Category Archives: Bad Influences

Mad Doctors of the Late 20th Century

Mad medicine was everywhere in the 80s and 90s. There were toys and playsets endorsed by mad doctors, for use by kids. Every time you watched cartoons, you saw a skinny dude with crazy hair in a white lab coat, maniacally mixing chemicals and potions for some nefarious purpose. Under the influence of this, I created my own mad medicine man; Dr. Kill-Everybody.

Dr. K (no hair), with Fronkin Steen and Psuto Moto.

Either the trope became shopworn around 2001, or something happened that discouraged children from playing with chemicals. You don’t see mad doctors and scientists like you used to. Maybe this is a good thing; maybe the concept was subconsciously driving impressionable kids away from lucrative STEM-field careers. I don’t know.

What I do know is this. Mad doctors once flourished in our society, even though they were annoying, and generally sucked.

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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee, Worst Of All

Barnstorming

In the early 1980s, video games were simple in concept, much like the “game apps” on phones nowadays. At heart, they were demonstrations of your skills with a joystick, paddle, or “track-ball” controller, performing one or more challenges. Eating all the dots, or climbing a scaffold to defeat a giant ape, to cite a couple of well-known examples. Navigating a maze while being pursued by killer robots. Killing a centipede, segment by segment. Swinging on vines over bottomless pits.

Or, flying planes into buildings. For fun!

Signed by programmer Steve Cartwright!

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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Nostalgic Obsessions

You Can Pick Your Nose, But You Can’t Pick Your Fans

A stalker once told me, as though it validated his abhorrent behavior, “You can pick your nose, and you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friends’ friends.” Admittedly, that’s partly true.

I mean, you’re welcome to pick your nose, if you’d like to be ostracized from society and make everyone sick at the same time. You can pick your friends, provided they’re in the same socio-economic class as you are, and they don’t consort with a better version of your identity. And you can’t pick your friends’ friends, who, for all you know, could be royalty, or morally repugnant wasted orgasms.

If you create art and/or entertainment, you don’t get to pick and choose who likes it.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Girls of BIUL, Uncategorized

Dire Straits

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Girls of BIUL, Nostalgic Obsessions, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club

Dead Kennedys

Real political subversion will be hidden from you by the media. When do you see a current celebrity interacting with rioters, or a mob of angry protesters? Never? There you go.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Faint Signals, Thousand Listen Club

No Dark Sarcasm In The Classroom

Comedy stinks right now because you forced it to stink. You vilified every experience in life that makes a great comedian. You made the safe, sponsored version of laughter the norm. You’re so afraid to really laugh in front of other people, that you turned comedy from an anti-establishment weapon into a cottony security blanket.

Comedy stinks right now because of you. Because you’re afraid of your true feelings. 

You probably don’t even know who this is.

Let’s take, as an example, one of these pusillanimous women that the media holds up as Queens of Comedy. You know the ones, I don’t have to name them. They’re all over glossy magazine covers at the checkout aisles, making “zany” faces to remind you they’re funny. 

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Filed under Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Late To The Party, Thousand Listen Club

The Gadfly Trap

A gadfly is a person who interferes the status quo of a society or community by posing novel, potently upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities. The term is originally associated with the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, in his defense when on trial for his life. [Wikipedia]

Imagine if you visited this site, only to discover that I had renounced my acerbic commentary on the world of music, and devoted my time to interviewing popular musicians of the day, in glowing “puff pieces”. How would you feel?

Betrayed?

From BIUL #2.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Don't Know Don't Care, Faint Signals, Idiot's Delight, Podcastery, Thousand Listen Club, Unfairly Maligned, Worst Of All

Matty Watches Transformers: The Last Knight

As an “underground” artist, I go broke often. Sometimes I have to sacrifice comfort or nourishment to pay my rent.

Sometimes, I’m broke because I’m a total assclown who takes public transportation across town to see a $22 popcorn movie, alone. (I didn’t have enough for actual popcorn.)

Even while facing the consequences, I have no regrets.

I don’t know what the hell Al Gore had to do with the history of Transformers, and I don’t want to know. I had to sit through the trailer for his second bullshit global-warming scare film, and he can go fuck himself with an iceberg.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Idiot's Delight, Movies You Missed, Nostalgic Obsessions, Robot Toy Fetish, Saturday Movie Matinee, Unfairly Maligned

Prideful Moments

From BIUL II.

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Filed under Bad Influences, Comix Classic & Current, Worst Of All

The Pink Panther Problem

In the 1970s, children’s television was heavily occupied by a presence that’s nearly forgotten today; an artifact from the opening credits of a slapstick detective franchise, called the Pink Panther.

Like Bugs Bunny, the Pink Panther was a former smoker. Many cartoon animals smoked in the 20th century.

If you were a kid in the 1980s, the sight of that character reminded you of a piece of Henry Mancini’s distinctive score. This is the Pink Panther Problem.

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Filed under Animation Analysis, Bad Influences, Faint Signals, Saturday Movie Matinee, Thousand Listen Club