It's Fuhrer-IFFIC! No wait, It's cherry. What a letdown...

HOLY SHIT! NEW ZEROES CONTENT BY ZARTAN!
08/19/02
ENJOY, YOU PLEBIANS

I'm going to come right out with it: this article is basically going to be a great big valentine to Kool-Aid and Kool-Aid Man, if by "valentine" you mean "a letter dripping with disappointment and regret sent to an ex-lover two years after the fact." The fact of the matter is that there isn't a single, servicable word for that concept, apart from "my life." I asked Microsoft Word for a synonym, and that smarmy little paperclip offered to help me write a suicide letter. Regardless, the people who make Kool-Aid (to editor: please research this as I don't have the bandwidth to waste on fact-finding; oh wait, it's apparently Kraft Foods) have much to answer for in their handling of one of my childhood heroes. I mean, if you go to their noisy, stupid Kool-Aid website, right beneath the words "Welcome to Kool-Aid Man's house" is "A message from our lawyers." Well how about a frosty-cold pitcher of cherry-flavored fuck you, Kraft's Lawyers? Yeah, that'll teach them.

I might as well go for broke, here, since my credibility seems intent upon committing suicide (to editor: please remove all the references to suicide that seem to magically find their way into unrelated material from this article), and confess: I liked a lot of really, really stupid stuff as a kid. A perfect example of this is educational programming. I don't mean socially acceptable programs like Sesame Street or The Electric Company; I'm talking about those shoestring-budget, two-thirty in the afternoon on public access affairs that were made somewhere in Canada in the mid-seventies. Unapologetically shitty shows with names like "Trade-Offs" and "Making Cents" and "Counterspy." I distinctly remember learning about ENIAC and UNIVAC from what looked to be a talking typewriter with glued-on ping pong eyes sitting in front of a test pattern, and - here's the kicker - loving every minute of it. My point is that you shouldn't be surprised - appalled, perhaps, and I hope you're proud of yourself, you fucking culture snob; I'm sure you'll be the toast of the Salon.com message boards tomorrow morning as you simultaneously deconstruct my pitiful attempt at nostalgic humor and comb the cracker crumbs out of your soul patch - when I admit to having liked some commercials better than the shows wrapped around them. One such series of commercials was, of course, the Kool-Aid Man.

For those of you who don't remember Kool-Aid Man before he was turned into a faggot, the commercials were just fucking rad. These kids would be thirsty or whatever for Kool-Aid (to editor: please remove that "or whatever for Kool-Aid" part since there is no "or whatever;" it's not as though you can be "bleeding for Kool-Aid" or "horny for Kool-Aid" although given the state of the Internet, I wouldn't be surprised to see some disturbingly enterprising lad or mannish woman had created an airbrushed portrait of Kool-Aid Man sporting a nineteen-foot cock, probably hosing down the Rescue Rangers or some shit. Also remove this entire parenthetical aside as it's obvious I've put even a moment's thought into this, which is too much.) and apparently a corollary of being thirsty in Kool-Aid World is being "completely bone idle." Rather than get up and make Kool-Aid (which takes like five seconds, maybe ten if you're crippled, or three hours, if you're my mother, barely sublimating her disgust at my constant stream of absurd demands) these kids would just yell "Hey, Kool-Aid!" and wham, the Big Red Pitcher himself has removed an entire wall in his fervor to deliver the goods. It's worth noting that these commercials were originally live-action. Kool-Aid Man was obviously real.

You wouldn't think I'd find a picture like this while researching an article about fucking Kool-Aid. You'd be wrong.
Yeah, bling bling, you cynically marketed fat fuck.

I had these.

Another character that exists, unfortunately, is "Macho Man" Randy Savage, whose real name is - get ready - Randy Poffo. How one

Because no homosexual would dress like this.

goes from a marshmallow of a name like "Poffo" to scary, pectorally-inclined words like "savage" and "macho" is beyond me. The Macho Man had a series of ads back when, um, whenever the hell it was that I watched them (I seem to remember high school being in there somewhere) where he injected a dose of incongruous and no doubt terrifying excitement to bored kids by, you guessed it, crashing through a wall with a fistful of Slim Jims. It's not as though these kids had screamed "Hey, Macho Man" or "Hey, Slim Jims" - no, they were just minding their own admittedly tedious business when, oh shit, here comes Macho Man in a flurry of crumbling mortar and pastel tassels and meat snacks so unhealthy I'm surprised people just don't rub them directly on their still-beating hearts. "Art thou bored?" he, um, well the thing is Macho Man doesn't "scream," even when he's being his loudest; his is the vocal equivalent of dragging a large concrete slab over living piglets covered in gravel and glue. Well, you got me there, Macho Man, I may have been bored but you know, that's life, and please for the love of god don't take off those sunglasses. Have you seen his eyes?

The Thirsties even have a space program. Take THAT, Nigeria. (Click to enlarge.)

Kool-Aid Man, my Kool-Aid Man, wouldn't have a brother named Lenny, either. At least, he wouldn't admit it - you never once saw him crossed over with that leprous yellow dinosaur Kraft Foods cooked up to pitch their Cheese and Macaroni (har har, it's so cheesy that we BLAM). Later on, Kool-Aid Man went animated, and he actually had enemies now. There were these creatures called the Thirsties. They looked like electric greenish-yellow stains and went around - just drifting from town to town, I guess, like travelling preachers or Internet pedophiles - deliberately making kids, um, thirsty. Well, as you can imagine, Kool-Aid Man was having none of this shit. So he went around vanquishing the Thirsties by... okay, my memory fails me, but I'm pretty damned sure that it was something a bit more fucking dynamic than just floating up and bumping into them. More on this in a bit. Anyway, this was acceptable. He even brought down those proto-Venom motherfuckers in space. Without a helmet. Apparently the braintrust at Kraft Foods, who would apparently later go on to inject steaming hyena shit directly into their brains, found this arrangement so compelling as to be the subject of not one but two video games. One of which was for the Intellivision, and I desperately needed this fucking game. Unfortunately, ever the little domestic, I'd blown all my Kool-Aid Points on a matching plastic Kool-Aid pitcher and glasses set.

I needn't have worried. Through the magic of emulation, I finally got to play this game a few weeks ago, and it was a goddamn disappointment. I looked at the overlay and thought, aw, yeah, this is where it's at, and then I smacked myself for being a 24-year-old white guy whose internal monologue ever actually sounds like that. Smacked myself good and hard - but seriously, check it out: it's action action action here, folks. Then I looked closer... the side buttons are assigned to "Pick Up / Set Down," the hell? Kool-Aid Man doesn't go around picking shit up and setting it down. Kool-Aid Man does not work at a fucking Hallmark shop. And I fire up the game, and, hmmm. It's some kids in a big black house. Looks like I should've just read the fucking manual, from which I will be quoting extensively: In PART ONE, two children are trapped in a haunted house. Oh, for fuck's sake, they're turning this into Chekhov. Anyway, you've got to slowly plod through this stupid but tastefully-appointed "haunted house" collecting the makings for KOOL-AID soft drink. And yes, they constantly refer to it as "KOOL-AID soft drink," which I somehow find both retarded and charming. Speaking of which, ever had a literally and profoundly retarded girl attempt to flirt with you? I have! Collecting the makings (hee hee) is needlessly complex; for some reason Old Mr. Ghastly or whoever owns this joint has left the bowl of sugar on a five-foot-high pedestal, so you have to go fetch the fucking Haunted Stepstool from the Haunted Attic and go all the Haunted way back, etc etc.

Yes, he does. He does describe this game as 'exciting.' (Click to enlarge.)
The overlay is actually the best thing about this game. (Click to enlarge.)
The ad cleverly glosses over the harrowing 'Fetching the Haunted Stepstool' sequence.

Of course, the Thirsties are after you, and they're just about as effective as these kids. They just sort of drift around at angles, ricocheting off of the roof and the first floor. If one of them catches sight of you, um, as it were, they might run after you for a little while. All seemed lost until I reached into my big soggy bag of clever and pulled out a daredevil evasive tactic: I went up the fucking stairs. I risked it all with this cunning manuever because, according to the manual, IF BOTH CHILDREN ARE IMMOBILIZED BEFORE THE KOOL-AID SOFT DRINK MAKINGS ARE BROUGHT TO THE KITCHEN SINK, THE GAME IS OVER! I wonder about the sort of mind that uses the word "immobilized" in a manual for a video game aimed at and marketed to the nine-and-under, "stuffed to the gills on glorified sugar water" set. As you can see, in the crucial endgame of ~~ACT~~ PART ONE, I got tagged by a Thirsty, and little Jane's body becomes a living prison for her mind for the very first (but certainly not the last) time. Fuck it; Jane's expendable. I had been playing this awful game for almost five goddamned action-free minutes and didn't feel like wasting any more time with fancy footwork. I wanted to get to the goddamned Haunted Kitchen and fill my pitcher with Haunted Tap Water and just fucking summon Kool-Aid Man already. I really ought to force every chuckleheaded teenaged bitch who comes drifting three inches off the ground into the library looking for books on "witchcraft" to play this game to completion. These magic rituals are fucking tedious.

This thirsty has somehow got 'capture and immobilize' confused with 'go the opposite fucking direction.

There's no 'I' in team, Jane, so quit your mewling.

And here's the payoff. PART TWO action begins when KOOL-AID MAN crashes through a wall. That's "a wall," not "the wall." He doesn't even bother busting into the haunted house. He just finds some wall out in a field somewhere and busts through it with, I have to admit, considerable enthusiasm considering he's just going through the motions. Then he materializes inside the Haunted House and WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE, PEOPLE. That, according to the manual, is a PHANTOM FLAVOR. This haunted house has just gone all kinds of weird. The designer of this game probably spends a lot of time trying to convince people that he can talk to animals. Controlling Kool-Aid Man is all right, I guess, but even the fact that he can walk through walls and float up through ceilings doesn't make up for the shite PART ONE. Anyway, you're meant to oh blah blah blah, fuck it, read the manual if you want to know how to maximize your score or whatever in PART TWO. I didn't!

Whoomp, here he is, along with an appropriately dated and stupid reference on my part.

This PHANTOM FLAVOR seems to be, um, a chuckling pineapple.

My attempt to get Kool-Aid Man out of the house and thereby out of this terrible game failed, of course.

Right, and I know that there was a Kool-Aid Man game for the Atari 2600, but just tell me with a straight face that you can make any sense of this shit:

Yes, someone once looked at this train wreck and said: 'It is done.'
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