Category Archives: Strange America

America can get weird with is sometimes. We like it, we support it, and we broadcast it for the world to see.

Tomcat Films Makes The Best (Worst) Movies in America

“Shit, superman is taken? How about ‘Hero Dude’?  No?  Well let’s do some re-shoots and get this bitch distributed!”

~Ted Chalmers

 panda-saurus

Making it big in the American film industry requires talent, perseverance, knowing the right people, and a whole lot of luck.  Unfortunately, not every American who wants to go into show business was born with Brad Pitt’s face or Willem Dafoe’s prodigious genitalia, and most dreams in Tinseltown end where they begin- holding back tears as you scrub semen stains off a producer’s couch.

But there’s a strange and frankly wonderful niche among all the critically acclaimed Indie darlings and massive blockbuster hits that is lucrative enough to account for 90% of the DVDs your grandma buys for you at Walmart.  That niche, of course, is the Mockbuster- super cheap, poorly CGI’d films that riff on popular blockbusters with names juuuust close enough to trick people into thinking “Wow, The Dark Knight’s on DVD for only $2.99!  Weird that they didn’t spell it with the K, but whatever.”

One of these Mockbuster purveyors is Tomcat Films, now under the umbrella of Summer Hill Films.  So we took one look at their offerings to the public and said to ourselves, hell yeah, let’s talk about the hilariously bad movies these guys have produced.  And holy hell, did they not disappoint.  So grab your off-brand popcorn and get ready for a master class in so-bad-they’re-good-and-then-bad-again movie making

Tomcat Films Makes The Best (Worst) Movies in America

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Great Moments in Spam Responses: International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

“Get me off your fucking mailing list.”

~David Mazières and Eddie Kohler

get-me-off-your-list

If you put a gun to our head and told us to tell you one thing that’s wrong with America, we’d press our forehead into the barrel and say, “That pussies like you don’t have the stones to pull the trigger.” But if you asked nicely, and weren’t a dick about it, we’d say, “probably the existence of companies and publications employing predatory tactics to gain profit.”

And while businesses that gain all their profits through legal-but-shady means are a global phenomenon, America does unfortunately have its fair share of assholes who trick the gullible, frightened, and elderly into giving them money.

One surprising and somewhat unsettling form this has taken involves, of all things, science. Specifically, “academic journals” that solely exist to mill out publications for graduate students and members of STEM academia. These publications spam academics and will post just about anything so long as they get their publication fee.

One of those publications is the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology which is the equivalent of us calling our website the International Publication of Extraordinary Patriotic Informative Studies, which is to say it’s a bullshit name for a bullshit publication (yes we are including ourselves in the “bullshit” category).

And that’s why it was so wonderful when, in 2014, Peter Vamplew, Associate Professor at Federation University Australia, decided to fuck with this publication, to amazing effect.  This is his story.

Great Moments in Spam Responses:  International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology

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The First Season of the NFL was Ridiculous

“You can’t both be called the Tigers. Or you can. Whatever. We’re kind of making this up as we go along.”

~Jim Thorpe, the first president of the NFL

football

The NFL is part of our nation’s DNA, exhibiting everything we stand for. Teamwork.  Perseverance. Struggle. Old white men punishing people when they dance too much in celebration. A shocking inability to properly handle domestic abuse. And, of course, Tom Brady’s cleft chin.

Imagining America without football is almost impossible. What would we do with our winter Sundays? Football is in the bible, you guys. “On the seventh day, the Lord kicked back a 12 pack on his recliner and watched NFL Red Zone with a close eye on his fantasy team.”

We think. Listen, just like most Americans, we like to use the bible to make our point, despite not having really “read it.” But we digress.

The point is, as much as we assume that football has always been with us, there was a time when the league was brand new and very, very ridiculous.

So let’s hop in a time machine of words and go back to 1920, where the first season of a National Football League took place.  It was sloppy as hell.

The First Season of the NFL was Ridiculous

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The Strangest (Unofficial) Lego Sets You Can Actually Buy

“Leggo my Lego!”

~That’s not their slogan…

lego

Legos are so ingenious we’re frankly surprised they’re not from America. They were actually invented in Denmark or Sweden or one of those countries way up over there, we don’t really care, we have a hard enough time figuring out if it’s Vermont or New Hampshire that borders Maine to care about where other countries are.

That being said, Lego is kind of the perfect toy—it encourages creativity in children, and Asperger-level concentration and commitment in adults. The genius of Lego lies in its adaptability—if The Lego Movie taught us anything, it’s that Will Ferrell is kind of an asshole of a dad.

No, wait, it’s that you shouldn’t limit your imagination. Well, that imagination is alive and well in America, in the form of custom Lego sets, for sale, by third party vendors.  Okay, so maybe you’re not using your imagination by buying them, but they are at the very least…unique.

The Strangest (Unofficial) Lego Sets You Can Actually Buy

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America’s Most Absurdly Pointless Museums

“This would be so much better if there was a bar here.”

~Museum Patrons

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Museums are an important part of American culture. They unite us to our history and offer a serviceable way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Museums are mostly fine!  Some are actually pretty cool!  Museums, or institutions that conserve and collect objects of various historic, cultural, artistic, or scientific significance, have been around for  thousands of years.

Literally every nation that isn’t ISIS has museums, because people want to feel connected to their past, present, and future, and looking at the leather jacket worn by the Fonz is a great way to help you do that.

Naturally, America does museums as well as anyone else.  According to Trip Advisor, for example, 6 of the 25 best museums in the world are in the United States, including the #1 and #3 museums out there (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Chicago Art Institute, respectively) which is frankly astonishing considering that we’re competing against countries such as England, Greece and France who have literally thousands of more years of cultural history than we possess. We’re kicking ass even when we’re competing with places like the Louvre and the Acropolis!

So yes, America knows how to do classy, important museums. But there is one category where no other nation is even close to catching up to us in. America is by far the master at museums that are utterly pointless to the point of hilarity. We have a museum for everything here.  Everything. To prove our point, we’re here to present you with…

America’s Most Absurdly Pointless Museums

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The 5 Best Presidential Pets in American History

“Squack, I’ll keep whatever pet I goddamn well please, squack.”

~Andrew Jackson’s Pet Parrot

Horse

It’s almost an unwritten rule that America’s President take care of a pet during their stay in the White House, even if the only reason is that having a pet is a good way to make the man with more power than anyone else in the free world just a tad bit more relatable  And also because pets are adorable.

When this article was written, in the before times, the White House was home to two Portuguese Water Dogs, and dogs and cats are pretty typical presidential pets because they’re pretty typical regular pets.  But that’s not always the case. Throughout our nation’s histories, some presidents have decided, “I’m the President, goddamn it, I can choose any pet I want” before taking care of the best and most insane pets ever.

Here are five times that American Presidents thought a bit outside the box when it came to pets.

The 5 Best Presidential Pets in American History

yooooo

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Matthew McConaughey is a Bad Dog Dad: An Important Exposé

“We could do tacos…we could do thai…Oo, how about sushi?”

~Matthew McConaughey to TWO GODDAMN DOGS

mcchey 1

This year, Matthew McConaughey continued his confusing commercial work with the Lincoln Motor Company, because he was in that one Lincoln lawyer movie, A Time to Kill.

For those of you who have not seen a McConaughey Lincoln commercial, who are you and what pleasure do you get lying to websites on the internet? The the rest of (all of) you who know what we’re talking about, we’ll still run down the basics.

McConaughey drives a Lincoln. Soft music plays. He’s saying something that sounds folksy but really isn’t (“I used to drive this kind of car and now I get paid to drive this kind of car”) and then he gives the camera a sly look through the rear view mirror that’s all, “Ha ha, I got my statue I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

America has stood behind that. Nay, America has united behind that.

But then McConaughey had to go ahead and film a commercial that proves that he is a terrible Dog Dad, and his dogs must be taken away from him before he causes them irreversible harm.

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The Dole Air Race: Crash and Burn, Repeat

“*crashes and dies horribly*”

~The average airplane pilot in the 1920s

crashed plane

On the grand scale of human endeavors, we as a species have only recently mastered the art of flight. We’ve been able to stay in the air in a contraption of our own design for only a little over 100 years at this point, and we’re still trying to work out the kinks (consider- Spirit Airlines).

But in the early days of flight, we really had no clue what the hell we were doing.  Like, at all.  Flying was something done by a very select group of crazy people with a death wish—listen, Amelia Earhart was a pioneer and an inspiration and blah blah blah, but it’s safe to say that part of her legacy comes from the fact that she partook in a profession that all but guaranteed that we’d never got to see what she looked like as an old lady.

The fact that Charles Lindbergh lived to be 72 is almost as shocking as the fact that he had a secret Nazi family.

The early days in aviation were filled with daring attempts to do something that had never been done before using planes that were made out of balsa wood, fabric, and a lot of praying. The ambition often exceeded the technology, and when we weren’t trying to milk sky cows, we were trying to fly to parts of the world that we had no right trying to fly to.

Which sets the scene for 1927, when James D. Dole, the “he actually was called this” Pineapple King, decided he would sponsor an air race from Oakland to Hawaii, a trip that had never been successfully flown before.

The Dole Air Race that followed would end up going down in history as one of America’s finest and most tragic moments of “What the fuck did you think would happen?” Just always remember- the reason you are alive today is that your great-grandparents did not try to fly airplanes in 1927.

The Dole Air Race:  Crash and Burn, Repeat

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The Most Terrifying Products Marketed For Lonely People

“OH GOD KILL IT WITH FIRE.”

~Single people

um wut

It can be rough out there for single Americans, to the point that you can pretty much will below-average R-rated comedies into existence just by giving it a name of “How to be Single.”

There are millions of Americans for whom the dating scene oscillates between shitty Tinder dates and long, depressing walks through parks that are impossibly filled with happy couples while “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” plays from an unseen speaker system that somehow seems to be following you everywhere you go (it’s actually being played through an iPhone of a kid that their ex paid to follow them around to torment them because their ex is a goddamn monster).

For many in this position, it seems like every product on the market other than two buck Chuck and Sharper Image neck massagers are happy-couple focused items that just rub your singledom in your face. Goddamn it, most couples don’t even want to buy a tandem bike, why are you putting out a full page ad for one in this week’s Maxim?

The point being, 50% of Americans are single, and those 50% are distributed between Americans in relationships, Americans who don’t want to settle down and want to “live the single life,” and Americans who feel, well, kind of lonely about their lack of a mate.

There’s also like, the five people who say they’re “single and ready to mingle” while doing that finger-guns thing, but there’s pending legislation going through the senate to ensure that those guys get their US citizenship removed.

But of those three groups of unmarried Americans, it’s, not surprisingly, the lonely people that can end up being a bit forgotten and left behind.  Sure, Buzzfeed is legally required to post a Liz-Lemon-gif-heavy article about “13 signs you’re an introvert” every month, but ever since Netflix got claimed by people using it to have sex, it’s hard for lonely people to find products and services that are really tailored for them.

Thankfully, entrepreneurs are starting to realize that there’s a huge untapped marketplace, filled with young, active Americans with gobs of disposable income not going towards Valentine’s Day gifts and wedding planning and *pauses and changes course once we notice that our single readers have begun sobbing*. Unfortunately, most of these entrepreneurs are goddamn psychopaths, and their cure for loneliness is nightmare fuel.

The Most Terrifying Products Marketed For Lonely People

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Hilariously Bad Comic Book TV Shows

“Burn it down.  Burn it all down.”

~Stan Lee

spider man

With the release of Batman v Superman: The Wrath of the Film Critic behind us, and America’s superhero movie craze either ramping up or slowly devouring itself from both ends, depending on who you ask, there’s been a lot of reflection of our comic book culture lately.

And those of you who have been to a movie theater since, oh, let’s say 1997 have probably noticed that, no matter what your opinion on the current state of comic book media is, comic books are pretty big right now.

Well, not the books themselves, the only people that read comics are still the same two friends of yours that have very strong opinions about Ben Reilly’s denim choices, but the stories and the characters and especially the heroes from comic books are impossible to avoid. Hell, Marvel tossed together a $60 million movie about an obscure antihero created in 1991 and filled it with swearing and Ryan Reynolds fighting in a burning building completely nude  and they still managed to crack $700 million worldwide.

And why’s that? Well, yes, the naked Ryan Reynolds does help a bit there, but mainly it’s that superhero movies are almost impossible to fuck up, unless you’re trying to convince people to care about the Fantastic Four.

We might forget, in all our Iron Man marathons and turning-on-subtitles-whenever-Bane-speaks-in-The-Dark-Knight-Rises nights, that this wasn’t always the case. Comic book adaptations were not the cash cows they are now, in fact they generally could be considered risky projects.

That especially applies to TV shows. While the current crop of Marvel and DC influenced television programs are pretty solid, especially with what Netflix is doing to Marvel characters we’ve either not heard of or tried to forget, the history of America trying to put superheroes on the airwaves has often been…well, let’s just say not so heroic. Let’s say bad.  Let’s say laughably bad.

Here are some bad TV shows.

Hilariously Bad Comic Book TV Shows

adam west is batman

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