Reflecting Day: Hot Dog Art Attack! Generation 3! (Patreon)

It's Reflecting Day and as you may have guessed, we are going to talk about Karate sex with handrails. But first, a shorter way to say the same thing: "art." Today marks the Two Year Anniversary of 1900🌭, and we got ourselves new art!

We worked with the great Rusty Shackles to create Year Three site graphics and author portraits for beloved founders, me and Brockway, but also double beloved contributors (starting clockwise from harpoon gun) Lydia Bugg, Alex Schmidt, Brendan McGinley, Tom Reimann, Jason Pargin, and the mysterious Sissyneck.

We did it, everyone! We made it through one tenth of an entire pandemic together! Why, I bet some readers aren't even old enough to remember when the tops of our articles looked like this:

We want to thank M.V.B. whose fantastic Year Two 🌭 Art is being retired with full punching, fucking, and upsetting honors.

And don't worry, MVB lovers, you'll still be able to find his art on the, holy shit, two hundred and sixty one articles we wrote last year. Or you can visit our store and buy a shirt or mug with the painting he made of us lasering gorillas in a volcano. Tell your lover you're thinking of them with the gift of ape battle. And tell your enemies you're thinking of them with the threat of ape battle. And tell your apes nothing, because our Congo beams already told them everything.

I imagine you knew this already, but I was not kidding about the Karate sex with handrails I mentioned earlier. We're talking art, so I'm obviously going to bring up my favorite six seconds from the cartoon, Chuck Norris: Karate Kommandos.

The show only ran for five episodes and it was about Chuck Norris, played by himself, leading a team of mostly children in paramilitary operations. His two adult teammates were a samurai and a sumo wrestler and they fought someone named Super-Ninja, because I don't think 1986 put its best guys on it. It was almost dickishly uninspired, like someone at Hanna-Barbera came in and said, "There are going to be some changes around here, you cartoon clowns!  No more second things! Lose the time crystals, the battle cars, the talking kangaroo... I just want bored Chuck Norris, stuck with a bunch of ordinary kids."

Keep in mind the show wasn't entirely normal. The principle star voiced himself with all the energy of a goldfish funeral, and if you ever saw a character in Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos wearing a shirt, you have it mixed up with Tigersharks. Torso-wise, it's a very, very naked show, but all this is unrelated to what I'm talking about. Let's take a look at a scene from Episode 01, "Deadly Dolphin," in its entirety:

Did you see it? Look closely! It's there between the shot of Tabe eating food and the shot of Tabe eating food. For no reason, and with no dialog, it cuts to Chuck Norris walking over to a handrail and giving it a single unexplained fuck. Why!? Let's isolate it and take a closer look.

I promise you there was no reason for it, and I don't simply mean the hump. I mean there was no reason to cut back to Chuck Norris at all for those six seconds. It did not reveal any new information. It did not advance any plotlines or change the setting. If you were to write it out as a teleplay, it would look like this:

Maybe you're generous and you say, "This is there to convey the passage of time." You're insane. The show clearly establishes Tabe eats chicken at the rate of 16 chickens per minute. If he's walking with a plate that still has chicken on it, he has been walking for .07 seconds or less. And maybe you're still being a pain in the ass and saying, "Look carefully and you'll see Tabe is carrying a stack of plates..."

"... which means, sir, that he has eaten at least five full chickens giving Chuck Norris plenty of time to stop his investigation for some innocent handrail fucking. Tabe and Norris-- they're the dream Karate detective team!" You're a lunatic. Even indulging you, the most insufferable Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos apologist, fifteen seconds -at most- have passed. Which means between the time this sumo wrestler picked up a tray (or trays) of food and walked through a door, the animators thought, "Shit, we need to check back in and see what Chuck Norris is up to!" And they decided he should be inseminating a safety bar-- efficiently, with one good pump, and nothing else.

And it's worth mentioning this wasn't a lazy show. You'd think it would be since it was a Hanna-Barbera production and half a napkin of an idea, but there were a lot of characters with multiple outfits battling across all kinds of locations. They didn't re-use a whole lot of footage or backgrounds, and that includes this haunting pelvic thrust. I couldn't find this animation cycle anywhere else in the show. It wasn't recycled from some aerobics scene or disco mission, and it appears only here between Tabe's chicken rampages.

Which means someone drew four distinct animation cels for this luscious moment alone:

Did they just have a Chuck Norris hump lying around they were trying to use? Why would someone with a no-doubt grueling animation schedule take the time to draw four unnecessary Chuck Norrises? That's eight Chuck Norris butt cheeks on top of your normal workload. What kind of person draws thousands of pictures of shirtless men grappling and thinks, "I don't care if I get fired-- it's time for these hunks to fuc--" Wait, never mind, guys. I think I figured it out.

This was really fun! Thanks for talking about art with me!

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If these images are borked, you can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM.