apparently bored of accusing Chelsea Clinton of secretly marrying a Soros and copypastaing PizzaGate rumors — took to Twitter to call Valerie Jarrett (an Iranian woman who apparently is 1/4th black or something like that) the hypothetical cross-pollination of “The Muslim Brotherhood” and Planet of the Apes.(*)

(*) By the way, Valerie Jarrett is the person more responsible than any other White House adviser for ensuring Obamacare’s failure — and thus, expediting and intensifying the health care woes of low-income Americans of all colors of the rainbow. Surely, there’s a good reason why the MSM hasn’t brought that up in all of their narratives, right?

Naturally, the only “right” way to interpret that tweet, as our illustrious media has shown us time and time again, is to immediately equate such as an act of racist linguistic terrorism, despite the fact a quick Google search does indeed reveal that Mrs. Jarrett does bare an astonishing resemblance to Dr. Zaius, a blonde, peach-skinned human-orangutan hybrid, from the original Planet of the Apes movies.

Of course, even noting an innocuous, nonjudgmental visual similarity between the two is considered a veritable hate crime in this day and age, because as we all know, nothing is more offensive than dare trudging up the hideous, bigoted, xenophobic notion that some darker-hued individuals may share aesthetic commonalities with lower primates — itself a gleefully discredited and discarded reminder of (pseudo)scientific racism so erroneous in theory and application that even Google’s most advanced artificial intelligence programs have NO PROBLEMS WHATSOEVER distinguishing our more melanated brethren from gorillas.

Was Roseanne’s comments truly anchored in steeped ethnoracial rage? Is that one tweet alone proof positive that she’s no better than racial purity proponents and ethnostate supporters a’la Don Black or David Duke (or Muhammad Ali, for that matter?)

It doesn’t matter. In today’s cultural milieu, there are no degrees of “racism.” The academic/entertainment/media/Silicon Valley complex makes no moral distinctions between low-key, politically-incorrect verbalisms online and vandalizing a historically black church, or spray-painting slurs on the walls of a college dorm, or calling in threatening messages to synagogues … which, nowadays, actually seems to be more of a “black” thing than a “white” activity, but such facts are useless against the reality-resistant masses, who have long embraced their own unfounded, unthinking, subjective feelings as unquestionable, unvarnished objective truth, regardless of the logical evidence to the contrary.

Roseanne herself is a bit of a contradiction. In the 1990s she miffed the conservatives by making fun of the national anthem and making out with that one chick with bushy eyebrows back when gayness on network TV was a novelty, and now she’s rankling the modern pop cultural puritans, the post-Hillary left, a consortium of fervid feminists and dogged dope smokers and aggrieved ethno-nationalists of all varieties united by their utter abhorrence of all things Caucasoid, masculine and heterosexual, by going after their one utmost sacred pillar, that one unifying ideal that makes their indignation dignified instead of less savory adjectives, like “childish,” “rash,” and my personal favorite, “ironically prejudicial.”

And it cost her dearly. Even the perception of being a ray-ray-ray-cist is enough to end one’s career in post-Hillary America, and it’s probably only a matter of time until Roseanne is thrust into the pit where micro-aggressors like Michael Richards, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Jimmy the Greek fester. She’s been branded with the Scarlet “R,” forever forced to carry with her a social stigma every bit as career-crushing as being deemed a communist during the height of McCarthyism or a Wiccan during the Salem Witch Trials. “The Racist” is our society’s agreed upon “One Great Evil,” the collective, cultural boogeyman we’ve convinced ourselves is lurking in the shadows, anxiously awaiting to derail all of our majestic “progress” and force the gays into gulags, women into subservient second class citizenship and the black folk into bona fide bondage … which, of course, are things you could never, ever accuse the Muslims or Red Chinese or any Sub-Saharan totalitarian societies of actively practicing. Hey — we can’t speak poorly of our allies in the struggle against the man, can we?

I dunno. Maybe Roseanne actually wanted to get fired for the LULZ. I mean, if she really wanted to be subversive, I guess costing 200 SJWs on staff their livelihood and screwing the company out of millions in advertising dollars would be a pretty dandy way of doing so. But so much about the woman makes so little sense — this is a self-avowed socialist who voted for Trump, after all — that I’m not sure what she even stands for culturally or politically.

All we know for sure is that we won’t be seeing her on TV for the foreseeable future.

Not that it matters, I suppose, since we can see her on the Internet, for free, anytime we want.

You know — until they kick her off that media platform for “wrongthink,” too.

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: MTV's 'Hate Rock' Special from 1993!

Yes, even back then MTV was trying to warn the masses about the scourge of white supremacy ... and in the clumsiest way possible, to boot.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Anybody who thinks MTV is just now rallying the SJW troops for a culture war against whatever the higher-ups at Viacom deem a "far right threat" really haven't been paying attention. The reality is that MTV has been bangin' the social justice battle gong for more than a quarter century, and nothing demonstrates that as well as the 1993 "special report" Hate Rock from 1993.

Yes, a full 25 years ago - LONG before Charlottesville and Andrew Anglin and Black Lives Matter and President Trump and Pepe the Frog - MTV was hellbent on convincing the same masses who unironically liked bands like Green Jelly and Ugly Kid Joe that, within their own communities, there was an insidious, underground menace a bubblin' that - if left unchecked and unconquered - would inevitably result in the Day of the Rope coming to fruition and scores of Jews and blacks and Hispanics and gays and Indians getting massacred by the Fourth Reich. And, as we are all keenly aware, such wouldn't start with the slow degradation of civil liberties in the name of amorphous multiculturalism, nor government policies that nonconsensually hoist globalization on the front lawns of largely homogeneous cultures economically and socially incapable of assuring its peaceful assimilation into the local fabric. Nope, it begins, naturally, with a bunch of shitty guitar players with bald heads screaming "nigger" into a microphone in front of crowds of literally dozens of rancorous racist fans, and it's up to MTV - the great cultural taste-maker it is - to enlighten and indoctrinate us all into stamping this stuff out BEFORE it gets too big (read: economically sustainable) and the Holocaust 2.0 happens.

You know, some readers have asked me what my favorite kind of propaganda is, and it HAS to be stuff like this - hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop built solely to discredit and disgrace a competing flavor of hardcore, ideologically-biased, fact-and-reason-resistant agitprop. This thing isn't even really meant to be entertaining, as much as it is 30-minute secular worship service, kinda' like the politically correct version of the world's least articulate Sunday school teacher mumbling his way through the story of Lucifer's fall.

But really, we ought to let MTV speak for themselves, shouldn't we? Let's push this sumbitch in the old VCR player and take a trip down memory lane, why don't we?

Kurt Loder lets us know the following is a "Free Your Mind" special report, which, of course, is marketing-speak for "let us tell you how you ought to feel about things for the next 30 minutes." From there, we throw it to a concert in Canada, where the creatively-named band Aryan is singing some song about Jews or race-mixing or what the hell ever. Then there's a quick, totally context-less clip where a dude with a Nazi eagle tattoo on his forehead talks about shooting somebody and here comes Kurt Loder - apparently, strolling past though the set of the first Candyman movie - ambling into the frame and to say something to the effect of "boy howdy, I bet you sure have noticed the sudden surge in 'race-baiting skinheads' wreaking havoc in the underground 'oi' scene, and goddamn, isn't it terrible, folks?" That's our cue for some black and white footage of people getting hit with baseball bats transposed over Hitler speeches as we cut to stock footage of skinheads and Confederate flag-waving marchers looking all vicious and whatnot while Aerosmith's "Livin' on the Edge" loops around it.

Loder says the fall of communism IMMEDIATELY sparked a resurgence of far-right politics in Europe, which in turn began influencing racist dissidents in the U.S. We then get to briefly meet two skinheads named Sean and Mike - obviously meant to draw parallels to Beavis and Butt-Head - and Loder describes them as "beer-swilling thugs" before throwing it to archival footage of this Mexican guy talking about this time he got roughed up by some Skrewdriver fans, with the onscreen caption sure to note he was attacked by "racist skinheads," as opposed to the TOLERANT skinheads dotting our fine chemotherapy centers from coast-to-shining-coast. And that's the perfect excuse to take a look at the world of NON-RACIST skinheads, which does indeed exist ... in Canada. Well, WHERE else would you expect to find that kind of shit? Loder then explains how "real" skinheads love black people and their music, especially ska and "the working class sounds" of non-Hitler-inspired "oi."

Time to sample some of that insidious white power music, why dont' we? Here's a few lines of prose from some band called No Remorse - "Nigger, face to face don't try and mess with the master race." Well, that's still less uses of the word "nigger" than in the aggregate Kendrick Lamar song, so what's the rub, MTV? Kurt then goes on to say that the National Front basically INVENTED racist music by co-opting the oi scene in England back in the late 1970s. Then we meet a chap named Warren Miekle, lead singer of the New Jersey-based outfit Aggravated Assault, who says his music has a "political message." And because the aggregate MTV viewer in 1993 STILL needed helps filling in the gaps, this is immediately followed by another Hitler speech quip where Die Fuhrer is talking about white superiority or some such mess. Then a bespectacled Nazi nerd named Todd shows a banner  reading "Adolf Hitler Was Right" while another 'un shows off a tatoo of a Jew hanging from a tree, to represent what he believes DIDN'T happen during the Holocaust. Which, in one of the most surreal things I've ever seen in my life, devolves into Loder talking about the "Final Solution" over stock footage of Auschwitz skeletons while fucking George Michaels plays in the background." Then this Holocaust survivor is wheeled out so he can say it's not like 1933 in Germany no more, because THIS time they have a chance to defend themselves against the intolerant.

I don't know about you, but I think naming your group "Unidentified German Oi Band" is just painfully pretentious.

We return from commercial break and Kurt Loder is walking around Berlin while "Winds of Change" by The Scorpions play because fuck it, subtlety is for pussies. There's this great transition shot where footage of people being all happy during the fall of the Berlin Wall is interrupted by scenes of skinheads throwing Molotov cocktails into buildings. Loder then talks about "economic paranoia" and "anti-immigrant sentiment" fueling far right ideologies in post-reunification Germany, which culminates with a clip of skinheads singing a song about giving Elie Wiesel cups of tea laced with Zyklon B. This ultimately leads to Loder stating that kids are turning to white power music because they feel as if their governments are sacrificing THEIR economic futures in favor of their own liberal social policies ... which, yeah, certainly couldn't explain why kids TODAY are into all of that "alt-right" Pepe the Frog stuff or anything like that. The narrator then explains how 1.5 million migrants from war-torn, former Soviet-controlled states have flooded into Germany since 1988, and that's making neo-Nazi skinheads ANGRY as all get-out. To demonstrate this, we get this one unintentionally hilarious scene where an Indian guy points to graffiti showing a swastika and carefully explains that it probably means "hey, these guys might be Nazis, be careful fucking with them." Then we get footage of a 1992 "anti-fascist" concert headlined by The Scorpions before another commercial break whisks us away.

Now we turn our attention to North American skinhead music, and it doesn't take Kurt long to start decrying outfits like "The Church of the Creator" and the "Hammerskins" as vile, reprehensible pieces of dookie who "hate all people different from themselves," all while praising "non-racist" skinhead groups like the Sharps, who - irony of ironies - hate everybody who thinks differently from themselves. That segues into the lead singer of RAHOWA talking about how important the Internet is to building the skinhead music fanbase, which leads to a scene in which a hacker acting on MTV's behalf infiltrates a BBS board that offers homemade explosives recipes and asks its users to send in the addresses of "queers" for some kind of database. This leads Loder to ask what is it about this kind of music that goads Americans into believing such incredibly "anti-American ideals?" One detective says it's probably because the kids are getting abused and neglected at home and they're probably longing for any kind of camaraderie that doesn't include their parents yelling at 'em or the cool kids at school referring to 'em as "weirdo faggots." 

Apparently, 1993's neo-Nazis looked like 2016's Bernie Sanders supporters.

Time to hear from the lead singer of RAHOWA again (who, of course, has renounced his Nazi ways over the last few decades, in case you forgot it.) He says some inconsequential shit, and now it's time for Kurt Loder to hit the mean streets of Orlando, wearing a gaudy red floral shirt and sunglasses as part of some "undercover" assignment.

Oh shit, he's there to interview the imperial wizard of the KKK, who is apparently a 16-year-old kid with four or five developmental disorders named Archie Johnston. Meanwhile, this dude in a Beastie Boys shirt makes fun of him for being into Hitler. He shows Kurt a noose in his bedroom and says the Klan is about "Christian Identity" and they argue about what the biblical definition of "neighbor" is. Anyway, they try their damnedest to make Archie look mentally retarded, which, yeah, he probably is. Then they show him talking on the phone trying to get a bunch of guys together to go scare some homosexuals while "Take The Skinheads Bowling" plays in the background. Loder than asks whether or not Archie and his ilk ought to be censored which - after citing the First Amendment - he begrudgingly says no. But that doesn't mean he doesn't think they shouldn't be under a constant state of surveillance, which Loder never addresses as a violation of the FIFTH Amendment, but what the hell ever. 

By the way, that Archie kid was later arrested for assaulting an interracial couple. And the special ends with him getting taken into custody while "The KKK Took My Baby Away" by The Ramones plays. Yeah - I can't imagine TODAY'S MTV being so tongue-in-cheek when it comes to TODAY'S skinheads, for sure.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Gomer Pyle, S.S.

You know, this kind of stuff is getting harder and harder to get a hold of. In fact, the only way I could even screen this special was a secondhand copy of a copy taken from fucking Veoh, so it's probably safe to assume that within another five or ten years or so, this thing's gonna' be all but erased from the Web. And since YouTube and Dailymotion are getting so insanely Nazi-esque about both copyright protected material and "offensive" content (even if it's framed in a way to make fun of and demean people with radical viewpoints) getting posted on their respective platforms, unless somebody is ripping this shit to the Internet Archive en mass we could be on the verge of a multimedia purge the likes of which haven't been seen since the great MGM vault fire of 1967.

The whole thing, from start to finish, is barely 22 minutes long and once you've caught it once there's not really anything noteworthy enough to inspire you to rewind the cassette. It definitely has a weird late '80s, early '90s vibe going on, meaning it doesn't really feel like it belongs in either decade, but still has enough aesthetic imprints from both to kinda feel familiar.

While MTV today hosts entire awards show anchored around white guilt, I suppose it's safe to say they weren't nearly as deft with their counter-propaganda back in '93. It's obvious that Viacom was trying to posit the emerging neo-Nazi skinhead music culture as a major cultural concern, but at the same time it's presented in such a hokey package that it's hard to take the program seriously. That's evident from the goofy Beavis and Butt-Head onscreen font and the downright bizarre musical interludes (I'm STILL not over the whole Auschwitz-set-to-George Michael music video), not to mention the depiction of Archie Johnston as a dude literally too retarded to answer basic questions about the U.S. Constitution, let alone usher in an ethnic purge of millions of people.

Eventually, Viacom would get significantly better at using the Music Television format to push sociopolitical agendas, but Hate Rock is certainly evidence that the powers-that-are at MTV have been trying to use their platform to engineer culture for decades. As an anti-white supremacist spiel, it's pretty weak and flaccid, and as a random abstraction of its time, it's not all that entertaining nor enlightening. Indeed, I think we'd all rather have watched the commercials that originally ran on the program than the program itself - and if that isn't a testament to the fact we've become a truly post-racial society (if not a colorless, mass-marketer-tested, consumerism-uber-alles Valhalla) I don't know what is.

ADDENDUM!

A while back I actually got an email from a guy who said he knew Todd and the circle he hung out with back in the day. I asked the reader if I could publish his email comments in full, which he agreed to under the condition I keep his identity secret. Anyhoo, here's what he had to say — by the way, I'm publishing it unedited, just because. 

I knew Todd (last name Keller), in fact I still have some junky old tattoos from the kid. (he was) Dumb as a rock,  I moved away from Orlando just a few months before this MTV episode was filmed. 

I'm NOT a racist, but sadly I was. I grew up and avoided the criminal life that killed or jailed everyone I knew from that time. I'm writing to give you some insight to what happened then and there in Oviedo.  

There is no justification for this ignorant bullshit but Todd wasn't  raised by some redneck - his mother was normal and frequently admonished Todd for his racism. He wasn't poor. He didn't do drugs. He believed most of what he aspoused to believe mostly because of the school system in Oviedo.  

Jackson Heights middle school and oviedo high were racial hotbed in the mid 90s. Both schools had a majority of African American students, these children were also having very hard lives. Crack was king and given the rural history of the town many of them where grandchildren or great grandchildren of real slaves. There were murders, race riots (in school), and if you were white you sometimes bore the brunt of issues. I saw two murders one in 6th grade and one in 9th. 

Time and travel continue to impress on me how strange of a world I live in. No one had hope, everyone hated everyone. In all honesty we (black and white) should have probably fought for a better school, teachers that cared, and our future. 

And really, there's only one thing I can say in riposte to that. And that thing, of course, is ...

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Billy Bob's Huntin' 'n' Fishin' on the GBC!

Revisiting an obscure 1999 Midway handheld release that nailed just about every "white trash" cliche in the book (and still got an "E for Everybody" rating despite its brazenly classist and racist sentiments.)

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

"These days we hardly ever see the redneck as anything but a caricature. A whole vein of human experience, of potential literature, is dismissed as a joke, much as America's popular notions of black culture were relegated to lawn jockeys and Sambo caricatures a generation or two ago. The redneck is the only cardboard figure left standing in our ethnic shooting gallery. All the other targets have been quietly removed in deference to unwritten laws of cultural sensitivity. We no longer have Stepin Fetchit, but Jim 'Ernest' Varney still rears his ugly po'bucker head. Instead of Amos 'n' Andy, there's Beavis and Butt-Head or Darryl and Darryl from Newhart. White trash are open game. The trailer park has become the media's cultural toilet, the only acceptable place to dump one's racist inclinations."

- Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto (1997)

"Billy Bob is in love, and the only way to win the hand of Daisy Mae is to become the best dadgum sportsman in Wydville! Shoot, that's a hillbilly biathlon of huntin'-n-fishin'! So grab your gear, gas up the quad and spend the day in the backwoods with Billy Bob!"

- Back box description, Billy Bob's Huntin' 'n' Fishin' (1999)

Imagine, if you will, a game company releasing a title called Ned the Nigger's Jigaboo Blues, in which you play a gigantic-lipped convicted felon attempting to flee child support enforcement officers while using crack cocaine vials as much-needed power-ups. Or how about Nick the Spic in Tortilla Trouble, in which you play an anthropomorphic burrito trying to sneak all 80 of his relatives into the U.S. in one beat-to-shit 1987 Toyota Tercel. Or maybe Fred the Faggot's HIV-Positive Adventure, in which you play a homosexual miscreant on a mission to anally infect as many innocent youths with AIDS as possible.

Yeah - doesn't seem too bloody likely that any publisher would release such software. In fact, the person who proposed any of those ideas listed above wouldn't just get fired, he would probably get black-balled from the industry altogether, and pending he lives in Europe or Canada, actually be imprisoned for cooking up such offensive ideas. 

But for whatever reason, mass society draws the "off-limits" ethnoracial stereotype line at white people. And not just any kinda' white people, mind you - poor-ass Caucasians who predominantly live in mountainous rural areas in the American south. You'd NEVER see website like New Republic publish headlines like "Hillary Clinton's Plan to Court Porch Monkeys" or "Bernie Sanders Makes Appeal to Greedy-Ass Jews," but I'll be goddamned if they see nothing ethically wrong about running headlines like "The White Trash Theory of Donald Trump." And whereas The New York Times would NEVER place a video on their website with a title like "Invasion of the Wide-Nostril Having Darkies" or "Attack of the Indian Convenience Store Owners Who Don't Wear Underarm Deodorant," by golly, they have no qualms about placing videos titled "Close Encounters of the Inbred Redneck Kind" front and goddamn center. And certainly fine, outstanding Democratic strategists and liberal publication writers would NEVER respond to Tawana Brawley's allegations of (faux) rape as the idle chatter of some big-assed ghetto welfare queen, but folks like James Carville have no problem belittling individuals who accuse their candidates of sexual assault as nothing more than "trailer trash."

Of course, this Appalachiphobia is nothing new. Hicks, hillbillies, rednecks and white trash have been cultural pariahs since at least the early 1970s, thanks in no small part to movies like Deliverance which portrayed the denizens of rural Georgia as literal inbred mutant sodomites. That's an image that still comes to mind whenever "normies" think about poor whites of the deep South - one, naturally, that is conflated with the unapologetically racist "good old boy" stereotype as depicted in EVERY single movie ever set in the 1950s and 1960s south of the Mason-Dixon, even though that's confusing two very different sets of white people with two very different sets of socioeconomic pedigrees. Things came to a head in the 1990s, though, when Jeff Foxworthy's "You Might Be a Redneck" shtick became a cultural sensation (interestingly, Foxworthy himself comes from a upper-middle class family that could hardly be described as "poor white trash." Indeed, he even attended Georgia Tech and worked as an I.T. specialist for IBM ... not exactly something you'd equate with trailer park couture.) And from that brief explosion in mainstream rednexploitation - yes, the same regrettable trend that gave us Joe Dirt and Cledus T. Judd and Redneck Rampage - comes Billy Bob's Huntin' 'n' Fishin', a Game Boy Color release from Midway that hit store shelves in the year of our lord 1999. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and in the case of this game's box art, I'm guessing 999 of them are variations of expletives. If there was ever an image that qualified as a "white minstrel show," this would be it. The toothless smile. The vacant, glassy-eyed stare. The brazen and pathetic ignorance of his own surroundings. The character is pretty much the gender-swapped version of that "Sheeeit" meme caricature - about as caustic and condemnatory a cartoon you can make about this particular ethnic group. But somehow, the character you play in the game is somehow even worse; not only is he a snaggletoothed, morbidly obese retard, he literally has flies circling under his armpits as a default animation.

Of course, it's one thing to look at the mere aesthetics of the game and write it off as deeply prejudiced, leukophobic virtual agitprop, but you all know that we here at The Internet Is In America always go one better when it comes time to deconstruct trash culture relics. Indeed, I played through the whole game recently, and ... yeah, it's pretty much everything the box art promised and then some.

Boy, how long do you think it took 'em to come up with this mini-game concept?

Strangely enough I do remember seeing the game at EB Games back when it was brand new. My morbid curiosity always compelled me to play it, but the opportunity (or desire, or having enough money to buy the fuckin' thing) never arose. Well, here we are in the "virtually everything ever can be emulated" era and man, do I pity the fools who sprung $39.99 USD for this thing when it was brand new.

There's a plot of sorts to Billy Bob. When you start off the game you're at a crossroads and given several branching paths. Signage points you to the game's hunting mini-games, its fishing mini-games and the double wide domicile of one Daisy Mae, who is the protagonist's unrequited love object. You see, the whole reason you're hunting and fishing to begin with is to impress Daisy, and every time you hit the lake or woodlands you're given a certain goal - i.e., shoot this many ducks or catch a fish that weighs this many pounds - to appease the apple of Billy Bob's eye.

But you just can't go out huntin' or fishin' anytime you want. You see, before you can go out and do much of anything you have to win licenses by completing some prerequisite tasks. Now, you can go hunting or fishing without a license, but when you do the game warden will chase after you and - since Billy Bob is, what, at least 350 pounds judging from the box art - it's only a matter of time until he catches you and throws you in the pokey for spotlighting. 

Naturally, the rest of the characters in the game are crude stereotypes of poor white Southerners, too. You've got gangly guys missing rows of teeth, guys with scraggly beards and yellowed armpits, hell, even the game warden is pretty much the epitome of the fat ass Southern sheriff trope. And if that wasn't enough, a slightly more upbeat ripoff of "Dueling Banjos" loops on an infinite repeat throughout the game. Fuck, you think these guys could've thrown in a meth manufacturing mini-game while they were at it?

As for the graphics, they aren't too bad. I'll give the developers of the game mild props for the fairly detailed stages. You've got toilets sticking out of mud bogs and outhouses and skunks and beat up abandoned cars dotting the environs, so you're not just ambling around green and brown blobs the whole time. And as someone who did grow up in the kind of milieu Billy Bob's making fun of, I can't say their graphical representation of what white trash America resembles isn't entirely unrealistic. 

While there is an overworld, so to speak, the bulk of the gameplay comes in bite-sized mini-game form. Here's a quick rundown of the game's, uh, events:

Gallery Shooting - just like that one game at the carnival, a bunch of cardboard animals move back and forth on a scrolling pulley and you have to hit a certain number of specified paper critters to move on. Hardly original, but at least the controls are pretty decent. 

Huntin' - yeah, it's pretty much Whack-A-Mole. There's about three or four different hunting spots that you monkey around in (next to an outhouse, right of a muddy dirt road,  etc.) and animal heads quickly pop up and disappear. Each "mission" you're assigned a certain number of critters to mortally wound, and the controls are fixed to a four directional scheme (which means you can't move the reticle around the screen, hitting up, left, right and down on the D-pad just cycles you around like you where on an invisible wheel.) Needless to say, this stuff gets tedious real fast, but it's not a broken mechanic and if you are REALLY easily entertained, it won't bother you too much.

Pig jugglin' - I honestly don't know how to describe this one without it sounding like I'm just pulling shit out of my ass. So, you have the option to take a bath after completing a mini-game, and of course, since Midway thinks poor Appalachians are literally stuck in the fucking Middle Ages, you have to wash yourself off in a pond. But you see, these pigs keep trying to jump in there with you - for whatever reason, I don't want to know - so you have to move left and right super fast to block them, a'la Arkanoid. Look, I know you assholes had a hard time coming up with thematically appropriate mini-games, but shit, pig juggling is the best you could come up with? Fuck, Jeff Foxworthy wrote an entire book about Southern recreational competitions, and the real Redneck Games had been a thing for three years by the time this game reached the beta phase. Promoting prejudicial stereotypes is one thing, guys, but being this lazy capitalizing on them is offensive on an entirely different level.

Worm diggin' and Crawdad catchin'- the prerequisites for the fishing stages. They might look a little different, but the concept (and controls) are identical. Once again it's a Whack-A-Mole variation as you smash the D-Pad trying to scrounge up as many nightcrawlers and crawfish as possible as they pop up and quickly disappear. I'm really at a loss to say anything more about this. 

Minnow catchin'- another fishing prerequisite (you need the minnows as bait, you see) but I'm giving it a separate entry because it's a practically broken mini-game. You stand in the middle of four tanks and little green fish fly across the stage in totally unpredictable patterns. You have literally a split-second to snap up the sumbitches, but there's a slight delay in the button push to character response time so invariably, by the time the net swinging animation begins the fish has already disappeared. Literally the only way to "win" this is to just hit the D-Pad like you're having  seizure and just hope that in your spasms you incidentally net a fish or two before hitting the waterways.

Does the fun ever end around these parts?

Soda can catchin' - you know that part in Maximum Overdrive when the Coke machine goes haywire and starts spittin' Diet Coke cans at people's skulls? Well, this is pretty much the video game version of that, only this time around you're supposed to get hit by the flying bottles of Mr. Pibb and Cranberry Sprite. I really have no idea what this game has to do with being a redneck, other than the fact the developers ran slap out of ideas and said "fuck it, let's recreate the milkshake stage from Back to the Future on the NES" and called it an afternoon. And shit, if you're going to build a game around crude stereotypes, couldn't you have made it cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, or moonshine or Oxycontin instead?

Fishin' - you're given the option of three different boats, but because white trash are too poor to afford nice things, all of them have holes in them, which means you can only fish for a finite amount of time until you sink. Of course, this is just a needless way of artificially amping up the difficulty and trying to wring a little bit more gameplay out of the experience, but unless you're an absolute retard you'll have no problem avoiding sinking. As with the huntin' sequences, you're given a certain task ("catch this many catfish" or "catch a bass that weighs this much") and you get to troll around until you complete the mission. The backgrounds are pretty entertaining (the water is clogged with busted commodes and pirate skeletons and aliens and UFOs, for whatever reason) but the actual fishing mechanic is ho-hum. Basically, you just hit the A buttn and after a few seconds something snags your line and then you mash the A button again like a motherfucker until you reel it in (so yeah, don't expect the finesse required in fishing games that are actually fun like Sega Marine Fishing.) The thing is, the events are totally random. Sometimes you'll get an actual fish, but half the time you wind up reeling in a tire, or a boot or some other worthless object and waste your bait. I can't say it's a terrible fishing engine, overall, but it's certainly one that leaves a LOT to be desired.

For those of you looking for a long-term investment, there's only about ten required mini-game missions before you can warp right along to the end boss. And yes, this game does indeed offer a final battle, in the form of back-to-back arm wrestling contests against Daisy Mae's mama and daddy before they allow you to fuck the shit out of her. This is just pure-D button mashin' right here - a left or right arrow signal pops up onscreen, and then you push the hell out of it and maybe, you'll win. Oh, and if you lose to either of them, you have to do BOTH of the final huntin' and fishin' stages over again. But I assure you, the final "game over" screen is totally worth the investment. I mean, isn't being able to see this shit right here WORTH the retroactive $40 MSRP? 

Hell, I'm just surprised the game didn't end with an option to marry the fuckin' billy goat. 

There's no way around it - this game sucks. I mean, not that it being a halfway decent game would necessarily override the blatant, anti-rural racism of the title, but shit - if you're going to insult an entire ethnic group, the least you can do is get the fucking control scheme right.

The funny thing - well, maybe not funny, what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, the opposite of funny - is that shit like this is STILL getting mass marketed in the video game industry. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can go to the Apple Store and download games like Redneck Simulator and The White Trash App, which not only gleefully misappropriate poor rural culture but indeed mock the multitudes of miseries of the impoverished Appalachian as quirky entertainment. Of course, nobody condemns these games the same way publications like Vice crucify video games about running dirty Chinese restaurants. As Jim Goad so clearly elucidated more than 20 years ago, in this America the mocking, shaming and stereotyping of ANY ethnoracial group is strictly verboten - unless, of course, that group is poor Southern white people. 

And in that, the mystery isn't how a piece of software as brazenly bigoted as Billy Bob's Huntin' 'n' Fishin' ever got released, but why they aren't even more titles like it glutting the video game arena. But as evident by the pending release of Far Cry 5 - in which video gamers across the world can commit virtual genocide against an endless wave of straw men racist yokels - maybe that little niche is going to get filled a whole lot faster than anticipated.

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Fun with Coca-Cola's Ill-Conceived 'Share A Coke' Generator!

Surely, the suits at Coke had to have seen such tomfoolery coming, right?

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@JimboX

On one hand, I have to give the marketing department at Coca-Cola all the credit in the world for their seasonal "Share a Coke With ..." campaign. It's such a simple strategy, but oh so effective. Who'd thought that simply slapping a couple of common first names on the side of a soda label would've aroused so much consumer attention and spurred summertime sales? 

But maybe it shouldn't be that surprising. After all, such gimmicks capitalize on consumers' innate egotism, and it's the kind of commercial pornography that's just ripe for social media exploitation. And now that they're throwing out cans and bottles with surnames on 'em, it's just a matter of time until ever Tom, Dick and Susan in the country is flooding Instagram with their personal information spelled out in fizzy drink packaging form. Privacy, shmrivacy, if pushing two aluminum cans together is all it takes to get 100 likes on Facebook, the aggregate American will do it in a heartbeat. 

Which brings me to this poorly thought-out marketing ploy from the House of Sprite and Mr. Pibb. By now, we should all know that it's NEVER a good idea to give the Internet hoi polloi the ability to submit any kind of user-generated content on a company's official website or social media feed. Remember that time "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" was selected as the official name of the latest Mountain Dew variation, or that time the New England Patriots' Twitter bots sent a shoutout to a user named "ihateniggers?" Hell, this isn't even the first time Coca-Cola has had the rug pulled out from under it using the whole "Share a Coke With..." shtick, as this article from 2015 elucidates upon. Simply put, nothing good could come from Coca-Cola re-opening its online "Share a Coke With..." bottle generator, and I took it as a personal challenge to fuck with the thing as much as humanly (and hilariously) possible.

Designing a bottle is about as simple as it gets. You get to choose from one of four different bottle designs, and you have about 20 characters to get your message across. After you're done, you can load the thing into your virtual cart and, for $5 plus shipping and handling, you can have the custom-made bottle zipped along to your home address.

Of course, the name generator does have some built-in safeguards. The really obvious stuff - the "n-word," the "f-word," Hitler, etc. - are already pre-banned, as well as the terms "fat," "diabetes" and "obesity" (gee, I wonder why?) Interestingly enough, even a couple of proper names are verboten, including Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, David Duke and Stalin. Even weirder, the word "black" itself is on the pre-banned list, even though "white" isn't, and even weirder than that, while "ISIS" is on the do-not-print list, "Nazis" is totally OK. So, from the get-go, we just know there's going to be a lot of gaps in their language filter, and within three minutes, I was already having a field day.

Say hello to Coke's new, limited-edition /pol/ flavored colas.

Apparently, Coca-Cola needs a refresher course on contemporary ethnic slurs. Pretty much every non-"nigger" pejorative for the black people you can think of flies by undetected, and practically every Nazi-related term that ain't "Adolf" or "Hitler" passes the smell test. 

And sometimes, you can get all three in one package!

There's a couple of other filter oddities afoot, too. For example, "obesity" all by itself is off-limits, but if you wedge a "morbid" in front of it, all of a sudden it becomes permissible for print. Similarly, you can get away with making a bottle that says "Black Panthers," but they won't let you print one that says simply "Black People." 

Something tells me that old "I'd Like To Buy The World A Coke" commercial would've played out way differently had they used THESE bottles.

Of course, anybody into vaporwave can already tell you there's an easy way around ALL of Coke's censorship. If you just have to have a Coca-Cola bottle in your possession that has "Hitler" or "Niggers" emblazoned upon it, all you have to do is put a single space between each letter and the filter is none the wiser. That said, consider me shocked a plenty that the formal filtering algorithms DIDN'T include "cunt" on the insta-banned word list. I mean, isn't that like a top five swear word everywhere in the Western world?

Man ... what a great idea for a sitcom!

The possibilities here are pretty much endless. Whatever offensive, deplorable or insensitive thing you can think of, Coca-Cola's half-assed censoring mechanisms are pretty much powerless to stop you from printing them. I spent an entire Saturday evening trying to conjure up the most disgusting, depraved and demeaning bottles I could, and by the end of the night I felt pretty confident that - if I truly wanted to - I could easily order a small platoon of Coca-Cola bottles lined with an endless panoply of swears and epithets. Of course, the real fun would be ordering the bottles and then sneaking them into actual businesses and slipping them into real display cases in an all-time awesome prank that would probably draw international coverage and goad Coca-Cola into issuing a never-ending stream of public apologies. 

Not that we here at The Internet Is In America would EVER condone such. Or encourage it. Or give you a direct link to where you can do so. Or offer a special prize to the first person who emails us conclusive proof that they actually received a physical Coca-Cola bottle with a major slur printed on it. 

I mean, what kind of trouble makers do you think we are, anyway?

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My 28 Favorite Fictitious Black People

A heartfelt celebration of the greatest dark-skinned people who never actually existed. 

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Every February, just about every website out there not operated by neo-Nazis scrambles to put together some kind of cloying "Black History Month" retrospective. Even the nichest of blogs try to cobble together something that highlights the impact/significance of black individuals on whatever random bullshit they cover, even when there's hardly any racial connections to work with whatsoever. Case in point? This dude who year in, year out, desperately tries to tack on a "Black History Month" angle to anime culture. 

Well, we here at The Internet Is In America are far, far beyond such half-hearted, half-assed displays of cowardly, politically-correct tokenism. By golly, if we're going to celebrate black people, we're going to go all out and celebrate black people as if we actually were black people (you know, because black people are known for being among the most festive of ethnic groups.) But why draw up yet another boring ass listicle highlighting why Martin Luther King, Jr. was literally better than Jesus and reminding people that a black dude invented peanut butter (even though some French Canadian fruit already had a patent on it?) Malcolm X and Booker T. Washington already get enough acclaim from us as it is, so howzabout we focus on that oh-so unsung, forgotten brotherhood of brothas' who exist solely in the realm of fiction?

If you ask us, make-believe black people deserve far more recognition, especially in this bitterly divided political climate. Sure, sure, the following pioneering black folks may not have corporeally impacted the world around us, but they sure as shit made an impression on ALL of our collective pop cultural upbringings. If blackness were a brand, consider the following 28 individuals to be among the best spokesmen the world of entertainment could ever hoist upon us - the melanin-challenged and the melanin-unchallenged, alike.  

So here's to you, unheralded fictitious black characters - this is a token of appreciation long overdue for both you and your peoples. 

01. Waldo Faldo (Family Matters) 

I've said it time and time again; Waldo Faldo was the absolute best thing about Family Matters, and considering this was a show that has an evil ventriloquist doll as a recurring character and people using the teleport pod from The Fly to turn into Bruce Lee clones so they can beat up drug runners easier, trust me, that's saying something. Give actor Shawn Harrison (who hasn't really done much of anything since the show got cancelled) all the credit in the world, because he absolutely killed it playing the Bizarro retard to Steve Urkel's boy genius Lex Luthor. It's hard to pick just one memorable Waldo moment from the show, so instead, I'll just recount my two favorite Waldo-isms: the time he took Laura to go see JFK (pronouncing it as "jif-kuh") and when after a bully told Steve to "put his money where his mouth is," he quickly interjected "don't do it, Steve, money's dirty!"

02. Arnold Drummond (Diff'rent Strokes) 

Diff'rent Strokes might just be my favorite sitcom ever, and a lot of that has to do with the little ball of delightfulness that was Arnold Drummond. Played by the greatest black midget actor of all-time (fuck you Emmanuel Lewis) - the inimitable Gary Coleman, who I think was about 40-or-something at the time the show was on - the character brought such an admirable air of pluckiness to the oft-heavy handed program, offering much-needed naivety and comedic relief whenever his best friend got molested down at the bike shop or his sister got abducted and sexually tortured by a guy who said he was an astronaut. Pretty much EVERY episode of Diff'rent Strokes holds up incredibly well today, making it one of the few shows from the 1980s that's not only watchable, but watchable in a non-smarmy, post-ironic way. And you can attribute most of the show's staying power to one thing, and one thing only - our adorable little buddy Arnold.

03. Demon (Friday the 13th: A New Beginning) 

Demon is my favorite victim in the entire F13 canon and don't nobody else even come close. Portrayed by Miguel A. Nunez, Jr. - yes, the same guy who played Spider in Return of the Living Dead, Dee Jay in the live-action Street Fighter movie and was the titular character in Juwanna Mann - Demon is a dude who lives in a trailer with a refrigerator filled with enchiladas, pizza and eggrolls who says "you're gonna' get it, bitch" to his girlfriend while she rocks him back and forth in a tin outhouse. Of course, this being a Jason movie and all, things don't exactly end well for him after he smokes weed and takes a shit will singing "ooo, baby" over and over again. Long story short? Let's just say the kind of penetration he gets prolly wasn't the kind of penetration he wanted.

04. Magneto Jones (Hamburger: The Motion Picture) 

Holy shit, if you've never seen Hamburger, you need to click out of this nonsense, mosey on over to YouTube and watch it right freakin' now. There are literally 9,000 things to love about this movie - from the scene where an old woman tells a drive-thru speaker "fuck off, pickle" to the part where Dick Butkus (yes, that Dick Butkus) calls a black cop "pecker cheese" and tells him to go pick up his check down at the welfare office to the grand finale where two dozen 400 pound-plus fast food patrons get diarrhea simultaneously. Alas, even in a movie jammed pack with highlights, the absolute best thing about Hamburger has to be Chip McAllister's performance as Magneto Jones, a Jermaine Jackson wannabe who's getting a free edumacation at Hamburger U just so the parent company won't get hit with a civil rights suit. Sure, he spends most of the movie handcuffed and kept in lockdown, but at least they let him out of bondage long enough to participate in this beautiful dialogue exchange:

Fred Domino: "All right, who ordered 60 Double Buster Burgers?"

Magneto Jones: "That fat motherfucker right there. That fat motherfucker right there. Them two giggling twin motherfuckers right there. And that skinny walnut headed motherfucker right there ordered 72."

And if you don't laugh your ass of when he receives a lifetime achievement award the minute he earns his diploma, you sir or madam, are not fit to live in our society.

05. DJ Professor K (Jet Grind Radio) 

The mastermind of the single greatest soundtrack in the history of video gaming (well, in-universe, anyway.) Kinda' sorta representing the post-corporate-apocalypse-takeover version of Samuel L. Jackson's character in Do The Right Thing, DJ Professor K operates the titular Jet Set Radio pirate station, which - in addition to slinging' the dopest electro-funk, J-Pop and indie hip-hop you'll find anywhere - also gives you crucial tips and info on overthrowing the man in your rocket-powered rollerblades. Considering how much I love both Jet Grind Radio and Jet Set Radio Future, I suppose you only imagine my exuberant joy when my girlfriend flipped on How To Get Away With Murder and the fucking detective WAS the same guy that used to scream "Rapid 99, gotta' FLAG!" on my Xbox. 

06. Roland Kincaid (A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, 4) 

Kincaid is EASILY the best thing about the Elm Street movies, and that includes Robert Englund. Hell, if New Line Cinema had any sense, they would've had Kincaid break Freddy K in half Bane-style in the first 10 minutes of part 4 and the rest of the franchise just woulda' been him walking around all day calling people "motherfuckers" and telling him how bad he's gonna' whup their asses for trivial offenses. Ken Sagoes - far and away the greatest alumni of Kennesaw State University, and it's not even close - also gets bonus points for portraying yet another iconic black character, Darryl on the short-lived What's Happening Now!

07. Carl Carlson (The Simpsons)

You know, Carl Carlson may in fact be the most flattering depiction of the working class black man in any realm of fiction. Totally devoid of the hackneyed, desperate black mannerisms most African-American stock characters are saddled with, Carl actually comes off as a fairly relatable and respectable blue collar worker (despite canonically holding an advanced degree in nuclear physics) who is far more professional than any of his white coworkers. And if geographical diversity is one of those things you're keen on, the character may indeed be the only pop culture character in history ever described as "African-Icelandic."

08. Clubber Lang (Rocky III)

Forget Apollo Creed, forget Ivan Drago and forget Tommy "Machine" Gunn - the best Rocky "villain" has always been James "Clubber" Lang. Unforgettably portrayed by Mr. T - who is basically just playing a slightly more jazzed up version of B.A. Baracus - Lang actually had a pretty convincing argument for hating Rocky ... because the media was showering him with praise for being "The Great White Hope" and he kept ducking him, knowing he was the far better boxer. Sure, threatening to rape Rocky's wife at a press conference was a pretty bold move, but hey, it DID get him that championship bout, didn't it? That it took an ass whupping from Hulk Hogan and Rocky literally learning how to fight black to get the belt back shows you just how daunting a rogue this Lang fellow really is. 

09. New Jack (ECW Wrestling)

After making his debut in Smoky Mountain Wrestling - where he tried to win matches by "affirmative action" (that being, a win via two-count) and feuded with a guy named "The Dirty White Boy" - one Jerome Young packed his bags to Philadelphia, where he was soon transformed into a "singles" 'rassler whose entire shtick revolved around hitting people with staplers, cookie sheets and old VCR units while Dr. Dre and Ice Cube blared over the P.A. system for the duration of the bout. His career highlights include almost murdering a teenager before a live audience, LITERALLY trying to kill another wrestler by trying to impale him on a ringpost, getting arrested for stabbing a dude FOR REAL during a match and this one time he legit  beat the shit out of an old dude with a baseball bat while disgruntled Caucasian fans kept calling him a "nigger." 

10. Tom Johnson (Shenmue)

Granted, a Jamaican hot dog vendor in rural Japan in the late 1980s may sound a little, uh, unlikely, but there's no denying the affable food truck owner isn't one of the most memorable characters from the Dreamcast classic. After all - the dude did let us borrow his ghetto blaster to play flowery Japanese pop music and taught us how to spin kick glass beer bottles, didn't he?

11. Freddy "Rerun" Stubbs (What's Happening!!)

You know how they talk about actors having their lives ruined by one acting role sometimes? Well, Fred Berry's life was totally destroyed by What's Happening!! and its less heralded late 1980s sequel What's Happening Now!! Until the day he died in 2003, he had to live in the inescapable shadow of "Rerun," the rotund, red beret sportin', hamburger-shirt wearing comedic fat-ass who ran around the hood yelling "hey, Hey, HEY!" and getting arrested for trying to bootleg Doobie Bros. concerts. But come on, was it really that bad of a hand in life if it produced one of the better black family sitcoms of the late 1970s? Eh - probably not, but at least he turned out better than Todd Bridges, I suppose. 

12. Grandma Turner (Fight For Your Life)

The only female African-American to make the countdown, but trust me, she fucking earned it. Longtime The Internet Is In America readers should already know plenty about the immortal blaxploitation/home invasion classic Fight For Your Life, and in a film LOADED with memorable moments, she might very well be responsible for the single best part of the entire movie. Say it loud and say it proud, kids: "don't move or I'll blow your motherfuckin' balls off!"

13. Jericho Jackson (Action Jackson)

Think, for a moment, just how incredible of a career Carl Weathers has had. What would certainly be the career highlights of a good 99.8 percent of the rest of the actors out there - roles like Dreamer Tatum in Semi-Tough - have all but been forgotten because of his even better performances in movies like Predator. Alas, as good as his portrayal of Apollo Creed may have been - and it's the epitome of fuckin' timeless already - the absolute zenith of Weathers' career HAS to be his performance as the eponymous Action Jackson in 1988. I mean, goddamn ... just LOOK at the trailer! There's no way a movie starring Coach as the evil antagonist should be this awesome, but trust me - it is. 

14. Tommy Gibbs (Hell Up In Harlem)

Picking my favorite Fred Williamson role is sorta' like asking me to pick my favorite testicle. Honestly, I'm fond of all of 'em, but if I HAD to save just one Williamson flick from vanishing off the face of the Earth, it would have to be Hell Up In Harlem. Why? Because it has scenes in which protagonist Tommy Gibbs does all of the following:

a.) he hangs an Italian mobster in a noose and says "I'm about to send you to wop heaven"

b.) he forces another Italian mobster to eat soul food at gunpoint

c.) he tells a preacher's daughter "whenever you get tired of talking to the Lord, come find me" and, perhaps most hilarious of all ... 

d.) while being pursued by the mob, he literally stops dead in his tracks so he can impale a dude at the beach laying on a confederate flag towel, even though he had nothing to do with why Gibbs was being pursued and didn't actually do or say anything to him at all.

So yeah, I need to do a review of this one, like, ASAP. 

15. Griff (Married ... with Children)

Al Bundy is one of the greatest TV characters ever, but it seems to me his supporting cast doesn't get anywhere near the appreciation they deserve. Griff was definitely one of the show's more understated characters, a fellow fatty-hating shoe salesman who, in many ways, represented an even better comedic foil than Jefferson D'arcy. And holy hell, could that guy sing, too!

16. FUCKIN' Dolemite!

As with Fred Williamson, I'm tempted to just include every single character Rudy Ray Moore ever portrayed. Shit, if February had 30 days in it, I prolly would have gone on ahead and done stand-alone entries for The Disco Godfather and Petey Wheatstraw. Alas, whenever you hear the name "Rudy Ray," the first thing that SHOULD come to mind, of course, is motherfuckin' DOLEMITE, the revenge-obsessed, impromptu crude couplet-forming pimp who fought a drug runner in cahoots with city hall in his first movie and then ran around slapping fat racist sheriffs with his pimp cane in the sequel. Yeah, Dolemite has been in some subsequent sequels and spin-offs, but really, you're way better off just watching The Human Tornado five times a day. I mean, just generally, in life. 

17.2 Cold Scoprio (WCW Wrestling)

Although 2 Cold wrestled in all three major U.S. promotions throughout the 1990s, his most memorable work was definitely at the beginning of his career in WCW. Shit, who could forget that time he unveiled his Tumbleweed finisher at Clash of the Champions, or that AWESOME back-and-forth match he had against Barry Windham that, even now, is pretty much the best "underdog almost wins it" bout ever? Yeah, he had some decent bouts in ECW, but don't even bother with all that Flash Funk nonsense in the WWF. Also: 2 Cold is single-handedly responsible for Arn Anderson being alive right now (as well as Sid Vicious not serving a life sentence for homicide.) 

18. Black Manta (D.C. Comics)

I think my favorite thing about Black Manta (besides the fact that he breaks a whole bunch of misconceptions about the black community and buoyancy by being an aquatic-themed African-American villain) is that D.C. just arbitrarily decided he should be black one day. The character had been around for 25 years before they decided to give him a proper backstory, and holy shit, did they ever - by making him a Baltimore youth kidnapped and sexually assaulted by pirates who hates Aquaman simply because he didn't rescue him back when he was eight. And if you're thinking to yourself, "you know, there's no way anybody can come up with an even worse way to retcon his origin story" - they turned around and made him an autistic kid with an affinity for cold water whose beef with Aquaman is derived solely from his desire to hold the nonexistent mantle of "Ocean Master."

19. Morris FUCKIN' DAY!

Yeah, there were some good songs in there (not to mention it was hilarious as fuck watching Prince try to act tough) but the absolute best thing about Purple Rain HAD to be Morris Day. The part where he walks by Prince's dressing room right after his dad attempts suicide, then walks backwards just to ask him "how's the family?" before shucking and jiving his way out of the building is pretty much the consensus pick for funniest dick move ever in the history of anything. However, Morris probably put in an even BETTER heel performance in Graffiti Bridge, complete with one of the greatest moments in the history of the motion picture - the infamous "you know, this plant looks kinda' ... thirsty" scene.

20. Ned Tiese (Brotherhood of Death)

Brotherhood of Death is actually one of the better "serious" blaxploitation movies of the late 1970s, but pretty much the only reason anybody remembers it is because its trailer - its glorious, glorious trailer - was included upfront on the VHS version of Faces of Death II. 'Tis a shame so few people have ever actually seen it, because it really is a well-made and entertaining little B-movie opus. And the only thing more hilarious than watching black vigilantes use an armored school bus to fight the Klan is when it suddenly dawns on you that the main character is played by the same dude who played Dudley's dad on Diff'rent Strokes.

21. Martel "Too Sweet" Gordon (Penitentiary)

Fuck Star Wars, the greatest movie trilogy ever HAS to be the trifecta of Penitentiary movies. You might be thinking to yourself, "old Jimbo, buddy, how exactly can you make a movie about the same character being wrongly imprisoned for a crime he didn't commit THREE TIMES and still make 'em entertaining?" Well, for starters, you make the entire franchise revolve around championship inmate boxing, which - as anyone who watched the great 2014 documentary Champs featuring Bernard Hopkins can attest to - actually exists. Secondly, you toss in a super eclectic cast of side characters, including but not limited to Mr. T and immortal WWF midget 'rassler the Haiti Kid portraying a coke-addicted butthole rapist who lives in the sewer. But most of all, you anchor the whole damn thing around one Martel "Too Sweet" Gordon - played with inimitable pizzazz by Leon Isaac Kennedy, who might as well be the Sir Laurence Oliver of blaxploitation movies - as he battles trumped up murder charges in the courtroom and both steroided up Ernie Hudson and a homosexual drug kingpin who makes Milo Yiannopoulos look like Brock Lesnar between the ropes. 

22. Papa Shango (WWF Wrestling)

There's never been a more terrifying/probably racist pro 'rassler than Papa Shango, and that's saying something when your competition also includes a fat black truck driver from Mississippi repackaged into a cannibal from Sudan with Lucky Charms marshmallows painted on his stomach. If you grew up watching WWF 'rasslin in the early 1990s, you no doubt have PLENTY of memories of this voodoo warrior, whether it was that time he set The Ultimate Warrior's boots on fire or made black sludge pour out of Mean Gene's sleeves on live television. Eventually, the suits at the WWF decided that showcasing a black man as a supernatural Haitian zombie prolly wasn't the most P.C. thing to do, so they did what any company looking to repair its image among minorities would do: the rebranded him as a street fighting thug with MMA skills and later, as an actual pimp.

23. "Black" Roper (Double Dragon)

There weren't a whole lot of black people on the NES, and even in the basketball and football games, they were usually more reddish-purple than any actual hue a black person has ever been. In that, the "black" Ropers from Double Dragon deserve some sort of mention for breaking the 8-bit color barrier. Sure, sure, they may have been nothing more than simple palette swaps of the "standard" Roper enemies, but hey - cultural representation has to start somewhere, even if it is in the form of barrel-throwin' ruffians. 

24. Kel Kimble (Keenan & Kel)

Let's end the argument right here and now - Kel was ALWAYS funnier than Keenan. Yeah, yeah, I know everybody remembers him from Good Burger, but the BEST incarnation of the character had to be the (slightly) more nuanced version featured on the mid-'90s sitcom Keenan & Kel - and the fact that he's the only black person I've ever heard of that prefers orange soda to the purple stuff is reason alone to include him on the countdown.

25. Russ Tyler (The Mighty Ducks 2, 3)

But, we will give Keenan his proper, dap, too. Perhaps noting that the original Mighty Ducks movie was - how to put it - whiter than a mayonnaise blizzard, the suits at Disney reckoned they needed to incorporate an African-American angle into their hockey comedy franchise. The end result? A scene where a bunch of inner city L.A. black kids are using a basketball court for a rousing game of roller hockey set to a song with the lyrics "getting' bent and bent and as a I puff on a dankt" and "uh oh, I crave skin, rip shit, find a honey to dip it in" with our main man Russ Tyler introducing his lethal "knuckle puck" technique ... which, of course, is illegal as fuck in real hockey, but seeing as how there's a redneck who literally "lassos" an opposing player in the movie's climactic championship game, it's not even the stupidest thing in the flick to complain about.

26. Peter (Dawn of the Dead)

While Night of the Living Dead gets all the credit for being the first horror film to (however inadvertently) drudge up the topic of racism, I think we can all agree that the black hero in Dawn of the Dead was way more memorable and likable - yes, even if he did look way too much like O.J. Simpson for my comfort. He's really the only character in the movie that seems to have his shit together, and he gives us the best line of the entire flick (you know, that whole spiel about "when there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.") Also, that look he gives that one bitch early on in the movie when she asks him if he has "real brothers or street brothers" is pretty much the funniest thing ever. 

27. Skeeter Valentine (Doug)

OK, so technically, Skeeter is more turquoise than chocolate, but goddammit, those mannerisms were straight up Afro-American. Even as a kid I knew that Doug's best pal was supposed to be black, even if the show took place in a world where purple and orange skinned motherfuckers were everywhere. And hey, don't accuse me of seeing things that aren't actually there - the creator of the show recently came out and said Mr. Valentine was indeed canonically a negro. 

28. Shaun King (The New York Daily News)

And last but not least, we have the greatest cultural satirist of our day, Mr. Shaun King. Shaun here has delighted readers coast-to-coast with his hilarious post-post-postmodern minstrel show, with only the absolute dimmest of the dim not picking up the surely intended comedy of a man whiter than lite mayo proclaiming himself a leader of the Black Lives Matter movement. Not since the heyday of Amos 'n' Andy has a white performer done so much for the art of racial imitation, and not since the heyday of Andy Kaufman have we seen anyone so committed to living out a public charade that anybody with two brain cells to rub together can figure out is a complete and utter ruse. There's no doubt about it - when it comes to fictitious black people, Shaun King is both our society and our era's literal poster boy, and to think anything less of him, naturally, is plumb preposterous.

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