This leads us to Janet, who is possibly more obese than Dennis, as she is constantly sucking convenience store soda into herself while rolling around on her rascal right into the street, causing a car to swerve into other cars and then into a bounce castle full of children, which then explodes.
This causes the blade to break free and rampage through the town because of course it does. He then tries to get up, stumbles back into the chair and rolls into the blade before exploding into a red mist. Charles retorts that it’s part of the town’s heritage. As a severed ear floats through town like a leaf on the wind, we meet Charles, a wheelchair bound drunk in rags who is approached by a child, questioning why there is a giant functioning saw blade behind him. Dennis says every town has a thousand stories, but he only has time for five, even though he only holds up four fingers to symbolize this. This is to set the tone of the show, where violence will be happening rapidly and consistently to the point you will be numb to it within the first three minutes, which is coincidentally how long this first episode is. We follow morbidly obese wise man Dennis (played by the only cast member I can recognize, Tay Zonday, of “Chocolate Rain” fame) as he introduces the viewer to the town while inadvertently shredding townspeople in his power mower. And I’m highly uncertain it can pull that off.
What we have for this series is attempting to work this world that people love for its randomness and switch it to a medium that has very established structure and pacing to it. They more often than not hold attention through their spastic and random behavior, usually in regards to frustration in completing a game that their viewers can relate to, and that’s definitely what I got out of Jack. However, the main appeal of watching Let’s Players (as far as I can tell) versus scripted productions is that the former usually ISN’T scripted. I don’t really watch many of those types of channels outside of the occasional Game Grump or Achievement Hunt, but I recently went through some of the videos of a screaming Irishman named “jackspecticeye”, and got quite a few laughs out of it (who knew there were so many ways a man could get harpooned and still ride a segway?). Incidentally, much of the cast for this new series is made up of notable Let’s Players, and sponsored an unrelated channel to play the game on their site, so there is at least some of that awareness of how this game has made itself known.
The game also prides itself on its massive amount of user-generated content, which is bait for Let’s Players, who still play and scream at the results to this day. Essentially, Happy Wheels sells itself on using characters that look like really average folks that have the epidermal strength of a lepper and then placing them in levels and courses that will see them stabbed, punctured, amputated, beheaded, disemboweled, and other ways of putting the organs, giblets, and various viscera on display. A Flappy Bird series would be more appropriate at this point.īut I should probably talk about the game itself for proper context. And there’s been no mention or even hinting at a sequel to advertise for, so have to ask: WHAT OR WHO IS THIS SHOW FOR? I admittedly am not that up on all the nooks and crannies of gaming culture, but I don’t remember this game even making much of a splash when it was new, let alone half a decade later. Well, Happy Wheels blows that right out of the water, because the game came out IN TWENTY-FRIGGIN-TEN (2010). Remember that the comic storyline for Combiner Wars, which the animation was based on, started and finished in 2015, while the series began and ended the following year. But that’s not the only thing this new show has in common with that one, because they seem to have a similar sense of timing, or lack thereof.
Happy Wheels, a ragdoll-physics browser-game that has now been made into a series of shorts produced by Machinima and released on the fledgling (and floundering) video service go90, who you might know from that collection of passed kidney stones that was Transformers: Combiner Wars.