Wario Wario Wario

I genuinely don't know why so many people's first thought when they saw Ember leaked for NASB 2 is "what about the supermarket shooter?" - I had only really heard of Ember through the shootings, and I didn't immediately think that - just "Huh, another 2000s villain! Guess we're not getting Luna Loud now that the rock star niche is covered, haha."

In general, I think the internet has a really weird habit of latching on to "the dark side" of childrens' media and ignoring basically everything else - where, if it isn't something both universal and relevant-in-the-2000s like Shrek; Mario; or SpongeBob, the entire discussion will become an obnoxious loop of "wasn't that one sex joke weird?", "that behind-the-scenes creep should be locked up", or "damn, that eldritch-abomination boss fight went hard".

I love the old "Ash vs. Red" comparison memes from the 2000s because like... all this tells me is that Ash is a well-written adaptation of Red??? Red is a character in a medium where stakes are derived from player choice and personalities are derived from imagination, while Ash is a character in a medium where negative consequences should be in some form unavoidable, personality defines a character, and a large recurring cast is essential.

I had a weird, vaguely religious dream where I was working for Nintendo's US marketing department in the 90s, and we ended up filming a guy farting in a bathtub while wearing a Superman cape as a commercial. Can't even remember the specific game, so a real "burgers?" moment.

I've talked about the Beano a lot in the past. British cultural staple, funny coincidence, lots of weird archaic synonyms for "laugh", so on. A lot of fond childhood memories, good times had by all. However, there's one thing from the Beano that has stuck in my mind for years - I can barely remember any of the comics (though I do remember a lot from the early 2010s reboot of the Dandy, and quite fondly), but every second of this DVD - The Beano Videostars - sticks in my head.

I believe it's the only DVD I ever wore out because I watched it so much, it came in a two pack with another Beano direct to video movie - The Beano Video, renamed to The Beano All-Stars - both pasted directly from VHS format with a few meta jokes relating to the format left in - I preferred this one since it had a rather fun cinema framing device and a music video. However, that's not really what I want to talk about - I want to talk about the one thing I remember most from this - "The Bash Street Kids in: The New School".

The word "childhood trauma" gets thrown around a lot online, so I'll try not to use it here as it doesn't apply, I don't get PTSD flashbacks to this silly low-budget British kids' movie or anything, nor did it effect my psyche. I'd say it's more "a thing that kinda put me on edge as a kid". I can go back to it now with no issues, and I was kinda stupid for reacting in the way I did to it as a kid.

For non-Brits unfamiliar with them, the Bash Street Kids are a pretty typical cartoon troupe of kids - a bunch of rowdy archetypes of British childhood nostalgia, the only one you need to know by name is Plug - the tall kid who's really ugly, but all the girls see as a heartthrob, simple character with a simple gag. This is the only Bash Street Story on this AVAB (Assigned VHS at Birth) DVD, but it is easily the most memorable part of the whole thing - and not necessarily in a bad way either.

The plot of the skit is that the Ofsted inspector comes to visit, and is appalled by the condition of Bash Street school so he sends the kids to a new, sleek, modern academy where the teachers are robots, while the original teachers are left homeless due to a lack of a job - leaving Plug to realize the crappy situation and get his friends out of the academy. Happy ending where Plug makes a rap song so bad it makes the kids realize what's up, the academy explodes, the inspector is out of a job, the teachers have their jobs back, and the kids are back to their old mischief.

"oh boy, another cartoon predicted AI!" OK, now that's out of the way, the thing that put me on edge about this as a kid wasn't any of those plot points I just mentioned, it was something I intentionally forgot to mention for dramatic effect: that the kids were given plastic surgery and brainwashed into "perfect children" - the tomboy becomes girly, the fat kid becomes buff, the glasses kid gets contacts, so on, yet still weren't "perfect" enough and were threatened with "being vaporized where they stand" for innocent things like asking questions - this gave me bad vibes as a kid, didn't make me scream or cry persay but certainly made me unsettled, and I could never figure out why - I could stand shows like Ed, Edd, n' Eddy and Billy & Mandy that had way more disturbing imagery and themes just fine, and everything else that freaked me out at that age I still fully understand - I always just pinned it down to being conditioned by other children's media to fear compliance - that was until very recently, when I realized that's because it's literally just my childhood as a "gifted child"/"naughty child" - through a wacky cartoon lens.

It's not a good skit mind you, it isn't all that funny, the plot just kinda... happens, and I'm pretty sure they didn't mean to portray it how I interpreted it, just a "maths bad, pranks good" power fantasy and nothing else, even in the 0% chance they did intentionally make an autistic allegory it doesn't actually say anything insightful or provide proper solutions beyond "listen to corporate white rap in class", the plot provides little opportunity for classic Bash Street pranks, and the entire animation of the special/movie/whatever looks like it was drawn with permanent marker - but the theme of being expected to be "normal", then cooperating as hard you can and failing anyway... hits too close to home. The main difference between kid me and the Bash Street gang in this story is that they were trying to be naughty and get a rise, I was just labeled as that despite being quite the moralist at that age. Absolutely overthinking things here, I bet only like, 2 other kids at most were disturbed by this any more than any other random kids' show one-off villain plot, it's all very daft and young me was certainly overreacting, even if those reactions were merely "vibes" - and at the very least, it was reassuring and had its heart in the right place, unlike Grizzly Tales. Don't get me started on Grizzly Tales - the only thing worse than the weird GoAnimate-tier child punishment fantasies in that thing is the voice acting. I appreciate this story in a weird way, not necessarily for being good but just for being one of the first things to - even if unintentionally - tell kid-me that something's fishy about how adults treat me.

Anyway, on a much lighter note, the ending of this DVD is hilarious. Dennis the Menace gets a love interest - and is so disgusted after realizing that he kissed a girl that he breaks out of the cinema screen, walks past his real-world self who presumably was some kind of Roger Rabbit cartoon actor, and then modifies the film reel to cut out the kiss scene. The girl gasps sadly, and then it rolls credits to stock cheer SFX. Chad behaviour.