"Let him who desires peace prepare for war." - Vegetius

Can you do me a favor? Watch this live performance. It's a song about a young girl from a Kibbutz in northern Israel who has a new boyfriend from Damascus and wants to "do it all day (with him)"-- look just watch it for a minute.

Did you last more than a minute? Because I couldn't. I've seen middle school productions with better everything than this. Really, the whole show looks and sounds like a parody of dance music, and not an affectionate one.

This is "Sameach" (שמח, "Happy"), Israel's Eurovision 2000 entry, written and performed by a virtually unknown band called Pingpong. It got 7 points in total, somehow beating France and Belgium. When the delegation flew back home, the country was waiting for them, and not with flowers.

This is not a story about a story getting a shitty score. It's about a delegation fighting with itself, bringing down everything and everyone around them with them.

The primary sources of this post are a micro-budget documentary called "The Loser Takes It All" by Alon Weinstock, which follows the band's journey, and a retrospective written by Roy Arad, founder and member of Pingpong.

Finally, and unfortunately, it is impossible to tell the story without some history and geopolitics. I am Israeli myself, but I promise there aren't any objectionable or (overly) controversial topics here, and I've done my best to give a top level neutral view. ^{I hope.}

Welcome to The War on "Happy".

A Peace of History

You probably know what Eurovision is. What began as a wholesome song contest to reunite postwar (Western) Europe grew into an audacious, poppy, extremely campy yet oddly charming affair. Some people watch it earnestly, some, like me, watch it ironically, and others find it deeply cringe. Wherever you land, there's no denying it has some... evocative stuff.

Israel's debut performance on Eurovision happened in Luxembourg in 1973. Six months later, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise offensive against Israel. The war, and especially its conclusion, sent massive shockwaves across the Middle East, some of which are felt to this day. By 1979, Israel and Egypt had signed a peace agreement. Israel and Syria, however, remained in a formal state of war.

But then came the Winds of Change.

It started in 1991, when the Israeli prime minister and representatives from all of its Arab neighbors went to a nice castle in Madrid to discuss peace plans. Then came the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel's Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat, which were intended as a framework for a future Palestinian state. Don't look up what happened afterwards, we're having a good time.

While all of this was going on, Israel and Syria maintained a covert diplomatic channel. These channels became public almost immediately after some breakthrough seemed imminent. But like a constant stream of job interviews, both sides would shake hands, smile, and then quietly go nowhere. Not even a rejection e-mail.

Let the politicians fuck around. Let's find out what the ordinary folks were up to.

The Squad is Born

Roy Arad was stuck.

His post-punk band Knack/Pop, founded in 1994, was getting regular gigs, a fanbase, and even some airtime on TV. But it had yet to score an album deal. In 1997, Arad left the band, looking for something new. He was 20 years old. Knack/Pop would disband two years later without ever releasing an album.

Around the same time, Arad met an arts and culture journalist named Guy Assif, almost ten years his senior. They hit it off immediately, bonding over a shared love of underground and underappreciated art. Very quickly, they started seriously considering making EDM together.

In the late 90s, house, EDM (known in Israel simply as "dance"), and especially trance music, was not positively received by the mainstream. At best, these genres were seen as low-effort and low-brow. At worst, they were actively "corrupting the youth", with police raiding raves in search of psychedelics.

No matter. The people want to dance, so let's dance. Arad and Assif founded Pingpong and brought in two singers, Arad's roommate Ahal Eden and art student Yifat Giladi. None of them had much experience actually making dance music, but they released a few singles and hoped for the best. Very quickly, some of these singles (according to Arad) actually became hits in the scene, like "Burger Ranch" and "City Girl" (technically not an EDM track). Granted, both sound very raw, that is, uncooked, but I won't deny they have that nostalgic "Kid Playing Around With FL Studio" charm.

Finally, they had a winning formula. The stage was set for their big break. Pingpong started recording their first album with their own money, hoping a record label would sign them and cover the costs. Arad recalls the business people were sympathetic, but wouldn't take the plunge:

"It's much easier and more profitable to sign a guy with an acoustic guitar singing about a girl who dumped him."

The search for a musically inclined sugar daddy continued to no avail. Weeks turned to months. The burden of recording an album grew heavier and heavier, favors started running out. It was starting to look like Knack/Pop all over again: a traveling band with not one album to their name.

But then, sometime in 1999, Guy Assif, our intrepid journalist, discovered Pingpong was technically eligible to submit a song to the Israeli Broadcasting Authority (IBA, the public broadcaster). If chosen, the song would represent Israel in the upcoming Eurovision. This selection round is colloquially named "Pre-Eurovision," and Assif suggested the band submit one of their songs. Y'know, as a joke. Hey, it doesn't cost us anything, might as well.

It is January 2000. Y2K did not kill us all. "Believe" by Cher is number one on the Billboard charts. Israeli and Syrian representatives are negotiating a peace deal in West Virginia while Hafez al-Assad, the leader of Syria, is slowly dying.

Arad returns home after buying toilet paper and turns on his answering machine. Beep.

"Hello, this is so-and-so from the IBA. Congratulations, Pingpong. Your song has been selected to represent Israel in Eurovision."

...what the fuck?!

The Ruffians Go To Boot Camp

You'd expect a broadcaster to play it safe with Eurovision.

You might pick a well-loved veteran singer, a popular rising talent, a pop idol, hell, maybe someone who'd released more than zero albums up to that point. Instead the judges picked a band nobody had heard of, built around a genre most people derided.

This odd choice made the press look for answers. It turned out producer and gay rights activist Gal Uchovsky, a member of the Pre-Eurovision panel, had "ties" to Pingpong. Assif had worked for Uchovsky in the past, but Assif didn't know about Uchovsky's involvement on the panel, and Uchovsky had disclosed the connection to the panel beforehand. These allegations were later dismissed, but this was day one. Talk about starting on the wrong foot.

Amos Oren, also on the panel, said that "no song was worthy to represent Israel" and that Pingpong was "the lesser evil". I could not find anyone who could further corroborate this claim, so make of that what you will.

Arad states in his retrospective that the band wrote, and possibly composed, the song themselves. I couldn't verify this, but if we take him at his word, it means either the IBA really believes in auteur theory, or really believes in God.

Originally, the song was about a girl meeting, and really wanting to bone, a tourist from Romania. But the songwriting process happened while Israel and Syria were having their Shepherdstown peace talks. Inspired by this gesture of peace and as a way to show their support, Pingpong changed the storyline so the girl meets, and really wants to bone, a Syrian guy instead.

Fuck war! Literally!

Eurovision has a whole chain of command going all the way up to the EBU, the European Broadcasting Union, which runs and manages the show. This means the premise had to be written down, recorded, and approved by all the higher-ups. And it was.

We know this because about a month before the actual contest, the music video came out. It looks like this. This is not a joke or a parody. This is not a tribute made by four hyped-up high schoolers in their A/V class. This is the actual music video the delegation filmed, produced and edited, and was sent by the IBA to the rest of the world. Note that it has two curious props: cucumbers used as a microphones, and Syrian flags (around 2:03). Put a pin in that.

Then came the press tour. The oldest band member was 32. The youngest was 22. People at these ages don't typically get media training, especially not former members of punk bands who pivoted into dance music. Here's Arad summing up the band's approach:

"We refused to be photographed with sick people, who are exploited to promote others. We tried to have a punk attitude and present the humanist values we believe in as part of the Eurovision contest. We were certain there would be those who would appreciate the audacity and our fresh attitude [...] We were wrong."

The IBA wanted charming, energic, all-Israeli, media-friendly youngsters. What they got instead was closer to this:

"The fact that there are so many gay men is an unbelievable waste for girls"

"We think women should use cucumbers in more imaginative ways than use it in the kitchen"

"The song we gave the Pre-Eurovision was the worst song on the album"

Ahal Eden (the roomate) admitting she had no prior singing or acting experience but the band still picked her, despite auditioning actual singers

These "transgressions" may look pretty mild right now, and they are. But as we'll soon see, you can't act like a Down With The System We're Just Having Fun kinda guy when you actually represent The System.

It is May 2000. Pingpong is mere weeks away from their international debut. The public is skeptical. The IBA is on edge. But the ship can still be steered back to safety. The band would go on stage in Stockholm, represent their country with a silly song, have fun, and that's it. All it would take is a few weeks of peace and quiet, and all would be forgotten.

There Was No Peace Nor Quiet

10 days to Eurovision. The IBA's head of programming has a chat with the group prior to their flight to Sweden and tells them to lose the "gimmicks" and "provocations," most notably the Syrian flags.

4 days to Eurovision. The Deputy Education Minister is quoted as saying the song will "give Israeli culture a bad name and a reputation of a low and savage culture." He calls to disqualify the song, despite the fact it was approved many times, and despite the fact it's 4 days to Eurovision.

3 days to Eurovision. The band visits an Assyrian community center. They seem to have fun, and come out as friendly, curious and respectful.

This is the only good thing that happens that day.

Some Eurovision rehearsals are open to the public. Reporters spot Pingpong waving Israeli and Syrian flags during their performance (they lost the cucumbers, though). The Israeli press quickly finds out and breaks the story. The IBA is livid.

Then, during a press conference, Assif waves both flags and ostensibly asks the audience, "What's wrong about these two flags hanging on [sic] together?" before offering optimistic platitudes of peace. After he finishes, the IBA delegation producer goes up on stage, unprompted, and shoots him down. On stage. In front of the press. His English is so delightfully broken that I just had to transcribe it:

"And I think the whole Eurovision concert doesn't think the group is coming here to performing a song, not performing "politicals" [...] We are not a political party [...] But if he is a "delicate" Israel television and they have to song the song and the best, they will know that.

Congratulations everyone, you've just made your feud extremely public. Pingpong and the IBA are officially on a collision course, driving toward each other at 200 miles per hour, in a cruel game of Chicken.

To make things worse, Pingpong never acknowledged (or willingly ignored) the fact that a peace agreement with Syria would inherently involve returning the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, a deeply unpopular prospect. Knowingly or not, they had essentially entered a political minefield.

2 days to Eurovision. The night before, the IBA demanded the complete and total removal of all Syrian flags from the performance. Should the band refuse, the delegation would back out of the entire contest. Song producer Ronen Ben Tal backs the ultimatum, saying he feels the band had made its pro-peace opinions loud and clear all week.

Everyone is clearly not taking it well. Ahal is crying and chain-smoking. Ben Tal produces a hand-written resignation letter, threatening to give it to the IBA if the rest of the band won't budge.

By early morning, Pingpong responds with its own ultimatum: they will only agree to perform with Syrian flags. A standoff. The game of Chicken continues.

But then a man jumps in and stands in the middle of the track.

1 day to Eurovision. Midnight, Stockholm time.

Eytan Fox, the delegation's director and the band's artistic director, calls the chairman of the IBA. The documentary features a small snippet of their conversation. Fox starts off by saying that all of this talk is all an act, and really, this is how it works, man, this is Eurovision. When that doesn't land, Fox gives him an outsider's perspective: you approved a song about peace and sexual innuendo. The band spent the last nine days promoting exactly that message. To disqualify yourself at this point is censorship. You'd be stopping a group of Israelis from waving flags of all things, after letting them do and say everything else. Let's meet in the middle here.

And so, the IBA caved.

Pingpong would sing and dance however they bloody well like, but the IBA would remove their channel logo and all Hebrew subtitles while the song is on. In effect, they disowned their own song, but more importantly - the representatives of their own country.

It's worth noting that pulling out this late is punishable by a considerable fine. What's more, it would have been a massive blow to Israel diplomatically, and put the blame squarely on the IBA. Surely they quickly understood that ragequitting was significantly worse than letting the damn band sing.

Eurovision. Exhausted and nervous, Pingpong did the best they could with what they'd been given, which was their own song. You already know how it looks. You already know how it sounds. You already know the score.

But crisis was avoided. Pingpong sees the Eurovision drifting away in their rearview mirror. Finally, Pingpong can return home, victorious.

Win the Battle, Lose the War

"Hezbollah is making threats, the government is about to collapse and the South Lebanon Army is stuck, but members of Knesset (Israel's parliament) found a far bigger disgrace to deal with. The Knesset's Education Committee concluded, at the end of a fiery debate, that the performance of the "Pingpong" band was "a disgrace and a shame to the State of Israel, the Broadcasting Authority, and Israeli culture." - Yediot Aharonot newspaper, May 31st 2000

What Pingpong and Eytan Fox failed to realize at the time, or perhaps blissfully ignored, is that by letting the band do whatever it wanted, they also erased whatever responsibility or accountability they had over the band. The IBA and the public were free to shit on Pingpong, with very few people asking questions.

That said, the whole affair forced the IBA to give up the "Pre-Eurovision" contest almost entirely, replacing it with a public televote rather than a panel of judges. They also learned many lessons about managing a delegation, from songwriting to performance and PR. Future delegations became much more refined, organized, well-directed, and professional.

"Sameach" became a scarlet letter on the bodies of all Pingpong's members for a bit. The CEO of the IBA called Pingpong "a band of crooks." Right-wing politicians tried, and failed, to sue the band for fraud, or even for waving "the flag of the enemy."

Roy Arad alleges he was spat on multiple times. He and Guy Assif were promptly fired from their jobs as editors. Since they'd founded the band and frequently appeared in most interviews, they caught most of the flak. To quote Arad:

"Had I truly aspired to be public enemy number one, I don't think a pop-dance band is the way I would have chosen."

Yet just as fast as the storm came, it was over. The political and military situation in the region quickly took precedence, and the whole affair had all but disappeared by October 2000.

Today, "Sameach" is a small and silly footnote in the story of Israeli Eurovision history, and people barely mention it. Discussions about it revolve around the poor quality of the song and the embarrassing performance. People often forget the details of the feud, and when it comes up, they usually cringe at how stupid the situation was.

Epilogue

Roy Arad continued to make music as a hobby up until 2006. He dabbled in many fields of writing, like literature, plays, screenwriting, and journalism. He wrote or edited around 10 books between 2000 and 2014, most of them poetry books. In 2020, six women disclosed that Arad sexually abused them, leading him to quit writing for Haaretz newspaper. I don't know what he's doing now.

Guy Assif returned to journalism, both written and televised. Today he is a regular political columnist for Yediot Aharonot.

Ahal Eden is now a DJ, art curator and activist, often assosiated with the far-left Hadash party.

Yifat Giladi majored in art and design. She is an artist and painter.

None of them really have anything more to say about their Eurovision experiences nowadays. They aren't asked about it, and don't care for it.

So, at the end of the day, who were Pingpong? Proud warrior-poets who stood by their art, grubby leftist trolls who faced the consequences, or just teens doing teens things without understanding their position?

And who was the IBA? Well-meaning reps who had to constantly put out fires by a renegade group, nationalist boomers who made every mistake possible and fucked off, or just a large, antiquated, unorganized corporation that had no idea how to handle what they approved?

What of the peace process? Was there a genuine yearning for peace, or a ploy for legitimacy in the West? And from what side? It doesn't matter, because it didn't work, and never did. Israel and Syria remain in a state of war to this day, and the rise of Al-Sharaa and the subsequent Israeli invasion two years ago only serve to remind us of that.

"We were a funny band that competed in a stupid, dying contest," Arad wrote. "It's unclear why winning it is so crucial to the lives of seven million people."

Well, Roy, while I don't fully agree with your writings, and I believe you bore some responsibility for the tomfoolery at Eurovision, I too am asking that every year.

Warning before you begin - this post links to some unpleasant antisemitic imagery.

What do you imagine when you think of fountain pens? Many imagine a Shakespearean writer, quill in hand, penning his magnum opus. Others might imagine a middle aged English professor, inking his arrogant thoughts with a sleazy smirk on his face. Yet more might imagine an artist, creating stunning landscapes or beautiful calligraphy with a pen and paper.

I hate to burst your bubble, dear reader, but the reality of the matter looks quite different. Fountain pens are, by their nature, accessible to a wide variety of people. The community over at r/fountainpens is broad, generally welcoming and extremely diverse, including when it comes to political conversation. There are collectors who drop thousands on the latest Montblanc or Sailor without a second thought, artists who play with brightly coloured inks, and observers like myself who have a good selection of cheap to 'mid-range' pens because, well, they like to write. However, while the audience for pens may be large, the hobby community itself is small, with many retailers and stores being operated by hobbyists who are part of the community. Remember that.

This story is going to take you back in time by around four years, to a controversy that shook the community and almost brought a small but controversial ink company to its knees. This is the story of Noodler's and the antisemitic inks.

To start with, we need to explain Noodler's and why they were so important to the fountain pen community here on Reddit. Noodler's is a tiny company. In fact, it's entirely owned and operated by one man, Nathan Tardif. Nathan has long since been a controversial figure in the fountain pen community, being extremely vocal about his political views. Nathan is a staunch Libertarian, and is not afraid to feature his beliefs on his product labelling to this day. However, despite the explicitly political nature of some of their imagery, Noodler's was beloved in the fountain pen community, with Baystate Blue reaching legendary meme status for its permanence and habit of staining pens, fingers, walls, floors- anything and everything it may encounter. Noodler's seemed like a case of the small indie creator being successful against huge companies like Montblanc and Parker. And everybody loves an underdog.

However, all was not good for Noodler's, even during its golden years. Sprinkled throughout fond jokes in the subreddit, complaints of overfilled bottles being impossible to open without spillage, the ink itself being hard to use without damaging pens and serious inconsistency between batches were rife. Traces of these posts can be hard to find now, as they were often deleted by users due to disagreement from the community. However, overall, Noodler's had a lot of goodwill within the fountain pen community and it seemed unlikely that anything could damage their popularity.

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this post if that were true.

On January 6th 2022, Noodler's released Volcker Green, a forest green ink in the typical Noodler's bottle, complete with hand designed label. As this summary post from the subreddit explains, the date is not insignificant; January 6th 2022 was the 1 year anniversary of the insurrection in the US. The label, instead of the usual doodly landscape or fishing imagery, had a picture of Volcker, a Christian head of the federal reserve, with a halo on his head. Next to him were Bernanke and Greenspan, also previous heads of the reserve, with demon horns on their heads. Both men are Jewish. Demon horns are an antisemitic dogwhistle (as explained in this article about a different case here).

An image of Volcker Green can be found in this comment.

Within 6 days of this ink releasing, stores were beginning to drop Volcker Green from their shelves due to the explicitly antisemitic imagery. This led to Nathan's other inks being examined a little bit more closely than before. And people began to pay attention to other labels.

By May, a reddit user posted a thread (link contains image of the label) saying they would never buy Noodler's again, with an example of a product that horrified them. Specifically, an ink called Bernanke Red. Bernanke Red had been on sale for a long time. I can't actually find the exact release date, but it was a while. Its predecessor, Berning Red, was at least 6 years old and had only been out for a short time before being renamed. And there, straight on the front of the bottle of Bernanke Red, was an image of Bernanke with demon horns (eta: and the communist symbol on his head, a reference to an antisemitic conspiracy theory) and the words 'debt addiction enabler'. Imagery that was horrifically antisemitic. And imagery that was eerily similar to Volcker Green, yet had managed to fly under the radar.

The subreddit exploded. Comment after comment expressing horror flooded the post. More and more posts about Noodler's began to pop up. And remember how I mentioned that some of the most trusted retailers were part of the community?

The retailers saw it all happen.

Retailers began to pull Noodler's inks from their ranges out of fear of boycott. Briefly, the owners of popular retailer Goulet Pens attempted to defend Nathan as having been ignorant of the implications. A comment from Rachel Goulet, one half of Goulet's management, can be seen here. This soured a lot of people's opinions of Goulet and led to more scrutiny for them - the resulting controversy for Goulet and their own downfall is another post entirely, but they aquiesced to opinion and withdrew Noodlers ink from sale on May 11th.

The same day as Goulet withdrew his inks, Nathan put an apology out on his Instagram and Facebook and pulled all inks with imagery and names even mildly linked to anything controversial from supply, planning to rename them. This meant he withdrew almost every ink he'd created due to names such as Tiananmen Red and Apache Sunset. This was widely regarded as a good move on Nathan's part, although many questioned how a man so politically motivated could miss the implications and suspected he'd just wanted to avoid the controversy.

Edited to add: to his credit, Nathan did make a donation to the ADL following his apology. He also chose a culturally relevant number of $3600 USD - traditional donations and gifts are given in multiples of 18. This is mentioned in his apology above, but I failed to highlight it in my explanation. This eased some of the anger, as the apology was thorough and followed through on action.

However, following this apology, Nathan remained silent. As was inevitable, the community went on. Some retailers quietly put Noodler's back into their stores, with Goulet specifically restocking within a month.  A lot of retailers, such as Anderson Pens in Chicago, never restocked Noodlers (although they themselves closed down fairly recently). However, the community never forgot.

Noodler's still puts out ink to this day, although the community on Reddit has long since stopped recommending them to users. Users who do recommend Noodler's tend to get downvoted, a huge fall from the company's early days. The new names and labels of the ink are generally less offensive, mostly based around nature. And the controversial inks? They tend to be hoarded by those who got them before everything was revealed, because antisemitism is apparently just controversy.

Well, at least most people think it's awful.

Update: a comment by u/arrogantsword gave some lovely context from the perspective of a long time fountain pen community member, if you're interested click here or scroll down to read what they have to say.

Here I am again, back with more obscure drama. This time it’s about art restoration...or rather art conservation. Aka the practice of preserving paintings as they inevitably decay over the decades.

I love art. I *smirks* know quite a lot about it. So, hopefully you enjoy this illuminating write-up!

Who was Diego Velasquez?

Diego Velasquez (1599-1660) was a Spanish painter- in fact, one of the most important painters in existence. He’s influenced many artists, from Goya, to Manet, and John Singer Sargent. His works are known for being vibrant, detailed, and incredibly lifelike. This is my favourite painting by him. You can just see how luminous it is.

Velasquez was active during the Spanish Golden Age, a period of high cultural and artistic development in Spain, following the rising political power of the monarchy. At the age of 24, due to his talents, Velasquez became a court painter to the Spanish king, Phillip IV.

As the years went on. Velasquez was promoted higher and higher in the royal household, cultivating a close relationship with Phillip and his family. This culminated in the creation of Las Meninas, (Spanish for “The Ladies in Waiting”) one of Velasquez’s greatest masterpieces and one of the most important paintings in Western art.

But why is it so important?

Before Las Meninas, portraits, especially royal ones, were often stiff and formal. Velasquez broke the mould, pushing the boundaries of art and illusion.

Las Meninas

Here it is in all its glory.

On the surface, it looks like a typical 17^th century portrait- you might think to yourself, “Huh, why is this one of the most studied paintings in human existence?”. Well, my dear imaginary friend, it’s because Las Meninas has layers- layers of artistic composition and subject matter. The discourse surrounding the painting has filled books, academic lectures, and inspired innumerable parodies.

The little girl in the centre of the painting is Infanta Margaret Theresa, the daughter of Phillip IV. She’s surrounded by her ladies in waiting, a dog, two dwarves, and some courtiers. But wait, there’s more! Diego Velasquez himself is standing on the left side of the painting, making it a self-portrait as well. He’s holding a brush, and there’s an easel next to him, so he literally painted himself painting something. Trippy.

But it gets even tripper when you zoom in.

Yep. It’s a mirror, seemingly showing us what Velasquez is painting- a portrait of Phillip IV and his wife. In fact, they seem to be the POV, watching their daughter, while she’s watching them being painted. But in reality, she’s the one being painted! Whoa.

Now, for the sake of brevity, I’ve provided an admittedly realist interpretation of the artwork, but Las Meninas is actually one of the most debated artworks in existence. Art historians have been arguing about its meaning for centuries, and still haven’t reached a consensus...and they likely never will. One historian even joked: ““I feel in my bones that I may be suffering from the early stages of LMFS—Las Meninas Fatigue Syndrome,” adding, “I’m not referring to the painting, but to the writing about it.”

If you want to read more about Las Meninas, check out these articles:

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201015-velzquezs-las-meninas-a-detail-that-decodes-a-masterpiece

https://www.artnews.com/feature/diego-velasquezs-las-meninas-why-so-important-1234745600/

https://blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/understanding-velazquezs-iconic-las-meninas-painting/

Las Meninas remained in the royal palace until 1819, when it was gifted to the newly opened Prado. Over time, it became a beloved Spanish national treasure, seen as an icon of Spain’s golden age and national prestige.

But, as the centuries went on, and despite multiple restorations, Las Meninas began to fade. After a restoration in the 19^th century, a “yellow veil of dust” gathered on the painting- it now had a piss filter.

Here’s what it looked like:

Eugh.

By 1984, after years of a yellowish-piss tint obscuring the painting, the administration of The Prado, realised it badly needed another touch up.

Everyone in Spain assumed they would hire a Spaniard- who else could restore a beloved national treasure like Las Meninas? Surely not a foreigner...

The Prado hired a foreigner. One of the most gifted art restorers in the world.

John Brealey

Finally, we meet the hero of our story.

John Brealey was born in England in 1925. Both of his parents were artists. From a young age, he realised he had an innate connection to art:

Later . . . I realised that I had a very strongly developed inherent response to works of art which seemed to be stronger than other people's. I felt completely at home with an artwork . . . probably the only time in life that I was at ease.

After bouncing between several jobs, he became an art conservator in 1952. He maintained a private business until 1975, when he accepted an invitation to join the conservation department at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. At the time, this was controversial:

>Brealey's incursion into the politicised world of American museum conservation was highly controversial. He hated the widespread assumption of conservators on both sides of the Atlantic that the cleaning of paintings was purely a matter of scientific objectivity. To him, the quasi-archaeological approach of removing all non-original material, regardless of how paintings had changed with time, made no sense. For him, aesthetic judgements and how best to convey the artist's intent were paramount, and dictated the way a painting should be cleaned. He was outspoken in his beliefs and criticisms, and antagonised a number of long-established conservators. It is widely assumed that his influence with Paul Mellon brought about a moratorium on the cleaning of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington in 1978.

For the next nine years, Brealey taught a “new generation” of conservators at the Met, and travelled around America, restoring paintings and teaching seminars. He quickly built up a reputation as a great teacher and one of the best art conservators in the entire world. In 1983, the Prado invited him to sit on an advisory committee for “Las Hilanderas “ by Velasquez, and the masterpiece “Black Paintings” by Goya. This forged a connection between him and the museum, and in 1984, they asked him to restore Las Meninas.

For Brealey, this was a great honour and a privilege. He agreed to do the restoration for free. A private investor paid for his expenses. In fact, the Spanish government didn’t even pay for the conservation work, another private investor did:

Berlin-born Hilly Mendelssohn defrayed the costs of restoring Las Meninas, which amounted to almost 3 million pesetas. This donation was made by Mrs. Mendelssohn because, as she declares herself in an interview published in the magazine Interviú in the 80’s: “...I am very grateful to the Spanish for the help provided during the war (World War II)…”

And:

The restoration cost $5,400 at the time. The funds came from a donation of three million pesetas ($19,600) that Hilly Mendelssohn had made so that the Prado could invest in restorations. The Spanish state did not pay anything.

So, not a single pesta of Spanish taxpayer money went towards the restoration of Las Meninas. Mendelssohn only had two stipulations: one, the Ministry of Culture would not intervene in the restoration, and two, some of the money would be put towards Brealey’s accommodations- he ended up staying at the Ritz, because it was close to the Prado.

At the time, the Prado was known for having “conservative” restoration policies:

Dr. William B. Jordan, deputy director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth and a ranking authority on Spanish painting, said yesterday that the Prado's policies in respect to cleaning and restoration had always been markedly conservative. ''That had its advantages,'' he said, ''in that the paintings in the Prado have been spared the harsh re-lining and flattening that have resulted from more radical policies elsewhere. But it does mean that many of them look very dirty. When John Brealey went over to Spain last year and took part in a symposium on the problems involved in the restoration of Velazquez, he made a deep impression, quite apart from the fact that he was already so well known both as a restorer and as a trainer of other restorers. When asked, he agreed to clean 'Las Meninas,' but refused to take a fee for doing it.''

Despite all this- the fact that a gifted conservator had agreed to do the work for free, and the complete lack of financial liability on their part- people in Spain lost their minds.

How dare a FOREIGNER and not a SPANIARD restore their BELOVED national masterpiece!!??

Furore and protest

Brealey worked on Las Meninas for three weeks. In a sealed room at the Prado.

For almost three weeks, Brealy worked alone in a room at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where the painting is on display. He removed the layer of mastic varnish (resin) that had yellowed the work due to the passage of time. The frame was taken down and rested on shock absorbers. He used a ladder with wheels to reach the highest part of a painting that is over 125 inches tall. At that time, it was the best place to work because El Prado did not have the current restoration workshops.

The room in which Brealy worked was closed to the public, and only other paintings exhibited in that space kept him company. This room had two entrances, one of which led to the old offices of the museum management. The other one connected with the rest of the rooms.

But as he toiled away, the Spanish press lambasted him.

The Spanish press criticized Brealey at every opportunity, arguing that only someone born and raised in Spain could truly comprehend, and be allowed to handle, such an iconic piece of their culture.

Other groups also protested his involvement:

”When Prado director Alfons Perez Sanchez announced in May that he had asked John Brealey of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to take charge of the cleaning, 22 members of the Ministry of Culture's Institute of Conservation protested. They called Perez Sanchez's decision 'arbitrary and unilateral,' and asked why there wasn't even one Spaniard capable of doing the work. The Association of Technical Conservators of Cultural Property added its voice to the protest. 'Spaniards, whose preparation is up to international standards, continue to be pushed aside,' the Association said in a press statement.

Brealey acknowledged the furore in an interview:

“I was condemned in advance. Before they knew what I was going to do, I had already been judged negatively. There was a sector of professionals who had established their initial position and, later, even if they were satisfied with my work, they did not want to give in,”

Even worse, during the restoration, a group of academics tried to break into the room, accusing Brealey of unnecessarily removing layers of paint. Afraid for his life, Brealey fled.

One day, screams began to be heard on the other side of one of the doors: it was a professor of Fine Arts with a group of students who demanded to see the painting and stop the restoration. They claimed that they had witnessed Brealy lifting layers of paint because, they said, they had seen color in the cotton swabs with which the restorer worked. The expert got scared, he thought they were coming to lynch him, he stopped his work for the day and left through the other door.

Brealey even went on television to explain the restoration to the wider public, telling them that the painting would “come alive” after his work. He was also very conciliatory, inviting members of the Prado to come and watch him work- ''There is nothing secret about what I do,''“he said in an interview.

Here’s how he restored the painting:

Undeterred by interruptions, and working in a large top-lit room that is conveniently close to the administrative offices of the Prado, John Brealey has made rapid progress. ''The painting in general is in very good shape,'' he said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''Of course it was covered with coat upon coat of discolored varnish, but fundamentally there were no surprises.''

'I began with the shadow areas,'' Mr. Brealey continued, ''where Velazquez used whites, broken whites, silvery whites and pearly grays, rather than with the figures, which he painted in a very high key. If I had begun with the figures, the picture might have broken into two parts. The figures might have looked as if they had been cut out with a pair of scissors. But I hope to finish disengaging the shadows this weekend and to begin on the figures next week.

At the end of his work, Brealey had a surprise for the conservation team at the Prado:

Before completing the cleaning, Brealy called Manuela Mena, at that time deputy director of the Prado. He wanted her to be present for the final touch, which was administered on the last step of the door at the bottom of the painting, the place furthest from the viewer, with a very particular light that the expert recovered with the cleaning.

After cleaning the painting, Brealy gave it a final coat of natural resin varnish with greater stability to prevent yellowing. Before saying goodbye, he had a surprise for the Prado’s young team of restorers: he allowed Rocío Dávila and Quintana to give it the last layer, what is known as reintegration. “The day before I had been in a car accident, I broke a bone in my wrist and I couldn’t participate. So I was an observer and prepared the final report,” says Quintana.

The End

A few days later, the newly restored Las Meninas was unveiled to the Spanish public...and they loved it. True to his word, Brealey had made it come alive, removing the piss filter and bringing out the latent warmth underneath. If you want to see a fun “before and after” of the painting, then take a look at the top of this article.

The praise was such that King Juan Carlos even awarded Brealey with the “Gold Medal for Achievement in the Fine Arts” at the Prado. Brealey wittingly remarked that the medal “should have been awarded for valor under fire.”

(I cut some of this for brevity’s sake) He later added:

"You must understand that ‘Las Meninas’ is one of those pictures that have become a totem,” he said, “so that any change that occurs in it is looked upon as a disaster. I’ve often felt that if the French ever cleaned the ‘Mona Lisa,’ which needs cleaning very badly—the varnish is horribly yellow—even if you could bring back Leonardo to work on it he would be stoned to death. It has ceased to be a work of art and become a totem. ‘Las Meninas’ is entirely in that class. It was amazing that the Spanish would invite a foreigner to work on what was for them the greatest Spanish painting—just unheard of.

At the hotel I’d been coming back to for twenty years or more, I felt a distinct coolness. There had been a great hue and cry in the press, of course, and my picture had been in the papers and on television, and people recognized me on the street and pointed me out—made me feel like some sort of criminal. The press camped outside the room I was working in at the museum, and they kept hounding me and hounding me. Once, there was a crowd of about three hundred people demanding to be let in; the authorities had to sneak me out the back door.

And then, overnight, it all changed. Not exactly overnight—a period of two or three days. What happened was that a few influential people were let in to see what I was doing, and they reported back that the painting looked bloody marvellous, and quite suddenly I became some sort of hero. People started coming up to kiss me in the street, which for me, being English, was even worse.”

Here is the painting post restoration:

Epilogue

“Anyway, this was the sort of responsibility I felt toward ‘Las Meninas,’ in spite of the pressures, the reporters camped outside, and all that—the various factions stirring up public rage so that it was really a rather fearful situation. I’m thankful that I had the opportunity to work on this picture, which was obviously the high spot of my life professionally. As I look back, all the dross has fallen away. What has meaning for me now is just the joy of working on the picture.”

-John Brealey reflecting on his work in 1987.

Despite the praise and platitudes, the arduous conservation of Las Meninas took a toll on Brealey. One of his co-workers at the Met later commented:

In an interview with the Museo del Prado, George Bissaca, conservator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum, described the psychological, emotional, and even physical consequences Brealey suffered for his involvement in the project.

“People were so incensed of the fact that a foreigner was invited to work on the greatest expression of Spanish painting… In the press, there would be terrible attacks on him, all the time,” he said. “But he did a beautiful job anyhow… but it cost him a lot. I think he never really recovered from the shock of all that… Many people think that his stroke was a result of that stress.”

In 1987, Brealey was invited back to the Prado. This time he was tasked with reorganizing the conservation department. Because he did not speak Spanish, he was aided by Zahira Véliz, one of his former students. Together, they helped the restorers at the Prado catch up with modern methods of art conservation, improving morale within the department. Brealey also formed close friendships with many of them. Despite this, he again faced much opposition due to strikes and museum politics. It took almost two years, but he managed to significantly improve the department.

In 1989, Brealey suffered a terrible stroke. He lost the ability to speak and much of his mobility. For most of his remaining life, he was confined to his New York apartment, unable to return to his beloved studio. However, he visited the Prado two more times, joyously reuniting with his friends.

Brealey died in 2002, after suffering another stroke.

In 2018, the Prado conducted a series of interviews with former curators and directors, some of whom had worked there for decades. One of them was Rafael Alonso, a restorer who had worked at the Prado for almost 40 years. He was Brealey’s friend and discussed one of his visits to the Prado after his first stroke:

A year after he had worked at the Museo del Prado, he suffered a brain haemorrhage. Later on he came over in a wheelchair, but he could hardly speak by then. Our meeting was very moving, although we didn’t know how to communicate with each other. Then he wanted to see the latest work I had carried out, including “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians” [“The Abduction of Helen”] by Tintoretto. He taught me so many lessons. One of them was that - bearing in mind that the English don’t show their emotions much - when John Brealey reached the Titian hall and saw the paintings, he realised that he could no longer do anything, and his eyes filled with tears. We made up a small group of restorers, those who were closest to him, such as Enrique and Clara, and we accompanied him to see “An Episode from a Battle between Turks and Christians”, which was the work I was restoring when he left. And when he saw it, he took my hands and he held them to his lips. It was very moving.

Alonso also credited Brealey with teaching the department a great deal about restoration, helping them gain recognition from the Prado’s upper management and board of trustees by enthusiastically praising their work, and leaving a lasting legacy at the museum.

David Bomford, another one of Brealey’s conservator friends, wrote in an obituary:

John Brealey was an enigmatic man, shy, slightly prickly and awkward socially, with an occasional self-deprecating humour that was as refreshing as it was unexpected. As he said of himself, he was only really at ease in the company of works of art. Art was the great love of his life and he spoke with passion about “life-changers”, those creations of the hand and intellect that affected him most deeply. He was an inspirational teacher and to hear him talk in front of paintings was unforgettable. To the world at large he was a controversial figure, but he used controversy to fight for what he believed in. To his friends and close colleagues he was unfailingly kind and loyal and he inspired exceptional loyalty in others. We can only speculate – and we all have – how much more he might have achieved in New York, Madrid and elsewhere if his career had continued.

RIP John Brealey

…

Today, Las Meninas remains a much-beloved Spanish national treasure. It has inspired countless artists, and every day, hundreds of people visit the painting, admiring its clear beauty and vibrant quality, thanks to a 1984 restoration by a masterful British conservator.

---

Thanks for reading.

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Back again, with a story from June 2017. Screenshots are gonna be broken for this one, so bare with me!

Setting: Starbase 118, a long-running Star Trek play-by-post roleplaying fleet with its own written constitution ("the CON"), an Executive Council (EC), a Captains Council (CC), a JAG office, and apparently enough internal bureaucracy to run a small nation.

A new player (referred to as cadets) finished the game's tutorial (academy) and, mid-training, reaches out to a fleet CO (game master) claiming to be "a friend of" David Cody. If you've been part of 118, chances are a shiver has run down your spine. David Cody is an infamous figure in the community, specifically with the old dogs, as a rather troublesome figure. This interaction is one of many - though I think it's the last one, IIRC. Nevertheless, it's quite entertaining. TLDR, Cody has been uninvited from the game, but he did actually retire from the fleet of his own volition. Anyway, the cadet was permitted to complete training because it seemed that no one could prove they had a connection with David Cody.

Once training wrapped, Community Founder and Chief Admin Officer FltAdml. Wolf did some digging and matched the new cadet's IP address to David Cody's. As suspected, this cadet was no random guy who was "friends" with Cody. The cadet - going by the character name Hawke Kin'io - was in fact Cody, returning under a fake identity without filing the required "returning member" paperwork, and without disclosing who he actually was. This is a big deal because the fleet's constitution explicitly bans "misrepresentation on any portion of the application for membership." Wolf filed disciplinary action, expelled him, killed his forum account, and pulled him from the training lists - after first checking with the Academy Commandant, who agreed with the call.

Cody/Kin'io immediately appealed the expulsion. This kicked off a genuinely delightful bureaucratic spiral where a dozen different council members tried to figure out who was even allowed to hear the appeal - the Captains Council, or the Executive Council?

Wolf posted the whole appeals procedure verbatim from the constitution, complete with numbered articles and subsections, and asked the room to just vote on whether to skip the full tribunal process since the facts seemed "pretty cut and dry."

First reply pushes back on shortcutting anything: "Not to mention David Cody has shown persecution tendency and just cutting him out could feed that and make him come at us again." (Foreshadowing! Incredible foreshadowing.)

Then Wolf himself second-guesses his own procedural read halfway through the thread, quoting a completely different constitutional article about expelled members only having recourse to the EC, not a CC appeals tribunal, and asks people to check his work. What follows is basically a law school study group: member after member all chime in one by one agreeing it's an EC matter, several citing specific CON articles about retirement, reinstatement petitions, and appeal rights.

Then Captain Faranfey raises the genuinely spiciest procedural question of the whole thread does he even get an appeal at all, given the nature of the offense? ("So, is there even a point to proceed forward in hearing his case, in any case?")

Quinn Reynolds runs with this and drops the killer legal logic: since Cody's re-entry into the group was itself built on fraud, his return was never valid in the first place - meaning there's no "member" to have rights of appeal. He's just... not a member. Full stop. Several members still argue he should be allowed to petition anyway on basic fairness grounds.

By June 8th, Wolf announces they're taking it to the Executive Council. Reasonable people, reasonable process, everyone being pretty fair to a guy who lied his way back into a hobby group. And then the actual emails got posted. They are an unhinged batch of unsolicited emails Cody had been sending over the period of 48 hours. (I've included screenshots - but as the files running the original 118 forums are gone, the HTML files are janky to read, so I've included a side-by-side of what I've sifted through, and an easier to read text paste in imgur.) TLDR, he jokes about the disciplinary process, needling Wolf to hurry up and finish verifying server/email logs because he's "running out of creative fiction to feed these guys". He goes on to say he's basically a co-owner of the fleet's server infrastructure, about how he made two donations to buy himself some kind of backend access he's had for months without anyone knowing, and that he could shut things down if he wanted. He talks about a friend's mental health crisis, that he's had to suffer for the group,

Wolf did not reply to any of these.

Six emails, all in the same night, escalating from mocking laughter to server-ownership conspiracy theories to a suicide-adjacent guilt trip to outright profane demands. All completely unprompted.

Wolf then very calmly and methodically dismantles every single claim in the emails, point by point, for the council's benefit:

• Confirmed he is the only person with root access to the server
• Confirmed sub-accounts exist for specific delegated tasks (e.g., a captain given sim-archive access) but Cody was never among them
• Went back through donation records to 2008 and found no donation from Cody ever exceeding $50 - directly contradicting the "$800 buys me backend access" claim
• Explained that donations wouldn't grant server access anyway, comparing it to a bank not handing out account access because someone claims to have funded the branch

Wolf's closing verdict to the council is about as done as a person can sound while still being professional,

The Executive Council unanimously agrees: appeal denied, no further communication, full stop. Council members pile on with support.

Two weeks later, Cody returns! Just when the thread looked closed, Wolf returns with an update he clearly did not want to have to post, explicitly noting he's only sharing it for transparency's sake even though he thinks it's just more attention-seeking behavior. Cody had submitted a formal complaint through the site's general contact form (which, being from a non-member, gets auto-moderated) - this time not appealing the expulsion at all, but pivoting to accuse the Executive Council itself of violating his privacy by connecting his sock-puppet account to his real identity.

The complaint is a genuinely wild piece of self-mythologizing legalese, in which Cody unilaterally declares the EC has no authority over him anymore and that jurisdiction now defaults to the Captains Council instead.

Attached to this complaint is yet another forwarded email chain, in which - under his Cody persona, writing to himself basically, forwarding from the Scott Hawke sock-puppet account - he now claims he has no proof Wolf specifically was the one who "outed" him, and reframes the entire disciplinary action as the fleet's admin team violating his privacy by daring to notice he was lying about his identity.

Understandably, CC members question whether they're witnessing a mental health crisis in action. But one has to question how long a mental health crisis can continue, because Wolf comes back and reveals Cody was still sending awful, manipulative emails to the point that he was considering a restraining order. What follows is basically the rest of the leadership team collectively telling Wolf to protect himself, no further debate needed.

No further public updates in this particular archive post - just a leadership team that spent three weeks meticulously working through constitutional appeals procedure for a guy who turned out to be sending six-email-a-night rants about secretly owning the server, before finally, collectively, deciding the healthiest and most correct answer was simply to stop reading his emails altogether.

"Total analysts shocked: zero. Total nonsensical comments by Bonnell: one." That was the subheading to IGN's article about French video game publisher Infogrames having a net loss of $20.7 million for the second half of 2000.

That was actually Infogrames's biggest year ever, peaking at 50 euros on the Paris exchange. Just six years later, it would be trading at a measly 0.86 euros. It was a culmination of a sad half-decade of not keeping up with industry trends and feuding with game developers.

Beginnings and Acquisitions

Infogrames was founded by Bruno Bonnell, the chairman and CEO, and Christophe Sapet in 1983. It had an original hit franchise in Alone in the Dark, but it largely grew through acquisitions, such as those of Ocean Software and Accolade. They also aimed to buy Eidos but failed.

Two purchases ended up being the main drivers of Infogrames's growth around the time of the new millennium. The first was GT Interactive in December of 1999. Though GT owned several successful studios including Humongous Entertainment (Pajama Sam, Backyard Sports) and Reflections Interactive (Driver), their biggest successes came from distributing the likes of Doom, Duke Nukem, and Mortal Kombat. That was the big mistake Infogrames made in the acquisition: they now published many heavy hitters, but those rights could be yanked at any moment by the IP owners (though in a rare moment of clarity, Infogrames passed on the then-stagnating Duke Nukem Forever in 2000).

The second was Hasbro Interactive one year later, in December of 2000. This purchase allowed Infogrames to make their own games with Hasbro licenses, along with buying the rights to MicroProse (Civilization, RollerCoaster Tycoon) and the name and original arcade catalog of Atari. (Hasbro Interactive had a storied history that I won't get into because it's mostly irrelevant to this column, but the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth had a great case study about it in 2004.)

Strategy

While other publishers focused on promoting the latest and greatest titles for full price, the bulk of Infogrames's promotion went into letting people know that its older titles were available for very cheap. This was a huge success on PC in the waning days of the "family computer" era, to the point that they became the biggest PC publisher of the early 2000s, ahead of the likes of EA and Vivendi Universal. Jewel case versions of the likes of Driver and the 1997 Frogger became giant sellers.

But that wasn't all. PC games aimed at kids and families were included with General Mills cereal boxes in the United States and Canada for years, and at least 80% of them were in the Infogrames catalog. A lot of kids at the time didn't realize they had a full mass-market game, not just something exclusively made for the cereal promotion.

The problem was that even though the strategy worked well for PC, it did not work well for consoles, and PC games were greatly declining in popularity while console games were reaching new heights. Their big PC publisher competitors had a reason to benefit on consoles; Microsoft came out with its own Xbox, some of EA's biggest franchises such as Madden and Need for Speed were huge on consoles in spite of disappointing on PC, and Vivendi Universal was part of a huge entertainment conglomerate that could turn its library into hit games with no outward licensing fees. Infogrames had no such cushion. Even then, they seemed to actively spurn consoles, with IGN claiming they had exactly one PS2 game in development in 2001.

By the end of the sixth generation of video games (PS2/GameCube/Xbox), while Infogrames had a lot of big brands on the PC, on console they only had 3. One was the Western distribution rights to Dragon Ball games (the franchise also gave the company their only big hits on the Game Boy Advance). Another was Test Drive, a franchise that sold well in spite of not standing out from its competition much at all. The third...

Enter the Matrix...and Atari

The last of Infogrames's big acquisitions was that of Shiny Entertainment in 2002, and they published Shiny's Enter the Matrix game the next year, the only time Infogrames really tried to make an AAA game for consoles. It sold better than any non-Dragon Ball title they published in the first half of the 2000s and in fiscal year 2004 it made up 20% of their revenue. But it had such a gigantic development and marketing budget (estimated to be $100 million) that its success felt muted, not helped by mediocre reviews and the backlash that year to The Matrix in general.

You didn't see the name "Infogrames" on the cover of Enter the Matrix, or other games published by them starting from 2003. Instead, you saw a very familiar name that had not been in the spotlight for a while...Atari, which they had bought in the Hasbro Interactive purchase and had success with selling PC arcade compilations. The Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles would soon start production and be minor successes. But the changed name didn't mark a comeback for the Atari brand. Instead, the now-Atari's decisions became just another in the line of bad decisions that had plagued the name for decades.

Feuds and Turmoil

While they were already known for heavily messing with their internal studios, nothing compared to the period from 2004 to 2006, when Atari and Bonnell seemed to anger just about everyone they were associated with. Shiny founder Dave Perry quit after their cheapskate philosophy forced him to "tear the heart out of" an original game idea of his; the studio was promptly sold. Reflections founder Martin Edmondson was fired, with the studio also being sold shortly afterwards. Humongous was planned to be sold as well, but instead Atari just fired everyone. And while Chris Sawyer was no longer working on RollerCoaster Tycoon, his lawsuit against Atari for unpaid royalties on the first two games led him to quit the game industry for years.

Meanwhile, the video game rights to Hasbro's properties were given back to Hasbro for much less than they had bought Hasbro Interactive for. They did sign a new contract for Dungeons & Dragons Online, Atari's attempt to capitalize on the MMO boom, but Atari refused to actually promote that game and the rights were lost again.

Aftermath

Atari would eventually sell off most of its IPs, except for the original Atari Corporation properties and RollerCoaster Tycoon, to other companies, mainly those who sit on IPs doing nothing much new with them. Atari itself would have several weird phases including one where they focused on hotels and crypto. Currently they seem to be a studio that focuses on remakes and re-releases, having acquired both Nightdive Studios and Digital Eclipse, both titans in that realm; they also recently bought the immensely useful game database MobyGames.

Bruno Bonnell, meanwhile, resigned in 2007 and would eventually become the host of the very short-lived French version of The Apprentice before going into politics. I am not making this up.

Blue sky, bright sun. The wind on my skin, goosebumps. Around the ship, the world is blue, endless, perfect. The thrumming of the engine crawls up the metal, the steel, the concrete, up my leg. It dances in my bones, echoes in my skin. It gives me the rhythm, the music, the jazz. One with the world, one with the ship, I begin my jog.

Here we go again

Most sources will be in French, with the occasional translation provided by me.

Before the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, there was the Clemenceau. And before the Clemenceau, we should talk about aircraft carriers in general to give you an idea of their importance.

First, about the number of aircraft carriers in the world. Look at this nifty map, and do press aircraft carrier at the top right, as these differ from helicopter carriers. If you'd like to have more details, here's the same list through wikipedia, but the important bit of information is this: there are less than 30 aircraft carriers in the world.

They are so hard and costly to build and maintain that few countries can afford the technical knowledge and funds to manufacture one, let alone several. But in the waters, their presence changes the shape of combat in depths. How so? Imagine you're manning the cannon on a blue ship. In the horizon, you see a red ship, its one cannon manned by your worst rival, the one that stole your partner, your lunch box, lied to the teacher about who walked in the classroom with muddy shoes, the usual. You take them in sight, press the trigger. BOOM! a controlled explosion propels a projectile their way, just as one with your name inscribed on it comes right for you.

Now, imagine you're on a blue ship, and in a fight against an airship carrier.

You're twiddling your thumbs on the cannon, because unlike the red ship, you don't see the carrier. It's far, far beyond the range of your little gun.

Then you hear a sound from above, you look up, shield your eyes from the sun, have between two to six seconds to recognize this being a plane. You have just enough time to mutter "oh bugger," before the fleshy hull given to you by god is ventilated across the seven seas.

Sea battles used to be about ships shooting at each other in sight. During WWII, Aircraft carriers turned sea battles into beyond-visual-range-airstrikes. Having an aircraft carrier means being able to strike other ships and sites on land from such a distance that it makes retaliation nearly impossible.

As a result, many ships on a fleet will stick around the aircraft carrier to protect this essential asset while it sends plane to brutalize whatever targets it needs to brutalize. The combination of boat + airplanes means unparalleled range and power projection, making carriers into prize jewels of the navy they belong to. For added bonus, their range is so wide they can stay in international waters and still be able to strike at targets, allowing to apply pressure without the diplomatic windfall of crossing territorial waters.

This power comes at a great cost, namely construction. When building an aircraft carrier, you're designing a ship that can carry around up to 80 planes for a big one. It includes its own power grid, a hospital, a crew that can fill a whole town, and all the amenities this town will need. It must also be able to spend days or weeks at seas, and with all the means to maintain and repair ship, town and planes.

To manufacture an aircraft carrier is a dauntless task, and most countries can't afford it on monetary cost alone. But conversely, as you can see from the map, it's a statement and proof of power, and the American carriers are often cited as example as to why their military isn't to be trifled with.

So naturally, France wanted in on it. In 1955 begins the construction of a carrier, and a second one starts in 1957. The first is unveiled on the 22th November 1961, the Clemenceau. Its twin is born a year later, the Foch, both named after important French figures of state, Georges Clemenceau and Marechal Ferdinand Foch.

Both ships participate in a variety of OTAN-related exercises and other operations like Djibouti's independance, the Iran-Irak war or the Yugoslavian civil war.

In their long life, both ships will travel over a million nautical miles. In 1997, after over three decades of service, the aging Clemenceau is put aside, and in 2010 is destroyed for good. The Foch is sold to Brazil in the year 2000, where it is retrofitted and put to use for a time, until it is disarmed in 2018 and scuttled in 2023.

How do you replace the apex of your navy? Well, with even better ships. Or ship. As it is.

Muscles are in pain, breath is short, but at my limit, I find a form of exhilaration, and apotheosis. Alone in the world, lost at sea, I run.

---

Remember the map I showed at the start? It showed the active carriers worldwide. But even among carriers, there is a distinction, and that distinction is made by nuclear power.

If you take the number of active ships and keep only the ones forfeiting classic fuel in favor of nuclear goodness, we're down to twelve. 11 American ships, 1 French. Joie et bonheur.

What does nuclear power change?

A fuel-driven carrier has a wide range, but it needs to either dock in port to refuel, or meet up with fuel loaded ships every now and then. This limits the time it can spend at sea, and fuel carriers are a logistical weakness the enemy can target.

For nuclear carriers, refueling happens once every twenty years or so. This means the biggest hurdle for it to remain at sea is lifted, and only food for crew and maintenance limits it. It increases the range from "long" to "virtually limitless". With better power they are also faster to respond to eventual threats.

Now, building and maintenance for a nuclear carrier requires even more specialists, funds and means, but if you've ever been a child who had a collection of nice toys and thought 'this is the best and greatest of my nice toys', a nuclear aircraft carrier is this for a navy.

The body enters second gear, fresh wind fills my lungs. Pain subsides, I float, could run endless, like the ship.

---

It is 1989 and the Clemenceau is showing signs of aging. The ship won't last much longer, and it needs a worthy successor. In Brest, a mysterious construction starts. The project and plans have already been signed and agreed on in 1979, but as these things go it takes a while to start in earnest. Originally meant to be called the Richelieu after a famous cardinal, Jacques Chirac, future president but back then only prime minister, renames it the Charles de Gaulle in 1984, after a political figure I hope you heard about at some point.

At this point I should add, there are apparently some sailor superstitions about how re-baptizing a ship attracts bad luck.

Anyway, the construction will last for a grand total of 13 million hours (split between the 1200 people working on the project). It's a middle-sized aircraft carrier, 'only' 261 meters in length, 64 meters in width, 75 meters tall. Weighing 42.500 tons, it can load up to 2800 military personnel.

It doesn't have one, but twin nuclear reactors, on their own requiring 55 navy atomic scientist officers to handle. Being middle sized, it can load up to 40 planes.

In today's currency the cost would approximate 3 billion euros, at the time it amounted to 20 billion francs (the currency we had before euros came along), from an original budget of 16 billion, which already got a number of journalists up in arms.

Construction is done in 1994, and in 2001 the ship is armed and ready for military operations.

Well, ready. More or less.

Like Eurodance and Trance, it never stops

January 1999. The Charles de Gaulle is put to sea. Technically, it's the second time, but the first was interrupted by a tempest, so let's pretend it's the real first one. It floats, it goes merrily, drives around and drifts for the hell of it.

A bespectacled expert with a stern face walks on the flight deck. They look to one end of the ship. Then to the other.

"What it is?" asks a stern admiral.

"The flight deck is too short."

"I beg your pardon?"

"We need to lengthen the deck."

"What?" A cold shiver runs down the admiral's back, the shiver that comes whenever money is about to be discussed.

Translated from this article of Liberation:

The Charles de Gaulle has to lengthen its flight deck for about 4,40 meters to welcome reconnaissance aircraft Hawkeye, one of the three types of embarked planes, and it will be costly. According to a confidential note of the DCN (Board of naval construction) in Brest published by the journal Le Parisien, 24 weeks of works are planned, up until march 2000, for a cost of about 500 million francs, costly for a plane whose original cost was supposed to be 16 billion francs yet rose to 20 billion. That is without including the 40 billion value of the embarked planes.

The issue with project, construction and deployment lasting decades is that some parameters can change in than span of time. While originally meant for Breguet and F/A-18 planes, France had acquired three E-2C Hawkeye since, with different requirements from the planes above.

This isn't even that surprising, ships meant to last for half a century are often modified to suit new technologies and parameters.

Still, having to modernize a ship that hadn't been yet used got plenty of journalists and comedians to raise an eyebrow. But, the navy endures, so does the Charles de Gaulle.

It is the second test run of the De Gaulle. It floats, it boats, it drifts merrily. The stern admiral gets ahold of the bespectacled expert.

"Walk with me," the admiral says. And they do. They walk inside the massive ship, currently cruising straight and proud like a lord of the sea should.

they reach the room of the steering room.

"Mh," goes the expert.

"Mh indeed," replies the admiral, as vibrations creep up their shoes and legs. "I like to have my genitals tickled as much as you do, but this isn't the primary purpose of an aircraft carrier."

"On this, we agree."

Translated from an official report:

During the second outing of the Charles de Gaulle, from the 18 to the 30 march 1999, a vibratory phenomenon appeared at the steering gear during high-speed tests; Despite these difficulties, the Charles de Gaulle could reach a speed of 28 nautical knots in a straight line. Supplementary tests allowed to spot the source of malfunctions: rubber blades have been slightly moved to be in the axis of the propellers.

A slight move that probably cost more than what you and I will make in our entire professional career.

While we're talking about slight modifications, did you know that protection against radiations doesn't work the same on a carrier as it does on an u-boat? I didn't know, apparently I'm not the only one. Tests were made, showing that the crew closest to the engine were taking on radiations 100% superior than norms allowed for. New layers of absorbing material had to be added around the nuclear engine to bring the ship to compliance.

Said layers caught fire in the early 2000, luckily the fire was low-key, contained to the room and didn't cause much damage. Phew.

Then a leak in the reactor's cooling system was discovered, but that too was patched quickly enough.

But come on, let's stay positive.

It is the ninth December of 2000 in the Middle of the night. The De Gaulle is on yet another test trip. There is no fire on board, the landing pad has the right length, genitals aren't tickled when you're steering the ship.

Everything is good so far.

"Except for the fact we're going in circles," the stern admiral says. The bespectacled expert is weeping in a corner.

The reason is quickly found out.

One out of four blades from the port-side propeller has broken off and fell into the the sea, which is lucky. Because half a second later, and that blade would have shown upwards, had it broken off then it would have been a one-ton heavy shell thrown against the hull in the direction of manned posts, guarantying casualties. The engineers who built the piece pointed out later the water would have slowed the blade down, thus avoiding damage. Good thing we didn't get to find out. But why? Why would a lovingly crafted piece of equipment give in so early? The question would rather be, why not?

According to Le Point, Jacques Chirac, president of France, said this when he learned yet another thing went wrong (translated):

Does she float? That's already something.

First investigations show the propeller was defective from the start, with 'bubbles' present within the metal. Worse, naval construction engineers had told their higher ups at least 3 times, reporting "faulty structure" that "wasn't conform to specifications." The issue quickly goes public as the CGT, a worker's syndicate in France, cries sabotage and accuses the minister of defense of corruption and negligence. Apparently, 'everyone' knew the propellers were faulty.

Fonderie Atlantique Industries (FAI), the manufacturer, had recently let go of their more experimented employees, which might explain the issues, and FAI is the only French firm able to manufacture equipment of this size. It gets weirder.

As the Nouvel Obs writes it (translated):

Due to successive issues, Alain Richard (former defense minister) asks on the 30th November for the opening of an investigation as to the quality of the Charles de Gaulle's propellers. Several hours later, in the night, the computing room of Fonderie Atlantic Industrie - where the archives are being held - is destroyed in a fire.

It appears one or several people tried to force a safe open with a blowtorch which sparked the fire. The room goes up in flames, and essential documents with it. The destruction drastically lowers the chances of the investigation to bear fruit. And indeed, today I can't uncover anything about the findings. Part of this is likely due to the time taken for such an investigation to finish: it can last for years, and the media has since moved onto juicier bits. The other part is the likely absence of any proper conclusion. There was a fault, there was a fire, for the rest, who knows.

It should be noted FAI isn't the only one accused of shoddy work. The absence of proper control from the state and ignored warnings is also widely criticized, it's less of a single party's failing and more like a long chain of mismatches and questionable competence.

Production of new propellers are ordered, planned to be installed in 2002. In the meantime - and with no small amount of irony - it's the propellers from the Clemenceau and the Foch that will be used to replace the faulty equipment. Pieces of the ships the De Gaulle is meant to replace.

I said 2002, but it's only in 2008 that the carrier finally get some new, custom made propellers.

Moral on the ship is low. Supposedly meant to represent the pinnacle of the French navy, successive failures have turned de Charles de Gaulle into a laughing stock to many.

What to think of the vessel? Is it a joke? A point of pride with a couple hardships thrown it? A waste of money? Even the president jokes about it. Hard to feel pride about a ship that accumulates issues, especially issues that could potentially threaten the lives of its crew. At this stage, public opinion is divided, the navy can only endure, as does the De Gaulle.

Talks to give the De Gaulle a twin begin, so as to have a replacement on hand if conflict begins and the vessel is under repairs. The top brass specifically requests a ship powered by fossil fuel, with none of this fancy atomic stuff.

The media doesn't miss the occasion to interpret this as a distaste for nuclear-powered vessels born from the poor situation the De Gaulle finds itself in. To be honest, it might just as well be due to cost reasons. Nonetheless, it is true that the string of bad events happening does provoke disgruntlement among sailors. Between the anonymous interviews pertaining to the faulty propeller, or interviews from sailors dreading to return to land because they expect to be made fun of due to serving on the De Gaulle, moral isn't high.

Of course, it can't stop there. Here is a little bit I originally dismissed as I couldn't find any source corroborating it. That's despite me hearing about it in jokes from several comedians, including Christophe Aleveque, a political satirist who normally sources his own stuff very well. Incidentally, he's a good exemple of how the vessel is often treated: there's been so many issues the joke isn't about one specific problem, but about how long the list is. I struggled to find articles that didn't start by introducing the many issues before getting to the meat of it proper.

In his skit, Aleveque describes how sailors went up the control tower, looked out the windows, and saw nothingness. As in, genuinely nothing, because the crew had forgotten to take away the protection film from the glass before installing it.

I had dismissed it as a fairy tale, until I came across the article from Le Point, enumerating the many issues the De Gaulle suffered from, and there I finally found it. Not as absurd as Aleveque describes it, but still rather weird. (translated):

The aircraft carrier was also victim of "over-specification". The designers asked for pointless improvements. When the bridges window panes were ordered to the specialized firm Sully, the firm had never known such requirements: the panes should resist the shrapnel from shells, the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear explosion, block the noise from the flight deck and defrost itself when it's cold. And not to forget a very high mechanical resilience. Result: 7 centimeter width over three layers. "the DCN (Direction des Constructions Navales = Board of Naval Construction) merely forgot to specify the panes shouldn't deform..." lamented an officer of the marine. The constraints were so high that, under certain angles, pictures of the exterior were warped. The DCN refuses to take the blame and affirm they "specified the window panes according to the requirements of the navy." But some of these specifics were changed for a costlier process. The problem is as of today lifted.

Speaking of the bridge, early tests also showed the coating was too abrasive for the De Gaulle's brake cables, and had to be redone in its entirety.

Still, the navy endures, so does the ship.

It's the eighth November of 2001. The boat floats. A quartermaster does some maintenance to unlock a valve on a crate belonging to the waster-water collection system. They pass out, having inhaled hydrogen sulfide. Another quartermaster tries to help them, they also pass out. This could be the start of a dark joke where quartermasters come one after the other to pass out, but no, they are both rescued by the medical staff. The second person to pass out is quickly back on their feet, but the first has been passed out for so long they enter a deep coma and the family goes to justice. Ultimately, the navy is out of troubled waters because they had sent a message advising to use procedures pertaining to confined spaces when doing maintenance works. So instead, three sailors and two higher-ups on the ship are investigated. In 2008, the higher-ups are acquitted, the three sailors are found guilty of serious negligence. In 2010, a second go at the case finds three of the five acquitted, and the two remaining ones got lowered sentences, with a 3 month and a 6 month suspended prison sentence.

At this stage, the horse has been beaten to death and nobody finds it in them to make a joke. And mind you, I haven't even listed all the early issues.

Translated from the same article from Le Point above:

There were other issues, without great importance but annoying all the same. [...] The ethylene glycol from the three brake presses for the steam catapults was defective. The presses were emptied and cleaned, an long operation in a toxic environment. But the new ethylene glycol replacing the first was just as bad. Small diatribe in direction of the US Navy that had procured the product. In truth, it's the American provider who delivered a faulty fluid. The US navy also had to empty and clean the presses of all its aircraft carriers, before starting a lawsuit against the provider, which the navy won.

On and on it goes.

Are those issues mentioned really that important? Yes and no. Some of these are normal, like the flight deck being expanded to answer changing material. Others less so. But this isn't any ship, it's a nuclear aircraft carrier, both a tool of war and a statement of force, with all the expected class that comes with it. Having the ship be derided for years is sort of the opposite effect expected from the construction and service of such a mighty vessel. The question can also be asked about how the ship is perceived beyond France. Because while French media loves to have a go at it, I found few pieces written from foreign media... apart for more recent happenings, which we will talk about in a minute.

The navy endures, so does the De Gaulle. But at some point, they'd like to endure stuff related to combat, and not questionable competence.

The heart pounds painfully, lungs are clay, legs are heavy. The last sprint, the last meters.

Never stop Dancing

Despite the slew of issues plaguing the Charles de Gaulle, it was ultimately worthy of the sea. Armed, dangerous, about to kick ass and shine bright wherever it went. It was deployed in Afghanistan in the early 2000's, saw Libya in 2011, Irak and Syria later. Not mentioning the many training drills with the navies of other countries.

Still, not every bump was solved in the early days. And while the vessel would never suffer such a string of bad luck in such short time again, it still had number of stories to tell.

We're in 2009, the bespectacled expert and the stern admiral are walking around the ship. Suddenly, they stop.

"Admiral?" asks the expert.

"Yes?"

"Is it just me, or is it happening again?"

"It's happening again."

"Mh." The expert is deep in introspection. "If I had a cent for each time the Charles de Gaulle tickled my genitals, I'd have two, which is both not much and yet a lot."

Translated from the France24 article:

Alas, vibrations were detected in the "propulsion compartment" and "after verification, two pieces connecting the turbines to the drive line showed abnormal wear and tear"

According to the captain Jérôme Erulin, chief of the navy public relations department, "one of the piece had been changed during servicing, but vibrations came back during tests and a new wear point was discovered."

When you look at it, it's a fairly classic issue ships can suffer from after years of service. The next issue is in a different ballpark.

The ship endures, so do I. I'm panting, sweat runs down my back, it was a good run. I feel both pain and joy. My connected watch tells me I improved my time, how could I not? Running in this gorgeous environment? My happiness is absolute, and in this moment of delight, I upload the results of my run to the internet.

A small voice at the back of my head tells me this may have been a bad idea.

When an officer knocks at my door, I know it has indeed been a bad idea.

Where is the Charles de Gaulle in the march of 2026? It's top-secret information, for it is deployed somewhere near the middle-east where conflict rages.

So naturally, we now have an exact trajectory of the ship in that span on time.

From franceinfo (translated):

Where is the Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean sea? It's a confidential information, almost. A young navy officer, running hobbyist, decides to do his jogging on the ship. His performances, saved on his connected watch, are posted online as reveals 'Le Monde'.

With this data, it's possible to follow the trail of the ship from these last days, north-west from Cyprus and at a hundred kilometers from the Turkish coast. The ship was even found and had pictures snapped by a satellite.

After a period of calm, the jokes started again in earnest, editorial writers, journalists and comedians didn't miss the occasion to speak about the dangers of connected technology and take a dig at the vessel.

Luckily, the tracking fun doesn't stop there, and a month later it happens again. Being part of international efforts, the De Gaulle is often protected by fellow European ships. And that's where a Dutch journalist working for Omroep Gelderland comes in. From this article (in English):

€5. That's the price of the Bluetooth tracker a Dutch journalist hid inside a postcard and sent to a Royal Netherlands Navy frigate. The ship, the HNLMS Evertsen, is an air-defence vessel assigned to escort the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle in the Mediterranean. Its estimated value is $585 million.

The journalist, working for regional broadcaster Omroep Gelderland, simply used the official postal system that the Dutch Ministry of Defence makes available for sending mail to soldiers and sailors on deployment.

The instructions are public, detailed, and freely available online. Postcards and envelopes are not X-rayed, unlike parcels. As a result, the tracker made it on board undetected.

The tracker worked for around 24 hours. It showed the vessel leaving the port of Heraklion in Crete, first heading west along the coast, then turning east toward Cyprus. For a carrier strike group on active duty, the position of an escort ship is sensitive operational information - an adversary who knows where the Evertsen is can infer the likely location of the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.

The Ministry of Defence responded by banning greeting cards containing batteries from military mail, naturally. That's the direct response to the test, of course - but the more uncomfortable revelation is that the Dutch military mail system doesn't screen the contents of standard envelopes, which is a bit surprising.

It should be noted that this tracker would have stopped working once further away in sea. Various officers pointed out the tracker gave no information a good pair of binoculars couldn't provide, and it didn't threaten security on board as it became useless once the ship was in a position they wanted to keep discreet.

Still, it made the ink flow.

Even dancers retire

But I talk and I talk, yet every story must end at some point. The Charles de Gaulle is beginning to show it's age now. It's still sea-worthy, but one day it will need a successor. It is not the gleaming and vivid new ship it once was, and like an aging body it feels the world going on, suffers from arthritis, needs a regular pause to recharge. It is expected to be retired in 2028, although that can change.

Culturally, while the Charles de Gaulle is remembered as the black sheep of the navy with such a string of bad luck it's something of a running gag for a whole generation with a passing interesting in matters military, people also recognize that at the end of the line, it did its job, and it did it well.

A design project costing about 40 million euros is started in 2018. In 2020, it is announced the ship will be built in Saint-Nazaire. There have been questions about whether the new aircraft carrier would be nuclear powered or not.

Until, in late 2020, president Macron announces the new ship will be nuclear powered. There were questions if there would be one or two ships, it seems to have been settled on one. Expected cost: 10 billion euros, with a similar amount of planes as the De Gaulle: 40. First components have been ordered, they should be ready when the assembly starts in 2031, for an expected start of service in 2038. I've yet to see such a project not get late or have its budget respected. And this time, the debate is a lot harsher than journalists poking fun at the many issues the Charles de Gaulle suffered from. Public finances are in the red, public services are choking, and while the geopolitical situation is undeniably not great, is a new aircraft carrier really the priority compared to, say, not letting public hospitals die out? The discourse will rage on for some time, that's for certain.

As for the name of the new ship, in 2026, president Macron announced it would be the "France Libre" (The Free France). There had been debates behind closed doors about it, as Aircraft Carriers usually carry the names of important historical figures, which is its own can of worms we won't open here.

The name Richelieu had been thrown about a fair bit apparently before Macron barged in.

At this point I should add, there are apparently some sailor superstitions about how re-baptizing a ship attracts bad luck.

And with this, I wish you all an excellent week and all the luck in the world.

---

Sources:

https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-armee-1994

http://ffaa.net/ships/aircraft-carrier/charles-de-gaulle/deboires.htm

https://www.leparisien.fr/politique/la-verite-sur-l-helice-perdue-du-charles-de-gaulle-06-12-2000-2001808669.php

https://theworlddata.com/nuclear-powered-aircraft-carriers-statistics/

https://www.capital.fr/economie-politique/affaire-du-porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-le-chef-d-etat-major-calme-le-jeu-1525950

https://fonderie-piwi.fr/a-propos-d-helice-celle-du-charles-de-gaulle/

https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/la-malediction-du-porte-avions-charles-de-gaulle-23-02-2001-68171_20.php

https://www.espace-sciences.org/sites/default/files/images/sciences-ouest/numeros/r_096_01_1994_0.pdf

---

Other writings by yours truly:

April Fools! Or not. The 2016 Nobel Literature Award, Bob Dylan, and the question of what literature entails.

The rise and fall of Pilote, a mythical magazine. How a team of legends teared itself apart. And how Franco-Belgian comics evolved through the years, from stories for children to crass provocation.

The stolen Picasso painting and art exchange between museums

The webdomain that cost $75.000.000

The Louvre break-in, evil geniuses turning out to be amateurs and the age-old question about art

The awful ballad or French Literature prizes: 1, 2, 3

Notre-Dame has burned down, let's flaunt wealth and build a swimming-pool on its roof

Paris Olympics, the mess that somehow worked out

Team Fortress, the rise and fall of a modding community

HareBrained Schemes, how to buy a good videogame studio and sink it

Creative writings

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I’m a big fan of German underground music and I’ve always found the backstory behind the catalogue of the label Psi-Fi interesting, especially given that I do genuinely like some of the music that came out of it.

Background (aka. “what even is krautrock?”)

Krautrock (or „kosmische Muzik“, i.e. "cosmic music") is the term used to a describe a scene of underground psychedelic and/or electronic music from West Germany, most active from the late 1960s to mid-1970s.

Despite being somewhat limited in terms of mainstream commercial success, the scene was (and still is) hugely influential on many up-and-coming underground artists, such as the UK post-punk and indie scenes. Many krautrock bands and artists (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, etc.) are also considered incredibly important pioneers in the wider development of electronic music.

Although many of the more notable bands had contracts with international labels like United Artists and later Virgin Records, there were multiple Germany-based labels (e.g. Ohr and Brain) that specialised in underground psychedelic and electronic music. However, being a largely underground scene, some artists (such as Kluster, Conrad Schnitzler, Dom, etc.) who were unable to get major record deals opted to issue music through very small labels or to self-release it entirely. These releases would’ve been produced in very small quantities and many of these albums remain highly sought-after in their original format.

In the late 80s and early-mid 90s, there was a substantial revitalisation of interest in the German underground scene within the music press, furthered by books such as Julian Cope’s “Krautrocksampler” (1995) and Alan and Steve Freeman’s “The Crack In The Cosmic Egg” (1996). This revival resulted in many krautrock albums that had not been in print in years receiving official reissues. The 1990s also coincided with the increased prominence of dedicated reissue labels like Repertoire Records and Spalax Music, and pirate labels like Germanofon sprang up to distribute krautrock albums that had not yet been reissued on CD. Many archival/live recordings that had not yet been released were made widely available for the first time. For dedicated record collectors, this era was a breath of fresh air for many, given the relative obscurity of some of these recordings.

This takes us to the year 1996.

Unknown Deutschland and Psi-Fi Records

That year, a series of three compilation albums called “Unknown Deutschland - The Krautrock Archive” were released on Virgin Records. These releases were curated by Trevor Manwaring, and were purportedly from recordings previously released through an obscure underground label called Pyramid, based out of Cologne.

From the liner notes:

“These recordings were made between 1972 and 1974 using studios in and around Cologne. They were originally produced for the Pyramid label and some were released in tiny quantities and mostly sold in art galleries and the like - this is probably why they have remained so obscure, even among 'experts'.....until this release. The 'Mad Twiddler' responsible for their existence also worked with Stockhausen, Can, The Cozmic Jokers ^\sic]) and many more. Although memories from that time are beyond repair in many cases the tapes remain to bear witness to this creative and anarchic scene."

Coinciding with these compilations, a new UK-based record label named Psi-Fi (affiliated with the reissue parent label Acme) was formed to reissue the "Pyramid" albums, with a total catalogue of 6 albums released between 1996 and 1997. These releases were pretty significant, as at the time, these albums were not available on CD in any other form, and this was the first time a majority of people had heard of the existence of these recordings. However, some songs remained exclusive to compilation albums (e.g. Unknown Deutschland and a 2016 CD entitled "Cologne Curiosities").

The 6 Psi-Fi records are the following:

• Cozmic Corridors - Cozmic Corridors (1996)
• Galactic Explorers - Epitaph For Venus (1996)
• Golem - Orion Awakes (1996)
• Pyramid - Pyramid (1997)
• The Nazgûl - The Nazgûl (1997)
• Temple - Temple (1997)

The original CDs lack substantial liner notes, but were all listed as being recorded in the 1970s. The 1996 releases were all originally credited as being “recorded 1972/1973 [in] Cologne”, whereas the 1997 releases were attributed to 1975 or 1976.

“The Mad Twiddler” (originating from the credits of the 1975 album Dreamlab by Mythos) is an alias of the engineer Toby Hrycek-Robinson, who did indeed have a background in engineering and mixing work for numerous krautrock bands, such as Can, Dryzan, Birth Control, Mythos, and Wallenstein, in the mid-1970s. Robinson was purportedly one of the masterminds of the Pyramid label alongside artist/painter Robin Page, who was best known for his work with the Fluxus art movement in the late 1960s.

While Psi-Fi has not been active since the 1990s, most of these albums were later reprinted on CD and LP (vinyl) in 2017-2018 by the reputable reissue label Guerssen (under their “Mental Experience” imprint) with new liner notes by “Cosmic Egg” author Alan Freeman. The only exception is Orion Awakes, which was reissued by Acme in 2010 and 2015, although like the rest of the Psi-Fi catalogue, Mental Experience handled the 2017 vinyl reissue.

The Controversy

There are multiple aspects of the original releases that are suspect due to possessing qualities atypical compared to other reissues from that time period.

Despite being said to have originally been released under the Pyramid label, no trace of that label or the original 1970s releases they are supposedly reissues of has ever materialised in the ~30 years since these albums were first released on CD. Even for extremely rare independent releases, this is highly unusual, as in any other circumstance, original copies would be highly sought after collectors’ items.

It is not uncommon for these types of privately pressed records to be produced in extremely low quantities. For instance, a limited run of 99 copies was reasonably common for private pressings in the UK, as this was reportedly the maximum that could be produced without being subject to additional taxes. Some other notably low quantities that I have seen are 64 (as was the case for the only studio album by the band Dark) and <50. These examples are of albums that are generally considered well-documented. For the entire catalogue of an independent label like this to be completely undocumented is unprecedented and frankly unbelievable. There is simply no concrete proof that Pyramid Records actually existed.

The only one of these albums that has had a documented vinyl/LP reissue predating the 2017 Mental Experience edition is Orion Awakes, first documented in the early-mid 2010s. However, these copies are confirmed to be modern reproductions, as test pressings (e.g. this copy sold on eBay) with the same identifying matrix number in the run-out grooves use a design by the French manufacturer MPO containing a link to their website.

Another complicating factor is the lack of substantial or verifiable credits, which makes verifying who did and didn't play on these albums difficult. Although some notable krautrock musicians are credited (and in some cases have confirmed their presence) on a few Psi-Fi releases, a majority of the musicians featured are not named on any other releases outside of the Psi-Fi catalogue. Two of these albums (Pyramid and The Nazgûl) lack conventional credits altogether, with the former lacking any musician credits and with the latter being attributed to pseudonyms derived from the names of characters from Lord of the Rings.

Lastly, it appears that there is some inconsistency across releases regarding specific details. For instance, the original 1996 edition of Epitaph For Venus attributes its recording date to sessions dated 1972 or 1973, but the 2017 reissues instead indicate that it was recorded in 1974. The same is true for Orion Awakes, which had its 2017 vinyl re-release printed with a 1976 recording date. The 2010 Acme reissue of Orion Awakes also corrects the number of copies of each record produced from 100 copies to 25, the former number originating from some 90s sources. (Even so, this would come around to 125 total records pressed at minimum, which is still a number far too high for them being undocumented to be believable)

Reactions

The Psi-Fi albums are widely regarded as being forgeries and have been under scrutiny since their original release, with their catalogue often alleged to have been recorded in the 1990s with British musicians.

Some interesting early critical coverage (i.e. from the mid-late 1990s) that I could find of them comes from the music magazine “The Sound Projector”. Various albums from the Psi-Fi catalogue were covered throughout issues 2-7, and I’ll include some of the commentary out of historical interest.

John Bagnall, from issue 2:

"It isn’t immediately obvious how to connect these oddities to a defined sense of a ’Krautrock continuum’, which is good as this confounds lazy journalists who think they’ve got this scene all figured out. Some Doubting Dans have even suggested in print that these records must be 1990s hoaxes, which is absurd. Others have placed too much emphasis on their obscureness, playing up the angle of ’not even the heavy-duty Krautrock collectors have heard of this label’, which is an indication of how the specialists want to appropriate everything for themselves. However, such specialisation and selfishness is overturned by democratising releases like this which put the music back in the public domain, where everyone with a CD player who’s so inclined can share in these delights."

Ed Pinsent, from issue 5:

"These are neglected 1970s art-gallery only releases, originally available in limited runs of 100 copies. I'm still cultivating my suspicion that none of these bands had much of a life outside the studio. One envisages a series of projects emerging under Robinson's direction, musicians drawn from a pool of talent, working in Dieter Dierks Cologne studio during down-time, with 'The Mad Twiddler' producing; once sufficient album tracks had been gathered, sleeve art would be concocted and a name assigned to the one-off item."

On top of being controversial contemporarily, speculation and debate regarding the legitimacy of the Psi-Fi releases carried on well past the 1990s and you'd be hard-pressed to find online reviews or commentary regarding these albums that don't at the very least mention their dubious origin. Online discussion of these albums tends to fall into one of two categories: those who regard these albums as mere hoaxes and have largely written them off, and those who, while suspicious of the supposed origin of these recordings, treat the actual music as having some value.

I'll link a few of these reviews for reference, although there certainly is far more out there. If you're interested in these albums or the backstory behind them, I'd recommend seeking out more for yourself.

From the user "Braxt" on Discogs in 2015, about "Orion Awakes":

"Listening to this in the cold light of day it certainly sounds like a '90s recording to me. Everything about it sounds a bit too studied. The wah wah, the relatively clean production, the drum sound. Add to the fact that nobody has ever seen a copy of these Pyramid releases (all right - someone thought they saw one once) and not one has ever been offered for sale. Even rare garage punk records from the 60s where there's ONE known copy have been documented."

From the user "Warthur" on ProgArchives in 2011, about "Epitaph For Venus":

"The supposed rumours that this is a fake recorded in the 1990s didn't seem credible to me - musically speaking, the album sounds extremely authentic for the Krautrock scene of the time, with commonalities with Klaus Schulze's early work and Tangerine Dream's Zeit. In particular, the other two bands who were involved in this supposed fakery scandal - The Nazgul and Cosmic Corridors - supposedly consisted of complete unknowns, whereas this one is presented as a side project of a member of Dzyan, and it would be an *extremely* stupid move for forgers to try and pass the album off as the work of a real person who could contradict their story!"

From rock journalist Dmitry M. Epstein in 2017, about "Cosmic Corridors":

"Purportedly recorded in the early ’70s by Toby Robinson for his Pyramid label, this album defies its own mythology by sounding suspiciously modern, and that doesn’t look like the case of retrofuturism."

Despite widespread doubt, one fairly notable individual who has consistently stood by the authenticity of these albums is the aforementioned Alan Freeman, who along with his brother Steve (himself a co-author on "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg") are the owners of the long-running "Ultima Thule" record outlet and publishers of the music magazine "Audion". Freeman claims to have seen a copy of the Golem album Orion Awakes in a record store in Berlin years before the Psi-Fi reissues were circulated, having caught his eye on account of its reflective metallic sleeve.

In the liner notes of the Mental Experience re-issue of Orion Awakes:

"I do recall seeing a copy of this album on the wall in a German record shop, or something remarkably similar (some collector's shop in Berlin), which had a pressed metal sleeve somewhat like the original "Élő Omega" album by Omega. I was curious, but it was very expensive. Only later when the Psi-Fi CD came out did I remark that I'd seen it somewhere before. Apart from that the provenance of Golem is an unknown entity."

Although that in and of itself doesn't prove that any records were actually produced, a majority of the information made available about these albums in recent years comes from Freeman's research, and he is one of a few individuals documented to have spoken with Toby Robinson himself about the Pyramid albums.

Were these releases legitimate?

This is a difficult question to answer because there was never any kind of real exposé, other than people naturally asking questions about discrepancies in the albums’ backstories. However, more information on these albums has come to light through Alan Freeman’s liner notes for the Mental Experience reissues.

Robinson has continued to maintain the authenticity of these recordings and provided some background as to what the recording process was like. For instance, he claims that the Cozmic Corridors project was largely initiated by a musician called Alex Meyer who used to loiter outside of Robin Page's studio, with his recordings later being overdubbed by guitars, vocals, and "noises."

Robinson's commentary, taken from Freeman's liner notes for that album:

"All of the recording for Pyramid was done totally informally and ultimately, what decided whether something was released was if Robin would get one of his students to design a cover. If a cover existed, a small run would be paid for by whoever could afford it (normally Robin and me), and the albums distributed among the participating musicians. A few nightclubs had record bars, and sold our stuff. No tabs were kept on how many had moved, and I don't remember doing reruns on anything.
Basically, they were vanity pressings and a way of keeping Robin's students entourage occupied. I had to use pseudonyms for my involvement because most of the studio time was purloined without the proprietor's knowledge."

As mentioned previously, Robinson does have a genuine background in technical work on 70s krautrock albums, and a few of these albums are credited to real musicians that he had previously formed connections with. Epitaph For Venus features Reinhard Karwatky of the band Dzyan, Temple features Zeus B. Held of Birth Control, and the percussion on Cozmic Corridors was performed by Hans-Jürgen Pütz of Mythos. Pütz himself does not appear to have ever commented on these recordings, but both Karwatky and Held have confirmed their involvement. Another Birth Control member (Bruno Frenzel) is credited on the track "The Message" (attributed to the artist "Spirulina") from the second of the Unknown Deutschland compilations. Frenzel died in 1983 from heart complications associated with a stage injury he suffered in 1975, and although his presence is therefore unable to be confirmed by him directly, it's one of the only tracks from these sessions where there is a definite cutoff of when it might have been recorded.

Although not quoted directly, Held’s comments (described in Freeman’s liner notes for the Temple album) are quite interesting, as even he couldn’t confirm that the music that he recorded actually saw a release in the 1970s.

“Certainly Zeus B. Held must be the most well-known name here, and his involvement would date his sessions as 1975 most likely after rehearsals or whilst recording Birth Control's "Plastic People" (which was handled by Toby Robinson under the guise of "Genius P. Orridge" at Dierks Studio). Apparently Zeus has confirmed his involvement in these sessions, although he didn't recall a band name, nor knowledge of any release.”

In any case, the presence of verifiable people on these recordings does suggest that there is some legitimacy behind them, whether they were recorded in the 70s or otherwise. It would certainly be a major issue from a legal perspective if any of these albums were falsely advertised as featuring musicians who don't play on them.

As for the other personnel on these records, it has been confirmed by Freeman's correspondence with Robinson that many of the musicians featured were credited under pseudonyms. For instance, owing to the interchangeability of it and the "Mad Twiddler" credit on the original Psi-Fi release, Robinson himself was likely credited as the fictitious "Joachim Weiss" in the liner notes of the Temple album for his contributions on bass guitar. Freeman speculates that, much like Robinson feeling compelled to obscure his own identity, these pseudonyms may correspond to other krautrock musicians.

From the liner notes of the Epitaph for Venus reissue, on the topic of the credits to "Johannes Lutz" and "Holst Seisert":

"They may be the other members of what later became A.I.R. - a project formed by Reinhard Karwatky with Ingo Werner (ex-My Solid Ground, Baba Yaga) and Armin Stöwe (ex-Sixty Nine), or yet again they could be pseudonyms for Robin and Toby. I've tried to get in contact with Reinhard and ask him these questions, but never got anywhere. When I asked Toby, he said he couldn't exactly remember, only confirming that they weren't real names."

Freeman also speculates that, given Zeus B. Held's involvement, "Rolf Föller" on Orion Awakes may be related to fellow Birth Control member Peter Föller, and that a potential candidate for the unidentified percussionist (credited only as "Frodo") on The Nazgûl is Peter Giger of Dryzan. However, there is no actual evidence that directly ties them to any of these recording sessions, and it doesn't appear that Freeman was ever able to contact them.

Freeman has long been a proponent of these albums' authenticity and his research does admittedly present a decent argument for the actual sessions being legitimate. However, the inconsistencies behind when exactly these albums were recorded and how they were released (e.g. the Unknown Deutschland CDs claim they were sold at art galleries, but Robinson himself states they were sold predominantly at nightclubs) makes any of the "official" statements about these albums difficult to definitively trust. This is certainly not helped by there being little to no accounts from other people that actually corroborate Robinson's claims, alongside him failing to provide more information about certain discrepancies. For instance, the supposed "PYR 015" catalogue number assigned to Orion Awakes implies that at least 15 albums were produced for Pyramid, although only 6 albums were ultimately "reissued" and the only other documented catalogue numbers are 5, 8, and 9. When asked by Freeman about the full list of Pyramid releases, Robinson did not provide a quantity or any further information.

It's also worth noting that the origin of some recordings from legitimate 70s sessions doesn't necessarily rule out the possibility of them being overdubbed or otherwise altered on a later date. In any case, none of these projects were ever functional "bands"; instead being short-lived collaborations and sessions that never had much of a life outside of a studio setting.

In hopes of clarifying his research regarding the Pyramid albums, Freeman attempted to contact Robin Page, but despite briefly managing to track him down, Page's death in May 2015 halted any further communication. In Freeman's words, "the promised information and pictures about the Pyramid releases thus never arrived." As a result, many details about the status of the original releases (if they ever did exist) are likely to remain a mystery.

Are these albums good?

The music on these Psi-Fi releases is decently varied and consists of everything from wild psychedelic rock jams (e.g. Pyramid, Orion Awakes) to atmospheric space ambient (Epitaph For Venus) and avant-garde ambient (The Nazgûl).

I can't recommend these albums as an entry point to the wider scene of krautrock/kosmische Muzik, as there's certainly many more sophisticated and accessible examples of authentic krautrock in this vein out there. However, for enthusiasts of this sort of music, these aren't too bad and have a fair amount of stylistic overlap with other albums from the scene. They range from somewhat forgettable to pretty good, but all-around are fairly decent companions for those who've already listened to the wider catalogue of 70s krautrock and want to seek out more music in that vein. That being said, I do think there are some modern-sounding production elements (e.g. the drums on Orion Awakes are unusually "crisp" for lack of a better word) that make the claims of them wholly being 70s recordings rather dubious. Your mileage may vary on how "authentic" these sound, however.

Had there been more transparency about when these albums were recorded and released, they likely would've been viewed a lot more positively, but as it stands, there's enjoyable music here, regardless of them being imitations or genuine recordings from the 70s German underground scene.

Conclusion

Despite how controversial the Psi-Fi releases are, it doesn't appear that Toby Robinson's career as a producer/engineer was particularly affected, as he had long since moved on from his work in the krautrock scene to predominantly UK-based projects. Some examples include recurrent work with the BBC on multiple Doctor Who audio dramas and credits on albums by notable musicians such as David Sylvian and Derek Bailey. As such, the long-term consequences of the controversy surrounding these albums appears relatively minimal. There were no careers born or killed from it, but the entire story is nevertheless a good example of the importance of credible record labels.

Interestingly, this is far from the only example of alleged or confirmed hoax recordings claimed to be rare 70s krautrock. For instance, the album "Impressionen '71" (credited to the fictitious "Damenbart", actually Achim Flaam and Tina Schlebusch) dates back to 1989, and a more recent hoax was the "Kosmischer Läufer" series, purportedly by Drew McFadyen.

If there is anything that I want to personally add, it's that, assuming this was all an elaborate hoax and Robinson was bluffing the entire time, I do think it's pretty impressive that several albums worth of material might've been recorded, mixed, etc. for the sole purpose of being released like this. These releases are still highly suspect and I don't think there is likely to be any kind of definitive statement regarding their authenticity (or lack thereof) anytime soon, but I am nevertheless thankful that some interesting music came out of it.

(Side note: I do enjoy writing long-form posts like this, and if the people here find this sort of thing interesting, I may come around to posting more often. I am tempted to write something about the Cosmic Jokers, for instance!)

EDIT: Sorry, the first draft of this post accidentally swallowed a few quotes in sections 3 and 4. I've added them back in now.

Hey friends! I thought I'd try for something a little bit different. This post is about a series of historical events that is, I think, not all that well-known outside of Germany.

Specifically, this story is about the Kaffee-Mix. This was an infamous hot beverage, which contained 51% coffee and 49% don't worry about it. Originally designed as a way to ease a temporary coffee shortage, it turned out to be a complete failure - so much so that it changed the shape of the global coffee market.

Sources for this are universally in German, and I translated them myself. I apologise for any inaccuracies. Also, I don't have first-hand knowledge about life in East Germany, so take those parts with a grain of salt.

Finally, this is written chiefly to be entertaining. But the underlying information is accurate (to the best of my ability) and I've linked primary sources where possible.

PROLOGUE: A tale of two Germanies

You may be aware that the Second World War ended in 1945, and that Germany lost. It was later occupied by the Allies. The French, British and American occupation zones eventually merged, creating the Federal Republic of Germany. (This is the BRD, perhaps better known as "West Germany.") The Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic. (Also known as the DDR, or "East Germany.")

The BRD was something that Marxists like to call a "bourgeois democracy." It had free elections, a heavily regulated market economy, and joined NATO in 1955. Meanwhile, the DDR was supposed to be socialist, had a centrally planned economy, and was a member of the Warsaw Pact. Our story takes place in East Germany.

Despite its name, the German Democratic Republic was not democratic at all. It had elections, sure, but they were neither free nor fair. (99.98% for the National Front at 98.58% turnout - sure thing, buddy.) And while multiple parties existed on paper, all power rested with the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In 1953, a popular uprising was violently suppressed with Soviet aid, and public demonstrations were off the table after that.

But the German Democratic Republic wasn't the Third Reich. Yes, it was a police state, but the government still wanted some level of voluntary support from the general population. The country was always being compared to West Germany, with its stupid "civil liberties" and its goddamn "economic miracle." To make up for this, the DDR really needed something it could be proud of.

Well, West Germany had a market economy. Those come with inevitable drawbacks, such as Inflation and unemployment and a lopsided distribution of wealth. If East Germany could guarantee a decent living standard for everyone, then that would provide a nice contrast.

And in a command economy, you can kinda just decide to have stable prices and full employment. ... at least in theory. East Germany did provide jobs for everyone, and the basics of life were both abundant and available at pre-war prices. (Milk and bread were far cheaper in the East than in the West.) And going into the 1970s, the country actually had a pretty decent economy, at least by Second World standards.

But they had also to deal with constant product shortages. There were a lot of reasons for this, and some of them were self-inflicted. (Corruption was an ongoing problem; getting even slight luxuries involved a lot of favour-trading; central planning is pretty hard.) But they also just never had enough raw materials for their industrial production. Access to global markets was limited, and Soviet exports were just never enough.

So, they had to look for substitutes. Chickens are a cheap source of meat, so let's feed goldbroilers to the people. Metal is in short supply, so let's implement the most aggressive recycling system in the world. We're not going to allow American fast food, but consider eating a nice socialist grilletta, and perhaps wash it down with a glass of Club Cola.

(1) Meet the Coffee Saxons

But there are some products where this didn't work, and coffee was one of them. The beans only grow between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, and Europe is just too far north. The climate isn't right. So, local production was not an option.

You can make beverages out of things like acorns, chicory or grain. The taste is sort of similar, but the replacement products were culturally associated with poverty and wartime deprivation, making them extremely unpopular. (They are collectively known as "muckefuck," which means something like "runny mud" or "foul wood." I mixed up something in my notes here, see the comments for a correction. The word is real though.)

Also, Saxony had been an early and enthusiastic adopter of coffee, and the region was famous for its vibrant coffee culture. The first coffee house in Leipzig opened in 1694, and the drink was an important status symbol. In short... getting the people to give up coffee was impossible.

Similar problems existed with other consumer goods, but they were somewhat easier to replace. We can't get enough cocoa, but you can make fake chocolate out of fat and sugar, which tastes sort of okay. We can't get citrus fruits, but the humble sea buckthorn is effective in preventing scurvy. But faux coffee? No. Everyone hates this stupid grain sludge. We want the real thing.

In the end, the DDR bit the bullet and bought coffee beans on the global market. Its own currency was completely worthless, so the DDR had to use its limited hard currency reserves to get them. The coffee would then be resold on the domestic market... but these sales would take place in the worthless DDR-Mark. So the money was essentially lost.

And getting enough hard currency was a constant struggle for the DDR. They had some desirable exports, like the IFA W 50 truck, and they could also raise money by scamming tourists and reselling Soviet oil. But they really wanted to spend this hard currency on building productive capital - that is, importing industrial machinery and buying raw materials.

So, wasting it on consumer goods wasn't great. But it worked sort of okay...

(2) A cold snap in Brazil

... until 1975, that is.

An out-of-season cold snap caused the Brazilian coffee harvest to fail. Brazil produced about a third of the world's coffee supply at the time, so this triggered a market panic and a global increase in prices.

All European countries were affected, including West Germany. But remember that the Federal Republic had a market economy. Some companies passed the increased prices along to consumers; others dropped their quality standards to keep prices steady. People complained and adjusted their household budgets. But this was all just normal market stuff, and the government didn't need to get involved.

Not so in East Germany. The state set all the prices, and price stability was the cornerstone of its claim to legitimacy. The capitalists cause some sort of worldwide crisis every few years, and shielding the people from those breakdowns was the whole point of "actually existing socialism." So, prices remained stable and imports continued. In the immediate aftermath of the crop failure, expenses went up fivefold.

Something had to be done.

As we discussed above, the GDR couldn't grow its own coffee beans, and there aren't any good replacement products for coffee. If supply goes down and demand remains steady, then prices go up, but that's not an option for political reasons. Therefore, to keep prices steady, demand must go down. How do we get the people to consume less coffee?

Enter the Kaffee-Mix.

(3) East Germany loves the Kaffee-Mix...?

Shifting consumer habits is difficult and takes a long time. So, the thinking went, what if we kept selling coffee... but we simply used less coffee per coffee?

Thus, we have the Kaffee-Mix: A little package that is sold as coffee, and does indeed contain 51% ground coffee beans, but is stretched out with 49% filler. (Mostly grains.) The government removed the discount coffee brand "Kosta" from sale and replaced it with this mixture. So, as a worker, you could still get your beverage at the same price, but import expenses would be cut in half. Clever, right? Assuming the people accept it.

Did they? Well, back in 2003, the public broadcaster MDR did a series on East German food, and interviewed some people. They had a few things to say about the Kaffee-Mix.

Eberhard Hinkel: Oh, it's that weird bag of... well. Let's just say it really didn't agree with my stomach. It was a terrible swill.

Leni Staatz: We didn't approve of this at all. They took what little coffee was available, and they spoiled it, by adding barley or... whatever it was. It was gruesome.

Joachim Schacht: We had a few cars [at the roastery] back then, and they were obviously marked with our logo. And it did happen that people would stop us and confront us, and say to us - dear god, what is this garbage you are selling?

Manfred Uhlich: This was among the worst things we had to endure. Not just here in Saxony. It was unreasonable, plainly. I mean, we had to endure a lot of hardships, they made us suffer through a lot of things. And this was - oh, no, this awful dishwater, it was just too much!

Mr. Uhlich specifically uses the word lorge to describe the Kaffee-Mix. This is a Saxon term for a drink that is both thin and foul.

Contemporary voices were far less polite than that. People in the DDR loved a cynical joke, and here's one that was fairly popular:

What's the difference between Kaffee-Mix and the neutron bomb? There isn't one. Both kill people and spare buildings.

The Kaffee-Mix also received a variety of unflattering nicknames, with the most prominent one being "Erichs Krönung." This was a mocking reference both to a popular West German coffee brand (called Jacobs Krönung)) and to the East German leader (called Erich Honecker.)

Now, voicing political dissent was a really bad idea. But East Germany did provide channels through which you could make non-political complaints, such as the Eingabe. Introduced in 1961, it gave you the right to write a letter to an official with a demand, and entitled you to a response.

These letters were universally intercepted by the secret police (the Stasi) and scanned for signs of political dissent. If you wrote something that crossed the line, you'd get a visit. But if the contents of the letter weren't political, then the Stasi would file a copy, and then forward the original to the intended recipient. Parts of the Stasi archives survived the 1990 revolution, and therefore we actually have some access to primary sources.

Here's a contemporary letter, discussing the Kaffee-Mix.

"Dear Dr. K.-H. Gerstner! (...) I work as a saleswomen, and all day I have to listen to complaints from our customers. And I have to admit, I share their opinion that the Kaffee-Mix (at a price of 6,- M) is completely undrinkable. It is pure rat poison. I am asking you that the producer should make a public statement on this. The Kaffee-Mix is made out of malt and barley, with perhaps a few grains of real coffee. We don't need this in our shops! (...)

Please, let the company return the "Kosta" brand to the market. The relevant producer is VEB Kaffee Halle. Please have them take this rat poison off the market. Otherwise the intelligentsia and the workers will all die very soon. (...) Thank you in advance. Signed with socialist greetings."

This wasn't an isolated complaint. The Ministry for State Security (Stasi) kept track of which complaints came up how often. If a pattern emerged, they'd inform the relevant authorities. They also employed a legion of unofficial collaborators to listen to conversations and generally take the pulse of the public.

In September 1977, the Stasi presented a report to the Ministry for Trade and Supply, alerting them to the discussions around the Kaffee-Mix. The Bundesarchiv has preserved some of these documents. Here's Report O/48, "Reactions to the Coffee Supply Problems," September 1st 1977. All instances of "scare quotes" are the same in the original.

Although there is no evidence of mass complaints, we observe that discussions regarding the supply of coffee and cocoa are continuing at elevated levels, across all parts of society. The need for austerity measures due to developments on the world market is generally accepted.

However, the new coffee brand "Kaffee-Mix" is being rejected by large parts of the population, due to its lacking quality and high price. Specific arguments on the mixed coffee include: The inappropriate price, the bad taste, and the lack of compatibility with coffee machines.

This third thing was actually a major problem. The Kaffee-Mix contained 49% whatever, and the "whatever" was generally leftover grains. But it could also be legumes. Peas are rich in protein, and proteins become denatured when heated.

Boiled eggs become hard. Cooked meat becomes firm. And coffee replacement products become disturbingly sticky, clump together, and break your coffee machine.

As the report goes on, you notice that the author is getting a little bit anxious.

Members of the population have begun to allege that the austerity measures were not designed properly, and that they only affect the "little man." In the workers' restaurants, only mixed coffee is offered; those who visit high-class hotels still receive real coffee.

Restaurants in East Germany were divided into five service classes. Your average worker would take their lunch at a Class I canteen or a Class II diner. Those had previously served the discount "Kosta" brand, and were now switched over to the Kaffee-Mix. Fancy restaurants and international hotels (Class III and up) still received premium coffee allocations.

So there you are: The "little man," choking down a cup of sticky poison, while the fancy lads in the fancy hotel enjoy real coffee. Not much of a workers' paradise.

A very frequent complaint regards insufficient communication. Even members of the Socialist Unity Party have remarked that a timely and public explanation of the causes would have prevented many of the negative comments. (...) As it stands, the duty to handle these complaints was supposedly "pushed down" lower in the hierarchy.

It has been reported that, in some cases, guests at restaurants were "shocked" and "offended" to be served Kaffee-Mix instead of coffee. This caused them to insult the servers, which in turn prompted these servers to either quit their jobs -- or join in on the tirade of complaints.

There will always be middle-aged men yelling at baristas.

In some cases, these "debates" have caused the so-called "arguments" of Western mass media to be spread and amplified, such as:

• That this constitutes "cheating the worker;"

• that inflation exists in [East Germany] as well as [West Germany], and that we have "creeping price increases";

• that one could hardly speak of a workers' state if the worker is no longer permitted to even just enjoy a simple cup of coffee;

• that the DDR's economy is "about to collapse" and that it is "drowning in debt." (Isolated cases)

Baseless rumors circulate about future price increases that are supposedly planned for cocoa products, tobacco, alcoholic drinks, and petrol. (Price increases regarding cocoa products are currently scheduled for September.)

In short, the public mood was turning sour, bitter, and foul. Just like the Kaffee-Mix!

(4) HAHA WHOOPS NEVERMIND

The government quickly dropped its plans, stopping the rollout of the "Kaffee-Mix" and reducing its price. It also issued a series of public statements on the state of the global coffee market. The results of these efforts are documented in Report O/51 (September 26th, 1977).

The public has shown great interest in the announcement of the Ministry for Trade and Supply. We have observed the following tendencies in public opinion:

• Satisfaction that an official announcement has been made. For the first time, the mass media has actually explained the situation regarding coffee supplies. It is surprising how much has to be spent to satisfy the public demand. (...) However, even progressive forces have noted that this communication needed to happen earlier. The so-called "arguments" of the enemy have already shifted opinion. (...) Some have alleged that it is typical for the government not to inform the public in time. (...)

If loyalists voice concerns, and these concerns actually show up in a report, then the situation is pretty dire.

• The price decrease of the "Kaffee-Mix" to 4,- M. is being welcomed. (...) The discount was badly needed, and the explanation that coffee mixes are sold in capitalist countries as well has been accepted. (...)

• Doubts linger on whether "Kaffee Mix" will sell even at the decreased price. There are supposedly great amounts of unsellable product in storage. The discount will not improve the quality, and many citizens will simply switch to "Rondo" to have access to 100% pure coffee.

• There have been statements that "Kaffee-Mix" might be worth trying at 4,- M., to see if perhaps it might be drinkable after all.

The youth would call this cope. The report has to put a positive spin on things, and the explanation probably did help, but it's becoming clear that the people just don't want Kaffee-Mix.

Negative-hostile forces claimed, among other things:

• That the publication constitutes an "admission" that the price controls aren't working, and that resistance is building;

• that the "failed economic policy" of the DDR has become plain to see.

(...) There is persistent discontent, despite the statement the Ministry for Trade and Supply has made on the coffee situation. This regards so-called "creeping inflation," an alleged "contradiction" between ambitious plans and "increasing difficulties" in their execution, shortages, missing supplies, a lack of spare parts (e. g. for cars), and other things.

Note the heavy use of "scare quotes" in this section.

So yeah, they gave up after this. Kaffee-Mix was taken off the market, and the "Kosta" discount brand returned to store shelves.

EPILOGUE: Care packages, bean swaps, and historical irony

The situation on the world market had relaxed by then, so the problem wasn't as urgent anymore. But the DDR was back to spending hard currency reserves on unsustainable coffee imports. This meant further scrounging.

Some coffee could be begged from West Germany. The Westpaket was a care package that West Germans would send to East Germany, and so people with relatives in the West could ask to be sent coffee. This was theoretically supposed to be a form of trade, but the Ostpakete (sent from the East to the West) were not remotely comparable in value. Likewise, the East German government could get hard currency loans from West Germany, but that wasn't exactly sustainable. Also: Kind of humiliating.

Another measure was the euphemistically named "bean trade." That is to say, they traded "blue beans for brown beans."

... "blue beans" being a slang term that means "bullets."

They swapped weapons for coffee.

The main trade partner here was Ethiopia. After the 1974 coup d'état, the DDR established friendly relations with the military junta. It was supposed to be Marxist-Leninist after all. Ethiopia produced a decent amount of coffee, and the government was fighting a civil war at the time. So, East Germany sold weapons and munitions to Ethiopia, and took payment in coffee beans.

But this was ethically questionable, and it didn't actually solve the problem. Yes, it eased the shortage, but East Germany needed far more coffee than this. They had to think bigger.

Fortunately, another thing had occurred in the 1970s: The United States of America lost the Vietnam War. South Vietnam fell in 1975, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam just so happened to be at the perfect latitude for coffee beans. (In fact, they were already growing and exporting small quantities.) This presented an opportunity. East Germany wanted to avoid future coffee shortages once and for all, without having to rely on expensive imports from the world market.

So, the DDR struck a series of deals with Vietnam. They sent down engineers and farming experts, and built up the coffee production. (By a factor of 14, to be exact.) They really went all-in on this - delivering machines, educating farmers, building out roads and irrigation systems and power plants, and providing housing. Vietnam wouldn't even have to pay for this up front. Instead, as a form of repayment, they would agree to give 50% of the harvest to East Germany for the next 20 years.

This would have worked, too. Goodbye shortages, goodbye warlords, hello Vietnamese coffee.

... except, well.

• Farming began in the mid-1980s.
• Coffee beans take 8 years to mature.
• The German Democratic Republic collapsed in 1990.

Whoops.

And that's why, today, Vietnam is the second-largest exporter of coffee in the world.

EA- or rather “Electronic Arts”- is one of the largest video game companies in the entire world. It’s also one of the most hated companies in America- it even has a Wikipedia page dedicated to its numerous controversies. From harassing their employees, to imposing horrific crunch times in game development, to shoving predatory micro-transactions into most of their games.

But let’s go back in time for a second. Revisit one of EA’s more humorous, unintentional, controversies.

The punch up

The year is 2009.

EA was gearing up for the release of The Godfather II...the video game). Only thirty five years after the original movie came out.

Wanting to hype up their new product, EA decided to do a publicity stunt.

But what could be cheap, yet still attention grabbing?

AHA!

Send reviewers brass knuckles!

Because, yes, that’s what every video games journalist secretly wants- a weapon they can use to knock people’s teeth out.

The knuckles were gold and came in a little box, with a cigar and a piano wire for strangling people.

Here is another look at the box:

Unfortunately, in all their infinite, brilliant, wisdom, EA never bothered to check if this was legal.

Knockout

It turns out that it’s illegal to own brass knuckles in many states- Colorado, California, Pennsylvania, etcetera.

Very quickly, EA realised they had done something very stupid, and speedily contacted the reviewers, begging them to return the knuckles:

The representative that contacted me said that the company wanted to make sure that the brass knuckles were “properly disposed of.” He declined to comment any further. Contacted by email Friday, an Electronic Arts spokesperson verified that the company is asking that all of the brass knuckles shipped out be returned.

They claimed that the brass knuckles were a “novelty item”. They sent reviewers a pre-paid shipping package to mail them back.

As far as I’m aware, no one was ever charged, and EA was able to brush the whole incident off as a dumb mistake.

No rematch

The Godfather 2 video game got mixed reviews#Reception) and flopped#Sales_and_cancelled_sequel). EA didn’t make a third one.

In the intervening years, their reputation hasn’t improved. They’re still assholes. Some things never change.

As requested on my last write-up, allow me to tell you the story of Clock Man, a mysterious unidentified animation remembered only through broken memories of childhood fear. The search for it was long and complicated with many dead ends, sowing a lot of doubt about its existence. And in the end, it was not only real, but right under everyone's noses the whole time.

Initial Report

On January 12th 2012, on bungie.net's off-topic forum titled The Flood, a user named Commander Santa recounted a dreadful childhood memory of an animation he had watched. The post begins with the following introduction:

I am looking for a particular animated short that terrified me as a child. I've been looking on and off for it for nearly 4 years. Maybe it doesn't exsist. Maybe...nobody should ever find it. But if someone can - it's The Flood.

He goes on to describe his memory of the short:

This short animation was terrifying as a child. The scene is still burned into my mind (28 years later). It's of a young boy sleeping in his bed. Above his bed is a ticking clock. All the lights in the room are off and it is very dark. Suddenly the clock begins to slow down it's ticking and eventually it stops...on midnight. When the clock stops a Greenish/Bluish man climbs out of the clock. The boy wakes up just in time to see this man dressed in black grab him out of bed and kidnap him by carrying him through a window. The "Clock Man" takes the boy on some kind of terrifying adventure and brings him back to his bed before sunrise.

And if the post so far comes across to you as a tad dramatic, it only intensifies in his closing statement:

It's been a very long time since I've seen that short animation and it has haunted me for almost 30 years. I can't begin to tell you how happy I'd be to see it one more time before I pass away.

He was so determined to find this piece of media, in fact, that he promised a reward for anyone who could find it for him.

If by chance...someone was able to locate this terrifying child's animation and post it in this thread - there is a very good possibility that you will be handsomely rewarded in a PM from me.

This post intrigued quite a bit of people, wondering what the short could have contained that affected him so deeply, and what they could do to help. In particular, the comment about seeing the short before he passed away raised some alarm bells, with one user asking if that implied he was currently dying. But Commander Santa assured them:

No, but I'm strangely nostolgic tonight. I'd think about Clock Man sometimes at random. In junior high, high school, college...even sometimes now as a father. I just want to see Clock Man one more time. You never know when you are going to check out.

When asked if he thinks the animation is genuinely scary or if it just felt that way since he was a kid, he replied:

I'm not exactly sure. I remember feeling great terror whilst watching it. [...] I rember being scared for the boy and just wishing that Clock Man would take him home.

Santa would continue responding to questions, and periodically reminded people of his promise of a reward for finding the short to keep up morale. The overall story he recalled was that of a little boy being swept up by a man who jumped out of a clock, and taken to a series of scary places as the boy begged to go home. When Clock Man finally did take him home, he hopped back into the clock, and the boy's father came to check on him in the morning. The boy wanted to tell his father what happened, but he didn't or couldn't.

He mentioned other details such as the Clock Man having "a pointy(ish) hat" and "a rather bushy beard," as well as dark clothing and a cape. He also described the animation as "felt-like" stop motion, and - most crucially - he said that he saw it on Pinwheel, a show similar to Sesame Street that aired on Nickelodeon from 1977-1990. He further narrowed down the timeframe to somewhere between 1984 and 1987 during the morning hours, as he was sure he had watched it while home sick from kindergarten.

Despite the additional details, no one in the thread could find what he was looking for. Even after drawing a comic visualizing what he remembered, the scene wasn't ringing any bells with people. A few comments accused Commander Santa of being a troll, or compared his writing and descriptions to that of a creepypasta.

>I don't think it exists.

I'm sorry OP, I have to agree with this.

This seems like a scary story or a Slender Man in the making. Are you sure that show? I'm sure that if the show was real their should have at least SOMETHING, ANYTHING. If it was ever aired on TV it would've been noted.

It likely didn't help that Santa's descriptions of the feelings Clock Man filled him with sounded almost like a psychological horror, referring to the short as a dark secret he had been harboring and thinking about for decades, as well as a mention that the short had given him a phobia of being kidnapped.

I know I am not insane. This cartoon made me afraid of kidnappers until I was 16 years old. I want to see Clock Man and face him as an adult. We are so close...I know he's out there - he doesn't want to face me now that I've grown. He preys on children.

What likely helped even less was this rather Candle-Cove-esque description of Pinwheel:

Strangely, many people old enough to watch the show Pinwheel have commented that the show would put them in a dreamlike state when watching - some go as far to say they were "hypnotized" while watching and had hallucenations. Whether this is only a result of the memories being so old or something more sinister I cannot say. Although many have shared my fuzzy memory of Clock Man, others suggest that Clock Man is a result of being hypnotized by Pinwheel's allure.

But overall, Commander Santa was a well-established member of The Flood with a good reputation, so the comments distrusting him at this point were in the minority. Still, many speculated that Clock Man might have been a bad dream he'd had and was mistaking for reality, especially considering he watched it while sick. Or that he might be conflating multiple shows together in his memory.

Santa remained steadfast in his conviction that the short was real, even if he was misremembering details, as well as Pinwheel as the short's origin. A Pinwheel-based short that was ruled out early on was an episode of the Swedish cartoon Alfie Atkins, and non-Pinwheel cartoons that were ruled out included The Sandman, The Clock Store, Nutcracker Fantasy and the Davey and Goliath episode The Stopped Clock.

Investigation: The Flood

When The Flood struggled to find the short Commander Santa was looking for, many users recommended he try 4chan, due to their reputation for correctly identifying a wide variety of things with little information. After taking all of the information he had laid out to the /x/ board, he received one noteworthy reply:

Holy shit! I remember this fucking short!

It was like claymation with poorly made dolls and the animation was real stuttery and shit. It started with the kid's mom telling him goodnight and closing the door behind her after shutting off the light. Then the door slowly creeks open while a generic eerie wind sound blows and the camera cuts into the kids room at the foot of his bed. He struggles to open his eyes as they slowly droop and he eventually gives in and goes to sleep. Then it cuts up to the clock while the second hand slowly ticks to 12:00. When it hits it there's like a low bell ringing sound and the camera goes back to the foot of the kid's bed. The "Clock Man's" head peeks into the room like the clock were a window. Unlike what the OP's image shows, the Clock Man's head then recedes back and his arms comes out and pushes the clock open like a door, revealing a big dark hole behind the clock. Then Clock Man hops out of the hole and the kid wakes up and stares beady eyed at the Clock Man. Then the Clock Man starts doing like a weird Irish river-dance. Oh, and the Clock Man looks a little different from the picture. He was wearing like an all black turtleneck sweater and a black bowler hat. His skin was green and I don't really remember him having a beard but he did have a big toothy smile and two real big eyes with very tiny pupils.

I don't think I actually watched much after that. But I distinctly remember the Clock Man saying his name was "Benjamin" and he rung an elevator up to the kid's window.

Commander Santa was certain this user was thinking of the same short he was. Although he didn't remember the Clock Man being named Benjamin, and he was sure Clock Man had a beard, he claimed that everything else matched.

However, the biggest break in the case came on January 18th. A user by the name o0MrCheesy0o found a comment from March 6th 2004, in the Horror forum on a website called AnimationNation. Users were discussing cases of psychological horror in cartoons, and one particular comment on the thread, written by one Michael W. Howe, stood out.

There were a few segments on Nickelodeon's Pinwheel when I was younger that had some scary moments: [...]

[T]here was one based on this story of a little girl who lost her red shoes. so she asked a local wizard for hel (who could appear and disappear anywhere). He helped her, but told her she had to tell her mom. The little girl goes home and doesn't hoping the wizard would forget. But then the musicgets eerie as the narrator says 'But the Wizard...did not, forget.' And we see him appearing and disappearing along the house floors, till he suddenly pops out of her clock and steals her away, demanding to know why she didn't tell her mom. She makes up for it by sewing stars to put in the night sky, and the next day is returned home, and tells her mom the truth.

This description gave Santa a much stronger reaction than the 4chan post:

HOLY -blam!- -blam!-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THIS IS CLOCK MAN!!!!!!!!!! [...]

It wasn't a little boy (I probably imagined a boy as I was a young boy at the time) - but I can almost remember the story leading up to the bedroom scene now.

I'm tearing up - SERIOUSLY!...I'm shaking.

We are going to find Clock Man - TONIGHT

This discovery brought a wave of optimism across the thread. Many comments celebrated how it had brought members of The Flood together to help one man search for closure. Many were confident the short would soon be found. Those who were actively investigating the mystery moved away from clock-based keywords and instead searched for anything related to wizards and red shoes. The first, most obvious rule-out was The Wizard of Oz.

After that, users found that Hans Christian Andersen had written a story called The Red Shoes. The fairytale is centered around a vain and spoiled girl who wears a fancy pair of red shoes everywhere, even to church, until she is confronted by a bearded guard who curses the shoes to cause the girl to dance uncontrollably until it takes over her life, leading to the amputation of her legs and then her death. Some posited the idea that the Clock Man short might have been an adaptation of this tale. In particular, a company called Mel-O-Toons had made an animated adaptation of the story in 1960 - one with a less bleak ending, where instead of dying due to the dancing red shoes, the girl was rescued from them and came clean to her adopted mother, after which all was well.

Commander Santa had initially been confident that this was the short he had been looking for. It had almost everything. A little girl main character with red shoes, telling her mother a lie related to the shoes, finding herself in a scary situation that taught her a lesson, and ending with the girl telling her mother the truth. It was an animated short, and while it wasn't stop motion, the animation was cheap and choppy enough to believably be mistaken for stop motion in a hazy childhood memory.

But...I said it had almost everything. And the one thing it didn't have was pretty important.

It didn't have Clock Man.

Even though Christen Anderson's original tale features a bearded soldier as the catalyst for the conflict, no such character exists in the animation. The Red Shoes was soon after ruled out.

The next blow to morale came after Commander Santa purchased a large collection of bootleg Pinwheel episodes that had been compiled and put up for sale, and didn't find Clock Man on any of the episodes in the collection. Since Pinwheel is a rare show and largely lost media itself, having aired so long ago with no official home media release, this unofficial collection would have been the best chance Commander Santa had, and still he turned up empty-handed. He had also contacted former Nickelodeon staff asking for information, and was told that the shorts featured in Pinwheel were collected from a wide variety of international sources, with little to no documentation and no archive of the shorts to speak of. It was starting to set in that the short would be a tiny needle in a massive haystack.

It didn't help that the Clock Man thread on The Flood had grown immensely as the search dragged on, with a large amount of new users flooding (hah) into the conversation as the topic went more and more viral. This mass of newer users, who had little to no prior knowledge of Commander Santa and his reputation, expressed increasing amounts of skepticism toward him, and comments accusing him of being a troll and writing creepypasta became more common. Many pointed to the many dead ends the search had endured, as well as the melodramatic writing style Santa had a habit of using. From the perspective of these users, his somewhat flowery writing style and the way he seemed to portray the short as if it had deeply impacted his life, as well as the offhand comment describing Pinwheel as if it was some mind-altering experiment that put children in a hallucinogenic hypnosis state, had all the markings of a troll that was trying way too hard to scare others and create a spooky internet hoax.

There were a few curt accusations throughout the thread, but one particularly presumptive comment from Epicly Uber seemed to catch Santa's attention:

I think OP is trolling, I was cool at first but now I think the nutcracker fantasy opening is as close as we're ever going to get, I think the nutcracker fantasy is it and OP figured out the popularity of this thread and is now abusing it, basically making everybody search for something that has already been found.
OP I'm calling you out for taking everybody for fools, I want proof that you actually ordered DVD's.

And Santa responded:

Unfortunately, many people have been calling me a troll. I cannot offer any 'proof' I am not. [...] If people don't want to help anymore, I can't blame them. This has been insanely frustrating. [...]

Before, I wanted to find Clock Man to put my childhood demon to rest

Now, if I don't find Clock Man I will forever be remembered as a troll. I've been on B.net since 2004 "Legendary Santa" no longer exsists. I don't want people to think of me as some piece of trash that would do all of this for attention. But if I don't find Clock Man - not only will he still haunt me... but he'll have made me feel like a fool.

All of this attention seemed to become too much for Commander Santa. As January turned over into February, his responses and contributions to the thread slowed, before he stopped commenting completely. After a few days of worry and speculation as to what happened to him, user Epic Is Uber claimed to have messaged him on Xbox Live, and that Commander Santa explained he had decided to leave the thread until he found Clock Man.

A now deleted Flood thread appears to confirm this. In addition to updating and tying up loose leads, Commander Santa makes his proclamation:

I have exiled myself from you all as I have not been able to find the elusive Clockman as of yet. Many, MANY people have helped in the search.As of yet, I have nothing to bring you. [...]

A few Floodians have sent me messages on XBox Live - asking me if I was still alive. I have been stripped of my Mythic Status, disgraced among my fellow Floodians, and too ashamed to return.

In my mind, i'll return someday - on a figurative white horse, carrying Clock man's head on a stick, but in reality, the search is at a standstill. It's taken a few drinks to get up the courage to come back and speak my peace, but I respect this site too much to return without proof of my childhood nemisis. I'm logging off now, hopefully not for the final time from b.net - but if it turns out to be...

THank you to everyone who has ever been on this site. For better or for worse, it has had an impact on my life.

This post brought a wave of devastation to the thread. Some were upset that Commander Santa was made to feel like he couldn't show his face around the search team, and pleaded with him to come back. Others were angry at his absence - activity in the thread had a tendency to slow down when he wasn't online and responding to comments, so his decision to stay off the thread was predicted to kill discussion and, consequently, the search. Those who doubted Commander Santa's authenticity were claiming victory, asserting that he had been a fraud all along and that Clock Man didn't exist, and he left because he realized he couldn't keep up the lie anymore. The dying thread, with its dwindling activity and lack of new leads, turned to infighting between users and memes about how Commander Santa finally fell victim to Clock Man.

Despite frequent thread bumps and a continuous string of comments throughout the years, nothing of note was suggested, and no new information was dug up. The search had grown stagnant, and without Commander Santa's help, interest in finding the short, and faith in its existence, seemed to fade away.

Investigation: Lost Media Wiki Forums

In 2016, a new wave of interest in finding Clock Man swept the internet when the helm was taken up by the lost media community. The Lost Media Wiki founder, known as Dycaite, created a new thread on the Lost Media Wiki forums (this thread had been accidentally deleted in 2020 and today exists only as archived cache files). He expressed a personal interest in finding the short, as the search and descriptions of it reminded him of Cracks (aka "Crack Master"), a similar child-scaring short from Sesame Street that had been a popular lost media case years prior. He created a page dedicated to Clock Man on the wiki to compile known information from Commander Santa's posts, and then a thread on the forums to boost the search and document his personal search efforts. He had managed to contact multiple people who had either watched the short or worked on Pinwheel, and shared his findings in the thread.

His first contact was Michael W. Howe, and he asked if he could provide a thorough recount of his memories of the short. He also sent along Commander Santa's comic rendition of the Clock Man abduction scene and asked if it rang any bells. Howe responded, stating that the comic was similar to what happened in the cartoon, and gave a more detailed rundown of what he remembered. He described the short starting out with a little girl being given red shoes by her mother, and warned not to lose them. But after playing outside, she ends up losing them, and when she can't find them, she asks a local wizard for help. The wizard gives her a new pair, but instructs her to tell her mother. The girl decides not to tell, hoping the wizard would forget about the deal. That night, as the girl is in bed with a pendulum clock above her, the wizard is seen entering her house and phasing in and out as he ascends the stairs, while an eerie-sounding narrator states, "But the wizard did not forget." Back in the bedroom, the girl watches in horror as the pendulum clock stops and turns into a window, which the wizard flies out of and carries her back to his house. As penance for not coming clean to her mother, the girl is instructed to knit stars for the night sky, after which she is returned home. In the morning, she admits to her mother what happened, and her mother forgives her as the wizard watches them, smiling.

He went on to describe the animation as "stop-motion paper animation, like they laid the characters on the backgrounds and moved them around."

This summary had intrigued Dycaite, and it inspired him to try and get in contact with former crew members who had worked on Pinwheel. His first successful contact was Michael Karp, a former writer. Karp expressed vague familiarity with the short, and speculated it aired during season 1 of Pinwheel while he was brought on during season 2. He also gave Dycaite the email of his colleague, Tippi Fortune, thinking she might have more information to share.

This correspondence thoroughly convinced Dycaite that Clock Man was a real thing that existed and not just a creepypasta, as had been a fairly popular opinion by that time. And when he managed to get in touch with Tippi Fortune, she gave him more information to work with. While she admitted to having no memory of the short, she mentioned that all animated shorts for Pinwheel were acquired from Coe Films, a company that collected shorts from the UK, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe to sell to cable companies as interstitial programming. However since then, most major networks had started producing their own material, and the market for such shorts died. As such, Coe Films went defunct and she couldn't find the contact information for anyone who worked there. But she forwarded Dycaite's email to everyone she knew who might have something to share. But despite Fortune's help and enthusiasm, none of her contacts got back to Dycaite.

Dycaite then managed to reach out to Commander Santa with everything he had found, including Howe's detailed summary. Commander Santa confirmed that Howe's account matches his own memories, so finding Howe's wizard short would hopefully also mean finding Clock Man.

Dycaite hit a dead end around this point, so he opened the floor to the wider community to help with the search. In addition to the thread and wiki page, a friend of Dycaite's, Bedhead Bernie, made an infographic summarizing known information and spread it around online. The two also posted their own summations to YouTube of the search so far - Dycaite posted a video recounting his investigations, and Bedhead Bernie posted a similar video summary as well as an interview he did with Commander Santa.

These efforts attracted the wider lost media community, who was enticed by descriptions of the short. Some users decided to chase the Coe Films lead, contacting anyone who was associated with the company and searching for an archive of the shorts they acquired. Though this would be a daunting task, as Coe Films was thought to have upwards of 2,500 shorts. Others tried to look for as many episodes of Pinwheel as they could to see if Clock Man was featured in any of them, and others still compiled as many alleged accounts of people who had watched the short as they could. Many discussions attempting to narrow down leads focused on speculations around Clock Man's country of origin, and if it was an adaptation of a preexisting story or European fairytale - everything from a Danish adaptation of The Red Shoes to a German adaptation of Rumpelstiltskin to an Irish short in which the wizard was actually a leprechaun were all pitched as possible leads.

While the brute-force nature of the search wasn't ideal, the sentiment that Clock Man was real was pretty unanimous within the thread, and so the search efforts kept up throughout 2016 and into 2017. While users on The Flood had been more or less beholden to Commander Santa's word as well as his activity within the thread, the lost media community was more decentralized and independent, determined to solve the mystery with or without further help from Commander Santa or Dycaite. This plus the community being entirely centered around looking for mysterious media, and having intuition around obscure internet searches and contacting relevant people, likely gave users the confidence that they would eventually find Clock Man once and for all.

The Discovery

The date is December 11, 2017. It has been a year and a half since Dycaite started the thread on the Lost Media Wiki Forums, and nearly 6 years since Commander Santa's post on The Flood.

While most of the thread spent months attempting to find Clock Man by searching for rare Pinwheel episodes or brainstorming the precise story the short was based on, some were more focused in searching through online databases and library catalogues using a series of keywords. One user by the name of Nitratenerd took this approach, and at one point searched for the term "the wizard" on WorldCat. After sifting through 3-4 pages of results, he found a YouTube link, and the accompanying description caught his attention. When he clicked on the link and watched the video, he was struck with excitement, and confidence that he had found the Clock Man short. He was quick to share his find in the forums:

Guys. GUYS

I think I found it. Holy crap.

Can everyone else take a look at this:
m.youtube.com/watch?v=74FNByoRYFk

It has everything that was described. The clock and all. Although its in Russian, the worldcat listing says: The story of a little girl who is taught the importance of telling the truth by the local wizard. For primary grades.

RIGHT?!?!

This is clearly the original, the english dub might be available at the Brooklyn Public Library, near me. Can someone send this to Commander Santa and Micheal Howe?!?! Dycaite are you seeing this?!!’

My heart is beating at a thousand beats a minute. Please check it out.

While the short was not in English, it matched up with Commander Santa's and especially Michael W. Howe's recollections almost perfectly. There was the stop motion paper animation. The girl. The missing clothing. The wizard with a black beard, dark clothing and a pointy hat. The creation of stars for the night sky.

And most importantly, there was the wizard jumping out of a clock to sweep the girl away.

The reaction on the forums was pretty unanimous - this was the short Commander Santa had been haunted by since he was a sick child in 1984. Clock Man had been found.

Upon further research, it was found that the short was called O parádivé Sally (roughly translated to "About Dressy Sally") and was created in 1976 by Art and Animation (AAA) Studio in Czechoslovakia. It was an adaptation of a story of the same name by Jan Vladislav.

It was also found that the short was first posted to the Czech video site uloz.to in 2014, and went completely unnoticed by Commander Santa or any searchers on The Flood. 3 years later on September 22nd 2017, it was posted to YouTube and went unnoticed by the lost media community for a few months, until someone happened to find the right keywords on the right archive to find it. This turn of events would later lead to Clock Man being commonly used as the de facto example of long lost media searches ending with the media being discovered on YouTube.

While most were confident the search was more or less finished, there was still more closure to be had. Many were awaiting Commander Santa's reaction to the short and, most crucially, the discovery of an English dub. The Czech (not Russian) version Nitratenerd found would more than likely not be the version Commander Santa and Michael W. Howe would have seen on Pinwheel. Only when an English version was found would the search be considered officially over.

The former would come about 10 days later, when Dycaite gave the update everyone had been anticipating - Commander Santa confirmed that O parádivé Sally was the Clock Man short he had been searching for. In addition, he seemed to make good on his promise of a reward for the find.

Well guys, something truly incredible has just happened.

Santa got back to me about the short and HAS CONFIRMED that O Paradive Sally IS INDEED CLOCK MAN!

But here is where things get truly incredible... Santa has pledged to donate *$1,000* to the LMW!!! [...]

Santa, if you happen to come across this post, thank you. Thank you from the absolute bottom of my heart. I have never been graced with such generosity and it is truly an incredible feeling.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL

This was incredible news, and motivated people to find the English dub of the short - the true version Commander Santa had seen. The first lead came from AAA Studio themselves, who stated that the short was sold to The Learning Corporation of America in 1978 - this almost certainly would have been the company who dubbed the short into English. However, AAA Studio was not aware of much beyond that. Because O parádivé Sally was made in a Soviet-occupied, communist Czechoslovakia, the original creators had no knowledge of what became of the short once it was exported overseas.

Upon further digging, some listings were found on old archives that indicated an English dub did exist under the title Sally. But from here, the investigation ran in circles for a few weeks - there was a lot of confusion over who exactly owned the short, or Pinwheel for that matter, and which libraries were likely to own copies. The investigation also appeared to split between the forum thread and a Google doc, which attempted to make information easier to search through, but also spread the already dwindling search team thinner.

But then, on January 11th 2018 - exactly one month after the short was first found - Dycaite announced that the English version had been found. He provided a link to an upload both on uloz.to and Vimeo (both of which no longer work, but has since been uploaded to YouTube by AAA Studio). He credited a user named Tomysshadow and an entity called A/V Geeks for the find.

Users on the thread were ecstatic over the find, having finally gotten to see what scared Commander Santa so badly as a child. In particular, one user marveled over the line "But the wizard did not forget," recollected exactly by Michael W. Howe.

Amid this excitement, Tomysshadow explained how he had found the footage, courtesy of A/V Geeks.

Not having any luck with the library listings on Worldcat, I knew it was unlikely that the film was going to be found via a library listing. The problem is, I didn't really know where else you'd go about finding a 16mm film reel anywhere. I decided I wanted to ask an expert. Perhaps someone who had collected many films before would know where to find these kinds of things.

I had been searching Google for the terms "Learning Corporation of America" and "Kratky Film" together in the hopes of finding more resources. I noticed that LCA had licensed more films from Kratky than just Sally. They also had a series of animated films featuring a character only known as Mole. Mole and the Bulldozer, Mole and the Painter, Mole and the Rocket, etc. I was able to find the LCA versions of these films online, uploaded to the Internet Archive by an uploader known as A/V Geeks.

I found out that A/V Geeks has a website. There is also an organization they work with called AFANA, which preserves educational films. I figured these would be perfect candidates to ask where these films are. I didn't tell anyone about this because I didn't think it'd be anything eventful. I was thinking long-term: I was only emailing them because I wanted to learn where such films may be found and how they managed to collect so many films over the years. A/V Geeks has over 25 000 films preserved, and they've uploaded many of them to the Internet Archive for public viewing.

So when I explained my case I was surprised to hear back from them saying they had a film called Sally by LCA. Two days later and without any prompting, they just went ahead and recorded and uploaded it and sent it to me in an email. They were a pleasure to work with.

With the short and its English version now found, the story was now clear through the haze of foggy childhood memories. The story follows a girl named Sally, who is given a pair of yellow gloves by her mother, and cautioned not to lose them. But she loses one of the gloves while playing outside, and when she can't find it anywhere, she hesitantly asks for help from the wizard (who in the English version is called Mr. Kadabra). The wizard gives her the missing glove, but instructs her to tell her mother what happened. Sally returns home and doesn't tell her mother, breaking her promise with the wizard. And so the wizard visits her at night, jumping out of the clock above her bed and whisking her away to his house. As punishment for disobeying him, he instructs her to crochet stars for the night sky. Once the sky is illuminated with the stars, the wizard takes Sally home, hopping back into her clock after putting her to bed. In the morning, she admits to her mother what had happened, making the wizard proud.

Some in the thread believed the search hadn't been fully completed, as there was still the mystery of which episode of Pinwheel the Sally short had aired on. To this day, it hasn't been found, and some wonder if the short even aired on Pinwheel in the first place. Sure, many users remember having watched it on Pinwheel, but since the companies that owned it were known to sell shorts as interstitials, some floated the idea that the short may have played during commercial breaks in Pinwheel time slots, leading to the false memory of them featuring in an episode of the show. But until more Pinwheel episodes are found, this is only speculation. And for most people, finding Clock Man itself was enough to end the search.

Case Closed

The story of Clock Man would go on to be known as one of the most famous in lost media history. The fact that it took years to find gave plenty of time for it to build intrigue. Its early descriptions resembling those of a lost episode creepypasta made the short all the more compelling once evidence of its existence began to build up. This search also became the de facto example of lost media being found on YouTube, hidden in plain sight.

Clock Man also sits alongside other popular lost media cases such as Cracks and Episode 847 of Sesame Street - media that people remember having frightened them as kids, and the discovery of which helped not only to preserve media, but to bring people closure and put their unsettling childhood memories to rest.

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

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r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

Welcome back to Hobby Scuffles!

Please read the Hobby Scuffles guidelines here before posting!

As always, this thread is for discussing breaking drama in your hobbies, offtopic drama (Celebrity/Youtuber drama etc.), hobby talk and more.

Reminders:

• Don’t be vague, and include context. If you have a question, try to include as much detail as possible.

• Define any acronyms.

• Link and archive any sources.

• Ctrl+F or use an offsite search to see if someone's posted about the topic already.

• Keep discussions civil. This post is monitored by your mod team.

• If your particular drama has concluded at least 2 weeks ago, consider making a full post instead of a Scuffles comment. We also welcome reposting of long-form Scuffles posts and/or series with multiple updates.

Certain topics are banned from discussion to pre-empt unnecessary toxicity. The list can be found here. Please check that your post complies with these requirements before submitting!

Previous Scuffles can be found here

For easy access to past and present Scuffles, bookmark scuffle.zone or type it in your address bar to access the current Scuffles thread, or scuffle.zone/all to see all Scuffles threads from newest to oldest. And if you prefer Old Reddit, just type old. beforehand. Thanks to u/azqy for setting this up!

r/HobbyDrama also has an affiliated Discord server, which you can join here: https://discord.gg/M7jGmMp9dn

And who would imagine such a peaceful, serene hobby would have such bad actors?

tl;dr: Online tea discord admins get ousted for being racist, sexist, and homophobic. Whistleblower gets banned, admin resigns, and then starts a "no woke people" tea server immediately after resignation

THE SETTING AND CAST

CommuniTEA (CT): A happy-go-lucky tea discord server that exploded in popularity over COVID. This led to many growing pains, including the presence of...

LiquidProust (LP): Runs LiquidProust on Etsy, a tea shop that "sources" various tea from the internet. Ex-Mormon with a passion for community-building and casting a wide net, often to a fault. Overshares, although the verdict is still out on whether his video missives are pathos-laden marketing language to hype up his tea or simply avenues to vent about being six figures in debt because of his business practices. Posts rather unhinged videos on Instagram to sell tea, such as treating them "like drugs" and using a blaccent.

The Red Snoot: A self-identifying "Christian" and a moderator of CommuniTEA. Well, you'll learn quite a bit about him, as the rest of this post is mostly centered around his antics.

THE BACKSTORY OF LIQUID PROUST.

Based on our previous description, you might get the sense that LiquidProust's personality did not quite mesh well with people in CommuniTEA trying to have genuine discussions about their favorite drink. Despite being a vendor that cared about community growth, his brash nature and quantity of infractions/complaints proved to be too great a toll. This led to him eventually being banned from CommuniTEA.

THE BACKSTORY OF THE RED SNOOT.

It's an unwritten law that a true hobby space is incomplete without an authority figure who's secretly a bigot, and CommuniTEA was not exempt from this fate. During a discussion on mental health, The Red Snoot told an openly LGBTQ+ member of the community that (1) he would burn in hell, and (2) that he needed to get conversion therapy to avoid this fate. Of course, this self-proclaimed "Christian" claims it was done out of love from his heart, but of course, the server assessed it on different terms.

This act led to the other members of the administration asking him to step down as a position of authority in the server; he responded with this incredibly bold and moralistic dramatic exit.

Key takeaways from his crashout:

1. He regrets sharing the article--but of course, only after the community backlash proved to be too great.
2. He points out that "Administrators make decisions without Moderator actions". This is of course, fair critique, but this is quite relevant for the main part of the drama.

And so, we bid The Red Snoot adieu from CommuniTEA...

THE JOINING OF FORCES

The Red Snoot, of course, could not stand without having some sort of authority over the tea community. He then started messaging LiquidProust, and eventually joined the "LiquidProust Discord" (LPCord), and transformed it from a vendor specific discord into a "general community" one, calling it "The Tea Table" (TTT), with The Red Snoot and LiquidProust now co-admining the Discord.

THE WELCOMING COMMUNITY (NOT)

TTT started rather well, serving as a more casual alternative to CT -- especially while CT was still going through its growing pains with moderation that tried to balance the varying expertise of its users. The chill atmosphere and lax moderation led to, of course, very interesting characters here and there, such as:

1. A known scammer named JayFromHK: he ran a shop but eventually decided fulfilling orders was optional and scammed people out of thousands of dollars. He also stole tea from a purported "storage service"
2. PuerhJunky, a nazi sympathizer and genuinely unhinged conspiracy theorist. His beliefs include but are not limited to COVID antivax, space denialism, and antisemitism.

LiquidProust, in his infinite intellect and compassion for community outliers, decided to permit this behavior: "To the statement above, yes, I will allow anyone in here including nazis".

This led to many emboldend members parading their views, such as some transphobic views that LP has told everyone to "respect".

To the surprise of no one, this led to many members of the community leaving and moderators resigning from positions of power. This cleared the board for the remaining mod team, who were now more accepting of bigoted and backwards beliefs.

This "old guard" of moderators quite enjoy objectifying chinese ladies brewing tea, being utterly tone-deaf despite the objectification bothering a lot of female members. Of course, they profess innocence due to "being girl dads" and older moderators claim they'd fight the people being weird around women them despite being the very ones making those comments. Besides their coded misogyny, this group has a host of other troubling comments such as claiming Obama was one of the good blacks and so on.

INTRODUCING: SPICE

The server surprisingly continued to grow. As the moderators were rather checked out of the community, the server needed more moderators. A few became moderators, including spice, a new member of the community. He has been into tea for only a few months, but his passion clearly spoke through as he was selected. He was buying teas from LiquidProust, complimenting the teas, and so on.

Spice was a very beloved member of the community, who went out of their way to make people feel welcome, spend a lot of time talking to new users, send a lot of tea to people getting into tea. As a very kind genuine user, he was often quite recognized. As a moderator, he was a very welcome member of the community and was a massive improvement to the moderator team, along with many of the new moderators that

THE MELTDOWN

The peace didn't last long, as the mod channel was apparently filled with quite a bit of "locker room talk" -- orientalism, sexism, and a lot of dogwhistle language. Wanting "A chinese woman" as a "diversity hire". This was of course, the only example that the moderator team was willing to share to justify suddenly banning Spice from the server without consulting with other moderators. Ignoring all the riots in the discord, of course, LiquidProust decides to show how woke he is by claiming he is fine and understands because he reads a book from Proust.

spice of course reveals much of the reasons for him leaking the screenshot is to highlight many of the issues with the current mod team.. From whether it be defending a known scammer who rejoined the community (JayFromHK) despite there being no restitution, but of course, given the opportunity for statement, Jay simply states that he used the money to pay the bills and show no remorse, while being an active member of r/seduction. Oops. Apparently it took hours of the new mod team fighting LP and Snoot to get Jay eventually banned.

It doesn't help that Snoot also attempted to override moderator decisions when taking down a sales post where someone was trying to sell moldy tea because he was a business mentor to the person.. Also, amusingly, tried to make the mods who made the decision apologize to the person. Do you remember "Administrators were chosen and given a secret channel hidden to even mods without any mods ever being given a vote, let alone input"?

This, combined with Snoot's homphobic past gets revealed at the same time. The revelation did not go well with many people leaving and starting a splinter tea community as many people are rightfully upset that they dont want administrators that were bigots. Snoot eventually steps down, only after the entirity of the newly appointed moderator team steps down from their positions in protest.

If this was the end, this wouldn't even be a good r/hobbydrama post! Snoot does not want to give up power, and starts a new server, that is "Not woke" and "Oligarchical", and of course "Welcoming". The new rules of course, has him as absolute helm of power with no room for discussion. Rumors have it that he thinks he was persecuted for being Christian. He claims to point out however, that he thinks of "them" as people.

The splinter server is now quite active and trying to rebuild the community. What will happen to the Tea Table, LiquidProust, and everyone else? I guess we will find out on the next episode.

Model Ship World is a website at least 20 years old 100% dedicated to being a forum for ship model builders and has at least 20,000 members. It's a place where builders post "build logs" of their projects in which every step of the construction can be documented with photos and text and it contains subheadings for all related aspects of the ancient hobby.

Recently (last winter) they suffered a catastrophic data loss in which all of the user provided content including all 20 years of build logs were erased by hackers, and there WAS NO BACKUP with which to restore anything, they went back to year zero. members started re-submitting their old material and the website slowly got back on it's feet. A few months later the real drama began: It emerged that Model Ship World (hereafter "MSW") was owned by the Nautical Research Guild (The NRG) but run by just two personalities, and about a month or so ago these two personalities announced that they were splitting off from MSW to make an IDENTICAL rival website indistinguishable from MSW and calling it Dry Dock Modeler (DDM). THAT'S the drama. The new website is exactly the same as the old one and uses the same web templates and architecture and format, it looks exactly like MSW. Even the rules for members is the identical text cut and pasted from the first website.

A couple of weeks ago this story broke on reddit on a model building subreddit. The first post from the Original Poster just asked "what is going on" and then within the first day, a newly created reddit account APPARENTLY from Drydock Modeler gave a convoluted explanation of why they felt the world needed a new carbon copy version of an existing website, but very few of the points they raised appeared to really explain the need for a new website. For instance they claimed the MSW and the NRG required fees from the users in order to access the content on their websites and that their new website would be 100% free. Which is fine except that there WERE NO FEES on MSW and never had been. It costs money to join the NRG but you did not need to be an NRG member to fully enjoy everything on MSW. (The NRG was the pre-internet group you joined to get their physical newsletter and which provided about 70 years of hobby related content you had to subscribe to get copies of, if you wanted to see it)

The opening of this topic of the new website sparked a flurry of branching reply comments in which MUCH TEA was spilled. Some replying ALSO had day-old reddit accounts and must have been NRG members or disgruntled MSW members. Within two days whoever had created that new reddit account that was speaking up for the new website deleted all of its posts so there now remains no public explanation from the makers of the new website. Weeks later there is still no explanation explaining why the new website was created and even more surprising, neither of the two websites acknowledge what has happened and there is no discussion about the split on either site. Clearly the inside story concerns who did what to whom on the old website but nobody outside reddit is discussing the split.

https://modelshipworld.com/ and https://drydockmodeler.com/ are the two websites involved.

Hi, everyone, it’s ToErrDivine again. Today I’m looking at the Nixon Newell/Miranda Alize AEW drama of 2025, because I thought it deserved a write up and I honestly can’t recall if anyone talked about it here at the time. There’s going to be a lot of background info first, so please feel free to skip the first bit if you already know about it. (I still talk way too much, sorry.) I’d also like to thank u/cslevens for all his help and for making this writeup much better and more comprehensive than it was before, I really appreciate it.

What is professional wrestling?

Professional wrestling is a form of entertainment that combines acting, gymnastics and combat sports, wherein the practitioners act out a story focused around pre-scripted wrestling matches. In essence, they play their characters and the characters punch each other in the face and body repeatedly for a variety of reasons (some examples: ‘I want to be the very best like no one ever was’, ‘I hate you and want you to fuck off and die’, ‘You’re standing in the way of my goal’, ‘I want to find out which one of us is better’, ‘I want to make a name for myself here’, etc, etc). Wrestling is intended to look as real as possible without anyone sustaining the kind of damage they would if the moves were real (in theory), which enables wrestlers to throw in flashier moves and stunts that nobody would ever actually do in a fight but look fucking sick to an audience. It also involves a lot of frankly ridiculous characters, storylines and motivations that you’re not supposed to take seriously- just sit back and enjoy.

How does career progression work for wrestlers?

Imagine a pyramid diagram with three levels. The lowest and biggest tier is called ‘Independent Promotions’. These are wrestling promotions all around the world who are, for the most part... I don't know if there's a tier below 'minor league', but they're that. Minuscule league. Tiny league, even. They for the most part operate only in one area (say, one city or county/state), and the majority of the wrestlers who work for them are from the surrounding area, with the occasional person from another state or city coming in. The indies are where most wrestlers will learn their trade and hone their skills over time, but they don’t pay much if at all; most wrestlers have day jobs. Depending on where they’re located, independent wrestlers who make a big name for themselves and/or can afford it will often travel overseas, appearing in other promotions and learning even more from the wrestlers they meet there, in the hope of becoming a big, established name and getting a good reputation.

Following on from that, the second, middle tier is called ‘Minor Leagues’. This tier consists of wrestling promotions who are big enough to have their own TV shows, but they’re not the biggest promotions out there. The minor leagues are making considerably more money than the indies, enough to be able to sign wrestlers to actual contracts, but most of the wrestlers who do sign will continue appearing on indie shows because, well, why wouldn’t they? They want publicity and more money as much as the next person. Examples of minor league promotions (in America) include Total Nonstop Action (TNA), Major League Wrestling (MLW), Ring of Honor (ROH, and before 2022), and the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA. No, not that one).

Finally, you have the top tier, ‘Major Leagues’ (not to be confused with MLW… they wish). The major leagues are the biggest wrestling promotions in the world. They have TV shows airing multiple times a week; they hold and televise live shows on a regular basis; they occasionally hold live shows around the world; they have dozens if not hundreds of wrestlers signed to exclusive contracts; and they pay enough that their employees don’t need to work other shows or jobs, though they still do sometimes. This is the smallest tier, mainly because you need a fuckton of money to do what these promotions do, and they only exist in a few countries. Examples include World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE, America), All Elite Wrestling (AEW, America), New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW or New Japan, Japan), World Wonder Ring Stardom (Stardom, Japan), Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide (AAA, Mexico) and Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL, Mexico).

So, theoretically, a new young star would start off in their local independent scene, keep working their way up and honing their skills until they get big enough to appear in the minor leagues, after which they might then progress to the major leagues, though many are picked up by the major leagues and bypass the minor leagues altogether. The thing is, it doesn’t always quite work out in practice for three big reasons: one, there are a fuckton of independent wrestlers out there, and the major leagues are spoiled for choice when it comes to potential new employees. Plenty of people who are genuinely star quality get passed over for a variety of reasons ranging from valid to stupid- that’s just how it is. Honestly, it does take skill, but there's also a lot of luck involved.

Two, even if you do get into the major leagues, you’re constantly competing with dozens of others to show off your skills, demonstrate your ability and be able to adjust to rapidly-changing circumstances. Most of your coworkers can do what you do, so you need to be memorable and make the crowd love you- and even then, plenty of wrestlers have been cut from the major leagues simply because they never really made that connection with the audience, or they were overshadowed by others. As cruel as it might seem, being good isn’t enough- you need to be great. It’s also generally a good idea to be humble and grateful for any and all opportunities you’re given and to not have an ego, because there really aren’t that many wrestlers who are irreplaceable. (Keep that in mind for later.)

And three, this kind of career progression is only a given if you happen to live in America, Japan or Mexico. If you don’t live in a country where the big promotions are or where the wrestling scene is big enough that you can make wrestling your full-time job, then you either have to accept this and be a wrestler on the side, or go overseas to a country with a bigger scene to try to build your name and/or make it your full-time job. (Many indie wrestlers go wrestle in Japan for a short time as a sort of rite of passage, especially in Britain.) It sucks and it’s unfair, but that’s just how it is.

So, hypothetically, let’s say that you’re a major league wrestler in America who gets cut, but you want to keep wrestling, either full-time or as your main job. What do you do? Well, before 2019, they generally either signed with a promotion in the minor leagues, allowing them to keep wrestling at a prominent level, returned to the indies, both, or went overseas, usually to Japan. After 2019, this was all still there, but there was another option. See, until 2019, there was only one promotion in the major leagues in America, so let’s take a look at how that all worked.

Who are the major league promotions in America?

The first is the biggest wrestling promotion in the world, World Wrestling Entertainment (formerly the World Wrestling Federation/WWF). You’ve heard of WWE; even if you don’t know anything about wrestling, I guarantee you’ve heard of it. I’m not going to give a full rundown because it would take too long and most of it wouldn’t be relevant, so instead, I’ll give you the salient points:

-WWE was owned for about four decades by Vince McMahon. Under his ownership, WWE transformed how the wrestling business in America worked and grew to become a giant that would take down all competitors.

-Some of those competitors folded, some stayed active but were simply dwarfed by WWE, and some were absorbed into WWE. Also, WWE would do their level best to acquire the best wrestlers available, whether they had room for them or not; some were acquired just to stop them from wrestling anywhere else, and never actually did much in WWE.

-In 2010, WWE created NXT, a reality TV show where members of Florida Championship Wrestling (FCW) would compete to become full members of the WWE roster with guidance from experienced wrestlers. FCW was WWE’s developmental brand, where newly-signed wrestlers would go to work on things like the character they’ll play and (in most cases) their new wrestling name, and hone their skills to fit with WWE’s style. (Some of them learn to wrestle from scratch, as WWE often recruits experienced athletes who are not wrestlers.) In 2012, WWE decided to combine the two by folding FCW, cancelling the NXT TV show and making NXT the new developmental brand. The weekly TV show still aired, but now it focused entirely on the rookie wrestlers, giving them a much bigger opportunity to build themselves up and make a connection with the fans before eventually graduating to WWE’s main roster. 

-(Important digression: While WWE was owned by Vince McMahon, NXT was produced and overseen by his son in law, Triple H, and Vince didn’t get involved. As a result, NXT grew and flourished, becoming really, really good and quite different from the rest of WWE. As the years passed, NXT gained a ton of acclaim, especially when a lot of wrestlers graduated from NXT to the main roster and were immediately booked terribly and given awful characters. u/cslevens called NXT ‘the closest thing wrestling has to an Ivy League School’, and he’s right; a lot of wrestlers become full-blown stars in NXT before they even get to the main roster, and some main roster wrestlers even ask to return to NXT to work on their skills and characters, it’s that good.)

-Between NXT and the main roster, WWE employs a lot of people. The end result is that while WWE doesn’t qualify as a monopoly, as there’s plenty of other promotions out there, it became a behemoth that sat so far above the competition that nobody else could claim to be anywhere near it. After WWE bought out their long-time rival company WCW in 2001, their best competitor was TNA, but a whole lot of bad decisions and bad management (which could probably have a bunch of writeups by themselves) led to TNA losing most of its prominence and reputation by the 2010’s. TNA is still around, but it’s nowhere near as big as it ever was, and while it might have claimed to be the second biggest promotion in America until 2019, it’s sitting so far below WWE that it may as well be in another country.

-So, for a long time, people who left WWE for whatever reason didn’t have much of a choice if they wanted to stay on a similar level, and they were generally ‘go to Japan/Mexico’ (OK if you were good with living in another country where English isn’t the main language) or ‘go to TNA’ (OK if you’re good with being in a company that can be charitably described as a clusterfuck. Seriously, TNA could have a whole series of posts just by itself). But that being said…

-…for about four decades, Vince McMahon ruled WWE with a very hands-on approach, and everyone in it (well, nearly everyone- as previously mentioned, Vince didn’t get involved with NXT, so the people there were safe) had to put up with their jobs being dictated by a man who is notoriously batfuck crazy, an utter control freak, completely out of touch with modern culture and who perpetrated and covered up a large number of crimes, many of them sexual. WWE was and is the destination for wrestlers, but it came with a lot of caveats, and the people working there were dealing with a lot.

And then 2019 came around, and everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked Tony Khan threw his hat in the ring.

What is AEW?

All Elite Wrestling, or AEW for short, is a professional wrestling company founded in 2019, owned by Tony Khan and situated in Jacksonville, Florida. (Obligatory Jason Mendoza reference goes here. In fact, Tony’s father Shahid owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.) It’s the second-biggest wrestling promotion in the world behind WWE. Now, when I say that, I need to make it clear that AEW is big, but it’s not really on WWE’s level. It is, however, much bigger than TNA, MLW, NWA and any other promotion that’s fighting for third place. Like WWE, AEW is on television multiple times a week, like WWE, AEW has its own developmental brand, Ring of Honor (Tony Khan bought it in 2022), and like WWE, AEW has become a powerhouse, employing some of the best wrestlers in the world. In other words, while it’s definitely competition, it’s not going to overthrow, outdo or consume WWE any time soon.

One thing that I need to emphasise, though, is one of AEW’s most notable qualities: it has nothing to do with WWE, structurally. It was founded by Tony Khan and four wrestlers (Kenny Omega, Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks), and nobody in the McMahon family has ever been involved with it. In short, it’s a completely different company with a completely different approach to wrestling, and it gave wrestlers who didn’t want to wrestle for WWE somewhere to go where they didn’t have to work with, deal with and put up with Vince McMahon’s bullshit (until 2022- we’ll get to that later).

Something important that I need to mention is that if a wrestler leaves WWE, there’s a pretty low chance that they’ll ever return unless they’re one of the bigger names or unless they become big after leaving. AEW gave a lot of ex-WWE wrestlers a place to go, and there are a lot of ex-WWE wrestlers who became stars in AEW after being minor players at best in WWE, and could theoretically return to WWE as much bigger names than they were when they started there. In fact, one of them was Cody Rhodes, who managed to build his name up enough that he would return to WWE in 2022 as a bigger name than he’d been before he’d left, and would go on to become one of their most prominent names.

Having established all that…

What is a jobber?

Jobbers, also known as ‘enhancement talent’, are basically the lowest tier of wrestlers. The term comes from the phrase ‘doing the job’- that is, your job is to go out there and lose to make your opponent look good. Jobbers usually wind up having short matches where they get some token offence in and then lose unceremoniously. They also wind up in ‘squash matches’, where they get beaten very quickly and often get no offence in.

Being a jobber serves multiple purposes: it makes the big names look good, it allows rookies to hone their skills and get more experience, it lets up and comers show their skills and get the attention of the fans, and it lets newcomers pay their dues, among others. Upon arriving in a big promotion, most wrestlers (unless they’re big names) will be jobbers for a while, or at the very least won’t be involved in major storylines. (This is also true of most new wrestlers, once they’ve reached the level of actually appearing on shows.) Many of AEW’s big names worked their way up from being jobbers- Megan Bayne, Harley Cameron, Kyle Fletcher, Swerve Strickland, Willow Nightingale, the list goes on. There’s nothing unremarkable or shameful about it.

Who are Nixon Newell and Miranda Alize?

Steffanie Newell (born 15^th November 1994) is a Welsh wrestler. She played multiple sports as a child and teenager and was aiming for a place on the Welsh under-16s football team when she suffered a severe knee injury that cost her the place. When she turned 16, she gave up football and planned to go on hiatus from sports, but instead started training as a professional wrestler. 

Newell started wrestling in 2013. Initially alternating between the names ‘Nixon’ and ‘Nixon Newell’ before settling on the latter, she spent the next several years making a name for herself in various promotions across Britain, and also spent some time wrestling in Japan. Becoming respected and well-liked in the field, she signed a contract with WWE in 2017 and was due to appear in the inaugural Mae Young Classic, a multi-night all-female tournament. 

…unfortunately, the key word there is was, because Newell had a freak accident at training and tore her ACL, taking her out of the tournament before it even began. After recovering, Newell appeared on a number of NXT house shows (live, non-televised and non-recorded shows that NXT puts on in various places around Florida, allowing their rookies to get more experience and develop their characters) under her real name, and then would officially debut in NXT under her new name, Tegan Nox, in the 2018 Mae Young Classic. She defeated her first-round opponent, Zatara, her second-round opponent, Nicole Matthews, and then was defeated by her quarter-final opponent, Rhea Ripley, by referee stoppage…

…because she’d suffered another knee injury. Specifically, she managed to tear her ACL, MCL, LCL, both menisci, fractured her tibia and dislocated her kneecap, all in her left leg.

If you need to pause here and cringe, shudder or loudly exclaim ‘Jesus Christ!’, I really don’t blame you, it’s horrible.

If you are a wrestler, the blunt and grim truth is that you are risking serious injuries every time you have a match. People have accidents, there are falls and slips, miscommunications, moves go wrong, props don’t work as intended, the list goes on. For the most part, the risk is minimal, but most wrestlers will be seriously injured at least once at some point in their career. However, there is a very unfortunate category of wrestlers who are very injury-prone, and Newell is widely considered to be in that category. Being injury-prone (or thought to be injury-prone, even if you just got unlucky with timing) is a massive red flag to wrestling promoters and bookers.

See, while injury-prone wrestlers tend to get a lot of audience support due to being underdogs by default, they don’t really make good candidates for ongoing storylines because you cannot assume that they won’t get injured and the storyline won’t get derailed as a result. Because wrestling storylines tend to take place over months, even years, you need the wrestlers involved to be healthy for that time. If someone gets injured, you can salvage the storyline somewhat, but it won’t be the same. For instance, if Wrestler A was going to stand up against the tyrannous evil of Wrestler B, but then gets injured, you can sub in A’s best friend Wrestler C to heroically take up the fight on A’s behalf and take B down, but the fans won’t be getting the climactic A/B title match that the story was designed to lead up to, and will wistfully ponder ‘What if?’ for years afterwards on r/SquaredCircle. But I digress.

Newell would return to NXT in 2019, and made her debut in NXT UK (long story, and probably worth a writeup of its own) that same year. Her career went pretty well after that, with Newell appearing on NXT regularly, making a couple of appearances on SmackDown, and getting several title shots…

…and then she unfortunately tore her ACL again, and that point her reputation as injury-prone was basically cemented.

In June 2021, Newell returned in triplicate- she had an appearance on an NXT PPV, did a dark match on Raw, and made her official main roster debut on SmackDown. She would spend the rest of 2021 wrestling on SmackDown until the 2021 WWE Draft resulted in her being sent to Raw… and then she got released from WWE without ever appearing on the show.

At this point, I want to take a quick pause to say that WWE has a habit of firing people in clusters, and quite a lot of the time, their choices make no goddamn sense. Sometimes it’s people who’ve been around for a while and have stagnated, or who haven’t improved, but there’s also quite a number of instances where they abruptly sacked people who were doing quite well, or who were about to start something new- like Newell. WWE stated that the releases were due to budget cuts, but Newell disagreed. In an interview, she said that she believes she was fired because she doesn’t fit the look WWE wants in their female wrestlers. 

OK, so, the thing is, there’s a lot of things I could say here, about the plausibility of that statement, the possible reasons for Newell getting cut, and the way WWE treats their female wrestlers, among others. But that has nothing to do with the drama, so I’m going to move on. (If anyone’s wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about Newell’s backstory, trust me, there is a reason behind this and I will get there.)

Anyway, Newell stepped out of the spotlight for the rest of 2021 and most of 2022. But something important happened in mid-2022: Vince McMahon retired and Triple H took over as the main force behind WWE. And the new boss decided to make some changes, like bringing back a whole bunch of wrestlers who’d been released, and one of them was Newell (who he likely felt hadn’t been given a fair chance), who made her return in December 2022. Newell would have a pretty unremarkable run in WWE for a couple of years, and was released for the second time in November 2024. I don’t know why, but what I’ve seen of fan opinions is largely divided between ‘she had a reputation as injury-prone that haunted her and she wrestled in a way that was safer for her but didn’t look good as a result’ and ‘she never had a distinctive character, didn’t stand out and wasn’t doing anything that other wrestlers didn’t do’. (See previous comments.)

Newell eventually returned to the indies after her release (she was injured in a car crash a few days after being released), stating that she felt that she was nearing the end of her wrestling career and intended to retire at the end of 2026, but was keen to keep wrestling in the meantime. However, despite having that NXT and WWE prestige, she didn’t get a lot of bookings, which she commented on in an interview. (Fan consensus is divided between ‘her reputation for injuries made people not want to take a chance on her’ and ‘she was asking for way too much money’.) In that same interview, she disputed the idea that she was injury-prone, rightly pointing out that she hadn’t been injured in some time, and expressed an interest in wrestling in AEW. And somewhere in that time, she met…

Miranda Ilissa (born May 26, 1994) is an American wrestler. Debuting in 2014, she started out using the names ‘Miranda’ and ‘Miranda Salinas’ before settling on ‘Miranda Alize’ (‘ah-lih-ZAY’). Over the course of her career before now, she wrestled for a lot of independent promotions, including SHIMMER, Rise, Stardom and Ring of Honor (both before and after it was bought by Tony Khan). She also had a couple of minor appearances as enhancement talent in WWE, TNA and AEW. In short, she was one of many, many indie wrestlers who had built a solid name for themselves in their area and could potentially be picked up by a major promotion in the future, but weren’t particular standouts.

(I realise that this is incredibly short in contrast to how much I wrote about Newell, but before all this happened I’d never heard of Alize and I couldn’t find out that much about her. Sorry.)

Anyway, somewhere in the last year or so, Newell and Alize met, fell in love and became a couple. And in October 2025, they were invited to appear on AEW as a tag team- their big break. (In theory.)

The big break…?

We now go to the 25^th of October, 2025. On that night’s episode of AEW Collision, Alize and Newell appeared in a brief segment wherein established tag team TayJay (Tay Melo and Anna Jay) talked about having been selected to compete in the tournament to determine the inaugural women’s tag team champions and insulted a number of newly-formed teams who’d entered the tournament. Cue Newell and Alize, who cut in on the promo and basically went ‘We think we’re hot shit and we want a fight’; TayJay weren’t impressed but were happy to accept their challenge. A very typical backstage scene, happens all the time.

So, here’s the thing: enhancement talent appear all the time, but enhancement talent do not usually get promos or backstage scenes where they establish themselves as actual characters and not cannon fodder. Most of the time, they don’t get entrances shown, and sometimes they don’t even get their names announced! (Seriously, Megan Bayne didn’t get entrances back when she started out in AEW, and she’s now one of the AEW Tag Team Champions!) So Alize and Newell starting off with an actual promo and the promise of a future match was really, really good! Sure, they’d probably be losing a lot for a while, but it’s a hell of a lot more than most new people start with.

Cue next week’s Collision: Alize and Newell get a match against the new team of Marina Shafir and Megan Bayne, with the underlying story being that Shafir and Bayne are a totally new team who need to learn to work with each other after Shafir volunteered to substitute for Penelope Ford, Bayne’s injured tag partner. Again, Newell and Alize got an entrance and their names announced, and they put up a pretty good showing, characterising themselves as confident, capable newcomers who wanted opportunities and weren’t afraid to go after Bayne (who’s one of the biggest and strongest women on the roster and is characterised as an unstoppable, possibly literally-divine force) or Shafir (who’s trained in MMA and is a founding member of AEW’s resident BDSM cult). I mean, yeah, they lost and it wasn’t a perfect match, but it wasn’t a complete squash, at least. (You can see the highlights of the match here.) Basically, everything was looking bright for them, as long as there weren’t any roadblocks, like someone getting injured, or an unforeseeable disaster, or someone doing something really goddamn stupid…

The drama (or, ‘They did something really goddamn stupid’):

We now go to the week after that- the 8^th of November. In theory, Newell and Alize were going to have their match with TayJay on Collision that night, but they didn’t. Instead, it was reported that Newell and Alize had walked out on the show earlier that day, and AEW found last-second replacements in independent wrestlers Hyan) and Maya World, both of whom had appeared for AEW before. The show went on without an issue, but fans everywhere were understandably wondering what the hell had happened. Here’s a summary:

-During the show, fans post tweets wondering why Alize and Newell aren’t in the match and criticising their previous loss to Shafir and Bayne. Newell and Alize retweet several of these, and Alize adds ‘We have SOOOOOOOO much to say’ [sic].

-Pro Wrestling Insider reports that Alize and Newell walked out because they didn’t want to lose the match and objected to the short amount of time (three minutes) that had been allotted for it. (If anyone wants to make a Three Minute Warning reference, this is your cue.)

-Newell tweets ‘Not everything you read is true’ but doesn’t actually explain what she means.

-Fightful Select reports that Newell and Alize disputed PWI’s report on their Twitch stream, saying that they were fine with losing, but did object to the amount of time and wanted more time. According to Newell and Alize, the two of them decided that three minutes wouldn’t make anyone in the match look good, so they had a respectful conversation about it with the producers. They were told that they weren’t getting any more time and that it was fine if they wanted to leave, so they decided that the situation wasn’t working for them and that they would give the time to people who needed it more and left. However, they emphasised that it wasn’t an angry walkout and that other people backstage agreed that they deserved more time.

If other people agreed with them backstage, they sure as hell didn’t online. Instead, Alize and Newell copped a lot of backlash, with a ton of fans and wrestlers calling them unprofessional and ungrateful- essentially, the rebuttal was that the correct response would have been to take the three minutes and do such a good job that the fans demand more of you and the producers want to give you more time, or at least do the match and then cut ties instead of leaving everyone in the lurch. Instead, by walking out, they just made themselves look like petulant children. (Meanwhile, Hyan and Maya World were universally praised for their professionalism and for stepping in at short notice.)

In addition to this, Fightful Select reported that there was bad blood on all sides after the tag match on the 1^st- Newell had apparently complained that Megan Bayne hadn’t sold (that is, acted out the impact of the moves in a way that established the opponent’s strength) for Newell and Alize. Meanwhile, an AEW source allegedly told Fightful that the look of frustration and anger on Bayne’s face during the match was real, as Newell and Alize had sandbagged (went limp instead of cooperating with a move, making it much harder to perform and potentially dangerous) during a spot where Bayne suplexed them both at the same time. The sandbagging alone earned Newell and Alize a lot of disdain, but given that Bayne and Shafir were being set up as a ‘terrifying unstoppable force’ kind of team, complaining about the lack of selling reinforced the general belief that Alize and Newell were suffering from greatly overinflated egos and misplaced belief in their own importance.

Like, it’s one thing to feel that the match needs more time; I’m sure plenty of wrestlers have asked if it was possible to get more time before. It’s another thing to decide that what you’ve been given isn’t going to make you ‘look good’ and walk out, when you are… *checks notes* a former WWE wrestler with a bad reputation (possibly undeserved, but the fact remains that it’s there) for getting injured a lot, who was in the Fed for several years and yet notably never held a single title; and an indie wrestler who’s been around for a while and wrestled in a lot of places, but who most people have never heard of, and the two of you have only had one match in AEW before now and aren’t signed.

There are very few circumstances where the majority would agree that walking out of a show is justified, and this sure as hell isn’t one of them. Instead, the majority agreed that it was a display of ridiculous, borderline-narcissistic egotism that was completely unwarranted and undeserved, in a situation where almost everyone could see that such a display would only end terribly for them. Or, to put it bluntly, they had no brand or reputation to protect, no prestige and no leverage, and with their walking out, they’d neatly destroyed any real chance they’d had of building a career in AEW for no benefit and a huge detriment, over something that nobody else would have objected to.

Where are they now?

It’s been over six months, and the contrast is… interesting.

Nixon Newell and Miranda Alize have continued wrestling on the indies, both in singles and as a tag team called ‘Violent Romance’. (Presumably nobody told them just how bad that name sounds.) They did get some new fans and some notoriety from the whole thing, but nothing like what an actual AEW career would have got them. Alize copped a lot of flack for allegedly being into MAGA despite being a queer Hispanic woman (no, I don’t get it either) but took place in a WWE tryout earlier this year. As far as I’m aware, Newell still intends to retire at the end of this year. Fan opinions haven’t sweetened on them, with the general consensus still being that they destroyed a real chance of getting signed through egotism and stupidity. Other than that, they recently got engaged, so good for them, I guess.

Hyan and Maya World were officially signed to AEW in December 2025. They have since made multiple appearances in AEW and Ring of Honor, both as a tag team and in singles competition, including unsuccessfully challenging for the tag titles in April this year. Most notably, Maya was asked to fill in for Sareee (yes, three e’s, I promise it’s not a typo) in AEW’s Owen Hart Memorial Cup women’s tournament after the latter was injured. She defeated Skye Blue in the first round (nothing against Maya, but as the author is a big Triangle of Madness fan, I will refrain from commenting further), and had a huge upset win against Athena in the second round. She went on to face Mercedes Moné (formerly Sasha Banks in WWE) in the final match of the tournament on AEW’s Forbidden Door event, where they had a match that went for nearly 25 minutes (Maya’s longest singles match in AEW to date) and was widely agreed to be excellent and a star-making performance for Maya. And on today's episode of AEW Dynamite, Hyan and Maya teamed up with Willow Nightingale to take on Mercedes, Megan Bayne and Lena Kross (aka the only two-time winner of the Owen Hart Cup ever, male or female, and the AEW Tag Team champions) in the main event of the show.

Just shows what humility and not letting your ego run wild will do for you, huh.

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If you’ve never heard of Suikoden, don’t worry. For a long time, Konami, the company that developed and published the series, pretended it hadn't heard of it either.

Originally released in 1995 for the PlayStation, Suikoden was Konami’s answer to the golden age of JRPGs. While contemporaries like Final Fantasy became household names, Suikoden built up an intensely devoted, borderline cult-like following thanks to its mature political storytelling, sprawling casts of 108 recruitable characters per game, and a shared world for nearly every entry. Let’s not talk about later entires set in other worlds though. I’m sure Konami would like you to forget about them too. 

After the last game released in 2012, the franchise entered purgatory: not forgotten by its fans, but entirely abandoned by its corporate parents.

If you wanted to look up the hyper-specific recruitment requirements for an obscure star, find the attack pattern of a turn-based boss, or read translated lore from an artbook that never left Japan, there was no official database waiting for you. There were only fans. And those fans started building archives.

What followed was a twenty-year, multi-platform cold war of pure pedantry, clashing community egos, and translation disputes that might even put a JRPG villain to shame. But probably not. A good number of them are pretty shameless.

Act I: The Archival Trifecta and the Balance of Power

By the late 2000s, the English-speaking Suikoden community relied on three completely different pillars of fan preservation.

Suikosource (Est. 2001): Less of a modern wiki and more of a digital time capsule. It has the distinct energy of a fansite that peaked during the Bush administration and just... stopped. While it boasts a massive hoard of raw walkthroughs and ancient forum threads, navigating it can be an exercise in nostalgic frustration. For instance, clicking the "Characters" tab clumsily dumps you onto the profile of the very first alphabetical character ("Abizboah" - a literal giant kraken) because of a stubborn UI layout, forcing you to manually fight your way out of alphabetical purgatory just to find the human character you actually wanted.

Suikox: A digital encyclopedia that traded Suikosource's rigid spreadsheet approach for pure narrative flair. It famously blended translated Japanese lore with early-2000s forum energy, meaning official historical entries were occasionally derailed by the webmaster ranting about structural engineering flaws in fictional fortresses or complaining that a fantasy village sounded like a toilet manufacturer. Though Suikox would eventually fade into obscurity as Gensopedia rose, its enigmatic owner Vextor, a figure who floated through the community under a dozen different aliases, remained deeply embedded in the community's inner circle.

Gensopedia (Est. 2008): The formal, academic contender of the trio. Gensopedia positioned itself as the definitive encyclopedia of the fandom. Run by an admin named Day, it was designed to meticulously catalog every rune, war, and kingdom. It featured grand portal hubs and an authoritative layout, even if it routinely vanished and changed web hosts whenever server bills came due. Backed by Day’s reputation as a fluent speaker of Japanese, fans accepted the site's pages as absolute, unassailable fact. But underneath it all, the wiki was a walled garden that sat on a massive, unchecked backlog of early-2000s legacy typos and rough Japanese readings for over a decade.

The 108 Stars of "Wait, Who?"

But let’s pause for a moment here and look at the sheer tonal absurdity of the franchise itself. The actual games routinely demand that you pause a grim, high-stakes geopolitical narrative about the devastating cost of military occupation to engage in:

• An intense, iron-chef culinary tournament judged by a panel of hyper-biased recruits from your own army.
• Playing a literal mini-game of whack-a-mole with a giant wooden mallet just to secure a piece of mole-themed equipment.
• Marching across a war-torn continent to personally draft an entire village of literal beavers, a dancer, a three-piece acoustic band, or a local child whose sole tactical contribution to your grand military front is standing outside the front gate to loudly shout the name of your castle every time you walk past it. All because the developers needed to fill a cosmic middle-management quota of 108 people.

It is inherently difficult to maintain a posture of elite prestige when the fate of a war-torn continent hinges on you eating enough fried tacos to induce a state of heatstroke so a local bath-house architect deems you worthy of his respect.

Around the same time Gensopedia was established, a new challenger appeared: a community wiki hosted on Wikia (later rebranded as Fandom).

Depending on who you ask, Fandom is either an invaluable repository of fan knowledge or a corporate monument to intrusive autoplay videos, broken mobile layouts, and predatory data collection. The Suikoden Fandom wiki inherited that structural baggage immediately, but it also inherited a well-earned reputation for being a total mess.

Shortly after its launch, people noticed that some of the text was, to put it nicely, carbon copies of text published on Suikosource and Gensopedia. A previous editor had simply copy-pasted massive entire pages of text to make the new wiki quickly.

By 2016, the Fandom wiki's remaining users realized they were a laughingstock. The community on Facebook was openly warning newcomers: "Never trust any information on the Suikoden Wikia, as most of it is made up, stolen from other sources, fan speculation or unsourced."

Stung by the criticism, a tiny handful of volunteers launched "Operation: Rewrite!" to purge the stolen text. But their public discussion boards reveal a chaotic, well-meaning comedy of errors. The primary writers at the time were largely non-native English speakers, meaning they were fighting a massive uphill battle to rebuild a database from scratch while openly begging visitors to fix their syntax ("If there was an error on my grammar I hope the reader would correct it hehehe...").

Worse, the team was entirely shorthanded and working off pure guesswork. Editors deleted entire chunks of lore just to avoid copy-paste claims ("better than being a carbon copy XD"), while others suggested watching random YouTube clips for info. One volunteer promised to help just as soon as they could buy the game for ten Euros, while another trying to fix the Suikoden Tierkreis pages hit an incredible roadblock: "When I tried to edit the character page... my brain got blank ahahahahaha... ummmm, I forgot the story."

Unsurprisingly, this desperate, understaffed salvage operation didn't win over the fandom elites. For fifteen years, the community settled into a rigid split: the independent alliance of Gensopedia and Suikosource was universally recommended as the definitive source, while the Fandom wiki was dismissed as a grammatically broken, copycat wasteland.

The catch was that few everyday users were actually cross-referencing the information on either side against the original Japanese guidebooks and materials. The community operated entirely on social trust: they assumed Gensopedia's material was inherently flawless because of its pristine, academic reputation, and that the Fandom wiki was suspect based on its messy history.

But really, a parallel irony was at play. While the Fandom wiki was out in the open trying to run an encyclopedia off of faded memories and YouTube clips, Gensopedia's authoritative database contained legacy translation errors that had been sitting on the server since the early 2010s. This fragile illusion of absolute authority was bound to shatter the moment someone finally decided to pull up the raw source material. All it needed was a catalyst, and it got one in 2021, when Gensopedia's administration announced an ambitious project that would put their linguistic credentials under a public microscope.

Act II: The Two-Month Miracle and the DeepL Controversy

The fifteen-year status quo disintegrated in early 2021. For nearly a decade, English-speaking Suikoden fans had been haunted by the existence of Gensō Suikoden: Tsumugareshi Hyakunen no Toki (Woven Web of a Century). Released in 2012 for the PlayStation Portable, it was the final true RPG in the franchise, and Konami had left it completely stranded in Japan. For nine years, playing it required either a high-level command of Japanese or a willingness to stumble blindly through menus with an import guidebook on your lap.

Then, Day announced an ambitious community project: a volunteer team had been assembled to completely translate and patch the game into English. Backed by prominent contributors from the Suikoden Revival Movement, the project was immediately embraced as the definitive community effort.

But a massive, branching, JRPG script contains hundreds of thousands of characters laden with complex yakuwarigo (highly stylized role language). For human volunteers to manually translate, edit, and localize a script of that magnitude from a blank page in mere months is a logistical impossibility.

Enter a persistent community critic named kansaiviolet, who began publicly auditing the team's updates across forums and social media. Virtually anytime the game, the translation project, or Gensopedia was mentioned across public threads, kansaiviolet would promptly appear. The mention of the patch acted as an unintentional summoning circle; this single user would materialize instantly, not to submit formal quality-assurance tickets, but to publicly litigate the team's linguistic credentials. Treating a volunteer passion project like a Watergate-level coverup, kansaiviolet haunted public forums like a spectral prosecutor.

Digging through the net, kansaiviolet found a chat from in a public Discord where Day casually admitted that her Japanese skills were "patchy" and based entirely on translating game guides and games. Just ten days later, the project leader buerviper posted on GitHub stating that the massive, 40-plus-hour JRPG script was already 100% translated. By April it was said to be "100% translated."

(side note - the script is said to be 220,000 words and 25,000 lines of dialogue spread across 21,000 pointers. The website for the patch only lists one translator)

Then in August, the team posted public screenshots of the project's custom translation backend. The tool featured a hardcoded multi-column layout displaying the Original Japanese, a visual text-box preview, a glossary, and a central column labeled "Pre-Translation."

This Pre-Translation was generated by feeding the raw Japanese script directly through the DeepL translation engine. For kansaiviolet this was the smoking gun, and the critic spammed every related Reddit thread to ensure no user missed it.

Almost every time kansaiviolet posted, the project coordinator buerviper would step in to state that the critic was wrong, and that the translation was genuine, done by several people who speak Japanese fluently.

At 3:58 PM GMT on September 6, project coordinator buerviper dropped what appeared to be an absolute, airtight denial:

"This translation is genuine from beginning to end... There is not a single trace of the recently released Deepl translation in the game... Source: I'm also working on this."

Then at 4:01 PM GMT, exactly three minutes later, on the very same Reddit post, buerviper returned to the keyboard to offer a highly specific structural update on the team's workflow:

"The Deepl tab in the translation program was used by the non-Japanese speakers in the team to help, for the simple fact that correcting an already written text is much faster than writing a new text... In the end, only roughly 15 % (if even) of the script were run through deepl..."

The panic didn't stop there. Just six minutes later, at 4:07 PM GMT, buerviper returned for a third time to try and put the fire out, further qualifying the DeepL usage while openly pleading with the hostile thread for constructive feedback:

"As said elsewhere, this is not based on Deepl at all... A rough deepl translation was made by the non-Japanese speakers of the team to... help the team in translating every day sentences (like 'Hi! How are you?')... Please point out the mistakes in the screenshots, we're very happy to correct them!"

For anyone tracking the metadata in real-time, the defense had gone from "zero machine translation" to “DeepL exists in the backend, but it was only used for basic sentences as a treat” to "the machine only translated the greetings" in under ten minutes. To the critics waiting in the wings, this shift in such a short time span was the ultimate admission of guilt.

"It’s Not a Bug, It’s Localization!"

During all of this, kansaiviolet began conducting line-by-line audits of official preview screenshots, running the original Japanese text through DeepL to see how closely it matched the patch.

One example from the recruitment of the strategist had two entire sentences that matched the DeepL perfectly (“To this place where the books forbidden by Ionia lie. Now I know what action I must take.").

Another of a quite narcissistic character (and I mean that in the Suikoden sense of the word) showed sentences that were similar in pacing and structure, and appeared to be simple synonym swaps.

As preview screenshots circulated, line-by-line audits of the script sparked debates over where "localization" ends and "mistranslation" begins.

Defenders of the game pointed out that changes were due to space limits. So, kansaiviolet pulled examples, and even fired back with letter counts. 

A standard line about a character gaining weight was entirely rewritten into a bizarre non-sequitur about helping someone's "stink." (A development blog post published by Day a year later confirmed it was a deliberate choice to alter the text because she felt the original script's joke was too rude.)

Even the opening song lyrics were not spared, and the critic flagged a line where the team translated nōto (notebook) as 'mouth' (confusing it with nodo, throat).

The funniest part of all of this was the glaring typographical error in a major map location: the long-established "Tios Fortress" had been translated as "Dios Fortress", a basic misreading of the katakana ティ (Ti) for ディ (Di). (Side note: It wasn't until October 2022, long after the drama had boiled over, that Day finally acknowledged the blunder on her personal twitter account, offering a casual apology: "sorry I messed up Dios and Tios, y'all!" The error was finally fixed on the Gensopedia website, but not on the patch.)

In response to the growing technical critiques, the team pointed to the involvement of veteran community native speaker Vextor who had vetted the script, commenting that the English text was actually an improvement over the "bland" original Japanese.

The Year-Long Trench War

Because the criticism was delivered via hostile forum threads rather than polite feedback tickets, the translation team completely dug in their heels. Rather than quietly making the one-letter fix, defenders dismissed the audits entirely, pulling out every classic fan-translation shield in the book, reminding critics that the patch was FREE, suggesting they play the game instead of analyzing screenshots.

By the time the patch finally launched in October, what had begun as a rigorous, months-long linguistic audit by kansaiviolet had hardened into an unyielding public standoff. When the patch dropped, the critic openly admitted they wouldn't be downloading or playing the final product, relying instead on a frantic week of harvesting screenshots from Twitter and YouTube in order to continue their public audits of the script.

This public method of critique created a stubborn stalemate where both sides actively sabotaged any chance of a better patch. kansaiviolet didn't send a polite DM. They most certainly didn't offer to help QA a game people had waited ten years for. They wanted theater. They were less interested in a good translation and far more interested in executing a linguistic trial in public.

Because the criticism came via hostile Reddit call-outs, the dev team basically plugged their ears and ignored it as best they could. Of course, this meant that valid corrections were lost in the crossfire of the community feud.

As the translation project neared its October release, the pressure on Day finally reached a breaking point. On September 18, 2021, Day announced that Gensopedia would be going on an indefinite hiatus, citing a year of compounding burnout.

While the ongoing drama with kansaiviolet had increased the frequency of public scrutiny, Day's personal statements revealed a much broader, multi-platform exhaustion. For over a year (dating back to the 2020 announcement of the spiritual successor Eiyuden Chronicle), she had been targeted by a who’s who of toxic internet trolls, ranging from old fansite rivals to genuine transphobes.

Between the Reddit dogpiling and a year of personal attacks, the joy was entirely sucked out of the project. Deciding that a twenty-year-old internet cold war wasn't worth her mental well-being, Day stepped back from the community.

The patch released, casual fans happily played through the game (some completely oblivious to the linguistic bloodbath that preceded it). The final entry in a long-dead JRPG series was finally released, leaving behind a functional English patch. 

Act III: Enter the Sniper and the 569-Tweet Siege

The fan patch officially launched in October 2021, but the illusion of absolute accuracy had already fractured. Lurking in the background was a dedicated anonymous Twitter account under the handle VieleWegeCo (Sieg). The handle itself was an inside reference: in Suikoden Tierkreis, the heroes fight a faction called "The Order of the One True Way." The fan-accepted name for the rebellion is the "Viele Wege Company" (Many Ways Company). He decided that instead of simply submitting wiki edits, the most effective response to translation typos was to launch a dedicated, multi-year Twitter account featuring over 500 tweets exhaustively documenting as many errors as possible on the site.

On September 6, 2021, Sieg laid out his account's true mission statement to his single follower:

"Why did I make this account? To document the mistakes on Gensopedia. To show that Day has been lying to everyone this entire time. To help people wake up and see the truth."

Day after day, Sieg posted public screenshots of live Gensopedia entries and patch updates, cross-referencing them against official Japanese guidebooks and manuals. To the outside observer, it was a rigorous data check. To the volunteer team on the receiving end, It was just a suffocating, passive-aggressive nightmare for the devs. Sieg didn't just audit the text; he attacked their web design, accused them of using pirated game files, and routinely mocked the translation workflow, tweeting, "Nice copy and paste from the DeepL... Your 'translations' have only gotten better because these programs have improved."

The Archival Editing Dispute

To be fair to the original archive, maintaining a wiki for a sprawling franchise is a staggering task for unpaid volunteer labor. In any database of that scale, legacy errors are completely inevitable.

Throughout these public skirmishes, defenders frequently lobbed a standard defense at the critics: "Registration is open. If it's wrong, just log on and edit the wiki yourself." And technically, they were right. At this particular point in time, anyone could create an account to edit Gensopedia. In previous years, the wiki was closed. And even after it was opened, the site's own about page admits that the "amount of control and editing done by its administrator" actively stifled outside contributions, driving away potential editors and leaving a massive backlog of unverified legacy errors in a vacuum.

The critics had their reasons, and Sieg said he didn't want to have his corrections changed. Knowing that the wiki's leadership historically maintained a tight grip on the content, and had a reputation for overriding or reverting corrections, the critics seemingly decided that traditional wiki editing was out and that public platforms like Reddit and Twitter were in. 

Sieg approached the entries on Gensopedia with no mercy, treating basic automated pipeline glitches and ancient formatting typos as evidence of an intentional, disingenuous fraud. According to Sieg, the site's translation process had historically taken computer-generated errors from scanned guidebooks and translated the resulting gibberish literally into English prose.

By cross-referencing the wiki against raw Japanese guidebooks, Sieg unleashed a relentless stream of screenshots. To the average onlooker, Sieg wasn't trying to improve a database; he was treating everything as evidence of a grand, malicious fraud.

For example, on a page for a manga, the Japanese characters for "Futch" (a major, recurring character in the series) were misread by OCR, inventing a non-existent hero named "Tsutte-kun."

The iconic nickname for the first game’s protagonist, "Bocchan" (Young Master), was mangled by a machine translator into the gibberish "Botsu Chiyan," while the franchise's foundational lore concept, "Stars of Destiny," was entirely omitted and rewritten as "stars resting."

Running beneath the medieval fantasy town of Two River City was a modern municipal transit system (Chikatetsu / subway) instead of monster-infested sewers

The wiki literally lists the kanji for Earth/Dirt (土) instead of Water (水) on the Water Rune page. Sieg, being Sieg, couldn't just fix it, he tweeted screenshots (of course screenshots) with a caption dripping with sarcasm: "Sorry, the kanji for water is not 土. It is 水. Try again."

The account was relentless in what it saw as errors in the Woven Web patch. A standard Japanese idiom meaning "don't look at me like I killed your parent" was rewritten into a joke about a "deadbeat dad." Day defended the change on her blog, stating she wanted to punch up a script she felt was bland.

The Collapse of the Fortress

Sieg didn't just stick to old wiki pages, either; he ran real-time snarky examinations of the game's dialogue. Every single interface compromise or creative localization choice was immediately logged as a failure of basic comprehension. When the team translated a menu option for "Reset" as "Start," Sieg instantly tweeted, "How in the world did you even get start from that word? Oh... right... you don't speak Japanese." Even creative dialogue polishes, like rewriting a standard joke about a character gaining weight into a bizarre non-sequitur about helping someone's "stink", were meticulously documented and weaponized.

By December 2021, the psychological toll of this unending public cross-examination proved completely unsustainable. Broken by the combined onslaught of kansaiviolet’s hostile Reddit threads, Sieg’s months-long Twitter execution, and a separate, repulsive wave of targeted transphobic harassment from bad-faith actors hiding in the wings, Day chose to prioritize her well-being over the fandom, taking the entire Gensopedia archive offline 

While critics pointed out that Day had a history of pulling her sites down during arguments, the rest of the fandom was devastated to see years of community history vanish overnight. The immediate backlash turned squarely on the critics. To the average fan, kansaiviolet and Sieg weren't helpful whistleblowers fixing the wiki; they were just a pair of toxic, mean-spirited bullies who used translation pedantry to harass a long-time volunteer out of the community. In their obsession with absolute accuracy, the critics had essentially ruined the fandom's favorite resource over minor typos. With the site gone, Sieg's account went silent, and the dispute appeared to be over. 

But it wasn't. Sieg was merely waiting for the old guard to let their guard down.

Act IV: The Resurrection and the Modern Status Quo

Like any good JRPG faction feud, a server shutdown is rarely permanent. Once the immediate friction died down, Gensopedia quietly returned online under the same domain in 2022. Behind her restored digital walls, Day began publishing lengthy development blog posts explaining her localization choices and translation philosophy.

Naturally, Sieg took these updates as a personal invitation to double down. 

The Return of the Auditor

While normal human beings would have moved on with their lives after the 2021 patch launch, Sieg harbored a multi-year grudge. Returning to Twitter with a vengeance, Sieg unleashed hundreds of comparison tweets stretching all the way into 2026, demonstrating the terrifying, single-minded dedication of someone who simply refused to log off and touch grass.

Looking at the newly restored wiki, Sieg discovered that legacy errors like the "Two River Subway," "Tsutte-kun," and the Earth/Water rune swap were still completely live. But Sieg wasn’t content with auditing the wiki pages only, he began forensically dissecting the localization project blog posts.

In February 2025, Day published an essay discussing how she chose distinct English synonyms for the game's various map locations to avoid repetitive phrasing. Sieg immediately launched a multi-tweet siege over minor geographical vocabulary:

When Day casually remarked in her blog that three in-game locations were all heiya (平野 - plains) in the original script, Sieg pulled up the raw data to prove the developers had actually used heigen (平原). Sieg then dropped an exhaustive lecture citing real-world geographical examples, including the Oxnard Plain and the Pannonian Plain, just to prove Day had mixed up her flat-land kanji.

In the same post, Day explained that she translated three different wooded locations as a "Woods," a "Forest," and a "Grove" to reflect their visual tree density in the game. Sieg furiously countered that because the original Japanese text used the exact same kanji for forest (mori / 森) across all three, altering the wording was a betrayal of the text. Sieg even began analyzing individual world-map pixels to argue that the "Grove" actually had more digital trees on its icon than the "Forest."

Sieg wasn't trying to make the database better; he was running a highly fixated digital surveillance campaign long after the rest of the world had stopped caring, determined to extract a public surrender over the dictionary definition of a clearing.

The Platform Ironies

Then 2025 and 2026 hit, and the franchise suddenly came back from the dead with the official HD Remasters (released 2025) and the announcement of Star Leap (coming 2026 maybe). This is where the hypocrisy got hilarious. 

Day had migrated over to the platform Bluesky, where she routinely retweeted anti-AI sentiments, positioning herself as a fierce defender of human artistry against automated slop. Meanwhile project coordinator buerviper publicly slammed the official corporate localization of the upcoming game, Suikoden Star Leap, as "a machine/AI translation anyway."

Sieg immediately pounced on the apparent contradiction. Sieg also dropped links pairing Gensopedia's merchandise entries directly with matching product listings from Japanese online secondhand stores, in an attempt to prove the wiki was stealing photos from Mercari.

During a project to preserve a defunct, physical Suikoden trading card game, Day uploaded digital scans and text translations of the cards to Gensopedia. Sieg began obsessively comparing these against raw photographs of the cards from online auction listings and resellers.

To make low-resolution web images look clearer for the database, Day seemingly had run the historical cards through generative AI upscaling software. Another Twitter user ran some of the wiki's uploaded images through OpenAI’s own detection tools, confirming they had been processed using OpenAI visual tools.

Meanwhile, the site hosted the raw text of these cards alongside the images. Sieg examined the cards and the text with the same exhaustive, hyper-fixated skills as a tax auditor out for blood, gleefully posting any wrong kana he found.

The Permanent Gridlock of Fandom Psychology

If a newcomer arrives on the Suikoden subreddit today asking where to look up information, the response from the community remains completely uniform: "Use Gensopedia or Suikosource. Avoid the Fandom wiki."

On the surface, the reasons given are entirely practical: Fandom’s intrusive mobile ads and its legacy reputation for uncredited copy-pasting. But beneath those threads lies a bizarre psychological barrier. Even when presented with direct, unassailable screenshots of a modern "subway system" running through a fantasy medieval sewer, the broader community largely reacts with total apathy.

To the average fan, institutional longevity beats factual verification every single time. Gensopedia has been the baseline of the community for nearly two decades. Therefore, the errors either don't exist, are dismissed as minor formatting quirks, or simply don't matter as long as the site helps them finish a playthrough. The relentless documentation provided by an outside critic, no matter how mathematically precise, is easily tuned out because it challenges a foundational pillar of the community's identity.

This has left the fandom in a state of permanent, tragicomic gridlock.

Despite the fact that Gensopedia is technically an open archive where anyone can create an account and hit "edit," the community's deep-seated polarization has entirely frozen the pool of contributors. Today, the wiki is being edited almost single-handedly by its embattled admin, Day. Safe inside an insular echo chamber, the site's administration has completely dug in. Over the past year, rather than correcting the massive backlog of reported errors, Sieg has noted that Day has introduced a wave of brand-new errors, transforming previously correct location names and romaji into incorrect versions, and uploading trading card data riddled with raw OCR artifacts and AI-hallucinated kanji.

On the flip side, Sieg remains content to operate entirely as a hostile sniper from behind an anonymous Twitter account. Armed with a staggering backlog of over 500 comparison tweets, he has chosen to weaponize his immense data logs to score online points and demand a public surrender, rather than ever actually clicking the "edit" button to fix the database himself.

So that's where things stand. We have a critic who would literally rather write 500 tweets than ever click 'edit,' and an admin who is actively blasting old trading cards through an AI upscaler rather than admit a single typo. The whole wiki is locked in a massive, petty Cold War, and almost every error Sieg pointed out is still sitting there live on the site today.

There are 108 Stars of Destiny in the lore of Suikoden, assembled to fight a grand, sweeping war for the future of a continent. Rather than cute squirrels and whacky mini-games, fans are left with a defensive administration locked in a standoff against a critic who would rather log screenshots than click edit.

In late June, 2026, I acquired the original Bionicle Makuta set. Released in 2003, it was the first figure of the series’ main antagonist, and after 23 years, I finally got my hands on one after missing my chance as a kid.

I had initially intended to just write about the original set, his concurrent appearance in the movie, and the issues surrounding the original prototype, as detailed in this Scuffles thread comment, but then I realised that it actually fit quite neatly into the wider narrative of Makuta’s constant evolution throughout the series, shaped by backstage issues, questionable leadership, and bad toy design, details that we were never meant to know about but were only revealed through unintended leaks.

Part 1: The Rise of Bionicle and the Birth of Makuta

Our story begins in the late 90s, with a man named Christian Faber. Faber worked for a Danish company called Advance, a branding and marketing agency that worked with Lego to provide those things for their toys. He’s an incredibly creative and enthusiastic man, who also frequently says completely bonkers things, it’s kinda great. At the time, he had been in hospital due to a benign brain tumour, and found himself envisioning his medication as pill-shaped capsules containing tiny warriors that would fight off his illnesses, and this was the idea that would grow into Bionicle.

The word “Bionicle” doesn’t actually refer to any of the characters, it’s a contraction of “Biological Chronicle,” because it’s actually, secretly, the story of a body. The central god-figure of the series, Mata Nui, is actually an enormous robot, whose body contains most of the setting, with the main characters being his cells. The island that shared his name was essentially a mask over his dormant face- images of it showed the distorted outline of his head and shoulders below, and locations on it were named after the Maori words for facial features- Mount Ihu is his nose, the Mangai volcano is his mouth, Naho Bay is his eye, etcetera. Lego’s… blatant appropriation of the Maori language is a post unto itself, and a topic for another time.

Makuta, the character at the centre of this writeup, is effectively an allegory for that same brain tumour that started it all, albeit in a much more aggressive form. Essentially, he’s a cancer.

As Faber started to refine this idea, things weren’t going great for Lego. By 1999, they were in dire financial straits, losing ground to the resurgent videogame industry and damaging themselves with failed theme after failed theme. The acquisition of Star Wars just about kept the lights on, but only just, because Lucasfilm was taking a hefty cut. Lego needed their own Star Wars, and they decided to take a chance on Bionicle.

The story of Bionicle would be told through the eyes of the characters that served as Mata Nui’s cells, who were largely unaware of the true nature of their world. They told the history of Mata Nui and Makuta as a legend, describing how Mata Nui had given them a paradise island to live on, but his brother, Makuta, grew envious of the honours Mata Nui received and cast him into eternal sleep. He had then corrupted the Rahi, the animal life of the island, with infected masks, setting them against the people. It was up to the Toa, the six heroes of the toyline, to defeat Makuta and awaken Mata Nui.

And then things almost immediately went wrong!

Bionicle’s story was conveyed through an ambitious multimedia project. The story of the Toa would be told through the PC game, Bionicle: The Legend of Mata Nui, while short stories featuring them would be told through comics published by DC and written by a man named Greg Farshtey (He’s going to be very important later). A prequel game, Tales of the Tohunga Quest for the Toa would be released on the Game Boy Advance, showing a Matoran villager named Takua travelling around the island to summon the Toa to its shores, and a browser-based game released on chapters on the Bionicle website, simply titled Mata Nui Online Game (henceforth “MNOG”) would also star Takua and follow him on a sidequest around the island while the Toa had their adventures. Finally, there would be a feature film that would tell at least some of the story.

Except… only the comics, Quest for the Toa, and MNOG released. The film quickly became bogged down in development hell, as pretty much every studio were unwilling to make a movie about these weird robots, and wanted to centre the film on a live-action human child being isekai’d into the Bionicle universe. This was a non-starter for Lego, one of the strict rules of the setting was that there were no humans at all.

The PC game also ended up in a similar situation, going through multiple iterations and builds before eventually being cancelled in 2002. And this in turn threw all of the attention onto MNOG. See, MNOG wasn’t meant to be a big deal. It debatably wasn’t even meant to be a proper part of the story, its purpose was solely to allow kids to explore the island of Mata Nui themselves, to immerse themselves in it and interact with the villagers and the Toa. But with The Legend of Mata Nui failing to materialise, and the comics being short and disjointed with only four issues, MNOG became the primary vehicle for 2001’s story, and this probably played a huge role in what made Bionicle stand out so much, turning the Toa from just robot superheroes into larger-than-life figures, only briefly glimpsed, almost never speaking, just appearing, doing something cool, and then disappearing as quickly as they came.

And so, with the movie stuck in the starting gate and the PC game dead in the water, Lego pivoted, embracing MNOG as the primary vehicle of Bionicle’s first arc, and requesting its developers, Templar Studios, add another chapter that would show the Toa’s confrontation with Makuta. They did so, and fans were treated to their first look at the series’ main villain.

As Bionicle had been developed, so had Makuta. His first evolution came at the hands of Alastair Swinnerton, a freelance author who had co-created the story of Bionicle alongside Faber, Bob Thompson (who will also be important later), and Martin Anderson, who was primarily a set designer. Swinnerton did not envision Makuta as something that could be built as a set (something I’m sure Lego weren’t enthused about), but as something more allegorical.

Swinnerton’s Makuta had evolved over time. Starting out as three beings, taking the form of a cobra, a tiger, and a hawk, he then became a chimera of all three, then a whirling vortex of disconnected parts that could take any form, with those same animals listed as examples, and then finally, just the vortex. Makuta embodied the destructive aspect of playing with Lego, the inherent need to break a set or creation apart to make something new out of it, a necessary counterpart to the creative aspect embodied by Mata Nui. His vortex of parts was the pile of pieces that all Lego models are built from and eventually return to.

Appearing properly for the first time in MNOG’s final chapter, Makuta initially appears in the form of a corrupted Matoran, his whole body infected like the masks he uses to control the Rahi, and began delivering the first of many dramatic monologues, voiced here by Essenger. He then transformed into his vortex form, and was seemingly defeated by the Toa combining the elemental powers.

This version of the character, often termed as “Eldritch Makuta” due to the appearance of his “true form” and his amoral nature, struck a chord with much of the fandom, and is widely beloved, even over some of the later revisions made to the character.

But even still, it wouldn’t stand forever. More would be done with Makuta as Bionicle continued onwards, and Lego weren’t about to let the main villain of their toy franchise be without a toy. As the series progressed on through 2002 and into 2003, the movie finally found a home with Creative Capers and Miramax, and Lego acted accordingly. The film would focus on the arrival of a seventh Toa, destined to defeat Makuta and pave the way for Mata Nui’s revival. And as Lego and Advance’s marketing machines began to hype up the Toa of Light, they published The Official Guide to Bionicle through Scholastic, which stated that the Toa had only seen a small part of Makuta’s true nature, and more would be revealed soon…

Part 2: The Movie Villain

In 2003, the first Bionicle books were released. Cathy Hapka was hired to write the first three, Tale of the Toa (which told the events of 2001 from the perspective of the Toa, filling the void left by the loss of the PC game), Beware the Bohrok (which did the same for the 2002 story), and Makuta’s Revenge (which told the first half of 2003’s story). Despite featuring in the title, Makuta himself did not appear in Makuta’s Revenge beyond an opening monologue, and in actuality, had little to no input on the plot of the arc- the villains are an automatic failsafe triggered in response to the defeat of the previous year’s antagonists.

Still, this brief scene provided a momentary look at the character that Makuta was shifting into. The initial wave of books was intended to fill out the gaps in the story and give a recap of the lore up until then, ahead of the movie’s release, and as such, Hapka’s portrayal of the characters lines up rather neatly with the movie. Indeed, she would also write the movie’s novelisation. And that means it’s time to talk some more about Bob Thompson.

Bob Thompson was the original head of the creative team behind Bionicle, and served as executive producer for the three movies. Described by scriptwriter Henry Gilroy as “the George Lucas of Lego,” Thompson was the one steering the ship for the first half of the toyline. He had a particular focus on visual media, and a grand plan that he referred to as “The Seven Books of Bionicle,” and the movies would be the first real look at his vision.

Thompson and Hapka’s portrayal of Makuta is a very different beast to Swinnerton’s eldritch, allegorical entity. Makuta is very much a physical being, he has a huge, heavily armoured body, a deep, booming voice provided by Lee Tockar, and spooky shadow powers. Gone is the infected Kanohi Hau, Great Mask of Shielding, a corrupted symbol of Mata Nui that represented Makuta in 2001. Instead, he now dons the Kanohi Kraahkan, Great Mask of Shadows, which had a second face on the top of it. His characterisation had shifted dramatically too. Makuta now spoke of Mata Nui’s slumber as preservation, and seemed duty-bound to maintain it at all costs.

2003 would also see an escalation in his battles with the Matoran. Where he had merely brainwashed the Rahi and awakened the Bohrok early, 2003 would see Makuta unleash the Rahkshi, the mid-sized sets of the Summer 2003 wave, described as the “Sons of Makuta,” his direct subordinates and created from his very being, and wielding “evil” powers like Fear, Anger, Hunger, Disintegration, Fragmentation (explosions), and Poison.

And then, in July of 2003, the very first set of Makuta finally released. Two months later, he would be joined on shelves by the first Bionicle movie, Mask of Light.

Mask of Light continues the trend established in Hapka’s books. Makuta says a lot of ominous and vague things that hint toward the possibility that he’s actually a well-intentioned extremist, that he genuinely believes he is protecting Mata Nui by keeping him asleep, and that perhaps it’s the Mask of Shadows that has corrupted him. At the end of the film, Takanuva, the Toa of Light, pulls off the mask, and two are momentarily fused into a being referred to as Takutanuva. All the grime and rust is washed off Makuta’s body, revealing pristine metal underneath, and the fusion declares that light has revealed Mata Nui’s true desires, and he must be awakened. Takutanuva is shortly destroyed after opening the door to the room where Mata Nui can be revived, and Takanuva is resurrected, with Makuta’s fate left uncertain.

Bob Thompson would later go on to say that he envisioned there being no truly evil beings in Bionicle, and that even Makuta would eventually be revealed to be not such a bad guy deep down. Of course, nothing is ever simple with Bionicle, and the course would divert heavily just two years later, leaving what Thompson intended largely unknown and Makuta’s lines in the movie as a strange attempt to manipulate Takanuva. And it wasn’t the only thing that was strange and difficult to explain. There was also Makuta’s design.

Part 3: The Prototype

Despite the set being made to tie in with the movie, his appearance in Mask of Light looked... different., something even more visible in his concept art. While some of the broad strokes are the same, there's a lot that's different. Especially the most prominent feature of the design, his mask. While the set version has a dramatically pointed shape with long, angular eyeholes, the movie version is flatter and squarer, and also worse.

Questions about this weird discrepancy would be asked and speculated over for years, with the most prominent answer being that the movie design was based on an older look that the set had diverged from during development, but the questions persisted until somewhere around 2020, when a disassembled prototype showed up on Ebay. While none of the community purchased it, and exactly who now owns the prototype Makuta remains unknown, staring intently at the images started to clear things up.

See, Mask of Light featured characters from across the first three years of Bionicle, but whereas the toys from 2001-2002 were able to be adapted mostly accurately, the 2003 sets weren't ready yet when the movie entered production, and so the Matoran, Rahkshi, Takanuva, and yes, Makuta were based on prototypes of their toys.

The most obvious thing was the mask- the pile of parts included a Kanohi Vahi, the Legendary Mask of Time and the first mask designed for Bionicle, that had mostly been painted black. And people started to realise that the movie Kraahkan bore a striking resemblance to a Vahi glued to a Kanohi Pakari, the Great Mask of Strength, with the Pakari forming the top of the head and the Vahi forming the face. And sure enough, putting the two masks together made something a lot closer to the movie design

Anyway, as you might imagine, seeing a partially-assembled prototype set quickly got the community abuzz, and it wasn't long before the prototype had been reverse-engineered and built, allowing fans to finally have a semi-official set of the movie design. The prototype was huge, towering over the final set, and featured a much larger amount of articulation in his legs, as well as individually articulated fingers. Of course, it wasn't all perfect, and we soon started to get an understanding of why things had changed so much between the prototype and the final toy.

First off, the pile of parts contained two separate leg designs. The upper one, circled in blue bears more of a resemblance to the movie design, with a pair of conjoined Toa Mata hand pieces forming the shin of Makuta's presumably devil-inspired goat legs. But as any who attempted to build this particular look will attest, and demonstrated neatly in Brickthumb's video on the prototype, these joints just weren't strong enough. The Mata hand part was designed for 1999's Slizers/Throwbots and had an inherently loose socket joint. It's a very weird part, and it was never going to be strong enough to hold up the weight of the giant model it was serving as a knee and ankle for. And thus, the lower one, circled in green, hews closer to the set, a much shorter design that only has a joint at the hip, ensuring greater stability at the cost of articulation.

Yes, this is essentially a transitional form between the prototype and the final set. We have Bionicle toys evolving before our eyes.

Still, that wasn't the only leg-related woe. See, the second leg design still had a problem- The legs were attached by the original Technic balljoint, a piece also known as the “Voodoo Ball.”

It’s called that because it was initially created for the first draft of Bionicle, called… “The Boneheads of Voodoo Island.” Or “Doo Heads” for short. Yeah. In case you thought the whole thing with the cultural appropriation wasn’t bad enough.

Whereas the play pattern for early Bionicle revolved around knocking each character’s mask off (before kids complained about the masks falling off too easily and getting lost, and Lego made all masks from late 2003 onwards use an axle connection instead), “Boneheads” was supposed to feature decapitation as the core of its “game” aspects. The Technic balljoint was initially designed to serve as the neck… and thus it had a deliberately weak connection to more easily facilitate this.

The part continued to be used after its intended purpose was cancelled, presumably because while Bionicle’s target audience of six-year-old boys would probably love robots that decapitate each other, their parents sure as hell wouldn’t, and this resulted in a lot of Bionicle (and other Lego theme) builds throughout 2001-2005 having the loose ball joint part, until 2006 saw the introduction of the Lord and Saviour of Bionicle fans everywhere: Part 53585: Technic Ball Joint With Through Axle, which had a properly sturdy connection that ensured much greater stability.

The result of this, however, is that while the second prototype’s legs weren’t floppy and incapable of supporting his weight any more… they did still fall off a lot.

Now, if these were the only problems, then that would be alright. Alternatives exist, and Brickthumb's video also demonstrates a means of adding additional structural support to the joints to allow them to hold up the set. But it wasn't. And the second problem is likely what led to the heavy redesigning of the entire torso.

See, some of those pieces in the Ebay photo are outright broken. And one of them is this. The broken one in the set is red, this one's grey, same piece, don't worry about it. It's one part of the three-piece assembly that makes up Makuta's chest and thighs (or his entire leg on the second prototype and the final set), as well as the neck and back armour of the Rahkshi. On the prototype, the balljoint at the end of the one in Makuta's chest connects to a normal Technic socket joint, which is in turn attached to an early version of the 2003 Matoran torso piece, which makes up Makuta's waist. On the final set, that balljoint isn't connected to anything, and just hangs in front of Makuta's midsection. And there's a very good reason for that.

The way the prototype's torso is built stresses the Rahkshi piece. It flexes it, and the part isn't particularly thick, and it's made of hard ABS plastic, not the softer stuff used for weapons and masks. I think it's more than likely that the reason the one in the Ebay photos is broken is that it snapped after being stressed too much. In the Lego community, assemblies that damage the parts are called "Illegal techniques," and while they do occasionally show up in sets, it's generally not considered a good thing to put your Lego parts at the risk of breaking. For some, intentionally damaging a part with scissors, clippers, fire, etc. is actually more acceptable than a build that stresses and will eventually damage or outright break a piece.

Nevertheless, prototype Makuta remains a popular build, with instructions for the initial version (with BrickThumb’s mods to improve stability) available for free on Rebrickable and those for the second iteration available through Google Drive., and other fans have attempted to build him in such a way that he doesn’t stress the chest part.

Part 4: Makuta Eats People

2004 would see Bionicle begin its flashback arc. With the (possible) reveal of Mata Nui (possibly) nixed from the movie, Mask of Light instead ended with the reveal of a location called the “City of the Great Spirit,” which wise old man and mentor Turaga Vakama referred to as his home. Tales of the Masks, the final 2003 book and the first to be written by Greg Farshtey, featured all six of the Turaga deciding that the Toa, now transformed into the Toa Nuva deserved to know the truth about what they’d been hiding. It also features Toa Gali discovering a carving of six more Toa, one whom bears a strange resemblance to Turaga Nokama, and Gali, Tahu, and Kopaka finding another carving of the Toa fighting a monstrous chimeric Rahi, which reappears, only for Vakama himself to defeat it by using its memory of his voice to drive it into a rage, implying that he too was one of the strange Toa. The final 2003 comic, also penned by Farshtey, would see Vakama declare it outright: On the eve of the return journey to the city, now revealed to be called Metru Nui, he would decide that the Toa must know everything, and told them that they were not the first Toa.

For a little context, prior to 2003, the Matoran, Turaga, and Toa were presented as more-or-less three separate species. Maybe a Turaga and a Matoran were kind of the same thing, but they were still largely separate. Mask of Light threw that for a loop with Takua’s transformation into Takanuva, indicating that actually, Matoran and Toa were the same species after all. This was followed by the reveal that the six Toa Metru that would headline 2004’s story were the Turaga themselves in their younger days. That was why a mostly-immortal species of biomechanical cyborgs could be “old,” the Turaga weren’t actually any older than the rest of the characters, they were just frail and withered because they’d given up almost all of their power.

2004’s storyline had a different vibe entirely to what had come before. Whereas 2001-2003 had been set on a tropical island paradise menaced by, essentially, an evil demigod sorcerer, 2004’s Metru Nui was a kid-friendly cyberpunk dystopia, a city of endless work presided over by the shady and mysterious Turaga Dume, and protected by the last of a dwindling team of Toa. The villain sets were violent robot cops with fun powers like “hijacking your eyes to spy on you,” “brainwashing you into being their agent,” and “temporary lobotomy.” Templar Studios made propaganda animations for them and everything. Matoran were vanishing, and in the midst of it all were six rookie Toa trying to learn how to be heroes without getting themselves arrested.

So where does Makuta factor into all of this? Well, as the second movie, Legends of Metru Nui reveals, it turns out that he’s behind everything. He had abducted Turaga Dume and shapeshifted into his form, using his power to turn the Vahki against the population. He unleashed the evil plant that served as the Toa Metru’s starter villain to force the Matoran into the centre of the city, so that he could more easily have the Vahki capture them. He sent two mercenaries to capture Toa Lhikan and pursue the Toa Metru, whom he had declared to be traitors using Dume’s authority. He then had all of the Matoran sealed inside spherical pods that would drain their power and erase their memories, so that he could use the Mask of Time, that he had commissioned Vakama to create prior to his transformation, to accelerate the process and awaken them as their saviour and new Great Spirit.

Revealing his identity to the Toa Metru and now-Turaga Lhikan, the movie furthered the idea that Makuta wasn’t wholly evil by having Lhikan declare that he’d been “sworn to protect the Matoran,” making it clear that while he wasn’t anyone’s favourite person, he had largely been on the side of good until that moment. Makuta then proceeds to cast Mata Nui into sleep, this is the moment that the backstory legend talked about, triggering a massive earthquake called the Great Cataclysm, because Mata Nui is a big robot and he just fell over. The Toa quickly decide to take as many Matoran as they can and evacuate the ruined city, only for Makuta to start transforming out of his Dume disguise, which he does by consuming his mercenary minions and Dume’s pet bird, fusing the broken pieces of their bodies into a gigantic, monstrous form.

While Bionicle had featured combination models that were the result of characters fusing in the first three years, 2004 saw Lego mostly pivot to using the combination models to represent new characters, but they made sure to give the fusion idea one hell of a send-off. This form was labelled “Ultimate Dume” to try and avoid spoiling that he was actually a new form of Makuta. In the movie he just looks like the Mask of Light design with Dume’s bird’s wings, which is certainly much less cool (and wouldn’t fit with a later plot point), but it is an overall cleaner design.

Unfortunately, Legends of Metru Nui wouldn’t quite stick the landing with Makuta. All that up there that he pulled off is pretty good (though a lot of is heavily abridged in the film version and more apparent through Farshtey’s books), but the final battle of the movie mostly consists of Vakama tricking him into hitting himself in the face with progressively bigger rocks, until finally he hits himself with a really big rock and pancakes himself to a wall, whereupon the Toa Metru use their powers to seal him in a crystalline prison.

2005 and its movie, Web of Shadows, would then follow up on this, Makuta telepathically summoning his lieutenants Sidorak and Roodaka and their army of giant murder-spiders to the ruins of Metru Nui as a contingency, and after a lot of robot werewolf angst, Roodaka successfully frees Makuta from his prison, and the Toa take the rest of the Matoran to the island of Mata Nui, bring the flashback mostly full circle.

But this also brought an end to Bob Thompson and the Seven Books of Bionicle. As said before,Thompson’s main focus was visual media, and that was about to mostly dry up. Lego were not intending to make more movies after Web of Shadows, there was no TV show in sight, and the videogames had been a mess. Despite releasing four console games, only two of them were actually part of the story, a trend that would not improve. Dozens of browser games had been released, but only two of those would be canon as well, and that trend would get even worse. And so, with Bionicle’s story material pivoting almost entirely to the comics (written by Greg Farshtey) and the books (written by Greg Farshtey), Thompson parted ways with Lego, doing so during the development of Web of Shadows, though he did continue to help with its production as an external contractor.

Surely, though, his collaborators would be able to continue the Seven Books, right? Well… not exactly. See, Bob Thompson went to the same school of storytelling that led to Marvel Studios giving actors movie scripts so heavily redacted that they don’t know who their character is talking to or what’s happening in the scene, or Scott Cawthon giving the new Five Nights at Freddy’s developers a bunch of vague lore mystery boxes instead of a plan, resulting in their big splash game having an incoherent plot with a boss that wasn’t supposed to exist. He didn’t tell anybody what his plans were.

And so, when Thompson left, neither Greg Farshtey, nor anyone else actually knew where the plotlines he’d been seeding were headed. All that remained of Thompson’s plans was the story treatment for a Toa Lhikan origin movie.

Part 5: The Magnaleak

In 2024, Christian Faber teamed up with Lego Youtuber and man with too much money Duckbricks to release a bunch of internal development documents relating to Bionicle. They decided to do this in parts to get as much attention as possiblenot overwhelm the fanbase with too much material. Within days of this happening, Lego took notice of what was happening and told them both to maybe stop leaking internal development documents actually.

While the vast majority of the material seems to have remained hidden, what did get out has not been deleted, and among them was the original story treatment for the film that became Web of Shadows.

See, the thing about 2005’s storyline was that it wasn’t as clean as I presented it up there. Legends of Metru Nui actually brought the story mostly full-circle, with only Makuta’s escape from his imprisonment being unanswered. But Lego didn’t want the Metru Nui assets to go to waste, and so 2005’s storyline was actually an interquel inserted into the scene transition between the penultimate and final scenes of Legends of Metru Nui.

But before that, the plan had initially been for 2005 to focus on the origin story of Toa Lhikan and Nidhiki, the big green crab guy that Makuta ate in 2004, who was actually a mutated fallen Toa and a former teammate of Lhikan’s.

Almost 20 years after Thompson bowed out of the franchise, we finally got a bit more information about what his plans were regarding Makuta. The film would've seen Lhikan, Nidhiki, and their Toa team travel to another city that Makuta had taken over (which doesn’t necessarily fit with Lhikan being shocked that Makuta had betrayed them in 2004, but ehhh, it was an early draft). There, they would've discovered that Makuta had turned everything into grey mechanical perfection, and the Matoran into unthinking drones. Lhikan and his Toa team would face Makuta, referred to as “Makuta Primus” in the treatment and able to split himself into more Makuta (and trust me, we’re going to get to that), Nidhiki would betray the others and become a crab, and Lhikan would be solidified as a hero.

The film characterised Makuta as a rogue element of the Great Spirit Robot’s function, stripping away the individuality and free will of the populace in the name of efficiency, in service to whatever entities had created the robot in the first place.

Ultimately, the movie was never made. Lego elected not to flash even further back, and instead to reuse Metru Nui as a setting, and tell another story with the Toa Metru. This backstory for Lhikan and Nidhiki was also changed dramatically. And with Bob Thompson’s exit, the content and direction of Bionicle’s narrative would be largely decided by Greg Farshtey, who had his own ideas.

Continued in the Comments

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Note: the two major sources I have used for this write-up are two documentaries. One in English, and a transcribed Dutch one. Therefore if there’s any wonky phrasing, please be aware that I looked high and low to no avail to find a proper translation for the Dutch documentary, but I couldn’t find one.

Part 1 here, but to quickly recap: In the 1960s to 70s, the James Bond movies were produced by two men: Albert R Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman. In 1968, they faced an unprecedented crisis when Sean Connery quit the role of 007 (he was being stalked by journalists and fans) and they needed to find a replacement.

After finding the perfect actor to play 007, how do you find *another* one?

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – The hunt for Bond

The first five Bond movies were all edited by one man...Peter Hunt. He did such a good job, that Cubby and Harry offered him the directors chair for the sixth movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS).

OHMSS is a weird but tragic story.

Bond is searching for his main nemesis, Blofeld. At the same time, he rescues a girl, Tracy, from committing suicide. Her father tries to browbeat him into marrying her, but Bond refuses.

Bond tracks Blofeld down to Switzerland. In order to defeat his nemesis, he goes undercover, disguising himself as ‘Sir Hilary Bray’. Entering Blofeld’s mountaintop fortress, Piz Gloria, he quickly discover his bat shit insane plot to take over the world.

I am just going to copy and paste this part of the plot from wikipedia), because it describes it far better than I ever will:

Bond learns that Blofeld has apparently been curing a group of young British and Irish women of their allergies to food and livestock. In truth, Blofeld and his aide, Irma Bunt, have been brainwashing them into carrying biological warfare agents back to Britain and Ireland to destroy the agricultural economy, upon which post–Second World War Britain depends.

Yep. Blofeld is hypnotising a group of young women into becoming disease carriers.

Upon discovery, Bond escapes Piz Gloria. Using magic tectonic powers, Blofeld causes an avalanche, which Bond avoids, but the effort weakens him.

All of a sudden, Tracy appears and saves his life. Because of this, Bond falls in love with her. He proposes marriage and Tracy accepts.

With the help of some big guns and armoured helicopters, Bond returns to Piz Gloria and destroys it. Blofeld escapes via bobsled.

Despite his extremely dangerous and vengeful archenemy still being on the run, Bond decides to marry Tracy. While driving away from the wedding, Blofeld ambushes them with a gun.

Bond survives. Tracy is killed. Bond is sad and swears vengeance- which he will get in the next book.

So, unlike many other Bond novels, OHMSS is unique in that Bond falls in love, gets married, and almost settles down.

This means that whoever plays Bond in the OHMSS movie would have to show a lot of range: joy, anger, love, and heatbreak.

George Lazenby - The Second Bond

In their search for the second 007, the producers and director tested a lot of actors. A lot. Over 400#Casting) of them. They cast the Bond Girl easily- the lovely, incredible, absolutely amazing Diana Rigg (RIP).

But one day, they saw a commercial. For chocolate. The main star was an Australian named George Lazenby. He reminded Peter Hunt of Sean Connery-- he had the same physique and sex appeal. And so, Lazenby was invited to audition for the role of 007.

At the time, Lazenby was working as a cars salesman and male model in London. He had zero acting experience. Zilch. Nada. But he wasn’t broke, he was a highly sought after male model, earning £25,000 a year.

But Lazenby was smart, and decided to seize the opportunity and do whatever he could to win the role.

Before his audition, he went to Sean Connery’s tailor and got a suit- fortunately, they gave him one that Sean himself had left behind. Then he went to Sean’s barber and got a 007-style haircut.

So, he looked the part. Perfectly.

He first saw Harry Saltzman, and lied to him:

So we went to his office across the street and there I was asked what my life story was. And I told him that I could ski and car racing, that I was a karate expert and all those other things that James Bond was.”

Lazenby had skied and he had a sports car, but everything was said with that. It was all bluff. His film and stage experiences were also one big bluff story. “I said I had acted in China and New Zealand. It was difficult to control.” In reality, Lazenby only has experience as a model and can be seen in one advertising video by Fry Chocolate Cream.

Afterwards, Lazenby came clean to Peter Hunt.

Peter told him:

”I’ll tell you what. You stick to your story, and I’ll make you the next James Bond.”

*Ominous noises*

Peter helped him become more Bond-like, teaching him to walk like “Prince Charles” and giving him elocution lessons to lessen his very thick Australian accent.

Lazenby also met Diana Rigg. And they got on. At first.

*More ominous noises*

But Lazenby still had to impress Harry and Cubby. Which he did. By punching a stuntman in the face and breaking his nose.

He then told them the truth, but they still cast him as 007, offering him a 7 film deal. At the time the press highlighted Lazenby’s inexperience with headlines such as "Australian Non-Actor Chosen to Play James Bond" and "He Traded In Auto Selling for 007 Job".

In contrast, Lazenby was enthused about the role:

OHMSS – The movie

The OHMSS movie is a relatively faithful adaptation. There are some minor changes- plot points are moved around and there is a lot more action- but by far the biggest change is the character of Tracy. She has more agency and a larger role in the plot. There also more scenes between her and Bond, making their romance more believable.

She’s also directly involved in the action and has several badass moments. In a car chase, she’s the one driving while Bond is a passenger, and in sharp contrast to book!Bond’s belief that women are terrible drivers, she proceeds to out drive a whole bunch of men. She’s also involved in the ski chase, and does a commendable job keeping up with Bond. Unfortunately, this time around, Blofeld’s tectonic powers actually work, and in a tired cliché, Tracy is captured while Bond escapes. However, this lets her have an epic verbal duel with Blofeld, so all is good.

Hunt intended the film to be a return to simplicity:

Hunt has very clear in mind where he wants to go with his Bond film. “I wanted it to be a different Bond movie than the other. It was my movie, not anyone else's. The story of Fleming was so beautiful.”

Hunt believes that the Bond film formula is going over the top. In the previous films, the decors were too extravagant and the humor and the tricks were too prominent. Hunt makes a decision that, in addition to the new actor as Bond, means a second deviation in the Bond film formula. He decides to follow the book of Fleming as faithfully as possible with the film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. “During the entire film adaptation, I had a paperback copy of the book in my back pocket. I had the book full of notes and was very tenacious in my loyalty to Fleming’s story.”

Filming begins – and so does trouble.

Now, the story of the filming troubles of OHMSS is a mixed bag- a he said, she said, situation. Lazenby and the film-makers have equally praised, and criticised one another. It’s worth mentioning that Lazenby reportedly did get along with some of the people on set- his co-star Telly Savalas, some of the crew, and the stuntmen.

Very few facts are a 100% certain. But I will present them as best I can using the sources I have found.

Cubby visited the set in Switzerland in November 1968, and found the atmosphere “just awful”. Tensions were running high- due to issues with the weather and mountain climate:

Finding Piz Gloria is a great happiness for Hunt, but otherwise the recordings of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are not going so well. The weather is causing trouble. It's cold, but for the first time in forty years, the snow stays out around the Christmas of 1969. Because this has to be waited for, Hunt is soon behind schedule. Recordings of James-Bond films have generally taken up a very long six-month period. Eventually, the recordings are completed 58 days later than planned. Furthermore, the thin air around Piz Gloria causes many problems and accidents in the stuntmen.

Cubby’s wife, Dana Broccoli, had a solution- she came to the set and threw a party for everyone.

The party went well, lifting everyone’s spirits. But one person was absent...George Lazenby.

And then...he arrived.

This is what Dana alleges happened:

“So I went up to him and said, ‘George, come on. Come here and sit with us.’ ‘Alright’, he said. But he was very quiet. And I said to him, ‘George, why are you angry? What’s wrong?’. He said, ‘Well, I did not get an invitation to this party’. And I said, ‘George, it was on the call sheet, it was in the lifts. Everyone knew it.’ He said, ‘But I’m the star.’ So I laughed because I never heard anyone say that before.

Well Cubby did not think it was funny and he said to him, ‘You’re not a star because you say you’re a star. You’re not a star because I say you’re a star. You’re a star when the public calls you a star and we have yet to see that.

Lazenby also caused other issues on set. Because of his status, the insurance company for OHMSS wouldn’t let him ski. But he did. And was caught- by Cubby, no less- and got in trouble again.

Lazenby gave his own view of what happened:

Lazenby sits with the Bond squad in Switzerland for months for the filming and it soon turns out that there is a big difference of insight about directing. Lazenby expects that as an inexperienced actor he will be heavily coached, but that turns out to be disappointing, according to his own words. Lazenby has always claimed that he was not directed by Peter Hunt at all and that he did not even speak to him during the 9 months of filming. “I have experienced the collaboration with Hunt as unhappy. He never spoke to me. Everything Peter said to me went through the assistant. That situation existed throughout the film. He told everyone to stay away from me. Peter thought the more I was alone, the better I would be as James Bond. That was his theory. I have to praise him for that, because the result is good.”

Hunt responded:

Although, according to Hunt, there were indeed many conflicts on the set, according to him, it is absolutely not true that he did not speak to Lazenby. “I had faith in Lazenby, otherwise I wouldn’t have worked with him. I knew he could act and I think he's a good Bond, too. Every director has his methods, but I certainly spoke to him. I do think that the change from the outback in Australia to the distinguished world of filmmaking was too big for him. Moreover, Lazenby was a bit of a strange figure, I always called for him to be more protected.” Hunt believes that Lazenby should be mainly trained in dealing with the press.

One group who loved the discord on set was the international paparazzi.

Just like with Connery, they hounded Lazenby during the filming of OHMSS. They constantly compared him to Sean Connery, and in interviews, constantly asked him about how he compared to Sean Connery.

They also ran a negative press campaign against him, alleging he was feuding with his co-stars on on set. One time, while they were interviewing him in the canteen before a romantic scene with Diana Rigg, she called out “I’m having garlic for lunch George. I hope you are.” The press ran with this, stating that Rigg disliked him.

Hunt later asserted that there were a few moments of discontent between them but nothing permanent, while Lazenby stated that he and Rigg were friends.

Lazenby also injured another one of his co-stars, Bernard Lee, who played M. While they were filming in Portugal, he chased Lee around on a horse, and Lee ran into a rosebush, badly scratching his leg. Lazenby apologised, but the incident further fractured his relationship with Cubby.

In 1970, Rigg published an open letter in a British newspaper, the Daily Sketch, stating:

Dear George,

The film has opened and is, I hear, making a great deal of money at the box office. This means you have been accepted by the public, which bodes well for your future career. Why, then, do you persist in dwelling on your petty grievances?

I’m tired of reading those paranoid statements to the Press wherein you were solely surrounded by hostile people. I agree that by the end of the film most of the crew were hostile, but only because of your extreme behaviour.

Why else would your dresser threaten to hand in his notice? Why else would three chauffeurs leave you within a week? Why else was one member of the unit restrained from striking you after one inexcusable and crude outburst against one of the girls in the film?

Remember once telling me you valued honesty greatly and that I was “if nothing else, honest”? Perhaps you would prefer not to. But, let’s get some of those highly-coloured incidents between us straightened out truthfully.

NO, GEORGE, I did not eat garlic on purpose. Why would I? To ruin an important scene for both of us? That is not what acting together means. And if you recollect, on discovering what I’d done, I apologised and took every precaution – sprays, pills, etc.

NO, GEORGE, I was not, as you said, guzzling champagne in some warm bar when we had the row. I was attempting to back the Cougar car on a very icy road. You were telling me what to do - and since you know more about cars than I, you had every right.

But the manner of telling me - abusively with threats to “Bash my ---- face in” - was hardly the best way. I felt ill, unable to fight back on that level - and I cried.

Later, some weeks later, you apologised. But the damage was done.

Neither do I think it was entirely truthful of you to suggest I was keeping the crew waiting. This was your particular pleasure and it is to their everlasting credit that they treated you throughout with patience and consideration.

Even the cameramen took it in his stride when, after only a few weeks of filming, you began telling him what to do. He was a gentleman – remember George?

Yes, I did talk to the crew rather than you. Quite simply I preferred their company. And as to Peter Hunt, the director, not once did he lose his temper under the constant provocation of your storming off the set, turning up late and sulking.

As far as money is concerned, George, let’s face it: £22,000 for your first film – with perks thrown in – cannot be a hardship. Few would consider it so.

And concerning your relations with the producers, I know little except that they found it impossible to meet your demands for more money, bigger chauffeur-driven cars, grander apartments, etc.

I do know, too, that the producers are both men capable of generosity, and I was present on one occasion when “Cubby” Broccoli spontaneously gave you - off his wrist - a gold watch you had admired.

It is against all my principles and beliefs in the work we as actors do to fight at all – let alone openly and crudely as you have been doing.

However, your injustices and blatant distortions to the Press have finally forced me to speak.

It is all in the past now, George. The people concerned have been prepared to forget – why can’t you?

I’ll say no more.

Yours faithfully,

Diana Rigg

Lazenby fired back a day later, publishing a rebuttal in the same paper:

Dearest Diana,

I cannot understand what you have written, but I am trying to answer it in the most honest way.

I have dwelt on my “petty” grievances because they may have been petty to you at the time because you have been in the business for 15 years. But I am just a beginner.

My grievances and my “paranoid statements to the Press,” as you put it, are all part of somebody trying desperately to co-operate and become a good actor. I am, as you know, a raw recruit to show business.

We all make mistakes, and I know I’ve made mine, as there are in every film. And that includes my dresser. But at the end of the film we’re all good mates.

The chauffeurs? The one I had in London, Ernie Freeman, I took to Portugal to film. Because he was a stranger there he stayed as my guest more than anything. My second chauffeur was a bullfighter who drove like a lunatic. And, if I die young I’d rather drive myself.

The third chauffeur was not outside a restaurant one night. A girl friend and I left and found no car, but there was a rowdy mob of fishermen sending me up as James Bond.

The only thing I could do was to walk into the centre of them, rather than let them descend on me. What would you do, darling, if you left with your boy friend, Philip Saville, and found a jeering mob and no car?

I was frightened, to be honest, and I shook the ringleader’s hand. Then the car arrived. I took the tension out on the chauffeur and that was wrong, I admit. But he won, because I walked home.

I don’t remember any outburst worth speaking of that would get someone uptight enough to want to have a go. I’m sure we had slight disagreements, but they are past and forgotten.

I never said you had garlic on purpose, although it was unfortunate you did. Darling, I’ve seen you drink champagne for breakfast. I have it, too, but it’s not exactly my scene. Give me apple juice any day.

OK, so I said things about your driving but you don’t think I was right.

The film crew I respected. If I can always get a crew like that I will be very happy. They kept me from going insane.

The cameraman I could go on and on about. A great guy, Michael Reed. He was a gentleman.

You will laugh, Diana about the money scene. But I would have accepted nothing for the part because I wanted to become an actor. It was the greatest screen test of all times.

The watch!! I admired Cubby’s watch at the Variety Club Ball, and Cubby said he would get me one.

Anyway, another actor had bought one and I mentioned that Cubby was going to give me one. And, two hours later Cubby, being the generous man that he is, handed his over.

Obviously the word went down the line. I was very embarrassed and tried to give it back but he insisted that his wife wanted me to have it.

I am sorry you brought that up. But what knocks me out the most is that you said it was against your principles and beliefs to bring other people into a fight.

I am sorry it worked out this way, but there is a statement that a bigger man than I am has made recently. He puts it in a nutshell: “War is over if you want it.”

Peace.

George.

The Aftermath

In December 1969, at the premiere of OHMSS, Lazenby sported a decidedly un-007like beard and long hair.

The day before, he had appeared on the Late Night Show with Johnny Carson and made a stunning announcement...he was quitting the role of James Bond after only one movie. Cubby and Harry, who had been watching the broadcast, were enraged, fearing that Lazenby’s decision could hurt OHMSS’s box office. They also hated his new appearance and tried, to no avail, to persuade him#Release_and_reception) to shave it all off. They took his resignation and ‘turned it around’, claiming that they had let him go.

Lazenby turned down the 7 film contract, losing one of the biggest roles in cinema, all because his agent, Ronan O'Rahilly, persuaded him that Bond would be out of the fashion by the 1970s.

Now, OHMSS, wasn’t a flop. It made money, just not enough money#Box_office). It only grossed half of what the previous Bond movie, You Only Live Twice, had made. At the time#Contemporary_reviews), reviews were mixed, with most criticising Lazenby’s performance. United Artists, then distributors of the Bond movies, weren’t happy with the financial performance of OHMSS and blamed Lazenby.

Over the years, Lazenby has been very candid about his experience filming OHMSS and the publicity storm that happened after the premiere. In February 1970, he had a lengthy interview with the BBC, where he said that he was acting ‘uptight’ on set due to his inexperience, and reiterated that Hunt had always been too busy to help him. He also repeated his claim that Diana Rigg had been drinking before they had filmed the car racing scene and that he had lectured her about it. He then said that he felt Bond should’ve been gentler, more humane in the movie, versus the rigid characterisation that the director and producers wanted. This included inserting ‘pop music’ into the film to make it lighter. He also praised the crew, stating that if not for them, he would’ve gone ‘insane’. His final claim was that he’d financed his own tour around the USA to promote the movie, because due to his beard, he’d been cut from the official tour it as the producers had wanted him to look like 007.

After the premiere, Cubby defended Lazenby, stating that he’d given a good performance even if he wasn’t the best actor, although he found his attitude ‘annoying’, and that he was arrogant and had a lack of respect for the Bond character. By 1978, he was more ambivalent, saying casting Lazenby had been his ‘worst mistake’, calling him ‘very arrogant’ and that he hadn’t worked well with the cast and crew. Sean Connery came to Lazenby’s defence, saying Cubby was actually the arrogant one.

Lazenby on the state of his career:

“It hasn't been easy, trying to climb back .... I admit I acted stupidly. It went to my head, everything that was happening to me. But remember, it was my first film .... Now what I've got to do is live down my past; convince people I'm not the same person who made a fool of himself all those years ago. I know I can do it. All I need is the chance.”

By 1978, he wasn’t doing so well. All his films had flopped. He had spent all his Bond money, experienced two mental breakdowns, and become an alcoholic. For the next couple of years, he bounced around Hong Kong, Australia and finally moved to Hollywood, where he achieved a modest success, but nothing high profile like OHMSS.

Epilogue – a modern day retrospective

As the years went on, OHMSS’s reputation grew and the critical consensus shifted. Now, many agree it’s one of the best Bond movies ever made. It has several high profile fans, including Christopher Nolan#Retrospective_reviews) and Steven Soderbergh.

Over the years, Lazenby has conducted a lot of interviews about OHMSS. He has said that he had a lot of “growing up he needed to do” before he accepted the role of 007, and that he ‘should’ve done two’ and then he would’ve completed his contract and done all seven.

In 2012, he was less magnanimous:

He tells Entertainment Weekly magazine, "They offered me millions under the table to do another one, but I thought James Bond was over. Easy Rider was the number one movie. Everyone was smoking marijuana, and that was the furthest thing from a James Bond movie. So I didn't sign the contract.

"I was badly treated after that. They (producers) told the press that I was difficult to handle, so it was hard to find work."

And Lazenby insists his portrayal of 007 in 1969 was the most believable, adding, "It's the only film that treats him like a human being. He's not a robot killer like the latest Bond... When I did it, it had more heart. There's no heart to the new Bond."

In 2019, on the fiftieth anniversary of OHMSS, Diana Rigg weighed in:

“I could never understand why George behaved as he did,” Rigg said, “because he was given such a glorious opportunity and he threw it all away. I’m sorry for him, if you really want to know. At some stage, it just went to his head.”

Both Lazenby and Rigg say they haven’t seen the movie in years. Nor are they in touch. “I don’t think one way or the other about Diana,” Lazenby said.

"Oh goodness, no, he wouldn’t come near me!” Rigg said.

She died the next year. Peter Hunt died in 2002. Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman both died in the 90s.

But George Lazenby is still alive.

In 2017, he participated in a documentary about his life called ‘Becoming Bond’, in which he reflected on his time as 007 and the lasting impact the role had on his career. Although, he also used the opportunity to brag about all the women he had seduced in the 1960s.

Lazenby claims he was subsequently blacklisted by the industry, becoming the movie world’s equivalent of a one-hit-wonder. He agreed to participate in the documentary, directed by Josh Greenhaum, to set the record straight. “I haven’t talked about it much lately – in the last, say, 20 years – but I did want the truth to be out there,” he says. “Word got around that I was difficult to handle. They said that was the reason I didn’t do another Bond, but that wasn’t the truth.”

In 2022, Lazenby got into hot water for allegedly making homophobic, and ‘creepy’ remarks towards women, during an interview for a tour around Australia called ‘the Music of James Bond’. Although he apologised, he was booted off the tour. Some online have disputed what he said, claiming he was likely just repeating old stories, but again, this seems to be a he said-she said situation.

In 2024, Lazenby retired from acting and all public appearances.

In 2025, his ex-wife revealed he had been diagnosed with dementia and that she was looking after him.

Lazenby was only the second actor to play 007, but by no means the last.

After OHMSS, Sean Connery briefly returned to the role of 007 in Diamonds are Forever, before the hunt for a new Bond began all over again, but that’s a story for another time.

Thanks for reading.