Fucking Day: Spicy City (Patreon)

Today, we all know what "cartoons for adults" means: sitcoms where ugly-looking characters say cusses and engage in pointless comical violence. It's a format pioneered by South Park and imitated by everything from Family Guy to Rick and Morty. But like a non sequitur cutaway gag, it wasn't always obvious that this was where we'd end up. Barely a month before South Park first went to air in 1997, another series debuted on HBO that presented a radically different vision for grown-up animation. That vision was mostly tits.

Created by legendary cartoon maniac Ralph Bakshi, Spicy City's look is inspired by the '70s comix scene he came up in. In this Crumb-esque world, women are hourglass pinups with six-inch waistlines and men are grotesque freaks, sniveling worms, or musclebound gorillas who don't even look like the same species, all defined by their obsessive lust over the fairer flesh.

Even if you've never heard of Spicy City, and you probably haven't, you likely have at least a passing familiarity with Bakshi. He did Wizards, the 1978 Lord of the Rings movie, and the feature film adaptation of Fritz the Cat. He also did Cool World, a movie about a man so horny for his own original character that it threatens the fabric of reality. Essentially, it's the answer to the question everyone had after watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit: what if you could have sex with Jessica Rabbit and also a young Brad Pitt was trying to stop you from doing that.

Needless to say, it received several video game adaptations. You know. For the children. They left out the part where Gabriel Byrne puts his human penis inside a drawing. The most you could get away with in a Super Nintendo title back then was implied doodle/noid humping.

The point is, Bakshi had some experience in drawing women that would later prompt the creation of countless Deviantart pages ranging from quaint collections of scantily clad sketches to truly innovative expressions of the human sexual impulse. But when he set out to create Spicy City, he didn't want to go it alone. He wanted the show to be real, gritty and new, and he needed to find the right people to help him do that — people outside the Hollywood bubble. And so, he put a team together that would today get him hauled up in front of a congressional committee for conspiracy to commit DEI.

The format of Spicy City is basically sexual Tales From the Crypt. It's hosted by Raven, a nightclub hostess whose delivery is so breathy it sounds like she might have a condition that causes her to orgasm uncontrollably whenever she speaks.

Each episode explores one sensual cyberpunk story, and you already know what the subject of the first one is. It was 1997! Of course it's about virtual reality!

The premise of "Love is a Download" is that the grimy robo-future which runs on floppy disks has cybernetic arms and fully immersive VR headsets that can transmit feelings to the wearer. There's just one catch: the virtual world looks like a goddamn Prozzak music video.

Prozzak is like, uh… imagine Canadian Gorillaz, but all of their songs are about a sad boner, except one which is about how it's ok to be white and/or straight. It's called "Be As," look it up.

Back in Spicy City, this geisha and hunk decide to go somewhere a little more private. They book a room at — where else? — the HTML Hotel! It's the '90s, baby!

And if you thought you weren't getting a whole mess of gags ala that one poster of a toilet explaining computer parts everyone's uncle had in a 1997 erotic cyberpunk cartoon by Ralph Bakshi, you've got another thing coming.

The animation quality of the VR segments is so, so bad. We're talking like, sub-'60s Marvel cartoons here. And I get that they're trying to distinguish the digital world from the real one, but Ralph! Bubby! It's drawings! The only limit is your imagination! You didn't have to draw a Virtua Fighter character moving at half a frame a second surrounded by chunky pixel effects representing him having cybersex with a white lady virtually cosplaying as Asian!

Alas, like my dad walking in on my IRC roleplay sessions, the romance between low-poly boxer and raceplaying geisha is thwarted by the intrusion of reality.

Our girl Alice is involved with sentient grease stain Jake, who appreciates her physical qualities but dislikes the fact that she has human thoughts and emotions. Luckily, he has a solution to this problem, skipping straight past "have sex with a robot or hologram because it's the future" to "lobotomize girlfriend to create a living fleshlight."

That brings us to the second issue with VR in the world of Spicy City — it can fucking kill you. If your avatar gets deleted while you're logged in, it destroys your immortal soul. But I mean, who wouldn't risk that for this?

And so, Jake hires "certified virtual investigator" Lem to track down Alice's avatar under the pretext of it having gone rogue or something. But Lem doesn't realize he's unwittingly leading Jake to the white woman who's been operating the geisha he's done erotic hand touching with in VR.

Side note: one of my favorite things about sci-fi is when authors can imagine wildly inventive situations and technologies for some aspects of life but then sort of don't bother for the rest. Philip K. Dick wrote sprawling stories of interstellar travel, time travel drugs, and psychic espionage, but he still thought we'd get newspapers delivered to our houses. Spicy City has robots and VR, but everyone still uses floppy disks, cassette tapes, and mailboxes.

At least they're cyber mailboxes, I guess. Anyway, Lem finds Alice but then realizes she's the geisha he loves. She's dying because she won't log out of VR. This kills you, apparently. Jake turns into a big shark and fights Lem.

It doesn't go well for Lem, who I just realized also decided to be a different race in VR. Maybe that's normal in the future. Maybe that's fine. It does seem kind of boring to be a human male boxer when you could be a giant robot shark, though. Anyway, Lem fucking dies.

Then Alice gets crushed into a cube, but The Power of Love resurrects Lem just in time for him to dive headfirst with his love-cube into a data erasing pit.

Lem is dead and Alice is braindead. Jake got exactly what he wanted! Or… did he? No. Because this happens:

Jake goes to call up another broad, not realizing the truth: that Lem and Alice have successfully transferred their souls into the amazing world of the computer, where they will live forever as white people pretending to be black and Asian, respectively.

The moral: technology. Maybe? Yes. More of it? Perhaps. I don't know. This was all pretty stupid, and there weren't nearly enough cartoon breasts. Let's try another episode. This one's called "Sex Drive," which is promising. Maybe it'll be about a sentient car that loves to fuck.

It is not. It's about a hooker whose business is being stolen by ghostly VR fuckbots. And wow, this is actually pretty prescient! But I have to say, our heroine isn't helping herself here with the name "Virus" in a profession where exchanging sexual fluids is one of her major job responsibilities. That would be like a waiter named "Spitz" or an auto mechanic calling himself "Jeff Carsexer."

Virus is being shaken down by some eyeless cops, but she can't pay them because all of her regulars are switching to dropping their loads in holographic racial caricatures.

Yes, she's called "Pocahontass," and yes, she says "you want make um cum cum?" The less said about this the better. I've already said too much. I regret mentioning it at all. Please forget this immediately.

This rookie cop, "Nisa Lolita," sees her superiors beating up Virus. She tapes the whole thing, but they steal the evidence and she's fired from the force. She decides to track down Virus to find out what's going on with the cops and an epidemic of disappearing sex workers, but something's different about her — she's become the artist's legally distinct Ororo Munroe stand-in.

Oh, also she's a superpowered cyborg who sucks men in an interesting and peculiar way. She sucks their intelligence out of their brains with her mouth. That must be one hell of a sloppy toppy, am I right fellas?

No. You fool. It's Storm electricity powers. Nisa follows Virus on a suck circuit of the city, during which she realizes that her quarry is systematically tracking down everyone related to the sexbot emporium, like this guy:

I know what you're thinking: ok, I've always wanted to see almost-Storm hanging seductively off a palm tree, but what does that goofy executive guy's ass look like? I'm happy to inform you that he is fully cheeked up.

If that was too erotic for you, I understand. But you may want to close your browser window, as this next scene really puts the spicy in Spicy City.

Well? Hard and/or wet, everybody? Virus stuns Nisa with a mount into a double titty grab, the same move which got me thrown out of a BJJ workshop when I tried to use it on Rodolfo Vieira. When she recovers, Nisa tracks Virus down to a secret computer lab, where she learns that a mad scientist turned her into a brain-hoovering cyber agent in order to steal the secrets of his partners in the virtual hooker business. Also, the virtual hookers? They're so realistic because he's been stealing real people's brains to model them on. He looks like this.

Kind of like if Judge Doom was trying to cosplay as World War II propaganda. Wait, let me just try something real quick.

Nisa finds Virus's personality CD-ROM and tries to restore it, but Ralph Bakshi squeezes in a little more hot and heavy fully-clothed lesbionic rubbing before that happens.

This goes on for what feels like hours, and I have to stress that at no point does it progress beyond the level of physical contact you would encounter at the average junior high dance in 2003. Well, except for this:

The very real possibility that someone taped this scene and jerked off to it in the late '90s is almost kind of beautiful to me. In 2026, jacking it to over-the-pants pussy touching might as well be pleasuring yourself to a picture of a verdant meadow.

So Nisa saves Virus and the other women and Virus sexually assaults the corrupt cops and then steals their identities, leaving them psychological blanks trapped in meat prisons. I mean, it's framed in a more fun way than that though.

When the scientist returns to his lab, he's confronted by his ex-captives, who have stumbled upon his collection of horror movie slasher weapons.

Nisa and Virus become cops, because if you expose a corrupt cop and then turn him into a drooling zombie, you become cop.

Be honest. You're surprised it took this long to get to a 69 joke.

Now Virus is sad because nobody will love her because she's a cyborg. Nisa gives a speech about how we're all cyborgs, because of computer and technology.

Is that what they thought this episode was about? It feels like a last-minute effort to class things up after all the girl-on-girl dry humping. It was like they couldn't decide if they were trying to make Black Mirror or that episode of Black Mirror where the Virtua Fighter characters fuck constantly.

Here's the crazy thing about Spicy City, though. Despite being cyberpunk Cool World, a premise that in any sane world would get you a tight-lipped grimace and some slow nodding as the person you were pitching it to desperately felt around for the silent alarm, it's… not terrible. And it was actually successful, too.

Keep in mind, this was 1997. If you wanted to see cartoon breasts set against a backdrop of cyberpunk dystopia in that era, it was basically this or a bootleg VHS tape of Ghost in the Shell. Today, if you search "cyberpunk anime boobs," your computer will get so hot that it burns your house down with you in it. What a way to go, though.

So why wasn't Spicy City picked up for another season? According to Bakshi, it's because he refused to fire his team of "Asians, blacks, transvestites, [and] guys out of jail."

Good on him for standing his ground. Sadly, as far as I can tell, despite their "ethnic prowess," none of the first-time writers on Spicy City ever worked in the industry again. But just think — if Spicy City had continued, so much might have gone differently. Maybe it would have been so big that it pushed Dennis Miller off of HBO! Maybe there would be more than 21 results for "Spicy City" on rule34! Maybe Spicy City's cancellation was the beating of the butterfly's wing that resulted in the eventual Warner/Discovery merger and the fucked-to-shit media environment we now find ourselves in!

Then again, probably not.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr, who digitized his well worn and slightly damp VHS copies of the episodes to a mere 3,216 floppies. The future!

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