Once again, I’d like to sincerely thank all of our fantastic SoSF guest hosts, both past and present. The effort you all put into it didn’t not go unnoticed, no matter how awful the arc you got stuck with might have been. You were all anchors, lynch pins, vital cogs in the daily SoSF machine, and I’m going to miss dealing with all of you.
Sniff. The fact that Harley, which isn’t even his name, easily found work in a public school says plenty about the Westview Board Of Ed’s hiring practices, especially in the 1970s.
“Welcome to WHS, Mr. Gacy. Would you care to tell me a little something about yourself?”
“Well, I really like clowns.”
“Terrific! You’re hired! The mop and bucket are over there, and the children are that way!”
Some guy tells me his name is “Harley Davidson” and I’d be all like “yeah, and I’m Lamborghini Ferrari, nice to meet you”. The guy was literally running around “nudging” high school students for the purpose of having them breed. That aspect of this story is really downright creepy when you think about it. “I NEED to make the geek and the nebbish fornicate…but how??”. Shudder.
Great Moments In FW Arc Recap History
Sept. 15-27, 2014
Scapegoats Football! The team endure Bull’s haranguing on team picture day. Owen is pressed into service when the first the team mascot and then the ‘Goats’ wide receiver succumb to the flu, and scores a winning Westview touchdown in the unlikeliest of fashions.
Good ol’ Owen. At the time, it seemed highly, highly unlikely, but I’ve actually grown just a little nostalgic about Chullo Boy and his oily sidekick, Cody. I mean hey, at least they weren’t in their nineties, and had discernible personalities. Owen was kind of a dumb, greasy scumbag, and Cody was something of a pitiful pervert, which is a hell of a lot more than I could say about Flash or Phil or Ruby or Batton aka The Geriatric Patrol. It’s kind of hard to believe it was all that long ago. I don’t believe we ever saw Owen and Cody again after graduation, unless they popped up in the background of a Komix Korner arc or something. I wonder what became of them? I assume Owen is employed at a vape shop, while Cody is probably heavily into crypto and meme stocks. And Alex is surely employed at a seedy tattoo shop, somewhere on the edge of town, next to a massage parlor and, well, another vape shop. These are best-case scenarios, of course.
Son of Stuck Funky 
In “Millenium,” John Varley named a time traveler Lucille Baltimore, which she shortened to blend into the 1970s. That caused another character, a late-twentieth-century American, to wonder why she missed a joke about being Lucy Ball.
Really, if you plan to blend into contemporary white American culture, this name is utter dumbshittery. You give it some thought and pick something so incredibly bland nobody would give it a second thought.
Harley isn’t a road hog…
He’s more of a road hard.
And put away wet.
Though the way he looks the wetness is likely due to incontinence.
😆😂🤣
In fairness to ‘Harley’, he’s trying to blend in with people named ‘Funky Winkerbean’, ‘Les Moore’, ‘Jack Stropp’, ‘Masone Jarr’, ‘Cliff Anger’, and ‘Crazy Harry’. How is he supposed to find the level?
Let’s not forget there’s a bus driver named Crankshaft and a proctologist named Keesterman in the next town over.
How did you forget Harry Dinkle?
Or June Bugg.
Seriously… how DID you manage to forget Harry Dinkle? Millions of readers want to know the secret, as we will never find inner peace until we remove him from our consciousness.
I remember that book. And the so-so movie that was made from it. And, for that matter, the short story (“Air Raid”) it was expanded from. All infinitely better than this crap.
The lead character was actually named Louise Baltimore, not Lucille (I just looked it up to be sure). So, not an “I Love Lucy” reference after all. Given the detail with which you remember a scene that apparently didn’t happen, I am concerned that Harley Davidson, the Time Janitor, has been nudging your brain. Check yourself for symptoms immediately!
The book and movie did include a robot named “Sherman,” though. By the end of the book, he was the only one who actually knew (almost) what was going on.
I think my memory was affected by my disappointment with the story’s outcome. Varley is such a good writer that I expected a better ending than “Hi, everyone, I’m the Big Computer, better known as God, and Sherman is My Son. Let’s not ask about those cryptic messages on the time bricks, or other problems, because I’m going to send all these nice, healthy people so far into the future that they’ll survive the time-disaster that’s going to wipe out everything.”
Sherman’s name was a nice touch. Lucy implied at one point that he was named after the tank, not mentioning Mr. Peabody and the Wayback Machine to anyone. But her knowledge of both Shermans implied that she’d done a lot of historical research, which was cool. And more than Batiuk’s characters did.
And the whack smug rises
From the phony down below
Batty’s not realizing
We won’t miss him when he goes
(Apologies to Greta Van Fleet) 🙃
And if he looked to his left, his name would have been Captain E.Z. Confectionery.
If he’d gone inside, he could have seen the spinner rack and named himself Jupiter Moon.
Or “Photo Supplies Tobacco”.
Hey Mr. Lookids Comics
Hey hey hey. It’s not like he said “My name’s Jay Barry.” Or, “I’m Barry Allen Embarrassment” or even “Rich Evans Bowel-Movement Jr” We need to cut this genius some slack!
Shouldn’t that be “Rich Evans Bowle-Movement Jr”? 😛
It’s way too complicated to parse for us, uh, “lesser humans.” We’ll have to wait for official word. I’m pretty sure CBH has the credentials to let us know. Until then, we need to be quiet.
I think you mean Rich Evans Tums Festival Jr.
oh get it! because his name is harley davidson. and that’s how he got his name. because he saw a harley davidson!
who needs stuff like plots, tension, or character development, when you can instead have little just-so stories behind trivial details that nobody asked about.
it’s a shame this strip is ending in a few weeks, because we’ll miss out on months worth of riveting strips like these.
I remember that football story. Easily one of the flat-out most idiotic things Batiuk has ever written, even in spite of there being a LOT of competition. (I mean, it may not have been THE stupidest thing, but whatever had that “honor” before pales in comparison to the swan song anyway.)
Is the guy on the motorcycle supposed to be someone we should recognize, or is he just some rando who will only exist for this one strip?
“Cool helmet, dude!”
He needed a name, an identity. And there it was! With a flash of inspiration he became Kohl Helmut-Dude!
Later regularized to “Helmut Kohl”, the time traveler — looking to change the world for the better — became Chancellor of Germany from 1982 to 1998. In that role, he played a significant part in overseeing the end of the Cold War, German reunification and the creation of the European Union. His mission was in every way a success.
But somewhere … somehow … each time disruption causes a time bubble, a bubble which grows into alternate reality. And in that alternate reality — invariably a duller, grimmer, stupider reality — a scenario will play out. A scenario wherein one alteration to a key detail will plunge the denizens of a damned hellscape that exists only a “quarter inch from reality” into a distorted nightmare from which they cannot escape.
_______
The time traveler couldn’t hear the motorcyclist’s comment over the roar of the engine. Instead, he fixated on the “Harley Davidson” logo painted on its side….
.
Helmut Kohl couldn’t have been a time traveller. You would never be able to generate enough energy to move that much mass through time.
Too bad Captain EZ doesn’t appear to have tobacco ads in its 1970s windows. Harley Davidson could just as easily have taken the alias “Virginia Slim” (I would have said “Marlboro Man,” but I already referenced the Mickey Rourke/Don Johnson film in a comment a couple of weeks ago).
Also, do not think a cameo appearance by Peter Fonda makes this ride any easier, Batiuk. You’ve still got three more weeks of padding out this chazerai to go!
That place looks like the drugstore from Batty’s youth.
That’s exactly what it is: https://sonofstuckfunky.com/2022/04/19/it-dont-come-ez/
Coincidentally, I learned last week that somebody’s making a remake/update of “Easy Rider,” a movie that is (despite all its flaws) about perfect for what it is, and inextricably bound to the period when it was made. About the only way this movie could be “remade” is the way George Lucas “remade” Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress.”
I look forward to a disaster of Batiukian proportions.
Some movies need to be left in their own era, and Easy Rider is definitely one of them. Footloose is another major offender. The idea of a town-wide dance ban made little since in 1984, and absolutely none in 2011.
Note how he used “photo supplies” and “tobacco” to properly date the flashback. Now if it had said “lottery tickets” and “delta-8”, he’d known he’d gone too far into the future. Very helpful detail.
One month left and a limited amount of strips to explain your sudden sci-fi retconning just to have an excuse to remove the time skip from Crankshaft, and you spend a whole day to go “hey want to know what this guy’s name was a reference to?” Amazing how this man can find ways to become lazy.
I may’ve mentioned this before to, but making all these flashbacks scattered across the Funky timeline feels like such a momentum killer. We went from last spring’s Donna origins/the Elminator to Susan’s suicide attempt to Crazy losing his postman job to the 1993(?) reunion to the post office bombing to Summer’s birth to Les and Lisa’s first meeting, and now to the very beginning of this time traveler’s saga! How is this an understandable retrospective when we’re skipping all over the damn place? We’re a better retrospective source and we do our recaps impulsively on what seems the most interesting to cover as opposed to the day’s strips!
I miss Cody & Owen too. My best memory of them was during a “Halloween at WHS” arc where Cody came specifically as “Ben Riley, the Spiderman clone!” (because just saying Scarlet Spider wasn’t straightforward enough. Could’ve at least used that as a springboard to wax nostalgic about the Clone Saga and give us a real laugh of comic history). I presume that if they’re nowhere to be seen, they did the best thing and got the hell out of dodge, just like April Patterson.
In retrospect, writing high school gags for Owen and Cody was well within TB’s wheelhouse and they probably got some of the best writing there was in Act III… not that TB intended this to be the case.
Last appearance of Owen, Cody, and Alex. August 28, 2017.
Ok here’s a conspiracy theory for ya: what if Bautik/Ayers looked back at this strip specifically for “hey what did we last show Summer looking like?”, saw the black-haired woman on the far right, and went for that for her new look even though presumably she was draw on the left closer to Keisha and their parents?
You are correct in iding the black haired woman on the far left. Black haired woman on the far right is, I’m pretty sure, Marianne Winters.
That’s Girl Les fist-bumping with Boy Lisa in the second row, isn’t it? (I kid, I kid.)
Amusingly, that actually happened to a rather prominent comic book character. In Lex Luthor’s first two appearances, he had red hair, but he also had a bald henchman who tended to be more prominent in the stories. For his third appearance, by a different artist, the artist looked back at the previous issues and apparently assumed the bald henchman was actually Luthor. So that’s how he drew him. And the character has been portrayed as bald ever since.
Oh man, Les’
ShakespeareWalter Raleigh costume. Seemed to make him more insufferable than normal…flashback to earlier that morning as Less readies for the day…
(screaming at Cayla) “That’s not how Lisa laid out my pantaloons! The edge, always on the edge of the bed!”
Why did this…thing have to establish an identity? For whose benefit? Why did this time/space shifter need any notoriety? Wasn’t he supposed to remain anonymous?
Good lord, look at the questions I’ve just asked. The sooner this strip ends, the better it will be for what remains of my mental health.
just wait! we might get a strip that explains how harley got his flattop, or how the curtains in montonis are red because harley brainwashed the interior decorator.
Notice where Harley’s cross-dimensional time helmet landed him: right in front of the comic book store.
And as you noted elsewhere and above: Not just any comic book store. His comic store. His. Not yours, his. Maybe you had a comic book store, but it’s not his comic book store, so that doesn’t matter. What matters is his comic book store, because it was his comic book store.
Me, me, me. Not you. Not any of you. Not all of the rest of you together. Me. This is my strip, this is my comic book store, and fuck all of the rest of you.
“My side! Your side! My side! Your side!”
Gang, I’m starting to think we’ll never learn more about Frankie’s plan to disrupt the Starbuck Jones franchise to get back at Lisa’s Story.
(Monday’s strip: ‘So, did you ever have to influence someone in the making of a movie about My Mother John Darling’s death?’)
There’s a future deep dive idea…FW arcs that never really ended. We never did find out what happened to Frankie and the Film Food truck. The arc suddenly veered into a whole thing about Marianne’s incredibly delicate emotional state, and that was it. I don’t think Frankie was ever seen or even mentioned again. He was a terrible villain anyhow, always being outsmarted by that bunch of knobs.
There’s Becky’s mom, forever suspended on that scissor lift, although I think she popped up a few years ago during a Dinkle arc. He never did finish the story, though. That was back when characters like Becky sometimes got actual story arcs, before he started using comic books as filler material. That was what was lost when BatYarn became obsessed with his fictional comic books, all those B and C-list characters just disappeared.
We never found out who the gay prom scenery was, either. Hopefully, it all worked out for the best, and hopefully it inspired readers to be non-committal until they had more information, too.
I’m still wondering if we’re gonna get a Chrismas Eve confession from Summer or Maddie that they were the gay prom scenery all along.
Would make that weird strip from Corey’s wedding where Maddie asks Keisha about Summer’s love life make more sense.
The winds shift quickly in this strip. I’m betting nothing more gets said about any of this. Those characters served their purpose and now Batty has moved on. Heck, he probably doesn’t remember half of the arcs we remember.
I would agree…except Susan Smith showed up to inexplicably not commit self-off more than ten years after she disappeared this year.
“So how did you get a name like Harley Davidson?”
“From my parents, of course.”
“You do realize you’re using the name of a motorcycle?”
“No, the company is using my name. My first time-travel mission to 1903 was to make sure the Heaven’s Angels would have something to ride, so I found two young entrepreneurs and offered to finance them. They were so grateful that they insisted on taking both my names for their surnames. Funny, now that I think of it, but Owen Harley and Cody Davidson had a time helmet just like mine.”
Had Harley arrived only 2 minutes earlier, he would have called himself Bultaco. 2 minutes later and his name would have been Oldsmobile Cutlass.
If he saw a truck, he could have been Peter Bilt, but that’s probably a little too porn-ish for Batiuk. A time traveler from the future visiting the past in order to get two uber-nerdy kids laid sounds like a 80s movie.
And if he looked in a different direction, he could have been Winston Salem.
“Yes, my name is Coca. Coca Cola, yes, that’s me.”
“My name is… Nick. Nick…. uh… Soap….dish. Yes! Nick Soapdish. It’s, uh, French!”
“I’m Chester Plate!”
“Pea…tear…griffin. Oh crap.”
Like Ford Perfect, “Harley” thought his name was “nicely inconspicuous.”
Douglas Adams is positively whirling dervishly in his grave.
ED,
I believe you got a worse daily strip than BC, and yes that is possible. Perhaps, TB’s final strips will all be printed in descending order. I pity the remaining daily hosts. But at SOSF, we don’t come to praise TB, but to bury him. (Shakespeare is so underused!)
These final strip’s really bring out the best in our commenters, don’t they?
While I was waiting for tonight’s post, I watched “Casablanca.” So many great lines, such as: “I’d like to think you killed a man. It’s the romantic in me.” If you all wish to add your own, I won’t steal your thunder. Few movies can match such great line-writing. You might think of others, but my money for prime line-writing is “Outlaw Josey Wales.” Here is one example: “Never paid him no mind. You were there” “I might have missed.”
But to me the most powerful moment in “Casablanca” is when the Nazis begin singing, “Die Wacht am Rhein” and Mr. Laszlow urges the orchestra to play “La Marseillaise.” They only do when Rick nods. Then the patrons erupt, particularly the Free French police. Complete face shots of the cast joining in as a FY to those Nazi bastards. I can’t watch that scene unemotionally. It is perfection.
Final comment about FW: They should have run Harley out on a horse. “My kingdom for a horse!”
(Shakespeare is so overused!)
Only twenty-one more to go now, and if I do half, that’s only ten or eleven more, not even a full two-week shift. It’s only going to get far worse from here, and I’ll enjoy every minute of it.
😭 oh no! Far worse? You would think that Mr. Batiuk had already reached the bottom of the barrel. Crap! Damn! He’s going through the barrel and tunneling straight down to the nether regions!
“This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels…The day may come when Freddy Got Fingered is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny.” -Roger Ebert
Ebert put out a book called “I hated, hated, hated this movie.”
We all know the man could write eloquently, but part of that is knowing when to knuckle down with the terse Anglo-Saxon words.
I think of that title often as I read FW. “I hated, hated, hated this strip.”
Siskel and Ebert were must watch in our household. I appreciate you, GL. You have made the perfect comparison. We live in a world that even “Freddy got Fingered” deserves higher praise than Act III FW.
Roger Ebert’s bad reviews were hilarious. You can read them at https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews. Just filter for rating, reviewer, and (if you want) year and genre. The line “I hated hated hated this movie” was about North, a dreadful Rob Reiner movie he dropped 50 megatons on. The Freddy Got Fingered review is good too.
North is a lot like Funky Winkerbean. It thinks it’s making all this drama and comedy out of contrived, hateful, painfully unfunny situations. And yes, it’s by Rob Reiner, a man capable of doing much better work. (Ebert loved This Is Spinal Tap, as do we all.)
Ebert’s spat with Rob Schneider is also hilariously vicious, and has a Tom Batiuk angle. Schneider took a shot at his critics, complaining that they weren’t qualified to judge him because none had won a Pulitzer Prize. Ebert’s answer was “I *have* won a Pulitzer Prize, and since I meet your requirements for having an opinion, I am qualified to tell you: your movie sucks.”
The line as relevant now as it was in 1942, when Rick tells Major Strasser, “Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.”
I know exactly what he means. In 1973 I was at my USAF training base in the Midwest. There were places ON THE BASE that were off limits due to crime and violence, not due to security reasons. So I can believe the bastard Nazis would have thought twice before going into NY.
“Casablanca” even has great lines when the history is off, as it is with Captain Renault’s rejoinder to Major Strasser, who’s been shot (round up the usual suspects), which is:
“We mustn’t underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918.”
Americans didn’t do that, Louis.
The face of Yvonne — hurt by Rick’s snub, ready to spend the night with a German — clinches the “Marseillaise” scene for me, and I’m glad to hear her fervent “vive la France!” when it concludes.
Jean Renoir’s “La Grande Illusion” makes excellent use of “La Marseillaise” in a POW camp.
Oh, yeah, time to be a pretentious history major (I settled on a major, Summer! Why couldn’t you?) again:
During the Russian Civil War, Lenin had the idea of sending bands to rouse the Bolsheviks. They would play revolutionary songs, particularly “The Internationale.”
Unfortunately, at that time, Russian musicians didn’t know how to play “The Internationale,” and they would have to play something else.
What revolutionary anthem could the musicians play?
It turned out to be “La Marseillaise.”
This irked Lenin no end, because it was the anthem of une revolution bourgeoise, and belonged to a country now engaged in an imperialistic war, but he yielded to expediency
Form your battalions and never wonder whether the gambling in Rick’s Cafe Americain is honest, for as Carl will be the first to tell you, it is as honest as the day is long!
The amazing thing about Casablanca is that the writing is so tight. There’s not a single wasted word, gesture, character, or scene. (Well, maybe a single one: I’d argue that Carl’s conversation with the couple trying to learn English before they emigrate to America could have been cut.)
It’s remarkable because the process of writing the script was ramshackle, with several different writers involved and last-minute changes galore. But somehow it all holds together concisely and elegantly. The first time you watch it, you focus on the snappy dialogue and the glow emanating from Ingrid Bergman. By the 10th time, you start to marvel at the pacing and how much is left unsaid, but still understood because the writers trusted the audience. By the 15th time, you are amazed at the craft that went into the script — eliminating the unnecessary is the hardest part of writing, and somehow there’s virtually no fat in the entire film.
I bet TB has seen this film more than once. I bet he likes it. He has a habit of liking good things but not learning a single thing from them. It’s like a brick wall somewhere in his mind where good examples cannot penetrate.
Such much?
You will do beautifully in Amerika.
You will get along fine in America.”
Your Grease:
Eleanor Roosevelt once said of John Kennedy that he knew what courage was and admired it, yet did not have the strength of character to possess it himself.
Your reflection on Tom Batiuk liking “Casablanca” not understanding why it’s great brought that to mind. It’s sad, but it happens: “The Rutles” parodied everything there was to parody about the Beatles, but, to my mind, it hit the targets and missed their essence.
Your analysis of why “Casablanca” succeeds (as its source material, from all I’ve read, doesn’t and never will) was superb. (You are certainly not misinformed, as some were about the waters in Casablanca.) The last time I saw it I noticed for the first time how early Jan and Annina come into the story, for instance, and the artful way we’re set up for Rick’s redemption: well before Laszlo welcomes him back to the fight, we sense that he wants to return to it, be it from Louis’s teasing, Strasser’s snark (“the other side would have paid you more” for the gun-running in Ethiopia and military service in Spain), his good deed for Jan and Annina (which Carl and Sascha rightly hail) and the fact that he keeps his employees on salary when the Cafe’s closed and leaves Sam going to the Blue Parrot to Sam alone. (Later, of course, when he sells to Ferrari he gets Sam a greater share of the profits, 25% rather than 10%).
The world will always welcome lovers, and it will always hail “Casablanca” in its final form, as time goes by.
Just shocked! Shocked! Gambling is going on. ( Here are your winnings, Captain.) Just another example of the perfect meld of script writer to director.
[AS, I will specifically regret no longer reading your comments. I don’t know how one person can be as well read as you, AND retain so much. There are some days that I believe Anonymous Sparrow must be an actual literary committee and not just one person. You will be missed.
Just as there was only one Roy Orbison, there is only one Anonymous Sparrow.
Thank you for your kind words. They mean a great deal.
You are appreciated!
Tacking this on at the end to note that the Schneider-Ebert “feud” ended by gracious behavior on both sides. Always loved this column: https://www.rogerebert.com/roger-ebert/a-bouquet-arrives
Jeff,
Thank you for posting Mr. Ebert’s letter about Rob Schneider. Too often we hear about the conflict, and so rarely about the making of peace.
How fitting during the holiday season!
Merry Christmas!
Yes, that is beautiful. Thanks for sharing it. As much as we snark here, many of us try to find things to praise, as thin on the ground as they are.
Speaking for myself, I would love if Puffy could somehow pull this sodden wreck out of the septic tank and stick the landing spectacularly. I know it won’t happen, but I would be positively delighted. I love when people exceed my expectations. I love when an artist changes my mind, or my perspective changes so I can appreciate something I used to hate.
“The first thing I need to do is establish an identity”? What, you couldn’t use your real name? Nobody in the 20th century knew you. Or don’t the residents of your Summer-Centric Shangri-La use cognomens anymore? Is everyone a number/letter combo like the people in the 1930 sci-fi/comedy “Just Imagine” (shoutout to all El Brendel fans!)? Geez, Blendin Blandin travelled back in time with his own name in “Gravity Falls,” and what’s good enough for that show is…probably too good for this strip.
That Venn diagram of overlapping El Brendel/Funky Winkerbean fans has got to be a mighty thin sliver.
But if that sliver can be found anywhere, it’s here!
He had a good comic role as an aircraft mechanic in “Wings,” and he was still acting three decades later in “The She-Monster.” And the futuristic society of “Just Imagine,” where people reproduce by purchasing their babies from oversized vendos, sounds exactly like what you’d expect from a Funkyverse-derived society.
In the glorious post-Summer’s book future, everyone is just called Lisa.
I wonder if he nudged other people into naming their kids something stupid.
Summer: Shoot! I forgot to take notes. Can you start over?
Summer: Can you use puppets and use silly voices?
This where this clip belongs!
As a glass half-full person, I am going to focus on the positive. At least BatHack didn’t show us how Harry Dinkle got his name.
Oh, man! 😂
Welp, seems like Harley has just died, as he’s staring off into space instead of crowding the panels in response to Summer’s passive aggressive half-questions. RIP.
I’m honestly surprised Batiuk didn’t name him Rex All, in honor of the Sacred Store with the Holy Spinner Racks.
Well, I’d been holding off but since Puff Batty chose to double down on this stupid name, here it is. Warning: Lousy song and potential earworm. The song appears to have been written in 2 minutes in the shower, so it totally fits this arc.
The need for our time traveler to do a name change is totally unnecessary (like much of what’s been going on this month). He’s coming from another time, not another planet. I doubt his real name is Zaphod Beeblebrox. Although that does make me wonder if TomBa is riffing off (or ripping off) Ford Prefect.
There’s an abundance of characters named Harley or Harley Davidson already. Why is it that no one ever looks at a pencil and names themselves Eberhard Faber? Now that’s a name.
Ray Bradbury has a Professor Faber in *Fahrenheit 451* and didn’t realize how significant the name was until much later.
Before there is enemy action, there is coincidence.
“Well, ‘Funky Winkerbean’ was already taken.”
Why does McFly think we all want to know his boring ass life story?!
He couldn’t use his real name, because his real name was TomBatiukLacksTalent J. FunkyWinkerbeanSucks, Jr.
Sure, that’s awkward, but at least his name’s not John Darlingmyfatherwhowasmurdered. No wonder he shortened it to John Darling for his broadcast career.