G.I. Joe PSA's

[00:00:00]

Welcome to Podcast. Awesome. Where we chat about icons, design, tech, business, and nerdery with members of the Fawn. Awesome team. well, I'd say this episode is in the nerdery category as we're going to jump headlong into some early two thousands meme archeology.

 today, we'll be diving into the VHS Glitchy Time capsule of Fencer Films, GI Joe PSAs.

 If you've ever heard somebody yell pork chop sandwiches 

or. Hey 

You not cooking? Yeah, I do.

Pork chop sandwiches. 

Hey kid, I'm a computer. at a party or something. This one's for you. It's about to get weird

What a computer. Stop all the downloading.

Once upon a time in the 1980s, at the end of every episode of the GI Joe cartoon, there was a kind of wholesome public service announcement that was also kind of awkward. you know, the kind a kid like nearly drowns and suddenly the shipwreck character shows up to explain how swimming works. It's pretty classic stuff for a PSA.

But in 2000. Three. A Chicago based film editor named Eric Ensler decided to mess with the PSAs and, uh, the result is, uh, pretty awesome. 

He'd chop up the audio and dub in his own voiceovers and the result was. Super weird and non sequitur. Just total absurdity and suddenly instead of, Hey, kids don't ever play with electrical wires, you'd get something like, 

Oh man. Check out that thing. Eh, what do you wanna do with it? Let's launch over it. Who wants a body [00:02:00] massage?

You have to see it to know what I'm talking about.

So in the wild West of Dial up, it was one of the weirdest and most funny things my friends and I had ever seen. So as weird as these were, why did they hit like they did? Okay, so imagine this. It's the early two thousands and hey youngsters, YouTube wasn't even a thing yet and broadband was a luxury. maybe you had a friend who hands you a burned CDR labeled with something that scrawled on the top of it with a sharpie pen and that kids is how content went viral in those days.

 It was basically underground bootleg art. So the way I see it is fencer's PSAs were basically proto memes. It's like the original shit posting.

speaking of which, Sam Greis, hopefully I'm saying that right. Wrote in Polygon where he draws a parallel between ship posting and Doism describing both as Masters of the, what did I just watch? Genre. He likens these deliberately confusing context free creations to revolutionary art like it's absurd on purpose and somehow politically spicy because of it.

I don't know. [00:04:00] According to Greis, the true aim of ship posting isn't clarity Or coherence, it's to leave the audience So baffled by the lack of meaning that they can't help but laugh or smile or figure out what you're gonna do with your hands. Nervously wondering if you missed, a very inside joke, which you didn't.

My God. Did that smell good? You detected it. Did No go in and you tell me do things. I done running.

Gee, 

GI Joe PSAs could probably be put into that same kind of category. They were short, surprising, absurd, shareable on a ripped DVD of course, and gloriously low res In a pre-social media world, these clips trained our collective brain for absurdist internet humor that was gonna come in the future.

And I kind of see the GI Joe PSAs paving the way for stuff like Badger Badger mushroom 

or Homestar Runner, and even the Tim and Eric stuff. so fast forward 20 years, and the GI Joe PSAs are still quoted. I mean, at least by me and my friends, and they've been remixed, pared referenced in shows like Robot Chicken even acknowledged by Hasbro, the toy company itself.

So like all gonzo, weirdo absurdist comedy, it's hard to really know why these catch on, um, and why this caught on like it did. Maybe it's the clean cut animation meets the [00:06:00] chaotic nonsense, or that they were super re watchable because. The more you watched them, the funnier they got, and the voice acting was pretty great too.

What may not compute with the young folk, I mean at least folks under 30, is that fencer didn't profit off these at all. They weren't tied to ads. It was good old fashioned internet joy. Just just because, and unsurprisingly. Eric Ensler went on to work with Tim Heer and Eric Wareheim

they're premium. Come on in. Buy 35 50 for 40. Oh laying egg. Go to Tim's discount prices. Our six 90 nines are down to two nine. Tim buys his prices from China. Mine are real American mix. Who wants to pay a premium for prices? 

and even helped create adult swim promos.

Make sense from 

Nice catch Blanco Nino with two bad. Your ascots. Sad

to actual tv. Nice work, Mr. Ler. Okay, so if we zoom out a little bit in an era obsessed with algorithmic perfection And virality formulas, the GI Joe PSAs. A reminder that pure creative chaos that just hits an entertainment sweet spot that an algorithm just can't reproduce.

And remember these, there was nothing optimized about these videos at all. They were just sort of accidental internet magic. So the next time you hear somebody say. 

Pork chop sandwiches. 

in sort of a reverent tone now, you know, and knowing's half the battle.

Mr. Bottom massage machine. Go, uh, what the hell? Bottom massage gi.

This has been another, oddball episode of podcast. Awesome. In video form. We like to do these once in a while just talking about nerdery and [00:08:00] stuff that's entertaining just because, just because it's fun and I, Matt Johnson, have been your host today and I am the producer and editor of these podcasts.

And when it comes to the video podcast, we get a little extra help from Mr. Isaac Chase. Thank you, Isaac for that. And the podcast. Awesome theme song was composed by Ronnie Martin. The music interstitials were done by Zach Mom and audio mastering was done by Chris Ends at Lemon Productions.