Total Effects, Part 3

We were less than thrilled to be running up against Uncle Bill again. Sure, he looks like an affable fellow but he's got a seedy, dark side ("I ain't got no nephews!", he once revealed to us during an interrogation).

We'd always pegged him as a relatively small-time operator, but we also kept an eye on him as someone ambitious and nefarious enough to expand his operation. Good thing too, because as it turns out, through a series of super-complicated and secret agreements between shadowy un-sanctioned government organizations, ol' Uncle Bill had arranged to be the key US distributor of knock-off products produced by China on behalf of Russia. Why? Mostly to make Americans sad, to lower their morale. How is that possible? Well, take a look at just how awful these products are...

Is this one of the lesser known J.R.R. Tolkien tales? It stars Christopher Judge; that sounds like somebody I've probably heard of. The artwork on the cover looks pretty cool and there's the word 'hobbit' right there. It's probably pretty good, right? Wrong. It's a piece of crap that never saw the inside of any respectable movie theatre and Christopher Judge mows the director's lawn.

Mm-MMM, Americans DO love their snack cookies! Especially ones made of chocolate with a sweet, creamy filling...unless that sweet, creamy filling is whipped Boron. That's right, a chemical element with symbol B and atomic number 5, produced entirely by cosmic ray spallation and not by stellar nucleosynthesis, it is a low-abundance element in both the solar system and the Earth's crust. Yucky. You leave our regular sweet, creamy filling of sugar-saturated lard alone!

There are reasons that the $100 iPhone is so hard to find. One is that the apps work but don't really perform very well. For example, all the months in the calendar app have 30 days. Also, the game Angry Birds is represented here as Angry Borios.

There's only one Superior Powered Thunderbolt Overlord Top King and he doesn't dress like that. Nor does his chest light up.

What if the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were One-Eyed Sword Wielding Ninja Frogs on Horseback? Then you'd have these characters, playing their favorite game, "Let's terrorize our horses by threatening to chop them in half while we're riding them!"

Titanic-Bot actually seems like a good idea... He transforms into a giant robot and walks right over those pesky ice bergs!... until you realize that the passengers and crew all wind up plunging hundreds of feet into an icy ocean either way.

This is over the line. To portray the lovable Mickey Mouse, the Bob Hope of cartoon characters (used to be entertaining a long time ago, I guess, but now doesn't really do much besides some hosting gigs), as some kind of vicious, rabid monster? Well, we simply won't have that.

And we didn't. We broke that whole thing right up. We didn't put Uncle Bill out of business, but now he only sells horrible, soul-crushing, American-made junk.

Hopefully, he's learned his lesson.

Total Effects, Part 2

So.

I assume you all saw this on Monday...

What could it mean? Why would someone anonymous drop it off at our place with a cryptic message attached? Why would anyone assume that three well-groomed gentlemen such as ourselves would require any 'revitalizing foam cleanser'? And what's it got to do with the price of fish? 

First, we took it to the Unbelieva-Lab for analysis, where it was quickly determined to be nothing more than bubble solution, which can be found in any dollar store or joke shop. So a quick phone call to the number on the above sticker put us in touch with a confused Wal*Mart employee. 

The Wal*Martian person agreed with us that this was a queer turn of events.

Whence did the tube of soapy crud originate, he asked.

Nary a clue, quoth I.

So, coming up against a dead end, we went back to the CCTV footage, to see if we could see anything in the grainy video that might provide us with a starting point.

Well, yes, it did.

This blurry shot of a '63 GMC pickup with a bad conversion job told us a lot. Check out that bumper sticker. Uncle Bill's Flea Market. North Carolina. We've had dealings with them before.

I think it's time we paid a visit to this so-called "Uncle Bill" and find out what he knows about knock-off merchandise. Maybe then we can figure out why someone thinks we should be involved...