She starts by asserting that Winter Wipeout is proof that gay people want heteros to suffer and… it actually manages to go downhill from there.

Also, watch the guy behind her. His reactions are hilarious.

I suspect that very few of you know what ‘The Shining’ is really about. You might think you know; you might talk about themes of isolation, claustrophobia, and the darkness in the human spirit made manifest as a “haunted” hotel. But you’d be wrong. You probably aren’t aware of the hidden messages about the dangers of going off the gold standard. You didn’t even know that it was a hidden confession from Stanley Kubrick explaining that he faked the moon landing footage. You hadn’t the slightest clue of its hidden warnings about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. And you…okay, you probably knew about the secret subtext relating to America’s treatment of Native Americans. That one’s so well-known that even Cracked.com covered it. But you probably didn’t know about all of the hidden meanings, because you simply can’t. There’s so many hidden meanings that there’s a whole other movie coming out just about all the meanings in the first movie.

In all seriousness, what does make ‘The Shining’ such a popular subject for such a diverse range of “cryptic meaning” essays? Surely if Kubrick really had a message he was trying to convey, no matter how cleverly he concealed it, you’d expect to get some kind of consensus as to what it might be. But (for those of you who really don’t feel like sitting through a 40-minute YouTube video, or spend an hour or so looking at screenshots) Kubrick’s film almost seems to become a sort of Rorshach test, continually revealing cryptic messages that just happen to exactly coincide with the researcher’s personal perspective. Why? What is it about ‘The Shining’ that makes it more confusing than ‘The Prisoner’? What makes this film the one that people fixate on, while ‘Donnie Darko’ (to name another cult film that plays its cards close to the vest) seems to avoid these kinds of questions? I don’t know that we can ever know for sure, but here are my suggestions.

1) Kubrick isn’t talking. Well, I mean…of course he’s not talking now, but even when he was alive, he wasn’t talking about his movies. Kubrick had a reputation as a notorious recluse, but it would be more accurate to describe him as someone who just didn’t give interviews. He was perfectly content to be social, but he also hated the way that filmmakers who loved to talk about their work had reduced watching a movie to a sterile exercise in spotting the things the director had talked about in a magazine. He didn’t want you to be thinking about the technical reasons that the hedge maze had replaced the hedge animals (budget constraints, for the record–moving hedge animals weren’t technically feasible in 1980.) He wanted you to be watching the movie, and to let you come to your own conclusions about it. Seen from a certain point of view though, a reclusive movie-maker who doesn’t want to talk about his movies because he wants you to “work it out for yourself” can sound like someone who’s embedded a secret meaning. The more mystery invested in the process, the more people expect from the ultimate solution. “Some people are just crazy” is not going to satisfy them.

2) Kubrick had a reputation as a perfectionist. Time and time again, as you read these analyses, you’ll come across a phrase that’s almost word-for-word identical every single time: “A legendary perfectionist like Kubrick certainly wouldn’t allow such an obvious continuity error.” It is a prima facie assumption made in all of these analyses that any apparent mistake in the film must be placed there deliberately, as Kubrick was known for being a perfectionist. These must be hidden messages, because Kubrick doesn’t make mistakes.

This is, of course, an assumption so wrong that it almost has to be unpicked word-for-word. Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, true, but “perfectionist” in this case doesn’t mean “meticulous about set continuity.” Kubrick’s reputation came from his habit of shooting far more film than was necessary, sometimes doing 80-100 takes of a single scene, in order to get the widest possible ranges of performance from his actors and to force them to genuinely inhabit their characters. ‘The Shining’ was no exception; Kubrick spent 200 days in principal photography for a 144-minute film. (This means that on average, Kubrick shot about 45 seconds of usable footage per day. Almost certainly, there must have been whole months worth of days where he shot nothing at all that he used in the final film.) Kubrick was a perfectionist in that he wanted the perfect take, and was willing to shoot as long as was needed until he got it; and once he was armed with all those perfect takes, he would go into the editing room and spend months assembling them into a finished film.

But there’s a big difference between that and being precise about continuity. In fact, Kubrick’s approach works against tight set continuity; when you’re shooting 30, 40, 50 takes of one shot, even going back the next day for more, then of course tiny details aren’t going to be the same from shot to shot. Kubrick wanted the perfect emotional resonance, not the perfect amount of sandwich eaten from moment to moment. Even if he did notice the continuity problems (and he almost certainly did) what was he going to do once he was in the editing booth? Throw out the best performance because the scrapbook was on the wrong page? Kubrick had to be aware that only obsessive viewers notice continuity mistakes to begin with, and he almost certainly had more important things to concern himself. But to the ‘Shining’ enthusiast, each of these tiny mistakes has to be a deliberate message, because they assume Kubrick is a genius who doesn’t do anything by accident.

3) The movie is different from the book. This is true of just about all adaptations, of course, but there’s a little more to it here. One, Kubrick didn’t discuss why he made the changes he made when adapting the novel. (See above.) Two, it’s assumed that a legendary perfectionist like Kubrick wouldn’t make arbitrary changes unless he had a grand vision to them. (See above.) And three, King and Kubrick were legendarily at odds over the adaptation, with King going so far as to write and direct his own adaptation that was more to his liking. With the theme of “changes from the book” highlighted, everyone’s attention is drawn to them. And again, we’re back to the “hidden messages” territory, with every tiny alteration assumed to have cryptic meaning, from the hotel’s origin to its final fate and everything in between.

Again, though, this assumes that Kubrick was able to work in the realm of pure art, with no concessions needing to be made to practicality. Subplots like the simmering conflict between Ullman the hotel manager and Jack, or backstory like his assault on a student at Stovington Prep? Dropped for time, perhaps, because the movie is already over two hours long and there’s not even a mention of them. Wendy and Danny seem different because the characters wound up being interpreted by actors, and because certain elements had to be emphasized and dropped to get the film down to a manageable running time. Logistically difficult effects, such as the destruction of the Overlook Hotel or the moving hedge animals, had to be dropped completely. Nobody ever gets to do everything the way they want to entirely…except maybe George Lucas, which may explain why it’s not such a good thing…and Kubrick is certainly no exception. But if you’re not willing to believe that, then each change takes on a special significance.

4) The ending is ambiguous. Sure, we know that Jack died. But then we get that last cryptic scene, of the photograph in the empty hotel filled with mysterious people and Jack at the center. The caption, “July 4th Ball, 1921.” It has to mean something. It’s the final shot of the film, the one that Kubrick wants us to leave on, the one he wants to resonate in our heads as we’re leaving the theater. He actually went so far as to cut an epilogue out of the film after it reached theaters, so that all we see is the cut from Jack’s body to the mysterious photo. A cryptic ending like that is one that demands endless analysis, deeper investigation, because we want things to make sense. And that ending really, really doesn’t, at least not in a logical and linear sense. (It says a lot that even after “notorious recluse” Kubrick came out and blatantly explained the ending to everyone, people still don’t believe it.) Whatever conclusions you come to about the final shot, you bring something of your own ideas and experiences to it…which leads us to…

5) People really, really like to create patterns. It’s human nature, and the final element that brings the first four together. Once you’ve decided that there is a hidden meaning to ‘The Shining’, once you’ve started looking at it not as a film but as a series of cryptic messages encoded into tiny details, then there’s a sufficiently large mass of data present that you can draw any number of connections between data points based on your own personal viewpoint as a lens. Think that Kubrick was a numerologist? Examine the time codes, you’re bound to find a pattern of significant shots at significant times. (Because Kubrick didn’t really put in any scenes that he didn’t think were important.) Want to find messages about your own personal political, mystical, or historical views? They’re bound to be there if you think symbolically enough and are willing to put in some work massaging the data. (Remember, numbers are infinitely transformable. Add, subtract, multiply and divide and 7/4/1921 can become any set of numbers you care to name.) And ultimately, you will come away convinced that Kubrick’s message was about exactly what you want it to be about. It’s a comforting thought, really. Kubrick must be a genius for hiding such an intricate message in the film, and you must be a genius for being able to find it. The two of you no doubt think alike, and wouldn’t we all want to think of ourselves as being in the company of geniuses?

For myself, I don’t think there is a hidden message in ‘The Shining’. I think that Kubrick, like all great artists, loved ambiguity, and loved to insert it in the work instead of forcing his own conclusions onto you. You are required, by design, to think about what’s going on in front of you because the answers are not provided, and Kubrick isn’t telling because your answer is probably better than his anyway. I think he’d probably be impressed at some of the creativity people have brought to finding meanings in his film…even if I can easily picture Wendy looking at Jack’s manuscript and reading, “It can be ruled out that Stanley Kubrick didn’t notice this obvious mistake as he precisely edited the shot that way for a reason and we all saw it happen…”

A sixty-second remake of The Thing but with Pingu?

But, as it is this site’s Christmas tradition:

And, as always, if you do not celebrate No Doubtmas:

Bob Garon, Vietnam veteran:

The bit I love is watching Mitt Romney’s dead eyes as he initially assumes that this old, crotchety, flannel-wearing gentleman is “safe” and then realizes that in fact that this is not the case.

So this is a song by Foster the People called “Houdini.” It’s a perfectly good song. I wouldn’t call it “great,” but as indie rockers go it’s solid enough: good beat, tuneful, distinctive.

See? Not bad at all, really.

But this is the same song as re-envisioned by Remix Artist Collective:

RAC turn the song into a nu-century riff on early 80s New Wave in a lot of ways – the Tron-like keytar riff omnipresent through the song gives it a harder edge, for example. And the upped tempo of the backing music against the unchanged vocals makes the song more dramatic. I know that judgements about musical quality are so often subjective, but my subjective judgement here is that the remix is quite simply a pure upgrade to the original, a case of a B-grade song becoming an A, and remixes are rarely, to my eye, so unambigiously better than their original material.

So some ad agency had the Muller people come in and say:

“Okay, so KITT is driving down the street and he parks all-awesome like, but a cop gives him a ticket, so this Muller truck nearby is actually a Transformer and it turns into a robot and it eats the cop, but then it spits out Yogi Bear because the Muller Transformer has turned the cop into Yogi. Yogi is happy so he dances down the street, but he runs into a crowd of rude businessmen, so the Muller Transformer spits out a rain of giant fruit and that turns them into Mr. Men and Pikmin and things. So they all dance happily but suddenly they see that a crane is about to knock down a small house in between two skyscrapers! Luckily, Muttley is flying his plane which has a giant hammer made from a giant Muller yogurt tin attached to it, and knocks the crane into the sky, where it dissolves into a rain of coloured birds. Then it looks like rain – oh no! But then another giant container of Muller is opened, and the yogurt forms giant hands which scoop up the rainclouds into a ball, then twist that ball into a rainbow with a smiley face on it. And scene.”

Why don’t I have that job, and the hallucinogenics that come with it?

It is a live cover of dubstep! (Specifically, Skrillex, so you know in advance it’s going to be at least a cover of dubstep that has art to it.)

I’ve watched Nonstop’s dance videos before, but this is, even for him, absolutely insane.

So here is Snowgoons:

What are you listening to lately? Youtube link in the comments if possible.

MGK: So we’re back, watching Animalympics again.
FLAPJACKS: …I know that. Why are you saying that?
MGK: I’m setting the scene for my readers.
FLAPJACKS: It’s really annoying.
MGK: Anyway – so slalom star Kurt Wuffner is missing.

FLAPJACKS: Why is the entire search party looking for him composed of elephants? I mean, if you’re gonna pick an animal to be in an alpine search-and-rescue team, “elephant” wouldn’t even make my top thousand picks. Because elephants are big and heavy and not winter-friendly animals and aren’t really known for their mountain-climbing abilities.
MGK: They aren’t known for their gymnastics skill either, but that didn’t stop one from competing on the uneven bars! Elephants are doin’ it for themselves.
FLAPJACKS: “So we know this is a tragedy – but now, how about some bobsledding?”
MGK: And the European team – which is British – is composed of… are they beavers? They look basically like beavers. They have beaver tails. But beavers aren’t native to England.
FLAPJACKS: Immigrants.
MGK: I wonder how the Animalympicverse version of the BNP feels about beavers coming to England and takin their jerbs.
FLAPJACKS: I’m more interested in the octopus bobsledders from Italy. These are the first crustaceans/fish/insects we’ve seen competing so far, right? It’s all been reptiles, mammals and birds thus far. I think we’re seeing another facet of the dreadful class system in this universe.
MGK: Meanwhile, Kurt Wuffner is dying on a mountainside when suddenly he finds “Dogra-La.” I don’t remember if this is a real thing or if he’s just hallucinating prior to his death from exposure.
FLAPJACKS: Given that he’s turning to “the camera” to point at the sexy dog girls dressed in kimonos that all look exactly like him, I vote the latter.
MGK: But enough death hallucination! It is time for hockey now!
FLAPJACKS: The American team – for they wear USA colours – is populated by Quebecois bears, apparently. And the other team is bulls, because… I dunno, I’m out of logic to explain any of this now.
MGK: It is amusing that they are totally playing hockey up as a game where people try to murder one another.
FLAPJACKS: Well, this was the early 80s. The Broad Street Bullies era of the Philadelphia Flyers had just ended. Hockey players beat each other up all the time. It’s not like now, when they beat each other up for a purpose. They used to maim each other for fun… why is the arena exploding?
MGK: Because that’s funny.
FLAPJACKS: And because we were briefly entertained for a moment there, how about a pointless vignette featuring the coaches of the two marathon runners where silly voices are apparently supposed to be endlessly hilarious?
MGK: I blame Gilda Radner. Baba Wawa ruined things for a generation.
FLAPJACKS: This California otter isn’t really… funny in any way. Or even interesting. I mean – he’s a hippie, sorta? He drives a car, he’s a vegetarian, he surfs, he likes to hang out in a hot tub? Where are the jokes? These are just things Californians do. And not even most of them. I mean, they at least had Bolt Jenkins living in a sewer like a respectable New York alligator.
MGK: New Yorkers think making fun of California is endlessly hilarious. They will never admit it’s because of their latent insecurity issues, of course, but that’s why they think it’s endlessly hilarious.

FLAPJACKS: Hey, it’s a dolphin! Who… somehow has legs!
MGK: That freaks me out more than anything else in this cartoon so far. Including the lioness nipple flash.
FLAPJACKS: They’re so polite to not mention his horrible, terrifying mutation.
MGK: And one of the swimming contestants is a manta ray! So that makes two non-traditionally-cute animals competing!
FLAPJACKS: I like how the octopuses get drummed into multiple competitions in the Animalympics. It’s like the animators just gave up trying to think of animals to draw. “Ah, let’s just use the fucking octopuses again.”
FLAPJACKS: In proud Animalympics tradition, the Japanese athlete is named “Ono Nono.” HA HA HA it’s funny because it’s racist!
MGK: At least the American announcers are acting like American announcers and only concerning themselves with how the American athlete will do. That’s realism for you.
FLAPJACKS: And now, the “hundred-meter dive.” Which is appropriately ludicrous for a cartoon.
MGK: And the bird diver is totally cheating! He is flying! That should be some sort of disqualification, not reason to give points. This world makes no sense!
FLAPJACKS: It’s a world with talking animals that can’t remember how many continents exist. I think that was more or less a given, wasn’t it?
MGK: That having been said, the hallucination sequence that the California otter has is actually decently trippy animation and the music is fun.
FLAPJACKS: The “history of Animalympics” sequence is… weird. I mean, you know they wrote it just so the animators could draw dinosaurs doing sports, but then they have no animated dinosaurs doing sports.
MGK: Also, the “pot showing the earliest depiction of animal sports” has dinosaurs on it. That pot is therefore tens of millions of years old. It should be dust. But it is not dust. Did dinosaurs die out much later in the Animalympic world?
FLAPJACKS: Consider, if you will, that at the beginning of the movie, the Animalympic Torch is lit off fire breathed by a dragon. I don’t think it’s a stretch to have dinosaurs still be alive.
MGK: Then where are the dodos?
FLAPJACKS: Well, that would just be silly.
MGK: And we’re back to the downhill skiing and the Kurt Wuffner saga. Since Kurt Wuffner is dying on a hill somewhere, we are introduced to a boar who has been rebuilt with bionic technology “for speed.”
FLAPJACKS: Shame he wipes out early.
MGK: Okay, you know what’s bitchy? This boar is clearly suffering through a major near-death experience right now, and the announcers don’t seem to care at all. Bitchy Dog Announcer makes a joke about him being used for “spare parts.” Ah, cartoons, you are heartless.
FLAPJACKS: And Kurt Wuffner returns and wins, of course.

MGK: Here’s what I don’t get. Right before Wuffner returns, the announcers are whining about how the best time today was a “disappointing” minute-fifty-eight. Then Wuffner shows up, and finishes the course in a minute-fifty-six-point-eight-nine. That is only about a second faster. These announcers are whiny.
FLAPJACKS: Is a second a big timespan for competitive downhill skiing?
MGK: Quickly checking Wikipedia, it looks like generally the top ten skiers in a downhill real-life Olympic event usually span about two seconds’ overall difference. That would make Wuffner’s time better by a lot. I withdraw my complaints as regard realism, but maintain that the announcers are whiny bitches.
FLAPJACKS: Why is that?
MGK: Name three sports announcers you really like.
FLAPJACKS: That’s easy –
MGK: Who aren’t dead and therefore can still bore or annoy you.
FLAPJACKS: Well then. Zero.
MGK: My point exactly. They should’ve just done narrative stories instead of the fake sportscast. The most entertaining bits of this thing are always when they get away from the sportscast and focus on individual characters. I mean, the goat/lion marathon battle is weird, yes, but at least it’s interesting.
FLAPJACKS: Speaking of which, the goat and the lion are officially now in love, it seems. Despite, you know, not having talked or spoken to one another during the race.
MGK: Well, that’s how love works sometimes.
FLAPJACKS: No, it doesn’t.
MGK: True. But, on the bright side, we get to see the announcers lose their shit over the goat and the lion running hand-in-hand. “Is it an international conspiracy?” asks Henry Kissinger Turtle.
FLAPJACKS: Then the turtle orders bombing in Cambodia. Tens of thousands die over his taking offense at the goat and lion’s relationship, born in the heat of competition.
MGK: Dark!
FLAPJACKS: Only that sort of thing can distract us from the worst part of this yet, which is Billy Crystal voice-acting against Billy Crystal.
MGK: This is offensive on so many levels.
FLAPJACKS: Could this get any worse?
MGK: Sure it could. For example, Robin Williams could show up and voice-act his “look at me, I’m pretending to be a black guy” bit. Or his Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation. Or, really. anything Robin Williams does, since his characters haven’t changed since we were eight.
FLAPJACKS: Oh, man, I just realized Billy Crystal is trying to imitate Muhammad Ali. That’s so wrong.
MGK: …why do I think that Billy Crystal, as the turkey interviewing the defeated boxer who isn’t Billy Crystal, is doing a reference?
FLAPJACKS: Because he is. Howard Cosell did that thing, remember, where he called someone who lost a match of some kind or another a bum who had let down his country?
MGK: I forgot for a second Billy Crystal doesn’t so much do jokes as he does riffs on people who exist.
FLAPJACKS: “Volleyball is rapidly becoming one of the most popular sports in the world.” Really? Did I miss something?
MGK: Even the referee looks bored here. I mean, lobsters playing volleyball, you’d think that was funny, but no.
FLAPJACKS: And we’re back to the marathoners! For some reason, they have decided to ask random athletes what they think of the goat and the lion being in love. The racist penguin makes some martial arts noises. The California otter says nothing of consequence. This feels like they’re padding out the show at this point.

MGK: Bizarrely, the weightlifting competition is somewhere in between a professional wrestling competition and a beauty pageant. This makes no sense at all, and I say that in comparison to the entire rest of this cartoon. Compared to this, the rest of the cartoon is perfectly sensible.
FLAPJACKS: Even the fencing segment, which turns into a swashbuckling fight scene?
MGK: That’s perfectly acceptable, because every fencer wishes that fencing actually had jumping about the room and vaulting through the air and swinging on chandeliers and dramatic entrances and exits and punning as elements of competition.
FLAPJACKS: The turtle once again insists that the continents are “locked in a five-way tie,” ignoring that at this point they’ve identified seven different competing teams, not counting Scandinavia, which may be something else altogether. Once again, he is offended that the goat and lion are in love.
FLAPJACKS: And they win together, after a musical sequence, and the fans… I dunno. I can’t care about it any more.
MGK: And this show wraps up with some shots of the “crew” and recap sequences, because re-using footage saves you lots of money when you’re animating.
FLAPJACKS: So was this as good as you remembered?
MGK: God no. You know what? We should all be thankful for Pixar. We really should. The musical stylings of one-quarter of 10cc aside, this was mostly pretty bad.
FLAPJACKS: Nostalgia lies. Except for TRON.
MGK: Well. Actually.
FLAPJACKS: SHUT UP I WILL CUT YOU.

FLAPJACKS: So what are we watching?
MGK: “We?”
FLAPJACKS: Well, I brought back your wok, so I figure I might as well hang out.
MGK: That’s not my wok. That’s a frying pan.
FLAPJACKS: So?
MGK: You had my wok for three years.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, and now we’re watching something. Keep up! What are we watching?
MGK: Animalympics. It’s an old cartoon from when I was a kid.
FLAPJACKS: …why are we watching this?
MGK: I used to watch this all the time when I was six. I remember one time, my parents were going out for the evening, so they took me to the video store and I got it for like the fifth time, but I’d accidentally gotten it in Beta instead of VHS, so my dad actually took me back to get the right one.
FLAPJACKS: That is deeply touching. Your life is a Hallmark card. So why are we watching it?
MGK: Because I’m curious to see how bad, in fact, it actually was.

FLAPJACKS: Fair enough – wait, that announcer sounds like Harry Shearer.
MGK: Bingo! It is Harry Shearer, explaining “Mount Animalympus.”
FLAPJACKS: That sounds dirty.
MGK: There’s probably going to be a lot of that.
FLAPJACKS: So, wait, animals carry the Oly…Animalympic Torch over water? What happens if that seal drops the torch?
MGK: Overthinking it.
FLAPJACKS: Like we’re going to do anything else?
MGK: Point.
FLAPJACKS: “Featuring the voices of” Gilda Radner, Billy Crystal, Harry Shearer and… some other person!
MGK: This was originally made by NBC as a pair of specials in 1980, which explains the cast. But the summer special never aired because of the Moscow boycott.
FLAPJACKS: Did you know that at the time?
MGK: Yes, because I was a geopolitically-interested six-year-old. No, of course I didn’t know.
FLAPJACKS: …why does the announcer turtle sound like Henry Kissinger?
MGK: I have no idea.
FLAPJACKS: I see Gilda Radner is doing her Baba Wawa voice.
MGK: And Harry Shearer is doing his Kent Brockman voice.
FLAPJACKS: And Gilda Radner does a slightly different voice.
MGK:And Billy Crystal does a bad Howard Cosell impersonation.
FLAPJACKS: And… wait, are they giving us highlights of the movie in advance?
MGK: Padding for the home video market, I think.
FLAPJACKS: That’s just sad.
MGK: A “grazing-room only crowd” at the stadium.
FLAPJACKS: But what about the carnivores? Are they telling us that the Animalympics are herbivore-centric?
MGK: Are you surprised? Herbivores control the animal media, you know. They just want to make a perfectly valid lifestyle choice a crime.
FLAPJACKS: A choice? Ahem. Carnivores were just born that way.
MGK: I stand corrected.
FLAPJACKS: …okay, they really put way too much effort into making sure that rhino’s butt moved in a taut, rhythmic manner.
MGK: Are you bothered?
FLAPJACKS: No. But it’s weird. Wait, why does the “mayor of Animalympic Island” sound like a Richard Nixon impersonation? Did Rich Little need some work that week?
MGK: Dude, that Nixon is nowhere near Rich Little’s. Rich Little does quality Nixon. It’s practically his calling card.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, that sports graphic looked appropriately cheesy. I can believe this was made in 1980.
MGK: “Rene Fromage.” That is the name of the European marathoning goat. “Frenchy McFrance” was already taken, I guess.
FLAPJACKS: Oh, man. This is all gonna be things that bad comedians think kids will find funny, isn’t it?
MGK: This hails from an era where Leonard Maltin was the only man over 25 who would admit he still watched cartoons. This is not going to be sophisticated or clever, I think.
FLAPJACKS: “Kit Mambo” is, I take it, his nemesis in the film.
MGK: Yes.
FLAPJACKS: And again with the ass. Man, these animators were butt-lovers, huh?
MGK: Try not to think about it.
FLAPJACKS: And we’re over to gymnastics. Okay, so this mink is… oh, wait, no, not an athlete, another interviewer. And she’s interviewing another mink.
MGK: Oh, yes, I remember this from when I was a kid. I thought they were ripping off Bugs Bunny even then.
FLAPJACKS: Did you really?
MGK: Probably not, no.
FLAPJACKS: But wait, she visibly fucks up during the routine and still gets a perfect 10? Is this commentary on the Soviet system here?
MGK: Given that the coach is prepared to hang himself if she fails, I suspect so. Subtlety is not what you expect to find here.

FLAPJACKS: And this gymnast is a hippo who hails from “Fatgard,” competing for Europe.
MGK: Why is a hippo competing for Europe? They don’t live in Europe.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe she emigrated. Ever think of that?
MGK: But she’s teaching all those other hippos to swim. Are there German hippos we don’t know about?
FLAPJACKS: It would be just like those Germans to keep a secret hippo community hidden from the rest of the world!
MGK: It would?
FLAPJACKS: I dunno. Wait – the pommel horses at the Animalympics are actual horses?
MGK: Well, the starting gun for the marathon was a bird that they squeezed to squawk, like in The Flintstones.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, but in The Flintstones, humans are still in charge. This use of animals as tools sort of implies a slavery-based system.
MGK: So basically what you’re saying is that the Animalympics are a distraction for the masses? Distracting them from their downtrodden position through sport?
FLAPJACKS: Yes, that’s exactly it. Why is this penguin Japanese?
MGK: “Asian.”
FLAPJACKS: But he’s Japanese. He’s clearly Japanese. His name is “Kwakimoto.” That is clearly a takeoff from Japanese naming conventions. And he is initially shown in a crowd full of other Japanese penguins waiting for the subway.
MGK: Even so, in the Animalympics there are only five continents competing.
FLAPJACKS: But they’ve already identified athletes from “Asia,” “Eurasia” and “Europe,” along with African and North American athletes.
MGK: There was also a South American anteater competing in the marathon.
FLAPJACKS: Oh my god, did they blow up Australia?
MGK: Well, I don’t –
FLAPJACKS: I bet they did. Those marsupials would be like horrific aliens to these walking, talking animals.
MGK: Can’t we just go back to talking about the racist cariacature in penguin form? Listen! His martial art is called “No-Can-Do!”
FLAPJACKS: Asians love martial arts!
MGK: And Harry Shearer is doubling down on the vaguely racist mock-Asian gibberish. “Me-Washy-You-Facey.” “Say-You-Punky.”
FLAPJACKS: You had horrible taste as a kid.
MGK: It was the early Eighties. Everybody had horrible taste then.
FLAPJACKS: And I note that, after the elephant gymnast wipes out on the uneven bars, the winners in women’s gymnastics are “Eurasia” and “Asia.” My geography theory continues to be supported.
MGK: More racist penguin!
FLAPJACKS: More marathon!
MGK: You know what’s weird about the marathon? The male goat is a very typical, asexual cartoon character, and the female lion is sexualized with distinct feminine curves. It’s honestly kind of creepy if you think about it: this is training kids to accept a double standard for male and female appearance.
FLAPJACKS: Also it’s a goat and a lion. The lion is not attempting to eat the goat.
MGK: There is that.
FLAPJACKS: And in passing, a panda athlete is identified as Yu Fat Ting. This cartoon just keeps getting more and more racist!
MGK: And the tour of the commissary! There are literally big chops of meat just waiting to be eaten by carnivore athletes there. They slaughtered presumably-intelligent animals to do it. This is so fucked up.
FLAPJACKS: Wait, it turns out Animalympic Island is being powered by slave labour!
MGK: Look, we don’t know that those snakes serving as tow cables are slaves. Perhaps they’re fairly compensated. Maybe they’re union.
FLAPJACKS: What type of seniority do you need to avoid being a cable? What do you move up to? Shoelace?
MGK: THAT’S SNAKE-RACIST! Armist? Limbist? Whatever.
FLAPJACKS: Figure skating! And there’s more “Eurasian” athletes. Where does Eurasia end and Asia begin?
MGK: More importantly, why is a salamander marrying a chicken?
FLAPJACKS: They’re in love. Duh.
MGK: …OH MY GOD THIS ANIMAL WORLD HAS AN EQUIVALENT OF “PLAYBOY.” You know what this means? It is standard for denizens of this world to beat off to animals outside their species.
FLAPJACKS: Well, it happens here too.
MGK: But it’s not normal.
FLAPJACKS: Dude, are you going to start making anti-miscegenation comments now?
MGK: They’re actually different species!
FLAPJACKS: And you don’t have any idea that they even do this, you know. Maybe there is porn for every species in this world. Like, “Playdog.” And… “Playgull.” And…
MGK: “Rustler.”
FLAPJACKS: “Flank.”
MGK: “Scenthouse.” We’re too good at this. We should stop.
FLAPJACKS: Wait wait wait – the flamingo skating star skates professionally in the “Ice Parades?” Are they saying that the Animalympics doesn’t respect the difference between amateur and professional athletes? Well. I am shocked.
MGK: I’m more trying to figure out how a cobra took third in figure skating. Where does it put on the skate?

FLAPJACKS: Too slow! We have moved on to an alligator doing a John Travolta impersonation!
MGK: Ah, good old Bolt Jenkins.
FLAPJACKS: You remembered this?
MGK: Surprisingly, yes. They’re about to do high jumps of 77 feet.
FLAPJACKS: Man, they aren’t even trying to suspend my disbelief!
MGK: This is a cartoon that can’t quite remember how many continents there are, you know.
FLAPJACKS: But they can remember to play his theme music as he pole vaults 180 feet.
MGK: And then a Wheaties parody before we get a musical montage.
FLAPJACKS: Oh my god, they bothered to do a race-walking bit?
MGK: That pigeon is totally going to out-race-walk that beaver!
FLAPJACKS: These are kind of boring. They couldn’t come up with any gags for the all-skunk relay team?
MGK: Well, that elephant and that… coyote?… are hitting each other with lacrosse sticks rather than play. That’s kind of funny to a kid, right?
FLAPJACKS: Was it?
MGK: I don’t know.
FLAPJACKS: Seriously, they could just keep showing me the race-walkers. That was actually legitimately funny. Because race-walking looks silly – and now they’re back to long takes of waggling anthropomorphized animal butts.
MGK: Okay, is this an equestrian event? Or the equivalent thereof? Because it makes no sense. No sense at all.
FLAPJACKS: They totally need some guy running alongside banging coconuts together.
MGK: And apparently the no-questrian event has a deathtrap in it. That seems sort of cruel.
FLAPJACKS: Dude, they make the competitors do 180-foot pole vaults. The Animalympics depend on death-sports to keep competitors from wondering why herbivores and carnivores aren’t always at war with one another.
MGK: I’m just wondering why the organizers decided to have all the events at the same time. It looks like a lot of athletes are getting hit by hammer-toss hammers.
FLAPJACKS: And now… the 100 meter dash!
MGK: Harry Shearer’s announcer: “Ah, 46 seconds. Not bad for fatso.” Uh, no, that is a terrible time. I’m pretty sure you can do a hundred meters in an electric wheelchair in 46 seconds.
FLAPJACKS: So, competing in the dash, we’ve got an African, a “Eurasian,” Bolt Jenkins – who, I note, is an “American,” and I’m not sure if that means he’s from the Americas or if they think the USA is a continent – and a rabbit from Europe. This whole “five continents” thing still bothers me, because at this point it looks like both South America and Australia have been destroyed.
MGK: And Bolt Jenkins wins the gold medal, and then gives it away to the African runner because the other athlete was “better” than him. Uh, Bolt Jenkins, this is sports. It’s not the Academy Awards. There is no qualitiative discussion going on here. You were faster.
FLAPJACKS: I dunno. That cheetah seems quite happy to get a pity medal. He’s probably thinking “as a stereotypical African, I am probably expected to say something about how this can feed my entire village for a year!”
MGK: Ugh. Back to the marathon!
FLAPJACKS: And the goat and the lion are becoming attracted to one another!
MGK: That must be confusing for the lion to be attracted to what it, let’s face it, her prey.
FLAPJACKS: Yes, I – OH MY GOD A DISCO SEQUENCE?

MGK: Oh, yes, they needed to pad out the time somehow. I mean, come on. Disco. Who doesn’t love disco? After all, this was 1980 so it was totally cutting edge and relevant. Hey, look, it’s the racist penguin again!
FLAPJACKS: Hey, wait! I just saw a team of four platypi! That means Australia isn’t destroyed after all?
MGK: You never know. Maybe they’re refugees.
FLAPJACKS: I never thought of that. Maybe they’re protected by species-rights legislation. A distinct society. They probably can’t get jobs anywhere because they bear live young and then nurse them in pouches.
MGK: And Bolt Jenkins again! In a Travolta-style white disco suit! Just in case you didn’t yet understand that Bolt Jenkins is intended to be a John Travolta parody, it’s another hint for you!
FLAPJACKS: You know what’s interesting? That sort of joke wouldn’t work today.
MGK: I don’t think it worked then.
FLAPJACKS: No, wait, think about it. That joke depends on commonality of celebrity culture. You can get laughs parodying John Travolta in the 1980s because everybody knew Travolta. Can you do it today? Who’s a big enough celebrity that everybody will go “oh, that guy?” Will Smith, maybe? And Will Smith isn’t funny to parody because he’s Will Smith.
MGK: I get your point, but there’s also the important factor that this cartoon impersonation isn’t even remotely funny, so how would we know?
FLAPJACKS: Needs more Rich Little.
MGK: And now we see some soccer, as the Germans – okay, the “Europeans,” but come on, we know they’re the Germans – clean the clocks of the American team from New York. So this is at least realistic.
FLAPJACKS: Incidentally, the fact that they then defeat the “South American Llamas” merely upholds my belief that something is deeply weird here. We’ve been told there are five continents competing, but so far there are teams from South America, “America,” Europe, Asia, Africa and “Eurasia.” Is there some sort of civil war going on in Eurasia? Two breakaway republics?
MGK: Maybe Bolt Jenkins isn’t from “America.” Maybe he’s actually Brazilian. And New York, in Animal World, is in Chile. It could happen.
FLAPJACKS: And we still don’t know about the Aussies.
MGK: Well, they are busy going back to the marathon and the oversexualized lion who is inexplicably falling in love with a goat she should more properly regard as a snack.
FLAPJACKS: Well, the goat clearly lusts after the lion as well. That makes more sense. I would expect many goats have secret desires to sexually humiliate their predators.
MGK: Do you really want to speculate about this? I mean, you’re one step away from hardcore disturbing bronyhood at this point.
FLAPJACKS: Actually, I want to talk about his hallucination/dream sequence. Because, in this sequence, he hallucinates human women which he pointedly avoids, because he is concentrating on the gold medal of course, but still. That suggests that in this world, they knew humans existed at one point.
MGK: My god. I think you have cracked the code.
FLAPJACKS: Really?
MGK: No. I was actually more interested in the fact that they depicted him as smoking. I mean, even though he’s French, I would have thought 1980 was late enough that they wouldn’t show cartoons smoking any longer.
FLAPJACKS: OH GOD THE MEDAL HAS TURNED INTO THE SEXY LION AND IT HAS NIPPLES AND EVERYTHING.
MGK: This cartoon just keeps getting more and more disturbing.
FLAPJACKS: How did you not end up a furry if this was your favorite cartoon when you were a kid?
MGK: I’m not sure. But regardless: that is one damn demented goat.
FLAPJACKS: Okay, in the slalom skiing, we see competitors from Europe, North America, South America, and Scandinavia. Which is not a continent! My god, what is the situation in Eurasia? Have the Finns convinced the rest of the Nordic countries to go it alone?
MGK: There’s got to be some brutal war going on that we’re missing because we can’t get past Billy Crystal’s godawful “funny” Swedish accent. Billy Crystal: willing to make kids miserable since… well, forever.
FLAPJACKS: It is so bad that we almost missed Kurt Wuffner’s disappearance! After a triumphant victory in the slalom, he has disappeared while climbing a mountain!
MGK: Approximately thirty seconds later, apparently.
FLAPJACKS: This smells fishy. I believe there is foul play afoot. Why would a devoted extreme athlete decide to climb a mountain in between his two primary events? I think this stinks of Eurasian manipulation!
MGK: Certainly. After all, note that Wuffner’s disappearance gives the win to Scandinavia. Presumably the Scandinavians are rebels warring against the European regime, and Eurasia’s central committee seeks to embarrass the EU, which broke away from it, by repeating their rebellion in microcosm – at the Animalympics!
FLAPJACKS: This goes down so many layers it’s scary! But I think I need a break.
MGK: Agreed. There is only so much Billy Crystal “funny voice” schtick one can hande in a day. We’ll finish it tomorrow. After you return my wok.

I’m impressed: he’s amazingly intelligent and eloquent when provided a stupid question or assertion from which to work, and he only swears twice. I would have trouble stopping at a dozen swears, honestly.