It must have been a combination of the dramatic lighting plus Holly’s come-hither look: “How about ‘ Mozart in the Jungle‘” sounded to me like some code word for sexytime! I didn’t know it was a series on Amazon. One that I guess TB enjoys watching, perhaps at home in the evening with the missus. Which I suppose is how he was inspired to come up with today’s strip. After a three week story arc set in Atomik Komix Cloud Cuckoo Land, Batty’s finally back to writing what he knows. And here at SoSF, we binge-read and write about Funky Winkerbean, and your guide for the next fortnight will be comicbookharriet!
Binge and Bungle
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
I’m guessing TB doesn’t watch Mozart in the Jungle, otherwise he’d know that most streaming services will resume from your last position.
“How about ‘Mozart in the Jungle’?” “Grrrrowwwlll! You go put on your loincloth and I’ll grab my powdered wig and velvet breeches!”
Well, at least it has nothing to do with comic books.
In the Meantime, I’ll fess up to never having streamed anything on my TV or using such a service, but one would think there’s some sort of record as to what they watched and when they can look up. Am I wrong?
Indeed. Jeff Bezos know everything about us.
Impossible. If he knew everything about me, the boredom would kill him.
How long has this strip been on the shelf? Cartoon Network stopped using that logo almost a decade ago.
I guess this is what a normal conversation sounds like to Batiuk, if he’s listening to boring people who nap a lot while they watch TV?
Oh Tombat. He went for it with that set-up line about why people binge watch TV shows, but he overestimated that punch line by around 100% or so. It’s definitely in character for a guy who assumes his readers have no short-term memories at all to assume that every binge watcher gets confused and ends up sitting through the episode they just watched, but that says more about him than it does about the readers. It’s a really stupid joke but at least it doesn’t have anything to do with comic books…yet.
Grunt! Plop! Another strip pinched off on the way to 50 years.
Thanks to TFH for his commentary. I especially liked his titles that referred to The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Don McLean, and The Band.
Seconded. The post titles are always the hardest part.
Also David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Sonny & Cher, and Ice Cube. (I had to look up the last two.)
I missed the Ice Cube reference. I guess I’m too white and nerdy.
Today’s installment could have been called “Bungle in the Jungle”.
Hulu AND Netflix? How decadent. The pepperoni food poisoning protection racket must be going well.
If it ain’t him not understanding what the Previously Watched thing on his Netflix queue is, it’s the clusterfuck happening in Crankshaft. Time for him to go.
Crankshaft has been especially dumb lately. I agree. Batty needs to be cancelled.
What’s dumb about Crankshaft is that the title character is an incompetent asshole, except when that would actually be funny. Imagine if Ed treated this baby delivery with the same concern he shows for Keesterman’s mailbox.
Or, if any other character bothered to point out that just last week he was incapable of parking a bus. Hell, Ed even set up the joke: “I’ve delivered a baby on a bus!” The obvious retort is “You can’t even deliver a bus!” Batiuk swung and missed, with “Really? You never told me about that” and wry smiles.
Batiuk only lets Crankshaft be a jerk in “lighthearted” situations, and then he gets those wrong. Like when he traded Lena off the bowling team. That wasn’t funny, that was mean and hurtful. And probably an HR violation, but HR doesn’t exist in the Funkyverse.
BWAWHAWHAWHAW! It’s funny because everything in today’s strip belongs to the real world, except the interaction of the characters!
It’s like people not remembering Pete’s last name.
Pete has a last name? I always thought “Pete” IS his last name, and his first name is “Mopey.”
TB gets a pass on this one; in my experience, it’s the 2010s (and 2020s) version of a 1990s problem I had in my house, where we had a pile of a dozen or so video tapes that my father would record shows on, never bother to label, yell “DON’T ERASE THAT TAPE!” whenever somebody suggested reusing tapes rather than buying more of them, then, when he did get around to watching them, half of the time, he would get ten minutes into the program before saying, “Oh, wait, I’ve seen this one already.”
Or my father with my parent’s first VCR. The concept of fast-forward was just lost on him, he’d watch shows he recorded and complain about all the commercials.
BTW there’s twenty year’s worth of Law & Order on VHS in the Bushka’s basement.
Eh, they’re just going to fall asleep in ten minutes anyway.
Whenever Batiuk has an idea for an inane sequence, he always uses the hapless Winkerbeans. If he needs someone to be befuddled or thwarted by basic existence, he always drags out Funky for it. It’s never Les, even though if he had repeated sequences like this between Les and Cayla it might make their marriage a little more convincing, because Les can never be thwarted by his inexperience or ignorance.
This isn’t to say that Les sequences aren’t inane. It’s just that when Batiuk intends for it to be inane, Funky’s always the subject.