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Let’s play a little game. It’s called “relive your childhood trauma”. We all have one. It may be watching a scary movie as a toddler, getting kicked by a scary clown, or finding out where babies come from by walking in on mommy and daddy’s “Alone time”. Remember it? Ok, good. Now we’re in the same place.
My trauma came to me during 5th grade, at a sleepover. We were over my house, and were done playing Tekkon and were heading downstairs to play Barbies (go to hell, yes I played Barbies in grade five. I played it all the way through grade seven. Which explains why people pretty much avoided me until grade eight, but I digress).
Now, the girl sleeping over had recently found a fun little something called “Happy tree friends” on the Internet. Now, snicker at the name if you must, but Happy tree friends did more damage than all the traumatic things in my pre-puberty Freddy Krueger streak. Now, I have been known to watch notoriously nasty movies without cringing. I have yet to see a live action film that got me feeling queasy on special effects alone. So how could a cartoon do this sort of damage? I’LL TELL YOU HOW!
The cartoon opened with two little adorable animated rodents sitting in a McDonalds. One squirts ketchup on the other one’s shirt, they all laugh, and things look well. Besides the fact that everything was bright enough to trigger seizers, it was safe at this point. And then the s**t hit the fan.
This little green hamster thing walks in and sees the ketchup on the other rodent’s shirt. This triggers a war flashback, and causes the green dude to go totally ape s**t. Now, I laughed at the first couple scenes, involving a bunny being stabbed in the neck with a bendy straw and death by mustard. However, nothing could prepare me for what was to come.
There was this little skunk flipping burgers on a big flat grill (I believe the technical term is “griddle”. However, the word “griddle” reminds me of those sausage things that old ladies wear so that they don’t look as fat). This little green ******** FACE SLAMS the skunk onto the grill. Now, I was ok at this point. HOWEVER, that wasn’t the end. Oh no, that was only the beginning. He PULLS THE FACE BACK UP. It’s nasty as hell. It’s bloody, the thing’s face is all burnt, its eye is falling out, and it’s just unpleasant. It was like hearing the f-word for the first time all over again, but coming from the mouth of Jesus. It was as if I was watching Jesus spout profanities wail shitting on Santa. Yah, it was that devastating.
How long did this stick with me? Let’s just say that when I went into Hollywood video at thirteen years old to rent Eli Wroth’s Hostel, I had to close my eyes past the happy tree friends boxed set to grab my DVD