If you were in any way interested in video games during the early to mid-2000’s, you’re familiar webcomic Penny Arcade. Even if you didn’t read it regularly, you knew what it is. It was a staple of the gaming scene during that time, and one that you couldn’t really get away from. And I don’t really mean that as a bad thing. I don’t recall anyone ever hating Penny Arcade the same way that people hated the infamous CTRL+ALT+DELETE. Probably because it wasn’t even close to being as fucking terrible as CTRL+ALT+DELETE.
:^U - if you know, you know.
Penny Arcade wasn’t over-saturated to the point that it developed some kind of knee-jerk disgust whenever you saw it posted on some backwater gaming forum or on 4chan’s /v/ board. So far as I can remember, you either liked it, didn’t dislike it, or just kind of knew about it as harmless fluff.
Launched in the long, long ago times that predated the .com crash of 2000, Penny Arcade’s inaugural comic strip would be posted on November 18th, 1998 on the now defunct site, loonygames.com. Written by Jerry Holkins and illustrated by Mike Krahulik - two high school buddies from the suburbs of the great, all-American city of Spokane, Washington - the strip featured two fictionalized avatars of Holkins and Krahulik, under the names John “Gabe” Gabriel and Tycho Brahe.
And, yes:
That is a joke about the Danish astronomer who famously had part of his nose cut off in a duel, and was perhaps better known for wearing a prosthetic made of brass - a little detail that was conveniently omitted from most of his portraits. Methinks a few extra Krones got slipped to the painters to keep that little bit out. Perhaps Gabe’s name should have been Johannes Keppler. You know - for the bit. This, for the record, is what the characters look like, rendered in that lovely early-2000’s webcomic art style.
And no, I’ve never been certain which character was supposed to be which creator, because Holkins and Krahulik look like this.
Krahulik on the right, Holkins on the left.
As you can see, generous creative liberties were taken.
The meat of the comic consisted of observational humor and parody surrounding hot new game titles, gaming culture, as well as a smattering of experiences taken from the creator’s own lives as roommates living in Seattle during the early 2000’s, which was to the gaming scene of the time as Baghdad was to the Islamic Golden Age. The comic would migrate from loonygames.com (probably a wise choice, given the rather questionable name) to their own proprietary site, where the two would begin to collect donations from fans that would enable them to quit their day jobs and shift to full-time comic production. Along with money collected from advertisements on the site and merchandise sales, this put the two in a very elite and exclusive club of content creators at the time that were able to support themselves solely on the income of their content. Even today, that’s impressive - try squeaking out a living in modern Seattle on a modest income collected from Patreon (you can’t) - but back in the mid-2000's, it was unheard of. Even though Penny Arcade was not the first webcomic, it was an early adopter of the format, and one of, if not the first that generated enough money to provide a sustainable income for the creators, which certainly made it among the most profitable and successful amateur, independent endeavors in both the world of gaming and webcomics at the time. By 2006, the site was averaging over two million views daily, which, again, was no mean feat back when computers were still a relative novelty or new introductions to the average American home. Then again, the overlap of the Venn diagram between gamers and tech geeks has always been an almost perfect circle, so, if anything was going to take off the way Penny Arcade did, perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that a video game-centric webcomic would be the one to break escape velocity.
In 2003, the pair would establish the charitable organization named Child’s Play as a direct response to popular accusations by various media figures that video games were a social poison that turned otherwise healthy, happy, and productive children into violent maniacs. One such article posted by journalist Bill France by the Everett Herald1 that claimed Violent video games are training children to kill was cited by the authors of Penny Arcade as a motivation to do more work to rehabilitate the negative perception of gamers in the media. To his credit, in a stroke of journalistic integrity that you simply don’t see in the 2020’s, France would redact his statements in the wake of Child’s Play's foundation, and go on to praise the two for their charitable work.
In today’s day and age, where the hobby of gaming has been normalized to the point of mundanity, if not ubiquity, and the nebulous demographic of gamer has expanded dramatically beyond it’s former confines of young men and boys, it seems outlandish, if not comically absurd to think that there was a time not all that long ago when the word gamer was tantamount to a racial epithet. A gamer was not something someone wanted to be, and the common idea of what constituted one was a goony, basement-dwelling man-ogre that was socially maladjusted, anti-social to the point of violent, and had never seen a woman’s bare breasts anywhere that wasn’t a computer screen or dirty magazine before. Though I’m tempted to say, Were they wrong, though? for the sake of comedy, to be totally honest… yes, they were. Mostly. Somewhat.
This image of gamers as social pariahs was pushed in the media by figures like the infamous (and disbarred) lawyer Jack Thompson and senator Joe Liebermann, both of whom were still towing the line that video games like Doom and other similar titles were corrupting the American youth and resulting in shootings such as the Columbine tragedy in 1999. While I would say that, today, we can demonstrably see that video games have had a net negative influence on a not insubstantial number of people, the allegations alleged by Liebermann and Thompson often rang hollow and smacked of sensationalist fearmongering that was only conducted for the express purpose of filling their own coffers rather than any genuine concern for the well-being of American children. Can video games be detrimental to someone’s mental health? Absolutely. Is Fortnite turning Junior into Mini-Ted Bundy? Definitely not. But you still might want to limit how much time he spends epically pwning n00bs and put him outside, instead.
I’d also be remiss to mention that this stigma hasn’t entirely faded. After all, the infamous GamerGate fiasco, I’d say, was in part another manifestation of this Satanic Panic-esque cycle of media hysteria, albeit one that swapped accusations of murder with allegations of mysoginy, and directly correlated to the expansion of gaming as a hobby to a more diverse audience. The simple fact of the matter is circa 2010, when Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency first achieved notoriety and set the stage for the drama of GamerGate to unfold, the gaming space had never been more inclusive and diverse. However, the culture was still dominated by the stereotypical socially-awkward white male, and, for the new, self-appointed crowned heads of the scene, including Sarkeesian and her Progressive cohorts, this was, of course, intolerable. GamerGate was little more than a mini-Color Revolution in the culture to push out the old guard and bring in a new, more inclusive, and politically charged ruling class, and get those who either couldn’t or wouldn’t leave to bend the knee accordingly. This article isn’t about GamerGate, and I don’t mean to make it into a GamerGate screed, but it is worth noting that one of the knock-on effects of the Progressive Cabal’s work in GamerGate was the effective death of the classic gamer image, and, with it, the kind of criticisms that Thompson, Liebermann, and others had spent years lobbying. The ol’ Video Game = Murder Simulator argument still gets trotted out every now and then, but in the post-Wii world where everyone and their grandma has played Wii Sports or Guitar Hero, its well past its sell-by date. There’s a reason you don’t hear about Thompson anymore, and there’s a reason Joe Liebermann had to find other boogiemen to harp on to frighten tech-illiterate boomers into throwing their money at him.
Do keep all that in mind, though - it’ll be important in a minute.
As of 2022, Child’s Play has racked up a number of impressive charitable endeavors and collected over fifty-five million dollars in donations. The organization is partnered with dozens of hospitals across the world, and has funded the construction of medical facilities in impoverished and under-served communities across America, and in countries including Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, among others.
In 2004, the two would host the first Penny Arcade Expo - often shortened to PAX - in Bellevue, Washington, which would go on to graduate from a simple fan convention to an out-and-out industry trade show and festival, hosting annual events in Seattle, Boston, and Melbourne, Australia, among other locales at various times. Today, the event has eclipsed the one legendary trade and now defunct expo, E3, as the de facto industry trade show. In 2023, PAX West in Seattle recorded a staggering attendance count of over 120,000 visitors.
Hokins and Krahulik have since expanded beyond the once meager borders of their humble webcomic and created a veritable media empire that touches just about every form of media one can think of. Podcasts, movies, animated series, trading card games, documentaries, even their own video games - if there’s something these guys could have done, they already have in one way or another.
Their success was such that, in 2010, Holkins and Krahulik were featured in Time Magazine’s Time 100 - a collection of the most 100 influential people in the world, according to the long-standing publication. In 2010, when Time had yet to fully transition into being a worthless propaganda rag, that accolade commanded some respect. The idea that two no-name gaming dorks from Spokane making a goofy webcomic about video games could reach such dizzying levels of success… well, that was pretty much unthinkable. Again, to even imagine that they would also establish a convention that would dethrone the well-funded machine that was E3 as the ostensible Mecca of the gaming world and take their modest profit and build hospitals across the world is almost difficult to believe, even living in the aftermath of the two doing just that.
This is, of course, to say nothing of the comic that started it all and the long-lasting impact on both the gaming subculture and the wider internet culture at large cannot be overstated. The strip still continues to this day. With twenty-six years of publication history behind them, the two authors can boast that they have one of the longest running webcomics under their belt, and an outsized footprint stamped into the landscape of the internet and gaming scene.
As such, I think it’s safe to say that Holkins and Krahulik have done well for themselves. What makes the two’s journey from a pair of geeks playing Quake in the suburbs of Spokane to titans of the gaming industry particularly awe-inspiring is the fact that, after all this time, they’re still going strong while many of their contemporaries have flamed out in spectacular fashion. Even though I’m not sure the comic still commands as much respect in the space as it once did, it’s still going, and the community around it is robust and very generous with their money. Both Child’s Play and PAX are still firing on all cylinders, and only continue to grow with each passing year with no signs of slowing down.
Meanwhile, Austin-based Rooster Teeth - another popular media empire that began with the legendary Halo machinima series, Red versus Blue - saw a similar prodigious climb through the industry and internet fame around the same time. Today, they’re in shambles. Despite producing a number of wildly successful multi-media projects, scads of video games, web series, their own gaming convention, charitable organization, the once well-respected and beloved outfit has gone completely to seed in a tragic story of epic proportions, resulting in the almost all of the founding members all being ousted, and, generally, all of their successes and profitable creations going up in flames around them.
Other gaming sites that saw similar success in the mid-2000's, such as ScrewAttack, GiantBomb, and IGN, and the personalities associated with them, floundered in their own unique ways and went from well-respected names in the gaming space to irrelevant anachronisms of another time, and the stories of their failures are worthy of articles unto themselves. It’s nothing short of a testament to what I would consider borderline genius levels of business acumen, brand management, self-restraint and general fortitude of character on behalf of Holkins and Krahulik that they didn’t end up mired in controversy, succumbing to vice, and laid low like their peers.
Trust me - one day, I would love to dive into the catastrophic fall from grace of Rooster Teeth. As a company that I always held a soft-spot for, watching them flame out in a mess of alcoholism, spousal abuse, violent assault, drug addiction, and, perhaps worst of all, the complete and total corporate sterilization and effective castration by media titan Warner Brothers, is a tale as sordid as it is depressing.
Some of the Rooster Teeth staff. In better times.
Hello. It’s me - Post-Script Editor Ape. I finished writing this article, like, two weeks ago, and have since been editing it off and on. In between that time and now, as I write these words at this very moment, the news has just broken that, as of literally an hour ago -
So, you can add the corpse of Rooster Teeth to the pile of carcasses of erstwhile contemporaries that Penny Arcade has outlasted. At this point, though, Rooster Teeth was tantamount to a sick dog that was in desperate need of euthanasia. I’d say this is a mercy to the once respected organization, but, truthfully, the truly humane thing to do would have been to put it down years ago, before Warner Brothers ever acquired them.
Tonight, be sure to pour a forty out for the real ones we lost along the way.
But we’re not here to talk about Rooster Teeth.
In fact, we’re not really here to talk about Penny Arcade, either. The topic of Penny Arcade was actually suggested by a reader,
, in the comments on my piece on Rocksteady Studios and their recent unraveling. Now, I am a benevolent writer, and I reward interaction and support with interaction and support of my own, which reminds me - I don’t have this written down anywhere, all of my paid subscribers are entitled to a one-on-one conversation in an eatery or drinking establishment of their choice, in which I will pay for exactly one (1) alcoholic beverage and/or appetizer2 with the caveat that said establishment must be in the general vicinity of Western Washington, and travel and accommodations must be covered independently. Yes, yes, I know - I am quite generous. As an aside, in the future, I’m considering running polls for content and taking reader suggestions more from paid subscribers, so, if you’re interested… let me know what I can do to make the prospect of a paid subscription more enticing. I want to give back to you - the people.
Anyways, while doing research into Penny Arcade at Cliff’s suggestion, I found myself tumbling down a different rabbit hole. I still wanted to write about Penny Arcade, as I do think that they played an integral role in shaping gaming culture in the mid-2000’s and beyond, but… there’s another piece to this we’ll get to in a minute.
See, when I say Penny Arcade avoided controversy… well, that isn’t entirely true. Now, it’s a demonstrable fact that they have never stepped in the absolute swamp of knee-deep shit that Rooster Teeth or others did, and, for the most part, they’ve managed to keep their noses clean and their track records solid… but there’s still a few blemishes on an otherwise sterling reputation. The pair took their share of lumps and got into some scrapes along their road to success.
First, there was the dickwolves debacle. On August 11th, 2010, the pair published this comic to their site.
As stated above, around 2010, Feminist Frequency and other progressive ideologues had already made steady inroads into the gaming space, and were beginning to make their way into positions of influence. Any kind of media that even mentioned sexual assault in any context was simply not kosher.
Now, this really go without saying, but rape is not funny. It’ss a heinous crime that ruins lives and, in my opinion, is one of the worst things one human can do to another short of just outright killing them. In my ideal world, the appropriate punishment for someone who performs such a loathsome act would be, er - losing access to the tools that make it possible, if you catch my drift. And, if an alternative is needed, let’s just say when it comes to certain crimes… I don’t believe in jail time.
Draconian? Maybe. But, either way, they certainly won’t be in a position to reoffend.
So, yeah - I really should not need to spell out that rape is not funny. Call me a prude if you want. Joking about it is low-brow, crass, and is almost always thoughtless and tasteless shock humor, which, in turn, isn’t funny, either. But, also, because I’m not a hand-wringing schoolmarm, I also think that, if you want to make jokes about it - well, that’s your prerogative. But no one’s obliged to find those jokes funny or tasteful, either. It should also go without saying that, obviously, I don’t endorse calling for the termination of the career of someone who does joke about such a thing, because being censorious like that over a bad, tasteless, stupid joke is equally stupid. The good thing about the nature of comedy is that it’s a self-correcting system. An unfunny comedian will (usually) not be around to make the same joke twice.
Look, I said usually, okay? You don’t hear much about Carlos Mencia or Dane Cook these days, do you?
But, here’s the thing about the above strip - the joke presented is not about rape. It’s part of the context, but the joke itself is not about the act of rape. It’s just an element used in a rather lukewarm gag to up the severity of what the poor, beleaguered NPC is suffering.
But, of course, even mentioning the R-word did not go over well with the new, enlightened Mandarins of the gaming world. Words like toxic masculinity, sexism, and misogyny began to be ascribed to the comic in think-pieces across the internet, even though a woman doesn’t appear in the comic, and pretty much nothing about the strip even pertains to women. Like, at all. The authors of Penny Arcade responded thusly:
Honestly, this is a pretty solid response. Not only is it actually funny - more so than the original strip, and, again, it’s not actually about the act of rape itself - but it accurately points out the absurdity of the claim that their detractors were making, which was that they were joking about rape (not true), endorsing rape (also not true), and probably turning readers into rapists (the least true of all). Which, to be clear - they weren’t, and anyone with any sense knew that was the case. But they weren’t dealing with sensible people acting in good faith. As I’ve stated before, when it comes to the Cancel-mobs of social media, you can’t apologize to them. There isn’t enough groveling one can do to regain their approval - if they ever had it at all - because, simply put, they aren’t looking for an apology, and even conceding that you did anything wrong will only open yourself up for more scathing aspersions, character defamation, and bad-faith attacks. The above comic is just about the only way the duo could reply to these aspersions against their character in a way in which they maintained a shred of dignity and self-respect, especially in the eyes of their readership, who didn’t give a flying fuck about what people in the world of games media said about them. If they would backed down and reneged and fallen down to grovel at the feet of the self-appointed overlords of gaming culture, it’s likely their own fans would have turned on them for being spineless.
Briefly, Dickwolves became something of a rallying cry for those pushing back against the usurpation of the gaming space by Progressive ideologues. Not only did Penny Arcade’s refusal to submit to the pressure of outside actors to redact their comic bolster their credibility, but they actively profited off it when they began peddling Dickwolf merchandise.
Why do the ears look like that…
This merchandise was, ultimately, pulled after Krahulik stated after receiving what he claimed were justified complaints about it after selling it at PAX… though, he did make a statement in which he said that anyone who felt uncomfortable over the contents of a t-shirt should probably not attend PAX, which, yeah. Probably.
In a Q&A panel at PAX 2013, he also stated that he regretted ever pulling the merch at all, a comment that received a standing ovation from the crowd. Since then, he’s waffled on that sentiment. When the topic comes up - and it still does - he, at times, claims that he stands by it, and at others states that he should have never published the strip at all, and ultimately justifying his choice to pull the merch due to death threats he received at the time, and, being a new father, he wasn’t going to take any risks on some lunatic actually making good on their threats when he had young children. Unfortunate, but completely understandable.
The two also had a long-standing, now-legendary back-and-forth with the aforementioned Jack Thomspon in one of the most infamous beefs in gaming lore.
In 2005, Thompson penned an open letter to the Entertainment Software Association - the regulatory body which oversees the ESRB that assigns each published video game an age and content rating, as well as the former organizers of the once august and previously mentioned trade expo, E3 - dubbed A Modest Video Game Proposal, thusly named after Irish author Johnathan Swift’s satirical essay of roughly the same name, minus the gaming part. You know - the one where he suggests that poor people sell their children as food to the landed Anglo gentry of Ireland. You probably had to read it in high school. It’s pretty scathing material, and far above anything that a simpleton like Thompson could ever hope to pen. I’m willing to bet the satire part of the essay sailed completely over his head.
At the time, Thompson was beefing with Take-Two Interactive’s chairman Paul Eibler, and pledged to donate $10,000 of his own money to a charity of Eibler’s choice should a game be published in 2006 that allowed players to kill video game developers in-game. Apparently, he was under the impression that developers would be too afraid to publish a game in which, as he said, players are trained to kill them.
Thompson, in all his wisdom, thoroughly underestimated the rather cavalier and irreverent attitude of most game devs at the time, as he was unaware that 2003’s Postal 2, published by developers Running With Scissors, featured a mission in which the players massacred Running With Scissors staff… and actor Gary Coleman, for some reason.
“What’chu doin’ wit’ that gun, Willis?”
In Doom II, there was also a moment in which co-founder John Romero is killed in the final boss fight. In fact, only a week prior to the letter’s publication, modders had created a mod for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas - a title for which Thompson harbored a deep disdain for - in which players mow through staff of the ESA, including the then-current head of the organization, Doug Lowenstein. Again, Thompson was unaware of this. He was not someone with a reputation for doing his homework too well. Or at all.
A small band of devs even came together under the name Thompsoncraft and published a game in 2006, dubbed I’m OK: A Murder Simulator, which followed the rather elaborate plot for a hypothetical game that Thompson outlined in the letter.
Naturally, Thompson refused to donate the money, citing a variety of reasons. Most of his stated reasons were just weaselly, mealy-mouthed loopholes that boil down to, Um, ackshually, I never said specifically that, so, um - gotcha! The chief reason, he claimed, was because Eibling never specified a charity for him to donate to. Did he ever reach out and ask Eibling personally? Did Eibling even know the offer was on the table? Of this, I am uncertain, but the end result was that Thompson never ponied up the promised cash.
So, Krahulik and Holkins donated the money for him. In his name. At a ESA fundraising dinner in 2006, they presented a check for the money, the memo line of which bore the note, For Jack Thompson, because Jack Thompson won’t. According to Krahulik, he was phoned by Thompson the next day, and even though the exact contents of this conversation have since been lost to history, we know that he didn’t call to say hi and share a hearty laugh. What is known is that Thompson told him to redact the article on their site detailing the event, with the nebulous threat of, or else. That's what people say when they're serious, you know. Which reminds me.
Or else.
Thompson also sent similar threats to other gaming-related news sites that ran stories about the event. I imagine these threatening letter were read aloud to the offices of these publications, which the staff met with raucous, uproarious laughter.
Literally the day after the event, because he was unable to wait even twenty-four hours, Thompson contacted the Seattle Police Department, claiming that Penny Arcade was running a campaign of targeted harassment against him. He went so far as to contact the Attorney General of Washington state and lodge a formal complaint that the two were extorting him for the money he’d promised to donate.
Now, to be fair, Thompson was being harassed for his actions by fans of the comic. He was also being harassed by a lot of people, actually. Mostly because he operated on the classic kick the dog until it bites strategy, in which he would purposefully antagonize gamers, gaming organizations, and others in the space with purposefully hyperbolic, overly vitriolic, and inflammatory comments, and, once a reaction was elicited, he'd immediately play victim, even though he was the one going out of his way to make trouble. Make no mistake - Thompson was and is a disingenuous and duplicitous piece of shit that made a name for himself fearmongering over video games, and, had he been successful in his campaigns, would have gleefully ruined the lives of developers, journalists, and artists just to keep his grift going. He's not a figure worthy of sympathy, and any harassment he suffered was that which he squarely brought upon himself in his self-appointed crusade and stirring up trouble where there was none to be found. There's a reason he was disbarred in 2009, and, despite multiple attempts, has been unable to have his license to practice law reinstated since.
But, given that neither Krahulik nor Holkins had ever endorsed such harassment and did not condone it, nor had they ever actually asked Thompson to pony up the money that he had promised to pay when they donated in his stead, all of these charges were duly dismissed. Thompson continued to attempt to raise legal trouble with the duo and incite them into acting against him through continued allegations of harassment, even going so far as to allege that they were co-conspirators in a grand ploy within the gaming industry to tarnish his already miserably poor reputation within a later case he fought (and lost) against 2K Games. The only response Krahulik and Holkins deigned to give him was releasing this shirt on their merch shop.
Again, one must respect the two’s ability to turn controversy into revenue.
But, ultimately, it’s neither Jack Thompson nor the Dickwolves that really caught my attention. Thompson’s legal troubles are worthy of an article unto themselves, and the Dickwolves are, in essence, just another flare-up, a small skirmish, if you will, that predated and preceded the larger drama that was GamerGate, which I’ve already said enough on for the time being.
Which brings us to one American James McGee.
American McGee is a retired game designer with a brief but intriguing career, and an even more interesting history.
American McGee - fueled by Snapple.
Born in Dallas, Texas to a single mother that he describes as an eccentric hippy and an absentee father who he claimed beat him in a drunken rage the one time they ever met, McGee was a gifted and bright child that excelled in mathematics and the burgeoning field of computer science.
After suffering through a revolving door of low quality step-fathers, his mother began a relationship with a trans-woman when he was a teenager. According to McGee, at the age of sixteen, he came home from school one day to find the house completely empty save for his bed, his clothes, his computer, and his book collection. A note left for him by his mother said that she had sold the home to pay for her new romantic partner’s sex-change surgery, left town, and that, basically, he could go fuck himself.
Nothing like a mother’s love, right?
With nowhere to go, McGee dropped out of school and began to work odd jobs, subsisting on the generosity of his friends and acquaintances before parlaying his love for cars into a job at a Volkswagen repair shop. When he was 21, McGee moved into an apartment in Dallas and found that his new neighbor was John Carmack. For an avid computer geek like McGee, moving into new digs and discovering your neighbor is John Carmack is like a film buff buying a house and walking outside to find Christopher Nolan watering the rose bushes in front of the neighboring yard. Carmack was the co-founder of Dallas-based iD Software, which, at the time, was riding high on the success of the original Doom. The two became friends and Carmack shortly offered McGee a job as a tech support position at iD Software. With a long history of computer tinkering under his belt, McGee quickly moved up the ladder, and found himself working on now legendary titles such as Doom II, Quake, and Quake II.
His time with the company, however, was brief. He joined in 1993, and, by 1998, was out. According to developer Sandy Petersen - previously mentioned in a former article as That Mormon Guy Who Worked On Doom And Said Killing Demons Is Based- this was due to a conflict in personality with studio director Tim Willits. According to Petersen, Willits - who he, with typical Mormon cordiality, only refers to as the snake rather than naming names, though anyone who read between the lines could identify - purposefully and maliciously gave McGee bad advice while the latter was working a level designer. Basically, he told him to do everything that Carmack did not want to see. McGee, perhaps naively, followed this advice. The resulting work displeased Carmack to the point that he fired McGee.
McGee has never confirmed the veracity of this story himself; it’s all second-hand hearsay from other iD Software employees who worked there at the time. McGee, for his part, claims that he doesn’t know why he was fired aside from compounded issues of internal politics and his own personal shortcomings. Such is the nature of office politics, which is basically like a fetid high school bathroom full of the meanest, pettiest, bitchiest teenage girls you could imagine, but ten times worse because said spiteful, catty people now control whether or not you get a paycheck, and you and your family could end up royally fucked just because Karen in Accounts Payable didn’t think you were smiling enough. Cool, right?
McGee was quickly scooped up by Electronic Arts, which, at the time, were still a respectable video game developer and not yet one of the most unanimously despised companies in the entire industry that they are today. Again, McGee was quick to scrabble through the ranks of EA, and even came to them with his own pitch for a new game which, surprisingly, EA gave him 4.5 million dollars to make. This game would be the infamous cult hit of 2000, American McGee’s Alice.
If you can’t tell, the game is basically Lewis Carroll’s fantasy staple, Alice in Wonderland, but with the caveat of, What if it was fucked up?
Two brief, humorous asides - apparently, McGee did not want his name in the title, but EA put it in there anyways since they were hoping to make a franchise under McGee's stewardship that would feature more famous stories - in the public domain, if course - reinterpreted by McGee with his own dark, almost Burton-esque spin. Also, he just kind of has a name that lends itself to such a title. It's simple, but evocative, and nothing if not distinct and memorable. Honestly, I was shocked when I found out American McGee was his legitimate, legal name.
Also, when I was but a wee ape, I remember my father received PC Gamer magazine, back when magazines were something you actually got physical copies of, because he was always a computer savvy guy, enjoyed computer games, and I recall him getting lost in PC games for hours and hours on end when I was a kid. I got my PC gaming itch naturally. However, when I was old enough to stay up until 3 AM playing World of Warcraft, he would come out and yell at me to SHUT THAT GOD DAMN THING OFF AND GO TO BED, which, of course, I did not do to him. Not even when mommy was gone and I was in dire need of a grilled cheese and his ass was too busy playing Close Combat to get up and make me one.
Anyways, because I would read anything I got my hands on, I usually read my dad’s magazines. But not the one with that fucking creepy-ass, anemic cat on the front when Alice made the front cover of the magazine. American McGee’s Alice scared the piss out of me. I mean, I already had trouble even looking at Goosebumps covers in the kid’s section of Barnes and Noble; McGee's vision of Alice and friends did not go over well with me, and I distinctly remember hiding this specific issue of PC Gamer away at the back of his magazine rack because I very much did not want to see that fucking cat or the dead-eyed stare of dark, twisted cycle-path Alice with the big knife.
Anyways, American McGee’s Alice was not the first to reinterpret Carroll's story of Wonderland. For as long as there have been fairy tales or children’s stories, I'm willing to bet there’s been some mouth-breathing goon out there that thought, Bro, but, like, what if we made, it, totally fucked up and, like, bloody and shit. Still, even though there had been other reimaginings of Alice's story before McGee's, there weren't as many as there are today, where subverting the classic Lewis Carroll story with a dark twist is so rote that it's passé. At the time, the concept felt fresh and unique. More so than it does now, after two decades of What if X, but TWIZTED!? Aided by an aggressive marketing campaign, the game made a splash in the gaming scene.
A few years later, in 2003, Canadian comic artist Todd McFarlane - creator of the comic series Spawn, founder of the iconoclastic Image Comics, and certified freak - released a line of figures under his line, McFarlane Toys, of Oz characters reimagined to be grotesque mockeries of their original incarnations. Because, y’know - wouldn’t the colorful, lively, whimsical world of Oz look better if it was a Limp Bizkit album cover? The line was literally called The Twisted Land of Oz, because McFarlane is unaware of the concept of self-parody. Here’s his take on Dorothy. Fair warning - it’s not NSFW, but it certainly violates good taste.
Here's some chatter I found on a forum that dates all the way back to the line's reveal.
I’m glad to see I wasn’t alone in my reservations. Y’see, I’m not sure what exactly about Dorothy being chained up, hobbled, blind-folded, and topless with her tig ol’ bitties a-swangin’ makes this take on Oz twisted so much as just plain perverted and tasteless, but, I must concede - I am not the sex pervert dark visionary that Todd McFarlane is. Let’s just say that we should all be thankful that the line did not include the Wicked Witch of the West, who I’m sure would have been reimagined through Todd’s boundless creativity into leather-clad dominatrix with a riding crop and a big ol' honkin’ rubber -
Point is, I also remember seeing those figures at fucking KB Toys, of all places, because, you know - that’s something that totally belongs on the shelf next to Buzz Lightyear and G.I. Joe. As if wasn’t bad enough I had to see Twizted!Alice and that ugly Cheshire Cat with the human, blood-stained teeth leering at me from Daddy’s magazine rack, I also couldn’t go buy a stupid Storm Trooper action figure without being subjected to Todd McFarlane’s fucking BDSM fetish. That was the early Oughts for you, I guess.
Explains a lot about why I turned out the way I did.
Anyways, American McGee’s Alice was actually a success and, as previously mentioned, was something of a cult hit. However, since cult hits rarely move the needle in the video game world, McGee’s twizted visions of Oz, Mother Goose, and Cocomelon never did came to pass. Alice did get a sequel in 2011, titled Alice: The Madness Returns, which was even more well received than the original. However, McGee was so burned out from internal politicking in the video game industry that, afterwards, he hung up his hat and abandoned it entirely.
Despite numerous attempts to revive his original vision and buy back the rights to his own creation from EA's iron grasp, McGee doesn't seem to be making any moves to return to the gaming industry any time soon. These days, he lives in Shanghai and runs a design company called Mysterious Inc.with his wife, which is one conjugation away from infringing on the copyright for Scooby-Doo’s Mystery Inc. They dabble a bit in a lot of things, but it appears their most successful endeavor is a line of stuffed rabbits called Plushie Dreadfuls. There’s a wide variety of these fellows, including a mental health line filled with plush, cuddly, pillowy friends that represent various illnesses and conditions like narcolepsy, OCD, bipolar disorder, and… celiac disease.
Sure. Why not.
I think these are my favorites, though. Big fan of the migraine one. I feel your pain, bunny.
Have you ever tried Excedrin, Migraine Bunny?
Honestly? I like them. They’re cute, and the designs are unique and fun, and they’re like Care Bears, only the exact opposite, which seems to be something of a forte for Mr. McGee. They amuse me, and if McGee ever took a stab at making an animated series about them… hey, man - call me. We’ll do lunch.
At first blush, I thought they came off as comedically insensitive, but, at the same time, the entire line seems to be more about raising awareness and offering some sort of empowerment for people who suffer from these conditions. To give the benefit of the doubt, I think McGee’s heart is in the right place. Really, I do. I don’t get the sense that he’s being malicious, cynical, or dismissive about anything here, especially given the share of lumps he seems to have taken over the course of his own difficult life. In fact, this disclaimer is on the page of every product.
I wanna make it clear before we move on that, for as much as I’ve clowned on the guy, I think McGee is a genuine creative spirit with a distinct vision that endured a lot of bullshit from the more corporate side of the video game industry, and it’s a shame that he was never able to materialize more of his talent due to petty squabbles and internal politics. I did play Alice: The Madness Returns back on the PC because you could buy it on Steam for the price of a McDouble (in 2012 money, not today’s Biden Bucks) during the legendary Steam Summer Sales, and, yeah - it’s a solid game. Now that I’m older and more mature and able to process the cover of a Goosebumps chapter book without dry heaving and sobbing from terror, I’ll admit that the art style is striking, distinct, and very well done. Maybe not my jam, but I do think there could have been a promising future for a larger universe of McGee’s macabre take on classic children’s stories. The games are, I must say, objectively good. I don't think the world would have been worse if his career had gone in a different direction.
While I was perusing the vast myriad of mentally unwell bunnies, my shite laptop spazzed out and the malfunctioning touch screen somehow added the one I was looking at to the online cart. Since I was that kid who would pick out a toy a the store and, even when I found myself regretting which one I picked, I couldn’t put it back on the shelf because I felt as if I had chosen it and it would be sad if I didn’t buy it3, so, yeah.
I swear my hands do not look that old and decrepit in real life.
I bought it.
Maybe it was karma for ragging on McGee, but I also consider it a gesture of good faith towards the man and a show that I’m glad that, despite everything, he seems to be doing well for himself. This is the ADHD bunny, which I was looking at because I, too, have iPad Baby Brain Syndrome, so this little guy understands my struggle. I have to say, it came in a nice, custom-printed shipping envelope, and nestled in side of a full-size canvas bag with his grim visage printed on the front. He even has the Chaos sigil embroidered on his middle, which means he will make a fine addition to my growing collection of Warhammer 40k chaos space marines. His name shall be Yakub, in honor of my progenitor.
Word to the wise, though - I caught the bugger trying to open a portal to Hell when I wasn’t looking, so… buyer beware.
If you ever wondered how I write hour-plus long articles as consistently as I do, you’re looking at the key to creativity.
Technically, it was also a business expense for this publication, so he’ll be a tax write-off.
Oh, and, in the immortal words of Casper, Wyoming’s resident sexy gothic bad boy KingcobraJFS - not a sponsor, toobz. American McGee is not paying me to hock his bunnies, but, er, well - if you wanted to slide me a little somethin’ somethin’ on the side, Mr. McGee… we can work something out. If you want, of course. Just sayin’. I’m open.
So, you’re probably wondering where the paths of Penny Arcade and American McGee intertwine. Well, in 2003, Krahulik and Holkins decided to help spur McGee’s creative process by pitching an idea for another child-friendly property that he might be interested in taking a swing at, and, on April 14th of that year, published a strip under the title of Tart as a Double Entendre.
Now, given the outlines of their previous tussles with public figures, one might assume that McGee saw this and took the gag as a sleight against his unique artistic vision of what he describes as Walt Disney, but a little wicked, and promptly made a fool of himself defending it. Obviously, Penny Arcade was, indeed, lampooning McGee’s game, but this specific strip was not a direct jab at it - no, this was made more to satirize McFarlane’s Oz toys, which, if you recall, were revealed… in 2003.
However, if McGee ever made a public statement on the matter, I can’t find it. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d assume that, given his inclinations, he was probably tickled by the proposal and most likely began to draw up sketches of a tarted-up Strawberry Shortcake in hot pink booty shorts and outline a story in which she went about slaughtering her colorful, food-themed friends to make a delectable feast of sugary sweets from their blood and guts. But, again - this is merely conjecture. I can’t find any response from McFarlane, either, but I also imagine that, given his proclivities for chains, whips, straps, and latex… actually, I don’t want to think about it.
But we do know that someone took extreme offense from this lurid illustration. And it wasn’t who you probably thought it would be…
American Greetings is the second-largest greeting card manufacturer in the world behind Hallmark Cards. If you’ve ever stumbled into Target and haphazardly grabbed the first pink card with hearts on it that you saw, a box of bon-bons, and a bundle of wilting flowers because you totally spaced that it was you and your lovely girlfriend’s third month anniversary and she was going to leave your bum ass if you forgot, you’ve probably bought one of their products before. The company came from humble beginnings, founded by Polish immigrant Jacob Sapirstein, who, in 1906, would trawl around the streets of Cleveland, Ohio in a horse-drawn cart and sell his handmade cards to stores in the city. His son, Irving, would begin assisting his father at the ripe old age of nine years old, which probably would have been violating the rudimentary child labor laws in place even back then, but I guess it doesn’t matter since he would eventually take the business from a small, family-based local venture to a sprawling, multi-national business empire by 1949. Ain’t that just the American dream? A bunch of shitkickers from European backwaters come to this country with nothing but the clothes on their back and a dream of a better life, then build giant corporate monstrosities that have all the compassion and hunger of a starving tiger shark.
You love to see it.
Like any good corporate behemoth, American Greetings began to gobble up every competitor that happened to cross them in the cut-throat field of greeting cards, dominating the market until they came head to head with another fish in the pond that they just couldn’t swallow.
While American Greetings had monopolized the greeting card market in mass retailers such as pharmacies, supermarkets, discount stores, and other such places, Hallmark followed a different strategy. Not to give you another card company’s full biography, but the first Hallmark store was opened in Kansas City, Missouri, by one Joyce Hall in 1910, who’s in stark competition with Evelyn Waugh for the dubious honor of being a man with the most grandmotherly name imaginable. Hall and his own family, like Sapirstein, had been expanding the business rapidly ever since. Rather than peddle their cards in pharmacies, supermarkets, and other such places, which was American Greetings domain, they carved out a niche behind American Greetings by selling their product out of their own stores, as well as ads strategically placed in nationally distributed magazines, radio shows, and catalogues. Oh, did you know that, today, Hallmark outright owns Crayola Crayons? Doesn’t have anything to do with their history - I just thought that was neat.
In the early 60’s, Hallmark decided to throw their hat into the ring of mass retail, and they had the finances to come in swinging.
Over the next two decades, they gradually chewed away at American Greeting’s stranglehold over the market, because there will always be a need to buy a chincy card with a funny monkey on the front to hide a tenner in for that nephew that you hate’s birthday, or people like me who can’t express sympathy in a way that doesn’t come off as irreverent and dismissive, so rather than write an actual letter when someone dies, they pick up a card with some generic Sorry for your loss statement on the inside to avoid looking like a prick. By the late seventies, the two companies were locked in a bitter arms race to one-up the other. A third competitor - Gibson Greetings, which is now a subsidiary of American Greetings, because anti-trust laws in America are a joke - purposefully began selling their own products at a loss to undercut the two titans, resulting in a free-fall in revenue as both Hallmark and American Greetings had to take a meat cleaver to their own prices to remain competitive.
As it turns out, the world of greeting cards is a dirty one. A true doggy-dog world, if you know what I mean.
But American Greetings had an ace hidden up their sleeve; cartoonist Tom Wilson was on their payroll. In 1972, Wilson created the character of Ziggy for a line of greeting cards.
And I’ll see you in Hell, mutant.
This little deformed homunculus captured the hearts and minds of Americans and quickly received a weekly comic strip, penned by Wilson, which became very popular very fast. Like, I always thought Ziggy was a lot older than that, and was a contemporary of Popeye or Lil’ Abner - I had no idea he was such a recent creation. Similar success had already been established by American Greetings when American watercolor artist, Holly Hobbie, introduced the character of… well, Holly Hobbie, in 1967, a character that became so popular that she was, by 1977, the most licensed female character in the world. And, if you think you’ve never seen Holly Hobbie before, you have.
I think that, once an American woman becomes a grandmother, she’s legally obligated to buy at least one piece of Holly Hobbie paraphernalia to display prominently in her house. One of my grandma’s had this very picture framed in the kitchen. Miss Hobbie is still knocking around these days, albeit in a much deteriorated form that’s more modernity friendly than the original incarnation, which was just too classic, timeless, and rooted in tradition to survive in the crushing vacuum of meaning, purpose, and generally everything good and wholesome that is modern America. So, like any animal, Miss Hobbie had to adapt with the times, or risk extinction.
You hate to see it.
American Greetings realized that people really love these funny little characters, and would snap up greeting cards, comic strips, kitchen cookware, and other such things with them slapped on them. With this in mind, they pivoted to focus on cards and merchandise bearing the imagery of iconic, eye-catching characters that, most importantly, only they had access to use or license out at their leisure. And, make no mistake - Hallmark and Gibson Greetings were never going to be allowed to even sniff Hobby Holly’s floral-patterned frock. Not content to coast on the hunched back of Ziggy or be carried along by Holly Hobbie’s wicker basket, American Greetings tapped Tom Wilson to head an internal art department that would focus on generating new characters for various lines of merchandise and cards.
Interestingly, infamous underground comix legend, counter-culture icon, and notorious freak R. Crumb actually got his start as a free-lance artist for American Greetings in their stable of for-hire talent that churned out greeting card designs and new characters like malnourished Vietnamese children in a novelty t-shirt sweatshop. If you know anything about Crumb’s infamously lurid output, you’re probably choking on the irony.
This guy was responsible for the first X-Rated animated film. Which is also considered extremely racist.
Among this pool of underpaid, under-appreciated, and, at the time, nameless, faceless, anonymous free-lancing artists in AG’s employ was one Barbi Sargent, who, in 1972, submitted a simple design for that year’s Valetine’s card run depicting a small girl holding a big ass daisy, creatively titled, Girl With Daisy.
The art director at American Greetings - Rex Conners - saw this design, and was immediately convinced that it would do numbers. It was the strawberries, he knew. It wasn’t the art or the colors or really anything about the work itself - it was the strawberry motif. That was the secret sauce. Bitches love strawberries, after all.
So, he tapped Sargent to make more strawberryish designs for their test market. This, Sargent did, and in 1977, the first four cards featuring the Strawberry Girl, as she was known, hit the market to great success. Around this time, Sargent, for reasons unknown, was shown the door, and Cleveland-native Muriel Fahrion was asked by the higher ups to take the Strawberry Girl design and give it a little more… oomph. In much the same way McGee and McFarlane reimagined classic tales with their own macabre twists, Fahrion took the Strawberry Girl concept and put her own more wholesome spin on the idea, turning the character into a sort of Raggedy-Anne-esque ragdoll character and drawing up a sprawling cast of thirty-two friends for her. Oh, and their pets. They all had pets, too. Settling on a general motif of desserts, sweets, sugar, and things that cause diabetes, the character was finally given the name by which she is still known by today - Strawberry Shortcake.
In 1979, the first proper iteration of Strawberry Shortcake would release to the public, and soon spawned lines of clothing, home decor, and other merchandise, all with her apple-cheeked, strawberry-hatted face printed on them. Spurred by this success, American Greetings then consolidated Strawberry Shortcake and other characters in their roster, including the aforementioned Ziggy, Holly Hobbie, and… Herself the Elf. Never heard of it?
Me neither. Just another line of bobble-headed, candy-colored munchkins that, apparently, were moderately successful, because I guess big heads, beady eyes, and pastel colors was the flavor du jour of the late 70’s. All of these characters were rolled into an internal marketing division within American Greetings under the purview of Tom Wilson. This outfit was dubbed Those Characters from Cleveland, because the company was based in Cleveland, and nothing inspires images of heart-warming, classic Americana quite like the quintessential, All-American city of rock and roll, heavy industry, and racist baseball mascots.
Those Characters from Cleveland soon began to license the characters in their roster to toy manufacturers, again, to great success. In 1979, Fahrion and her sister, Susan Trentel, worked with toy designers at Cincinnati-based Kenner Toys to create the first Strawberry Shortcake dolls. This was roughly around the time that Kenner Toys was also making money hand over fist with their classic and iconic run of original Star Wars action figures and other licensed products, making them the hit factory of the toy industry. The fruity-scented Strawberry Shortcake rag-dolls, which took their cues from the immensely popular chubby-cheeked Cabbage Patch DeformedHomunculi - sorry, Kids, and debuted to great success. American Greetings and Kenner Toys, as the kids would say these days, could not stop getting those W’s. In 1980, only a year after her introduction, Strawberry Shortcake merch raked in a staggering $100 million dollars in sales. Not bad for the new kid on the block.
I wonder what these smell like today… probably not very sweet.
Fahrion’s winning streak continued into the early 80’s, when she was brought on to illustrate concept art and help refine fellow illustrator Elena Kucharik’s new pitch for the company. Kucharik was also a native of Cleveland, which, it seems, was really just the place you wanted to be if you were in the business of greeting cards and drawing cute cartoon characters. Kucharik’s pitch was one of yet another broad cast of cute, technicolor, easy-to-recognize and easy-to-market characters that children would be begging their parents to buy toys of. And I know you know the characters from Fahrion’s next big project.
You know them. Little girls love them. Little boys performatively hate them for clout with their peers, but their success suggests that, secretly, inwardly, they love them, too. Their songs have driven parents to madness across the planet. It’s…
The mother fuckin’ Care Bears.
According to Those Characters From Cleveland’s co-president Jack Chojnacki, who I can only imagine was making a fortune for himself peddling stuffed animals to kids in the 80’s, when he presented the colorful ursine friends to the businessmen on American Greetings board of directors, "It had a high aaaaaah factor." What exactly he meant by that, I’m not entirely sure, but I am very amused by the mental image of a bunch of graying corporate stiffs soyjacking over Care Bears, of all things. It’s worth noting that Kenner Toys would also secure the rights to make Care Bear toys, at which point I’m fairly certain meant that the CEOs of both AG and Kenner Toys were making enough cold hard cash to light Gurkha cigars with burning hundred dollar bills over glasses of whiskey distilled from the tears of unicorns, because the polychrome cast of ursine acquaintances were about to take the fuck off. By the end of the decade, 40 million Care Bears had been sold.
A photo of the hundred thousandth viewer of the first Care Bears movie being gifted a complimentary bear. In Amsterdam. These bears ruled the world for a while.
Fahrion also worked on another similar property that also featured kind, loving, saccharine sweet talking, walking animals called The Get Along Gang, which looks to me like an almost self-parody of the entire schtick of friendly furries made as a mean-spirited joke in a cartoon for teenagers. Like, I feel like this could have come from a South Park gag that ends with them all getting mulched by a woodchipper.
Despite the expansive and ever-growing bullpen of cute, cuddly, doe-eyed mutant animal freaks obsessed with friendship, cooperation, and generally nice things, it was both Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears that managed to hit escape-velocity to join the pantheon of the most profitable and iconic toys from the 80’s, joining Optimus Prime, G.I. Joe, He-Man, the Cabbage Patch Gremlins, and others in the halls of Mount Toy-lympus.
Like her peers in those other venerable franchises, Strawberry Shortcake’s fortunes began to wane with the end of the Reagan Era and the dawning of the Clinton years. She would, as they all would, undergo dramatic changes in an attempt to shed the cutesy, wholesome, rag-doll aesthetic that had first won acclaim, but now seemed outdated, boring, and lame to children of an era typified by bright, garish colors and the word XTREME. As stated before with Holly Hobbie, the name of the game is adapt or die. THQ - yes, that THQ, the video game developer, who, believe it or not, started off making toys - tried to breath new life into the series by focusing on small, plastic dolls rather than larger ones made from fabric, and also gave Strawberry Shortcake and her sugary sweet friends new, more modern make-overs to appeal to the sensibilities of a new age. The attempt, unfortunately for them, was met with middling response for the public, and actually led THQ to pivot away from toys to video game development, where they would be the reigning heavyweight champions of making god awful licensed games based on bad movies for kids.
Ultimately, Miss Shortcake would disappear into obscurity for a while. She never quite exited stage left, but, like a one-hit wonder with only a mildly respected song that everyone forgets about until they hear it on the radio and think, Oh, yeah - that was a thing, she hovered around the periphery of pop culture as some vague, hazy memory, and often only recalled as the punchline of a joke. She was, however, not alone. She wasn’t the only body-proportion challenged 80’s leading girl of a toyline that was based around the conceit of bright colors, silly names, and the power of friendship.
The eighties was a good time to be a big-headed dwarf with small eyes and cute critter friends. The nineties? Not so much.
Yet, as with all IP’s that once made beaucoups of money… they never stay gone for long. Even when they fail, they always seem to inevitably pop up again every couple of years when some new company buys the rights and decides to reinvent it for a new audience and new era. Kind of like the cyclical nature of Samsara, death and rebirth. Or herpes.
The cycle, currently, is in full swing. In 2019, we saw the Care Bears make a return to the television screen, replete with a brand new line of toys and more simplistic designs for the Cal-Arts era of TV animation. Just last year, one of the crowned heads at Warner Brothers merchandising division, George Jones, acquired the brand with his own personal fortune to do the same thing with it he did with Harry Potter - print fucking money. The little buggers were selling out and sparking fist-fights during the 2023 Christmas season, with not one, not two, but six new animated, hour-long specials on the docket for HBO Max, so don’t expect these fuzzy bastards to go anywhere anytime soon.
Even though they look like they should be cereal mascots, I actually do like the redesigns of the Care Bears. Something about them just makes me feel like my ADHD kicked into overdrive.
And, uh - I don’t think I have to say anything about the return of the other premiere 80’s franchise about colorful, talking animals aside from, yeah; it came back, alright. Oh, did it come back…
But we all know that story. In the wake of the early 2010’s Pony-mania, they even tried to resurrect Strawberry Shortcake’s spiritual sister, Rainbow Brite. It… didn’t take.
One can only wonder why.
Strawberry Shortcake’s 2010’s reboot comes a bit earlier than the rest, even predating the Technicolor Equestrian Crew of Whom We Shall Talk No More. Hasbro acquired the licensing rights to the property from American Greetings in 2008, and, by 2009, had begun to push new products with a new, friendlier, more hip n’ happenin’ Shortcake who liked to play guitar and wear bell-bottom jeans, because that’s what kids do. I think. There’s an argument to be made that, along with their success in the motion picture industry with the Transformers films, pulling off this face-lift for Miss Shortcake was another event that set the stage for the Pony-pocalypse we saw in 2010 when Hasbro unleashed My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic upon the unsuspecting public.
Everyone say, Thank you, Shortie. It could have never happened without you.
Even though I was in high school when this launched, when I think of Strawberry Shortcake,this is the iteration that comes to mind. Why? Well, it wasn’t as if there was some fucking social movement on the internet to aggressively push media properties made for kindergarten-aged girls onto young men, at the time. No. That would be ridiculous. No one was trying to make that aberrant fluke happen again.
Spoilers: They were.
And, even if it wasn’t nearly as aggressive as the Pony Putsch, I remember folks on 4chan and various other sites really trying to get lightning to strike twice and start a social movement around another recently revived children’s property. The other one I recall being hammered hard was the reboot of the Littlest Pet Shop brand that dropped around the same time. Needless to say, you don’t hear about the Petter crowd these days, and we should all be grateful. God is truly good like that.
It’s around 2016 that things begin to get messier than my attempt at making an actual strawberry shortcake. In 2015, a brand management company called Iconix purchased the rights to Strawberry Shortcake. Not from Hasbro - Hasbro was only licensing the character. No, they bought Strawberry Shortcake right from American Greetings for the tidy sum of $105 million… which, really doesn’t seem like all that much, when it comes to these things. Anyways, this was the first time the character would be owned by someone other than the company that gave rise to her in the first place. Hasbro was able to keep their licensing in place and continue on with their iteration of the character, but by 2017, a Canadian entertainment firm under the name of DHX came in and bought Iconix, and thusly, poor Strawberry Shortcake was sold off like a chattel slave. And, wouldn’t you know it! DHX was merged with a subsidiary of Iconix - WildBrain Studios - which finally brought an end to the almost comical chain of one corporate fish eating another.
This constant shuffling of property rights left poor Miss Shortcake to be passed around like a two-buck tart on the Vegas strip. A flurry of reboots, redesigns, and botched attempts to jump-start the series anew - all while Hasbro was still cranking out fresh material themselves - ultimately resulted in the current iteration of the character, under the subtitle, Berry in the Big City. I guess Sweets in the City would have been too evocative of something else. The actual animated series is animated in flash, but the movies appear to be CGI. Bad choice. Always a bad choice.
Something about this just screams Acid Reflux Medication Commercial. The show, however, seems to be doing well. I mean, it’s got, like, three seasons and a few movies, with the most recent season ending in late 2023 and more ordered to come in the near future. Looking through Google images, it appears like they have some sponsorship deals with Canadian companies and they wheel out this abomination to shuck and jive with Canuck kiddies.
And, yeah - I watched some of it. Because I’m just a glutton for punishment. Also, I wanted to give an honest assessment, because I love you. Tips are not expected, but appreciated, et cetera, et cetera.
The series is… very My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The art style, the animation style, the humor is all very reminiscent of that show, which really speaks to the impact of Friendship is Magic on the greater animation industry, and how, again, almost everyone who’s come after has been chasing the crown Hasbro left behind when the show wrapped.
If you told me this was a spin-off of Friendship is Magic, I’d believe you.
And, to be clear, it’s not a bad influence. If you recall my assessment of Friendship is Magic, the show is not bad by any means, but, like the current children’s obsession du jour, the blue canine thunder from Down Under, Bluey, it sometimes feels like it was written more for adults than children. Sounds strange at first, I know, but it makes sense when you see it. The snappy dialogue, the snarky, sarcastic sense of humor, and jokes that will fly over a child’s head all seem to be there for the sake of parents that will inevitably end up watching the show with their children. There’s even that penchant for goofy, exaggerated faces that just so happen to be very convenient for snapshotting and turning into easily-shared reaction images to be used on your favorite cartoon and comics discussion board with other goony manchildren. Or perhaps your Substack publication.
> mfw
Again, not a bad thing in and of itself, but all these factors results in something that doesn’t feel like something explicitly for children, and something that may or may not have been hoping to court an older audience. It feels like they’re running through a violent, Oklahoma-tier lightning storm with pots and pans strapped to their body, waving around a metal rod and hoping to get that Zeus will cast down a mighty bolt and shock them with ten thousand jigawatts of that Friendship is Magic good-good.
Hell, Friendship is Magic alumni Andrea Libman and Tabitha St. Germain turn up in the Strawberry Shortcake cast, too. Much like Friendship is Magic, where the ponies substitute the term everypony for everybody or nopony for nobody, these characters use terms like everyberry and noberry. The show couldn’t be less subtle about its influences short of having Strawberry Shortcake wear a shirt that says, I’MNOT TWILIGHT SPARKLE, BUT DAMN IT, I’M TRYING!
In the show, Strawberry Shortcake4 and her friends all run small businesses, trying to turn a profit in the berry-eat-berry world of food stalls and street vendors. I suppose Berry-tropolis, or whatever the city is called, has no child labor laws or OSHA equivalent. One of her friends is even a thinly-veiled caricature of a venture capitalist. Berry-ville, it seems, is the ultimate anarcho-capitalist paradise. Of course, the Non-Aggression Pact is constantly threatened by a cavalcade of grown adults who apparently have nothing better to do than antagonize a twelve year old who peddles pastries from a cart. I can sympathize - whenever I see kids in my neighborhood with a lemonade stand, I have to make a conscious effort to restrain myself from popping the curb and flattening it with my front tires, just to remind them that life is unfair and often cruel. It’s not like they have the proper licensure to run a refreshment stand, anyways. The joyless city bureaucrats would probably consider me a hero.
Anyways, Shortcake moves to the city to follow her dreams of being a baker or a pastry chef or run a Korean donut shop, or whatever, and lives with her Aunt Praline, who happens to be a lesbian. My biggest issue with Aunt Praline, frankly, is that she’s named after a dogshit confection that always feels like chewing wall tack5.
Also, I noticed that one of the characters has the Killmonger-haircut that has finally begun to get the negative rap that it deserves.
I’m really glad people are beginning to ask why every black guy in every series nowadays has to have the sour gummy worms cut. Michael B. Jordan could pull it off in Black Panther because Michael B. Jordan is a good actor, and he was playing a character literally called Killmonger, but it looks much less… apropos on a fat, dumpy, gay fashion designer. Oh, yeah, and this character is gay, too. I didn’t mention that. Noticing a pattern? He also makes a dress that looks like this for a character described as a transberry - keep in mind that berry is their word for person.
Tommy Sotomayor’s “conspiracy” of the emasculation of black men in the mainstream media continues at pace.
Again - it’s about as subtle as a clown slapping a strawberry shotrcake in your face. For some reason, despite constant accusations of children’s media going woke, I’ve never once heard anyone kick up any dust about this show. I suppose part of that might be because, in the world of kid’s media, there’s bigger fish to fry and more appetizing targets that will get a better return on investment with user engagement, and another is that this show is both produced in the People’s Republic of Canada and a Netflix production, which basically guaranteed that it there was going to be more liberal posturing than there are chocolate chips in a cookie.
But, in my research, I discovered that this isn’t exactly out of place in the world of Strawberry Shortcake. This was a character from the Hasbro line, which had a brief overlap with Wildbrain/DHX/Canada’s run with the franchise, and appeared prominently in their joint venture to bring the Shortcake crew to comic shops with publisher IDW Comics.
This is Sweet Grapes. Her twin sister is Sour Grapes. This naming convention leads me to believe that she is their parent’s favored child, and they absolutely did not love the two girls equally. Very sad. There’s nothing I could find that explicitly states or suggests that Sweet Grapes is a transberry, but the color scheme of her bow (and her stockings, which can’t be seen in the above picture) is a little too specific to be accidental. It’s worth noting that Hasbro’s take on the franchise was criticized by the usual suspects for making the entire cast skinny white girls.
I’ll give them this; the characters are suspiciously lithe for being people who’s entire diets appear to consist of sugary sweets, pastries, and generally tasty but unhealthy things. It would be more realistic if Strawberry Shortcake was shaped more like a Strawberry Poundcake, or, at the very least, had Type 2 Diabetes, but I suppose that take on the franchise will have to wait until I can scrape together enough cash to buy the rights to the franchise.
Given that Sweet Grapes seems to be a late addition to the cast - again, based on the rather messy timeline I’ve pieced together, which may be inaccurate - I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some desire among the staff at IDW Comics to diversify the cast a little that either never took off or reigned in by the suits who pull the purse strings at Hasbro’s HQ.
You can take it even further, right back to one of the creators. Here’s Muriel Fahrion with some art she did in the aftermath of the George Floyd fiasco in 2020.
Can’t imagine why Black Lives Matter Bear didn’t go over well with test audiences.
But we’ll come back to her shortly. We’re not here to hand-wring over this most recent iteration of Strawberry Shortcake and her motley crew of diverse, pastry-themed pals, either. No - let’s rewind a bit and take it back to 2003. Let’s set the stage again and put all these pieces together again.
Todd McFarlane releases his line of nu-metal album cover Oz figures. Penny Arcade responds with their American McGee’s Strawberry Shortcake gag. Well, as it just so happened, unbeknownst to them, 2003 was also the year that American Greetings had planned to rev up the first of what would be many relaunches of the Strawberry Shortcake brand for the first time since THQ’s failed attempt to do so in 1992, replete with a marketing blitz to push the strawberry-haired strumpet back into the cultural consciousness.
And they did not want children, and, more pertinently, the parents who were going to buying said children the toys, to get on Google expecting to find this sweet, innocent Strawberry Shortcake, and instead pull up a BDSM-themed parody of Miss Shortcake in red latex smacking her friend’s sweet buns with a riding crop. Of course, neither Krahulik or Holkins were aware of the goings-on behind the scenes at American Greetings, and I’m sure if they did, they wouldn’t have cared, anyways. Because why would they?
Well, American Greetings thought they should, and within days had issued a Cease-and-Desist order against the duo. Since Penny Arcade was still relatively young at the time and financially unstable, the two complied, and the original strip was replaced by this.
To be clear, the Penny Arcade duo did nothing wrong when they published the strip. The image is clearly parody, which is squarely under the purview and protection of American Fair Use laws. Satire is a bit more murky territory, but anyone who isn’t getting cash from a big corporations coffers will be willing to say that it shouldn’t be. Either way, the men would have been well within their rights to keep the strip up, if they’d wanted to. However, American Greetings made it clear that, if they did, they’d be facing a blitzkreig of legal warfare. While the men would have been legally in the green to tell the company to pound sand… it would have been a very costly claim to make, since they would have had to lawyer up and meet the absolute animals in American Greetings lawyer line-up on the stand. So, I also don’t fault them for backing down. The two had only recently become financially independent through monetizing the comic, and it was probably wise not to jeopardize their newfound income.
Of course, the two didn’t exactly take it lying down, either.
Naturally, American Greetings was not too thrilled with this, either, nor were they all too happy about one of their lawyers emails being posted. They took that as a shot across the bow and claimed that doing so was an attempt on behalf of Krahulik and Holkins to incite harassment. After all, the two’s fans, being as supportive as they were known to be, were very adamant to let American Greetings now exactly how they felt about a large corporation throwing their weight around. A few even sent American Greetings their own ideas for a new take on Miss Shortcake. You know - as a pitch. These, of course, were a little more on the adult side of things, even risque, perhaps, but I’m sure it was all in good fun and the sake of earnest, creative expression.
The controversy caused such a stir in the community that when the first PAX kicked off the following year, there were a handful of Sexy Shortcakes cosplayers on hand, and, much to American Greetings’ chagrin, still have a habit of popping up every so often.
But, the two would stand their ground this time and, despite grumbles of further action, American Greetings decided the cake wasn’t worth the slice, and ultimately slunk back.
In 2011, after McGee’s Alice finally saw the release of its long awaited sequel, the two would lampoon the ordeal by taking a similar stab at one of Miss Shortcake’s contemporaries.
Now, Rainbow Brite is under the purview of American Greetings' bitter rivals, Hallmark. If Hallmark took similar offense to this colorful rendition of their own poster girl, they kept it behind closed doors. Perhaps because Miss Brite was not then currently in the midst of a brand revival. But probably because it was pointless to get sand in their gooch over a silly comic strip made by a pair of gaming geeks (I mean that endearingly) on the internet.
Thus, we come to the end of Penny Arcade’s triple-trouble of legal spats. But we aren’t quite at the end of Strawberry Shortcake’s funny business. She’s a sweet girl, so it’s really no surprise that a lot of hungry folks have wanted a slice of her cake. And American Greetings is not known for their willingness to share.
For a company that postures themselves as being this wholesome, All-American company that makes sweet and saccharine greeting cards, American Greetings is almost comically litigious. Then again… maybe there is nothing truly American than some corporate leviathan abusing their vast sums of money to bully those beneath them who don’t have the means to defend themselves against a small army of legal blackshirts with all the compassion and kindness of a rabid pitbull. Point is, if you look up American Greetings and sue, you’ll find that they’re very quick to draw that card on just about anyone. They’re probably drafting the legal documents to sue me for this article, and, if I had to guess, they’re gonna try to sue you for reading it, too, so, uh… lawyer up while you can. Again, I wouldn’t have guessed that the world of greeting cards was so nasty, but if I’ve learned anything from the E-Girl explosion of the 2020’s, the more cutesy and innocent something or someone wants to look, the higher the odds are that they’re actually a sociopath and/or have one of McGee’s BPD bunnies sitting on their shelf.
The thing is, the subject of who actually made the character of Strawberry Shortcake is a murky one. Legally speaking. To me, it seems pretty cut and dry.
Remember Barbi Sargent?
Despite having the artistic sensibilities of a grandma, Sargent apparently looked like a Nagel woman come to life.
Remember how she drew up the original designs for what would become Strawberry Shortcake? Notice how she just kind of… disappeared from the story, at some point, and never really came up again? Yeah, that’s because American Greetings took her original drawings and assigned the task of spinning them off into something greater to Muriel Fahrion, and left Sargent out of the loop. Despite creating the template for Strawberry Shortcake, Sargent was not consulted on what would be done with the character, what was done with the character, and, more importantly, she was not given so much as a dime outside of the payments she was given for the original illustrations that were used to create the sprawling media franchise. One can only speculate why they would basically build this whole media franchise behind her back, though, if I had to guess… it probably had something to do with money.
Which she wanted. Obviously. I mean, shit. I would, too. Get that bag, queen.
Sargent’s attorney stated thusly:
"[Strawberry Shortcake’s] the hottest thing they've ever seen. We're not seeking an injunction or anything like that. We're not trying to shut them down," said Christopher B. Fagan the artist's Attorney.
"But by law, she's entitled to the profits from the business generated by sales of the character," he added.
So, in 1982, Sargent sued American Greetings for her fair share of the shortcake. The thing is, as a free lance artist that was working for commission by American Greetings, and, being young, inexperienced, and basically fresh out of high school, she didn’t really understand the complicated, tangled rat’s nest that is licensing rights, copyrights, or trademarks, nor was she really kept in the loop about it all. That’s just kind of the nature of being a gig artist. American Greetings tried to make the argument that Sargent had not made the character, Strawberry Shortcake. She’d made the character that had only ever been referred to as Girl with a Daisy, if you recall. Muriel Fahrion was the one who took Girl with a Daisy and created Strawberry Shortcake, and, ipso facto, Sargent was not entitled to a cut of profits for a character that she didn’t make. She didn’t name the character Strawberry Shortcake. In fact, the name didn’t even come around until much later, once the project was already out of her hands. She never even touched anything dubbed Strawberry Shortcake.
Except that wasn’t true.
Remember Rex Conners? The director of AG’s art department that had said originally seen the potential in Girl with a Daisy? Well, he took the stand during the trial, and Sargent’s lawyers asked him - “What did you say when you first saw Sargent’s illustrations?”
Conners response?
"I was thrilled. This was exactly what I wanted!" Rex said, "This is it! This is it! This is Strawberry Shortcake!"
The court granted Sargent the right to Strawberry Shortcake. All of them. However, Sargent, in her benevolence, did return the copyright to American Greetings. Obviously, she didn’t want to stop them from pumping out merchandise with her creation on it - she just wanted her fair compensation for, y’know, making the fucking character.
Now, in the spirit of giving proper credit where it is due, I also want to add that much of this information was found on this blog, compiled by an anonymous author, and was a big help in finding information that was otherwise unavailable or hidden behind paywalls. Thank you for your service, Shortcakin’ Berry Blogger. We salute you.
One must wonder how Muriel Fahrion feels about this. It seems as if the topic of which of the two created Strawberry Shortcake is something of a thorny topic in the fandom. Not sure why they both can’t be given equal credit for their respective contributions, but, whatever. Even today, she makes the claim that she created Strawberry Shortcake. She says the same thing about Care Bears, which, again, were originally the creations of Elena Kucharik. And… she’s not exactly wrong to make that claim. But I’m not sure it’s wholly correct, either. I suppose it all depends on how you define created. Fahrion, demonstrably, made the character what she was, and is one-hundred percent able to make the verified claim that she created the larger cast and world around the character. She and her sister crafted the first dolls from rags. She was tapped to be the one who refined the Care Bears from a loose amalgamation of Kucharik’s designs into a more cohesive vision. I’m not sure if she’s the creator of these properties, but she’s certainly integral to their stories and history, and I don’t mean to diminish Fahrion’s contributions. These franchises would not have evolved or become the behemoths they did without her input. But I don’t think she really made the characters like a lot of people say she did.
She also makes the claim that she has never received royalties by American Greetings for her work. Now, that much I believe. Keep in mind, royalties and residuals are different from compensation. She was on American Greetings payroll, and was paid the work she did at the time, but that’s different from a continual, annual royalties payment, which would entitle an artist a portion of the continued profits of a successful project. The following comes from the Instagram page for her current independent art studio, Outta Thin Air, which she operates out of her now long-time home in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
One can only imagine that seeing Barbi Sargent come in, secure the rights to Strawberry Shortcake’s media empire, and get her just desserts probably left a sour taste in Fahrion’s mouth, especially as she’s encountered financial hardship in her later years. I think it’s safe to say that she’s entitled to a cut of the money that her work still generates today.
This kind of parasitic relationship between artists and copyright holders, where corporate stiffs collect the lion’s share of the funds generated by the hard work of creatives, not uncommon, unfortunately.
Ever since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney, the many authors, artists, and creatives who helped build the Expanded Universe that fleshed out the series beyond the films have ceased to receive any royalties, residuals, or any sort of financial compensation for their work… even though Disney is still selling their work.
Timothy Zahn, author of arguably the most popular and, in my opinion, best Expanded Universe books, the Thrawn Trilogy, is currently seeking to claim over a decade’s worth of residual back-pay from Disney. As he well should. Not only is his character of Thrawn now a major figure in Disney’s sequel era, having been a lynchpin of Dave Feloni’s Rebels and Ahsoka, but, like I said - they’re still selling his fucking books. In bookstores. Right now.
Now, in the interest of fairness, Zahn was brought on to write a new series of books about Thrawn, and even consulted on the Ahsoka series… though, given how abjectly horrible that series was, I can only assume his input with either negligible or outright ignored so Feloni’s streak of releasing glorified fanfiction instead of anything good could continue at pace. He does make money off of those, I’m sure. But the fact of the matter is that Disney weaseled their way out of paying him for books they acquired the rights to from Lucasfilm, despite the fact they’re still being published, and that just seems, y’know… kinda shady, to say the least.
The worst part is, if you do some digging around the fetid wasteland of the Star Wars fandom, you’ll actually find a lot of Star Wars fans believe that Zahn is entitled to fuck all, because he probably already made a decent amount of money and already got his money and, c’mon - who really needs more income for a product that they made that’s still turning a profit? That’s just being greedy, and, in their opinions, Zahn should stop being such a money-grubbing hog and just be happy that Lord Mickey would even deign to keep his shit books in circulation.
Once again, Disney Star Wars fans prove that they are truly soulless, cretinous vermin that would absolutely lick dog-shit off Bob Iger’s boots if he asked them to.
If you think that’s underhanded, you should see how poorly Disney has treated the various creatives from Marvel comics. Jim Starlin, who created many of Marvel’s cosmic characters, saw more compensation from his brief time working with DC Comics when they used the characters he created for them than he did from Marvel then they did the same. What characters did he create, exactly?
Oh, just most of the Guardians of the Galaxy. And Thanos. You know - a character that is now one of the most iconic cinematic villains of all time.
Fortunately for Starlin, his complaints resulted in a re-negotiation of the rights with Disney that he has since said that he is pleased with. Which, again - fair. Get that bag, king. But it seems as if he’s one of the few that was able to get what he was owed from the Mouse. Many of Marvel’s former artists and writers that either created characters or wrote their most lauded titles, which have since served as the basis for Marvel Cinematic Universe entries, have received no royalties, no recognition, and no respect.
What does all this have to do with Penny Arcade? Nothing, really. This whole article turned into a grab-bag of a lot of mixed content, all of which kind of tangentially flowed from one to the other as I did my research.
But, I suppose a neat bow could be tied on it, and the beginning come full-circle to the end, by once again citing that the creators of Penny Arcade were able to sustain themselves and accrue a small fortune off their work. There’s a lot that could be said about the corporate side of content creation, art, and the place of artists and creatives in it, but stories of creators being stiffed of their pound of flesh are unfortunately common.
Worse still, there seems to be an increasing amount of apathy among consumers about whether or not these artists are owed one at all.
While I’d argue the average consumer has never really given a damn about the person who actually designed a Care Bear or written a Star Wars novel, we’re seeing a gradual shift from apathy to antipathy, where people like Zahn or Starlin or Fahrion are seen as avaricious and their demands for proper compensation for their work a potential threat that might temporarily stop the diarrhea valve spewing absolute dreck out of the House of Mouse’s septic system and into the pig troughs for braindead Redditors to lick up. Those awful, covetous, penny-pinching artists wanting fair compensation for their work are hurting dear Michael Mouse! Shouldn’t they know that they’re lucky to even have their work featured by such an august establishment? They should just shut up and take their pittance; Bob Iger has another super-yacht to buy, and the other stockholder’s vacation homes in Malta aren’t going to mortgage themselves!
Such is the nature of slave entertainment and pandering to an audience consisting exclusively of the lowest common denominator.
This is a conversation being held in the midst of the AI art debacle and the existential threat it poses to pretty much everyone who wants to make a living off their creative work. Of course, AI “art” is never going to replace the work of a true, talented, and passionate artists for a myriad of reasons that I won’t go into here, but it does seem likely that if Disney and their cohorts can cut out humans that have to pay rent and replace them with ChatGPT, which doesn’t, they likely will at their nearest convenience, and as soon as they won’t get flayed alive in the public for doing so. Given the fact that there’s a large contingent of uncritical consoomers perfectly willing to gorge themselves on any slop that has the right branding on it, I have a feeling that day will come sooner than we think, and no amount of strikes from the WGA, SAG-AFTRA, or other industry unions will stop it. It’s a matter of when, not if.
This is all to say that the support and fair treatment of independent creators in any field is going to become paramount in the years to come, as they’ll be the only people making any real art worth a damn, and if they can’t pay their rent, or even just cover their own cost of living, the only thing we’re going to be getting is Star Wars: Episode 19 - Ahsoka and the Mandalorian’s Electric Boogaloo or The Avengers 12: The Wrath of Lord Asshole, all generated in Stable Diffusion. Honestly, I don’t even think that AI generated content is inherently a bad thing - it has its uses - but if you want to see the future of AI-produced media for the mass consumption, you need look no further than the current Google Gemini debacle to see what shape it will take.
Oliver Cromwell was actually a woman of Gujarati descent. Everyone knows that.
Even though most anyone with any sense would rather do anything else, up to and including bashing their head against a brick wall, than watch an AI-generated Marvel movie… there’s plenty of good little paypigs who will gladly plonk down the cash to see it.
And those people vote, too.
We don’t live in a vacuum where these people’s actions bear no consequences in the world around them. As has been said by many times and many people, the West is in the midst of a culture war, and I think the consequences of relinquishing the reigns of culture to large corporations pumping out AI-generated trash can and will be catastrophic in ways that few can currently imagine or concieve6. I’ve said before, humans need art, need leisure, need entertainment, and, in the event of such a future coming to pass, independent creators across the creative spectrum will be our only lifeline back to genuine and sincere human expression.
Where am I going with all this? Well… you know, I am something of a creative myself, and, as I’ve expressed interest in many times before, I’ve got a lot of ideas for movies, novels, music, so on and so forth. They say that you have to be the change you want to see in the world. So, I think it’s time. It’s time for one of us to step up and take the reigns of the future of entertainment into our own hands. And, if no man will rise to the occasion… well, maybe the job will fall to an ape.
If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. And my first project? Well, if I had it my way, I’d do Wendigo Mermaids of the North Pacific. Seriously, I would. But, I’m still waiting for Blumhouse to approve the script, and, also, I need something with an audience that’s already… baked in. Kind of like… a shortcake. Something with brand recognition. Something that’s going to get people talking. Something provocative. And I know just the property - or properties - ready for a fresh coat of paint… or maybe, a new layer of frosting.
You see… I have this… vision, if you will. A vision where two titans of the toy industry come together. Corporate greed has kept them apart for too long, but, now… I think the world is ready.
Everett, for those unaware, is a city north of Seattle, and one of the largest cities in the state, so this was basically someone in their own backyard reading them to filth.
You know how you can tell an article is well written?
When its core subjects are a bunch of things I didn't read, didn't watch, didn't buy, and generally didn't pay attention in my younger years, but I still find it interesting and engaging enough to read about all the way to the meme at the end. They say a room full of monkeys can write Shakespeare. I say, why settle for a room full of monkeys when a single ape is more than capable of the same?
You know how you can tell an article is well written?
When its core subjects are a bunch of things I didn't read, didn't watch, didn't buy, and generally didn't pay attention in my younger years, but I still find it interesting and engaging enough to read about all the way to the meme at the end. They say a room full of monkeys can write Shakespeare. I say, why settle for a room full of monkeys when a single ape is more than capable of the same?
Thanks for despoiling the fond memories I have of Rooster Teeth, ya shisno.