Kung Fu Grip and Broken Pixels
Oy....
Oscar Wilde once stole a bit from William Shakespeare, who in turn stole it from me, when he said "Brevity is the soul of wit." To verify this undisputed truth, old people are very rarely funny. Occasionally you'll meet a truly hilarious geriatric delinquent, like those old bastards who yank out their dentures to scare small children and rodents, but for the most part, old people aren't very funny at all. The longer something goes on, the less funny it is. This is a solemn, brutal reality, and something I'm about to prove, because this is going to be a very long article, and I dare you to find something to laugh about while reading it.
Take, for instance, The Satyricon by a dead old Roman named Petronius. The thing is supposed to be a hilarious comedy of errors as a slave is freed and suddenly inherits millions of drachma, in sort of a Sid Meier version of Brewster's Millions. This thing goes on and on and on and on, until finally you realize that there is absolutely nothing funny about it all, and you're just reading pages of what the nouveau-riche Roman ate for dinner (flamingo tongues and stuffed dormouse, BTW). It's absolutely dreadful. Still, they classify it as a "comedy", and it apparently was considered to be so in it's day. The Emperor Nero, a man with a high sense of camp if ever there was one, found absolutely nothing funny in The Satyricon, and sentenced Petronius to commit suicide for besmirching his family's reputation with anti-comedy. To further prove that drawing things out beyond their duly alloted minutes is unfunny, Petronius spent his last evening alive reading poetry loudly while slowly bleeding himself to death, tying and untying a tourniquet around his arm during the course of this terminally unfunny party.
Watching Kung Fu Grip is very much like watching Petronius commit suicide. It's long, it's painful, and there's a certain post-ironic bent in knowing that everything about it has already been done somewhere else, funnier. The concept is relatively simple, much like it's intended audience. Some fleeting source of gamer humor is drawn out, suffocated, drawn, quartered, defenestrated, and finally dunked under an icy lake like Rasputin with action figures and dolls. Much hilarity is presumed by invocation of rape, poop jokes and casual racism.
Now, to be fair, I like jokes about rape, bowel movements and casual racism. I am quite the connoisseur, actually. To do these sorts of jokes correctly, they must be served like prosciutto, not like Spam. Thinly sliced, delicately positioned, and surrounded by as many tasteful things as possible. And then jammed up one's nose.
The problem is that we've already seen this thing before, both in ToyFare Magazine's "Twisted Toy Theater" and the mindbogglingly dreary Robot Chicken on Cartoon Network. The advantage that both of these have is production value and the creative goad that is editors/producers/advertisers. The Internet, being srious bizness and all, tends to breed a certain sort of "entertainer" without any sort of limitations to guide the flow of their creativity, leading to a free-for-all of bad taste, bad production, bad timing.
I hate to end a review on a hateful note, call it the softening of this barnacle encrusted heart of mine. Kung Fu Grip... I admire your Mickey Rooney "HEY KIDS LET'S PUT ON A SHOW!" kind of mentality.
Onward and upward!
On the opposite end of the scale is Broken Pixels, a weekly offering starring the Internet's version of Baby Jane, Seanbaby. Seanbaby is a firm believer in the Law of Anti-Charisma, which states that you will be much more interesting, funny and charming if you surround yourself by persons who are socially inept, unfunny and boring. Broken Pixels is a show about old, bad video games, territory that Seanbaby staked and claimed over a decade ago.
For those of us who are old timers at this Internetting thing, Seanbaby used to be the end-all-be-all of awesome websites. His site was witty, well designed, original (for the time) and, most important for the New Media, completely self-absorbed. Seanbaby is an arrogant ass and we loved him for it. He knew we love him for it. And we kept going back. Then, in about 2001, his site went dead, a bleak relic of what we thought was the end of an era. He resurfaced in EGM as their "Crazy Back Of The Magazine Rant" Guy (i.e. what I do here) and occasionally showed up on G4 shows from time to time.
Broken Pixels is a mixed bag. Like I said before, brevity is not this show's gimmick. While each episode is about 15 minutes long, it's at least broken up into several bad games before wrapping up. The hope is to be a Mystery Science Theater 3000 for video games, with Seanbaby and pals yakking it up and exposing some true horrors. Unlike the utterly brilliant Zero Punctuation, which takes brevity to a level of grandeur not seen since Peppin the Short, Broken Pixels takes it's time. Seanbaby takes many long, languid sips of beer.
At the risk of continuing to talk and breaking the brevity thing (oh well, you weren't laughing anyway), most of the games Broken Pixels is mocking have been mocked ad nauseum online for years. The Cho Aniki series, for example, is the standard by which Japanese weirdness can be measured, the Greenwich Mean Time of Nippophilic Insanity. The oddball rail shooter, Space Pirates, has been dissected and snickered at for almost as long. There's just not that much ground here to cover that hasn't been covered.
BUT!
And there is a but! There really is! I swear!
The real charm of Broken Pixels is not the video games, not the set-up. The charm is the feeling that you're sitting around, listening to guys tell bullshit stories and goof off. At the risk of sounding like I'm hitting on him, Seanbaby has some really, really great stories to tell. One story, referred to here as the "Spunk Burrito" story, is worth the entire price of admission. What Broken Pixels does that I can appreciate is basically take an established format, surround it with a specific topic, and then let a few funny people be funny. It's similar to Stephen Fry's Q.I. in that way. Kung Fu Grip takes the same approach, but fails. Why? NOW YOU KNOW WHAT'S IN THE BURGERS.
So: brevity is the soul of
What say you?!