Holy fucking shit, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Nearly three whole years, in fact! Haven’t done one of these in all this time, as I just got complacent; fell into bad habits of using social media and watching hours upon hours of bullshit on YouTube. But I had to come back to the Archive. I needed to feel something again, and the best way for me to do that is to dig through the past in order to see the future.
In any case, I have pizza, I have root beer, it’s Saturday night, let’s take a look at some cool stuff.
Gags and Gals
Gags and Gals is a collection of musical vignettes from the 1940s. Of the three shorts in this special, two of them are pretty much just, hey fellas, wouldn’t it be swell if these dames would just shut their yaps and suck your fucking cock already? The first short has a dude having women show up to his door in cardboard boxes as if they’re property, or someone’s weird Metal Gear-themed sexual fantasy. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to watch if you’re looking for some female empowerment. It’s dumb as fuck, and way too stupid to actually be offensive or anything.
So, why then am I mentioning this in a post about cool things I’ve found? Easy, the third short is where it’s at. It’s a song about…I don’t know, fucking hanging out with your friends or something. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is this:
OOOHHHHHHHHH MMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYY!?
There is a record-shattering number of girls lifting up their dresses, bending over, spreading their legs, all types of horny shit. I was not expecting this from a 1941 musical comedy. You always hear about what a sexually repressive time the 40s-50s were, especially the 50s, so it was a nice surprise to watch something that was otherwise dull as fuck and realize that wow, girls have butts.
Gags and Gals is kind of a lame, goofy thing that will take less than ten minutes of your life. But the real reason I’m posting about it is because it serves as a precursor. See, I got a little curious about eroticism from this time period. Obviously, it existed; pin-ups, Tijuana Bibles, Bettie Page and Marilyn Monroe. But I needed to find more. Because it’s Pride Month, I tried to find anything from that period even remotely LGBT. Sad to say, I couldn’t, all I could find were some very hetero fetish magazines from the 40s which, don’t get me wrong, were pretty good, but I wanted to see some freakin’ gay shit. Kind of a downer, eroticism is as much a part of queer history as much as anything else, and having that documented and saved for future generations to see how their elders lived is pretty important; there’s more to the past than struggles and suffering. All I could find on the Archive was stuff from the 80s and 90s, which could be pretty fucking harrowing, especially the amount of “Female Impersonator” magazines that boiled down to “we’ll never be real women! Rather than be desired by one of our own, we are genetic freaks for weird guys to jerk off to!” A shame I could not find more than what I was able to.
Anyways, Gags and Gals, it has girls bent over wooden barrels and that made me laugh.
Opoona Re-localization
Opoona is one of my all-time favorite games. That I haven’t written about it yet is both baffling and shameful. Since I plan on doing that eventually, I’ll avoid talking about the game too much, other than to point out this patch. See, Opoona, while being great, had a spotty localization; I can remember having to answer Yes/No to the question, “How are you today, Opoona?” Anyways, this fixes some of those issues. Still a few typos here and there, but it does do a good job of helping to make this game even better, and it’s already one of the best. Look forward to me writing about Opoona sometime, I’m sure.
The Danzig Handbook
This is the part of the post where I get cancelled for my beliefs. Specifically, my belief that Danzig fucking rules. Yes, Glenn Danzig is a grumpy ass conservative Republican these days, most likely due to being a little too much into anime and import games, and not doing these things in moderation like the rest of us. Besides, he’s still the least fascist member of The Misfits by like a mile. But before all that, he was an amazing musician, a legitimate punk rock icon who made a seamless move to heavy metal. Plus, I thought his Elvis covers were a lot better than the internet gave them credit for. Also, there is no fucking way you can look at him in his Misfits era and not want to fuck the shit out of him until he gets cross-eyed. You’re a liar if you say otherwise. Like…look, just give me a time machine, and I can fix him, okay?
Ahem. Anyways, the Danzig Handbook is, surprisingly, an official publication dedicated to Glenn Danzig and his band, uh, Danzig. It is hilarious, for reasons that are both intentional and extremely unintentional. There are some good jokes in here to add some brevity to a band that, God Bless Them, tried so hard to come across as the coldest, hardest motherfuckers to ever live.
Having read through this a few times, I’m still not entirely sure if this was meant to be a joke or not. In either case: definitely the funniest thing you’ll see in The Danzig Handbook:
Danzig does not start fights! He has never started a fight! Definitely no video evidence of him starting a fight ever! Just know that the first time I read the sentence “Glenn does not go out looking for a fight,” I proceeded to laugh until tears poured down my face.
Damn, that’s…actually some really solid stuff he just said there. Just like…aaaaahhhhhhh fuck! Danzig, what happened!? What made you change for the worse!? Being a queer Danzig fan is a life of pain and misery. Truly my cross to bear.
The Nebz Shady! Show
Shameful confession: I’ve been getting back into comics these last couple of weeks. I stopped reading them 20 years ago after the bubble burst, after surviving the Clone Wars saga, and with the final straw being the X-Men books becoming complete dogshit that sucked. Fuck making the X-Men wear those terrible leather outfits from the movies. Fuck Stacy-X. Fuck that storyline where Archangel did statutory rape in full view of the other X-Men and somehow didn’t get his ass kicked because of it. Plus, you know, all the MCU and Snyderverse bullshit. But between replaying Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 and checking out that new X-Men show, I got curious. I mean, it can’t all be “Captain America is a nazi now,” or “the Avengers are teaming up with a real-life defense contractor,” or “good lord they’re giving Frank Miller work again,” right? With the Internet Archive being a library, and comic books being books, I’ve been doing a deep dive on stuff that I’ve been missing out on all this time. Did you know that there are a lot of Fantastic Four books with good writing contrasted with spotty artwork not befitting of Marvel’s First Family? It’s quite disheartening!
In my exploration, I found an account that was uploading various collections focusing on particular story arcs, or highlighting the run of a specific illustrator or writer, all with editorial commentary in the collection titles and descriptions. Comic uploads on the Archive tend to be pretty bland: either quoting the promotional copy, or simply giving the year the issues were published. These uploads I’m talking about were clearly posted by a fan, letting us know that either “this run kicks ass!” or “Rob Liefeld fucking sucks!” So as I like to do when I see even the slightest bit of personality on this site, I check the profile to see what else they’ve uploaded, because I will probably like it.
What I found were some videos where the creator (for lack of a better term) essentially portrays themselves as Shinji Ikari (kind of sounds like him, too) and either plays Sonic games or reviews Spike Lee movies, among other things.
This owns. In an era where everyone is making 80 hour disingenuous epics on YouTube like “The Existentialism of The Day The Clown Cried” or “Birth Of A Nation: Secret Leftist Masterpiece?” or “Why You Were Wrong About The Cane In Citizen Kane,” or “The Simpsons Are Good Again,” it’s refreshing to see a video review where someone cuts out all the bullshit and says yeah, I thought this was cool, here’s why. The internet is a better place for having a svelte twenty minute video about the music in ‘Do The Right Thing.’ Warms my crusty, bitter, nearly middle-aged heart to see someone possibly a little over half my age doing this for the love of the game. Making a video or writing a post about something you like, and sharing that joy with the world, just to do it. You know, the thing I’ve been convincing people to do for the last several years? Well, here’s somebody actually doing it!
Well, this post has gone on for quite a long while, so I’ll end it here. I’ll have to continue this journey into the Archive again soon, and not take three years to do it.
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