CMep191
Wed, Jul 23, 2025 9:47PM • 49:08
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
machinima, Happy Wheels, violence, cruelty, animation, audience, YouTube, game adaptation, humor, gore, production quality, community, target demographic, content creation, commercial success
SPEAKERS
Speaker 1, Tracy Harwood, Damien Valentine, Phil Rice, Ricky Grove

Speaker 1 00:01
And now it's time, I said, and now I said, it's time enough for something completely mashing Emma, and now for something completely mashin EMA, and now for something almost entirely, very precisely, but Just not exclusively, sort of adjacently, kind of approximately completely, hello

Phil Rice 01:00
and welcome to And now for something completely machinima, a podcast about machinima, virtual production and related technologies. My name is Phil rice, and I'm here with my co hosts. Tracy Harwood, hello, Ricky Grove, howdy and Damien. Valentine, hello. So this week, we will be talking about Ricky's film pick for the month, and this is an interesting one, Ricky, why don't you tell us about

Ricky Grove 01:28
it? Sure thing, I'm really thrilled that there's a interesting synergy going on between my pick today and Phil's pick, which we will talk about next week, they connect each other in terms of their ideas and that I, as you know, I've been choosing films from archive.org the Machinima collection there, and I've mentioned in the past that they're not really, yeah, initially, when the collection came together, they were curated, and you could see pretty consistently high quality machinima, high quality, meaning, production values, ideas behind them, originality, that kind of thing. But I think they've stopped doing that. So what you do is you have quite a range of of machinima choices, from being the absolute best kind of stuff to really bottom level kind of thing. And I was going through them, and I came across this, this machinima called Happy Wheels. And I watched it, and it was stupid and crass and cheap, and I started thinking about it, and I thought this would be an excellent choice, not so much for the actual film, because what we do is we try to pick unique films and talk about what makes them So interesting. But I thought it would generate a conversation about a how it was produced, who targeted for who the audience is targeted for its background, which I know Tracy will come out and talk about, but also the idea of a community of machinima viewers, and how that has changed over time. So I'm less interested in talking about the film, which is obviously pretty bad, and more interested in talking about what the film implies, what its background is, the community, the audience, and also a little bit about violence, cruelty and animation. I know that's that's quite deep topic, but I just finished reading a book called west of everything by Jane Tompkins, the inner life of westerns and books inform my sensibility of the world more than any other media. And in this she talks about westerns and she talks about the cruelty and focus on death and westerns. And that led me to make this pick. Basically, the pick is a is, is a series of cruel deaths made in a game that was that's been around for a while called Happy Wheels. Now the actual production quality of the film, excuse me, is not that bad. They they get the gestures, the lip sync, right, the the rendering of the cartoon is, is not particularly good, but it suffices. And what it what it appeals to? So it appeals to that notion of humor in violent cruelty and in cartoons that works very well, and it's been around for a long, long time. Farce is basically a series of cruel escapades that we laugh at because we realize they're not human, real human beings. They're being injured or hurt. The best example I can think of is the Wiley Coyote and Road Runner and the Road Runner cartoons, we see the coyote gets smashed in unbelievable cruel ways, and we cheer on the Road Runner because we have no investment as far as them being real beings, they're cartoons. So cruelty is something that we laugh at because of the very fact that it gives us it takes away our sense of responsibility or guilt towards watching someone be cruel to someone else in the same way we watch this movie, which, this short film, which begins with a guy in a in a lawnmower, the kind that you ride running over all kinds of people. It's got like this Ozzie and Harriet, this small town music vibe to it, which, again, it's ironic and produces laughter. He's killing everybody. There's blood everywhere. Later in the in the episode, he a father and a son are out, and the kid ends up being thrown into a some wall of spikes, and he dies, and then the it separates, and the kids thrown up. And the father's comment is, well, I guess I won't win that Father of the Year award. It, it produces humor, by the con, by the sort of non sequitur contrast. We don't expect a father seeing his son die so cruelly to say what he says, and that makes us laugh, and we feel safe doing that. However, there's a certain sense of cruelty in this particular film that is annoying and bothersome, and I wanted to talk a little bit about why this kind of film was created. Tracy will give us the background on it, but basically it was based on a game that was made by Jim banducci and the people at the second iteration of machinima.com not the first one, the second one, run by Philip DeVos A. I met Philip DeVos a at a machinima meeting, and one of the things he kept trying to tell us is make very short, popular episodes of machinima. That's what he wanted to do. What he did was he bought the thing as an investment in order to put together short films that he could sell to a very targeted audience, and that targeted audience was young men between 16 and 25 now we all know young men between 16 and 25 have a love of violence and cruelty as humor. So it fits in perfectly for the kind of audience that it's being sold to. And it really it was being sold because they wanted to build up viewership for YouTube to make a lot of money. And he did make a lot of money on doing that, and he got a team together composed of people who were like that, 16 to 25 mostly men, making content that would appeal to the same kind of people. Now in the first iteration of machinima.com if this film had gone up to the community, it would have been eviscerated. It would have just been smashed to pieces. Although there would have been some people that would have laughed and would have defended it, but for the most part, it just simply would have been destroyed. However, in the second iteration of it, it would have appealed to to those kind of people, and I wanted to bring up a discussion with you all about a the idea of violence and cruelty in machinima, the targeted audience that machinima.com made, and our sense of community, how much it's fragmented over the years. So that's what I had to say about this awful little film. What did you guys think

Tracy Harwood 09:40
you want me to give the background a little bit more the details. I think they'll probably be a good idea, because that might, that might then give you opportunity to sort of think more about its target audience, because I think there's some things that I've discovered that might pin it down a little bit more. Well, okay, so this was released on November the 15th, 2016 on well, by machinima, as he said, based on Jim bonaches game, as you said, Happy Wheels. And it was produced by a company called BMP digital, the digital division of bunny Murray productions, and they released nine episodes in this series which expanded on the game. And at the time, that game had more than 12 million players a month, and there were over 3 billion, let's play video views of it, and more than 5 million user generated levels as one of the basically, it's one of the top three to play games

Ricky Grove 10:48
in the include a level editor and all of that he did,

Tracy Harwood 10:52
yes, he did, which I'll tell you about in a minute, because that, I think, was critical to how it's evolved. So this series was launched on Go 90, which was primarily for a US audience, and then it went to a global audience with Sky Q, that's in the UK, AMC Iberia, which was Spain and Portugal and so who in China and its executive producers were John P Roberts. That's not the guy who bankrolled Woodstock, but a guy that is the Chief Content Officer now for a studio called pure imagination, and somebody else called Gil goldsheen, who now runs co runs that is something called 5x media now go 90 was a was an Internet TV channel which was operated by Verizon, but apparently that, according to Wikipedia anyway, that was plagued with a series of failed program launches, not dissimilar to What you're talking about with machinima, you know, later strategy. In actual fact, Ricky eventually go 90 was shut down in July 2018, so what would that be a little before machinima itself was switched off? Now Happy Wheels, the series featured these characters, various fan character, Fan Fan characters called, well, one of them was called wheelchair guy. Another one was called irresponsible dad, and the one that you've just mentioned was Lawnmower Man. And the game itself is entirely focused on this kind of what became a very notorious dark humor and a penchant for blood and gore. The Voice actors in it were pretty well known YouTubers in their day one was called Jordan Meron, otherwise known as Captain sparkles, who played the business guy. He was a very well new, known YouTube personality specializing in Minecraft gameplay and themed music videos. He had something like 11 and a half million subscribers, and on his channel over 4.1 billion. Views of his content. That tells you a lot about what machinima were up to. Now, he was originally signed to machinima, and obviously now he has his own network called xrea, which is still part, as I understand it, a full screen which, of course, is still owned by Warner and his Minecraft short called Revenge. Not too sure when that was released, but that still holds, I believe, a Guinness World Record for the number of views, not surprisingly, with those kinds of figures. So that was one of the voices in it. Another one was called Ryan McNulty xrpm. 13 was his handle. He plays Charles's dad, and was actually a well known Minecrafter as well. He played Minecraft, Hunger Games particularly, and was well known to be a collaborator with Captain sparkles, as I understand it. He no longer youtubes. He doesn't do occasional twitching, but not much on YouTube. Now, the show was very similar to the game. The series involves these characters in Happy Wheels going through, as you said, these brutal and violent courses with excessive gore. But it did have only the one season, albeit with these nine episodes in total, and each of the episodes of the series ran. Sort of three to five minutes. The game Happy Wheels is basically a rag doll physics adventure based flash game which launched in 2010 Players control a selection of various characters with their goal being to set or get to the finish line and activate some kind of trigger which in itself, triggers a victory and then collect tokens and basically avoid being splattered across levels by all these hazards and obstacles and whatnot. And as you said, users can create and share their own custom scenarios using this level editor that Bucha released. Guess how many levels have been created? No idea, 10 million. Over 10 million user made levels, which is just an astonishing thing. I think so too. I have never heard anything like this, actually, apparently, but actually, was motivated to make the game out of, out of sheer disappointment. In other words, other games that he describes as rag doll physics games, apparently. He said in an interview in 2010 that no one was making their Rag Dolls die properly. They use flop around harmlessly or or in some instances, they have some over and over. So that was his reason for doing it. And originally, Happy Happy Wheels was made for fun between Jim and some of his friends. It only really contained the wheelchair guy. But after that, it gained some notoriety, and, you know, he basically let it loose into what it has become since he he also took on a few other projects, one being total jerk face, which is the, if you go to his YouTube channel, it's called total jerk face.com that's the only place where you can play this game now. He also created something called divine intervention game test 12, and some flash movies called Beautiful day. And where's my bike he's he originally started working on Happy Days in about 2006 and he quit his job, you know, as he was making this in order to sort of finish it. But then as he's as he was doing that he realized he just couldn't create all the levels himself. It just taken too long. And that is the point at which he opened up the level editor where users could kind of get involved. I can't believe how many levels there are in it, actually. Yeah, the demo version, as I said, is he put through all these different websites all I think it's a free to play game. There's a there was a mobile app that was released in 2015 an Android app in 2020 and by the end of 2020 there was a full JavaScript remake of it, which is what you can see on his website. So

Ricky Grove 18:19
how did machinima get involved in a, well,

Tracy Harwood 18:22
he was a YouTuber. I would say he was a YouTuber, or the or at least ways, I Well, I don't know. So the so bonaci wasn't involved with machinima, but the creators were just by the sheer number of Let's Plays and what have you that came through. So did

Ricky Grove 18:42
he get cut out of any of the profits or benefits

Tracy Harwood 18:47
from don't really know how he's I don't really know how he's made his money. I can't, I couldn't really pin that down in what I've seen, because I don't think this is, this is free to play, whether he gets out of gets a cut from levels being uploaded through.

Ricky Grove 19:04
Well, I was thinking about the YouTubes machinimas YouTube channel, and knowing double was a penchant for creating agreements which benefited him and the game screwed others. Yeah, that he probably didn't get a dime. Well,

Tracy Harwood 19:20
no, what machinima were very good at, actually, was generating advertising for game devs. So it's possible that he got his cut through the game dev contribution, I would, I don't really know, but that's that would be my guess. It's

Damien Valentine 19:34
also possible that people watching the on the, you know, the actual videos on machinima, yes, yes, exactly. I want to play this game or try it out. The indirects, yes, the

Tracy Harwood 19:47
indirects wouldn't. They wouldn't generate any income, I don't think, because it's free anyway, whatever the whatever the financial model is, I'm not, I'm not 100% sure, but I'd say it's like you said, Ricky, it's got to be something to do with me. Cinema in so far as I can tell, the last update to the game was Feb 2004 there's obviously a fan wiki for this. There's all the levels mentioned in this, I believe. Well, I'd say all probably fair to say that some of the most popular ones are there. I logged into the discord for it as well to have a look in there. And when I went online, which I have to say, was about half past five this morning, there were about two and a half 1000 people online. But the wiki does say it has over 90,000 members on the discord. Wow, yeah. Now you're going to ask me what I thought about these episodes. I'm thinking,

Ricky Grove 20:44
Tracy, what did you think of these episodes? Well,

Tracy Harwood 20:52
considering it's 2d and low poly animation, which, which, thank goodness it is, I thought it was surprisingly bloody and gory. It is obviously not to my taste.

Ricky Grove 21:07
Well, I wasn't asking you whether you like them or not. No, no. When I chose it, I knew everybody wouldn't like it. I didn't like them. I'm just curious as my questions about cruelty and animation, about machinima.com focus on a particular audience. That's what I was interested in.

Tracy Harwood 21:24
Well, I can see where you're coming from, and indeed, I can see why folks would get into this. I mean, I would guess if you can sit through trite like Final Destination or scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer or Five Nights at Freddy's. It's got to be the same kind of pointless horror as those films are targeting.

Ricky Grove 21:47
But I think reduced like, like us, like a soup that you left on the oven for too long, and it's distilled down to it's just like, it's essence.

Tracy Harwood 21:57
It's very cool. I mean, each scene, each there is no real point to it, that other than just how much Gore can you get out of each

Ricky Grove 22:07
well, cruelty, that's the

Tracy Harwood 22:08
point. Yes, yes, exactly. But

Ricky Grove 22:11
cruelty, as I commented on, showing people in in situations where you wouldn't expect cruelty to occur and death to occur, which makes things funny. And I think that's it appeals to a particular group of young men who find that kind of cruelty very funny

Tracy Harwood 22:31
indeed. Well, I mean, my notes here, I mean, there's, there's clearly a level of humor in it, but it, but it obviously isn't my taste. It actually made me squirm a bit, because, of course, you know what's coming. You know when you've got giant blades breaking loose and running havoc and lawn mowing over people and people getting run over, you know what's the result of that's going to be? It's just, you know each each death is just more

Ricky Grove 23:03
unseen, more jokes,

Tracy Harwood 23:05
more humor. It's just, yes, I mean, it's a kind it's a kind of craft where the craft is about setting up joke after joke, which, frankly, I just don't think are in particularly good taste. It's clear there is a narrative there. Though, given that, because you know, you don't, you wouldn't be able to sort of necessarily see the joke if you didn't understand what the narrative was. So there is a narrative in it. And brief, though the episodes are, you kind of get a clear sense of each of the characters as well. You know what I say, the editing is quite well done. The music is confusing. I kind of thing. It's sort of Disney and Hanna Barbera, and

Ricky Grove 23:53
which is the contrast, yes, the happy music versus the death and cruelty of all of the characters. And my point that I was trying to make was that machinima, the one reason for its success is its ability to target the interests and types of people and produce content that would appeal to those particular types of people. And that was a vast difference between the original machinima, which had a much more open process and was not about commercializing something to make money, because the sole purpose of this series is to Make Money for machinima. The people that produce machinima.com you com,

Tracy Harwood 24:43
yeah, yeah.

Ricky Grove 24:47
Community, it's not about building a community. It's not about encouraging people to be creative or to produce content that's based on human values or anything like that. Is just to produce. It's like Paul the pulps in the 30s to produce consistent content over and over again that works on a targeted audience by hiring the people in that targeted audience to produce content that they know would appeal to them. If it makes them laugh, then it's going to make the audience laugh. And I wanted to bring up that topic for a discussion. Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 25:24
yeah. I agree,

Ricky Grove 25:28
Phil. What did you have to say?

Phil Rice 25:31
So I first got introduced to Happy Wheels by way of grace still plays, because in addition to we've we've reviewed some of his Sims stuff, and he does a lot of work in GTA and at least for a while there was doing a lot of Happy Wheels stuff. And the situation he had set up over the years was when viewers saw that he was playing that game, they would create levels specifically, hoping he would find them and put little messages in the screens for him. So it became this, this weird sort of interactive experience. But yeah, I mean, the game plays not too different from how, how this animated series plays out, minus the narrative part. You know, it's in the game. It's even more distilled. There's no narrative at all. There's not even an attempted narrative. It's just scenarios where, inevitably, you know this, some kind of you know body mutilation is going to happen to these cartoons. They emulate the look of the game very precisely. So I find it hard to imagine it wasn't made with the game. I can tell that because the game is actually fairly limited in terms of its mechanics, but the art is definitely Jimbo, not cheese. It's an exact match. And they've added stuff like, you know, the lip sync and things like that afterwards. So I would guess this was made in something like Moho or cartoon animator, one of those 2d animating softwares. And they, they, I would guess, I can't find anything online about what the arrangement was, and maybe that's not too unusual, but I would guess Bucha was still developing this game for several years after this series came out, so he was actively developing and supporting the game when this was made, hard to imagine that, that they would have just stole it from him or something. He was a developer. He was known, so I'm sure that they arranged something for the IP, because you're right, Tracy, if it was just about driving interest in the game, he doesn't make anything from that, that I can tell, yeah, he doesn't make anything from it. It's free to play. It's free to make the levels, it's free to upload the levels. All that's free. So, yeah, if he was gonna, if he had any sense at all, unless maybe he had a conscience about I don't want to make money on this, but if you don't believe in it, then why are you doing it in the first place? Right? Exactly. Anyway, so, I mean, it's, you know, divorce it from what the content is, which is disgusting. It's well made, like the series is actually, it's actually well made from a craft point of view, that it's well written. The joke style is very much in the vein of like Family Guy. This is a Seth. This is what Seth McFarland show would look like if there were no TV sensors. I'm confident of that, because if you look at the core humor of Family Guy, it is very much about this same thing you brought up Ricky. It is about cruelty being funny, and they they do as much graphic violence on Family Guy as they can get away with, and are constantly pushing the limit on it. Now, it's not this. It's not everybody is thrown in a wood chipper kind of thing. This is what he would do if there was no censors, though, that he has that same and he's my age, but he has that same adolescent humor and always has every movie that he's made, he can't help but go that direction. There's some absurdly violent, comical scene in everything that he does. So he's one of those, he's, he's one of those guys that just never grew up, or he is of the mindset of the machinima.com people, which is, I'm going to lean into this, because I know this audience, and I can, I can make something off of them, you know. But what's, what's a little frightening. Mean, because I think every I think your analysis, Ricky, is spot on, except that I don't I think that it would be better if the interest in cruelty as humor were confined to the What did you say, 16 to 25 to 25

Ricky Grove 30:21
young male

Phil Rice 30:22
I sure wish that was the case, but I have a feeling, an unsettling feeling, that the appetite is a much broader demographic than that I see, and

Ricky Grove 30:34
that's a little but primarily men,

Phil Rice 30:37
primarily men, yeah. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, if I showed this to my wife, and, you know, in sincere like, Oh, you'll I love this, you'll love it, I'd probably be divorced. It's not something that appeals to women at all, but I think, I think, unfortunately, it appeals to a an even broader age range of of men. And if we're going to be honest here and not not sound like some evangelical preacher, I think video games may have something to do with that, because if you look at what started happening in video games, post Doom, where graphic body mutil I mean quake two. One of the major plot points of Quake two is you come upon this factory where your fellow soldiers are being ground up into body parts that look just like this. They came up with a name for it, gibs or jibs, these body parts, giblets, yeah, yeah. But it wasn't done with comical intent back then. I don't think it didn't come off that way, but it was, hey, we can get away with this. This is something that you would never see in a movie because it's too graphic. Well, fast forward now 30 years. We're seeing this thing, final destination. It's in, it's in. There's a market for these movies too, full body. And frankly, there always were movies like this. It's just that they were, they were really off the beaten path, and they they probably didn't get theatrical runs. I'm trying to think of what some of the names of them were, but there, there's a series of movies that I want to say were done in the 80s that are about this group of people who end up this group of, let's say, Americans, Westerners, who end up lost in an Amazon jungle, and they get they get abducted by this tribe of very primitive, you know, Headhunter types, you know, and, and it is insanely graphic, like, I think, I think it was called Cannibal Holocaust. Yeah, that's one of them. Yeah, there's a series of them. And, and I read just I've never watched anything like that, but I someone made a reference to it, and I went and looked it up, and just reading the Wikipedia plot summary, I got nauseous. It's really, really gruesome. And then there's even worse stuff, you know, human centipede and things like that, which, if you don't know about that, don't, don't do yourself a favor. Don't even Google that like to see what that's about. It's, it's, it's unbelievably hideous and and that that's not made for 16 to 25 or maybe it is, but a lot more than that. You know that you look for who the fans are of that kind of content, and it's way beyond that demographic. So it's a little little frightening there. But anyway,

Ricky Grove 33:38
I think we moved a little away from the focus, which was because in movies like Cannibal Holocaust and centipede man, the the goal is to introduce fear into people essential red, right? Whereas cartoons that we're talking about, the sole reason was to use cruelty to produce

Phil Rice 33:59
humor, right? And like element of farce, like you mentioned, right, exactly. And good point,

Ricky Grove 34:05
it was a joke. So you have a joke, a death scene, and then another situation comes up and you tell the same joke again, and then another situation comes up and you tell the same joke again, which is why they're less than three minutes, right? Because you can't tell the same joke 17 times without losing the audience. Sorry to interrupt you, but I wanted to steer us back on.

Phil Rice 34:28
Yeah, and actually that maps, that maps precisely to the game. That's what the game is. You play the level. It's a few minutes long. There's something gruesome that that either happens without question or you try to avoid it. But the level is designed to make you know, like one of them is the irresponsible father. It's a man on a bicycle with his kid in the bike seat behind him and riding this crazy obstacle course with spikes and you know things to. Smash and coyote and Roadrunner type stuff, but with all the blood and guts and it's just gruesome, it's just horribly gruesome, and that's what the game is. So this show is faithful to that. Yeah, it's, it's.

Ricky Grove 35:19
So why does it appeal to such a large range of men and boys?

Phil Rice 35:24
Well, I don't know. And you're you're asking that of the guy who, when he was 28 years old, made father frags best, which was a a family multiple homicide, uh, put up in a satire context for the purpose of humor, and it was bloody and gory. And you know that the sun murders like six people or something and just

Ricky Grove 35:49
but, but what you did is fundamentally different from what Happy Wheels does. Because, is it? Though? Yes, it is, because you told a story that was humorous. It wasn't just the fact that people got fragged, but it was the the verbal humor as well, and it's centered around a homer simpson or a Bart Simpson type character who would just rebel. There's none of that sense of identification in any of these, these characters are not characters. They're just figures that we identify as cartoons. Oh, that's a father because he looks like a father in your scenario, those were real characters doing real things, same type of humor, cruelty and violence to make a laughter, but with people who did verbal humor as well and visual humor as well, so it's much more sophisticated. I think,

Phil Rice 36:50
well, you're, you're, I think you're being generous there honestly, like, No, I'm not well. I think that I remember when you interviewed me years and years ago, and you actually, we sat down and did, like, an hour long interview, and you talked to me about that film, and there were things that you were lifting out of it, in terms of sophistication that I remember thinking, Did I mean that? Like, was I intending that? I don't know, and maybe that doesn't even matter, but that's the fact that it's there is what matters. And if it came out of me, subconsciously or whatever, I had a very interesting experience. Re watching that film. My film very recently, I did a director commentary on it and put it on my Patreon. And yeah, that ended up being the point of that watch was, who was this guy that made this I don't even know him, you know, and it's because I just couldn't imagine being entertained by or even being able to stomach the idea of putting that out there as humor. And I talked some about what the proposed sequel was for father Frank's best, which was the next day Joey goes to school and takes out everybody there. Yeah, you know what happened right before that finished production, Columbine, which, there's nothing funny about Columbine, no, and that's what, that's what made me cancel that whole production and kind of wake up, of course. But even so, even given that event, I still look back on it. And first of all, think who was that guy. And secondly, I was 28 you know, if I'd made that when I was 16, it'd be a different feeling, but I was a grown man. I should have known better. So I don't know. I'm gonna reluctantly agree that that, yeah, maybe there's a little bit more of a narrative structure going on, but I still feel like that most people would see father's father frags best, and think that it's that that narrative is really just there in service of these graphically physical comedy

Ricky Grove 39:03
jokes. If machinima.com was around and they approached you and said, Hey, we want to buy father Frank's best and we want to do a series. Would you do it

Phil Rice 39:11
back then? I don't know. I was really thirsty back then. Is that? Is that the Gen Z term for it, when when you know you're trying too hard. I was really thirsty for some kind of commercial success back then. Now, absolutely not out of the question. I don't even want to re release the film myself. I'm not putting it out on the free channel. Mainly for that reason, I'm doing the director's commentary. And the only reason I did the director's commentary was to open up about how it makes me feel now, you know, and my conflicted feelings about it anyway, I don't want to spend the whole episode on that, but, yeah, it's a really interesting topic. And what's funny too, is that I can think of a time a year ago when I was watching gray still plays play this game, and. And it made me laugh. But I think most of that is his performance. What he brings to it, that the comments and the he's he's basically with his let's play style. He is ascribing narrative to it. He is his. And so it gives it maybe a little bit, it lifts it just a little bit, but still, it's using this same skin and bones. So it's really, yeah, it's making me, making me think differently about that. So I want to say great pick when I do, you'll know what I mean, not one that I love, but, but I'm glad, really, really glad that you found this and picked it. I had no idea it even existed, and it is interesting to talk about.

Ricky Grove 40:42
Thanks, Damian,

Damien Valentine 40:43
what's your thought about all this? Well, I'm glad I got to listen to all of you first, because I watched this and I thought I have no idea what I'm going to say about

Phil Rice 40:53
it. I thought you were I thought you were saying because I watched this and I laughed my ass off.

Ricky Grove 40:56
No, it's fine. Hey, if you loved it and you thought it was great. Please tell us.

Damien Valentine 41:02
No, not really. Okay. There are a couple of things I did like. So I start with that I liked that it was 2d rarely do we see 2d machinima, because most games are obviously 3g now. So that stood out to me, something that I quite liked, and I guess that's about it. It reminded me a lot of South Park, the animation style, right? The South Park does do the over top violence and cruelty, usually just to tell a joke, but sometimes they do try and put some messages behind whatever the situation is, just to show just how ridiculous things can be.

Tracy Harwood 41:52
Yeah? Message here would be, what? Don't stand in front of a giant wheel. Yeah, don't

Damien Valentine 41:57
do that. So, yeah, there's none of that kind of messaging in this film. It's just about, let's see how much violence we can cause. I didn't find it funny. I don't know. Maybe when I was younger, I might have done there was another thing it reminded me of which I did find funny at the time, but I probably wouldn't now, there's a cartoon series that was released online called, think it's called Happy Tree Friends, and it's about these cute animals, and it'd be just as brutal and violent as this to each other and things like that. And I remember, I was listening to you, I was thinking about this, and I thought, I know why I found that funny. It's because it was so wrong. The thing about humor the situation is that it's just you've got these cute little animals. Like bunnies and squirrels and things, and you don't expect this. And it's funny because it's wrong, and that's why I liked it. And I introduced my cousin, who's a few years younger than me, to it, and he loved it, too, but again, I don't think he would now either. So I think we've matured a bit in our what we find entertaining. But as far as how, what's the appeal of something like this? It's probably the same thing or something similar. It's, it's just wrong. That's, that's it. Well, actually, just popped into my head. There's a show I do watch now called the boys, which is like a, oh yeah, I know that one, yeah, the parody of the superhero stuff. It's really over the top violence in a way that is wrong. That's just the way to describe it. I do enjoy that. But even then, there are times like it's not funny because they go too far with it. But when they get it right, it's funny. But this, yes, this Happy Wheels doesn't appeal to me at all despite the popularity of the game. I'd never heard of it until I'd seen this video. And I hadn't heard of those youtubers that Tracy was talking about me either. Again, they had massive followings, but until Tracy you mentioned them earlier, I had never heard of a single

Tracy Harwood 44:01
one of them, no. But then you've got to remember there was a period of time when we were, you know, we were at the back end of the first wave of machinima, still enjoying the quality of the work and recognizing the fact that the quality was, or the number of quality films was sort of dropping off. We weren't really picking up on the on the network channels and what machinima was doing, because it was clearly going on a path that wasn't technically machinima at all, just, you know, just a sort of a money making machine, really, which is, well,

Phil Rice 44:36
and Minecraft wasn't, and maybe still isn't, wasn't ever on our machinima radar because it wasn't being used for that, and it, frankly, isn't capable of being used for that in any compelling way. And that's where all these creators come from. That's where Captain sparkles comes from. And this was at a time when Minecraft was at its peak and was was breaking all kinds of records on YouTube for Miss. Essentially what are just, let's play videos in different styles. Log, dot. Zip is another one that's mentioned as a voice actor for this, and he was a, he's a, he's an interesting one. I was surprised to see him there, because he has since grown up into quite a mature young man. And would, I would never in a million years. Associate himself with this content now, but, but back then, he was probably 16, yeah, if I'm guessing his age right, he's actually somebody that when back in 2021, we did an episode where my pick was a review of Minecraft, let's play machinima, and I covered like half a dozen creators, and he was one of them, long guys that was really nice. Seems to be a really nice guy has worked his way up and kind of pretty regularly, is part of the high level, like whatever that that online trade show type thing that that Minecraft does every year that they broadcast live. And he was, for several years, was on, he was flown in and did that show. So he's, he's, he's developed a nice reputation for himself. But yeah, his content, his early content, tilted more in this direction, not quite like this, but tilted more in the childish, adolescent male humor direction, and he grew out of it, which is what people are supposed to do, right? So,

Tracy Harwood 46:28
yeah, I was going to ask, you know, do you think this would still be popular today?

Ricky Grove 46:36
Oh, I think so. Yes, I definitely think so. Yeah, definitely think so let me this is becoming an excessively long episode, so I thought I would close with making a couple comments and then finish the episode. What I'm in this pick and in my comments, and I suspect in all of your comments, it's not so much making a judgment on this type of material, because it's not wrong to laugh and enjoy this kind of material. What I was trying to do was to point out what it actually does, so that you'll know that that's what that does. And you'll maybe think about that a bit more in the same way that this great book, west of everything, by Jane Thompson talks about, she eviscerates Westerns for all of their problems with death and males, holding, withholding, their feelings and explosions of violence, but she's still addicted to them. So it's not an ethical judgment about this. It's just trying to point it out. What is the goal? What is the purpose of making these kinds of film? And the purpose is to find an audience that they know it would appeal to, and to make the kind of stuff using cruelty and violence and cartoons to make as many possible views as they can. And as Tracy pointed out, the views are astronomical, which is why I suggest, if you did the same kind of thing today, a la South Park, you'd get a huge mass of people watching it. So it's not wrong. There's a sense of fun in all of it, and there's not wrong to have fun and enjoy, but keep in mind what it actually does. That's all I'm trying to say. All right. Well, that's our episode. Would you like to close out for us? Phil,

Phil Rice 48:37
yeah, sure. Audience, I'm sure this is a provocative topic here and and film. So we would love to receive your feedback and your thoughts on this. Feel free to drop us a comment down below the video or or drop us an email at talk at completely machima.com my name is Phil on behalf of my co hosts, Tracy, Ricky and Damian, thanks for tuning in. Thanks for sticking with us on this long episode, and we'll see you next time bye, bye.