The Final Elimination Round

Picked me up some vintage Funky Winkerbean merch not that long ago.

Even though this shirt is only going to fit me after a crash diet or a long bout of dysentery.

I love finding this old stuff, especially Batiukiverse wearables from past decades. And, lets be real, if anyone is going to spend real world dollars developing a weirdo shrine to something they love to hate, it’s gonna be me. Maybe in another decade I’ll have an entire room dedicated to Jar Jar Binks.

This shirt has a copyright from News America Syndicate 1985. King Features Syndicate bought News America in 1986, so that date tracks.

But it means that The Eliminator merch was produced in 1985, the same year that The Eliminator character would drop off the strip almost entirely. On Sunday May 12, 1985 we got the Mother’s Day strip I showed in my last post. And then we wouldn’t see Little Limmie typing away at her computer until February 23, 1987. That’s right. Nearly two years between appearances.

(CBH has actually seen Shatner at a convention. He nearly fell over trying to catch confetti falling from the rafters.)
Ah the good old days, of sentient computers, reused lineart, and fourth wall breaking meta humor; the real cancer victims.
(FYI, Star Trek Convention Arcs featuring Slim Whitman and E.E.T. were real things that happened.)
“Then he huffs some magic flowers, tries to run away to a drugged out hippie paradise, and has a fist fight with his boss.” “Yeah, still sounds about right.”
Obviously ‘Friday’s Child’, someone kick this poseur out.

Act I would go on for another five years, but The Eliminator would never been seen again. Except for one little cameo in 1992, on the yearbook pages that heralded the first time skip.

The Eliminator’s Act II and III emphasis seems outsized, when I think of so many prominent Act I characters that have been well and truly memory holed, characters like Rita Wrighton, Bodean, Neal, Ginny Wolfe, even compared to characters who only got a shadow of a mention in following eras, like Barry Balderman, Junebug and Derek, Carrie, or Tracey. Many of these had dozens more strips than little Limmie. Why has she gotten to retell her story half a dozen times?

Thumbing through Act I, it’s obvious that Batiuk just followed his fancy for the most part. He’d come up with a gimmick for a character, but the longevity of said character had more to do with their ability to be incorporated easily into multiple types of jokes. Batiuk didn’t push himself with the Eliminator, didn’t think of fun ways she could interact with Les, or Cindy, or Barry or anyone else other than Crazy Harry, who already fit her niche of geeky weirdo outsider.

It’s like if Snoopy was ONLY the Red Baron, and could only EVER be shown flying an imaginary plane atop a doghouse.

The Eliminator is kinda like Boba Fett I guess. Showed up for five seconds in the originals, did almost nothing, but was instantly iconic just because of a helmet. So now we’re forced to explore their retconned past and puffy, gross, boring future for decades and decades after.

69 thoughts on “The Final Elimination Round”

  2. Snoopy was a WWI flying ace but not the accursed Red Baron.

  3. CBH:

    “Thursday’s child has far to go…”

    But Leonard James will get there in the end!

    I don’t know whether I should pat myself on the back for thinking that the “Spock” booked for the Convention would turn out to be Benjamin…or just feel old. (In my comic-book reading, I could never guess who the mysterious individuals lurking in the shadows over several issues were…until one day, in the 1990s, I deduced correctly in a *JLA* arc that this time it was the Atom.) All I know is that I thought it would be the son of Benjamin Ives and Mildred Louise and not the son of Sarek and Amanda, and I guessed right.

    Of course, “beam me up, Scotty” never turns up on the original series, any more than Sherlock Holmes said “elementary, my dear Watson” in the Doyle stories.

    It would be much funnier if Crazy Harry and the Eliminator held a James Bond convention and booked James Bond…only to find that they didn’t have Sean Connery, George Lazenby or Roger Moore but the author of *Birds of the West Indies.*

    (Agatha Christie has a James Bond, too: he appears in “The Rajah’s Emerald,” a short story.)

    You look for William Shatner, not Captain Kirk, but you look for “Spock” and not Leonard Nimoy…heavens to Kneemoi, Carmen Sandiego, what is wrong with these guys?

    Don’t do it for them, Rockapella, and deny them all access to the planet Roddenberry!

  4. Thanks for the insights and the trip down memory lane, CBH. The Boba Fett comparison is spot on. As a kid, I enjoyed the Eliminator. She certainly offered a sense of fun–something you can’t say about her current incarnation. Having said that, I find Donna one of the least annoying members of the cast.

  5. Below the part about the Funkyverse wearables, i got an ad for “Anime Kimono Robe
    Authentic Japanese kimono robe for cosplay and special occasions.”

    For some reason I can’t explain, I find this very funny.

      1. Google any photo of sumo wrestlers, that would be pretty close. (There are a handful of western ones.)

  6. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    There’s a store near where I live (and by near I mean it’s almost in Chicago) called Lawrence’s and it sells fish, one pound of fish costs $17 dollars

    There is no way breakfast in a diner costs $500

    1. Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean

      A few hours later, crankshaft buys himself $3000 worth of scratch tickets, and none of them are winners

      Crankshaft: GOD FUCKING DAMNIT!

  7. Limmie had one other Act I appearance… sort of. She appears at the very very end of the stage musical Funky Winkerbean’s Homecoming, just minutes after Crankshaft sings his song. Les decides to join the computer club after school so he can duck a scheduled fight with Bull (a fight promoted as a spectator event over the school PA system) and runs into the Eliminator trying to hack into the school computer. Les figures out the password (“orangutan”) and they hack into the school computer and change the homecoming game back to a home game instead of an away game (yes, this is the driving plot of the musical). Les is hailed as a hero by all (especially Holly, desperate to win homecoming queen)… but Suzie Peterson still refuses to go out with him. The fourth wall breaks, the curtain falls. Fin.

    Funky Winkerbean’s Homecoming has been something of peculiar fascination for me, I cannot say why as I was not a theater kid nor am I a big fan of plays as an adult. I have strived for several years now to find a copy of the script and to find and get working my old downloaded copy of a performance of the play that was once on Youtube… and perhaps turn that into a series of posts on here. I have not had success locating a copy of the script, hard copy or digital (and I have tried some moderately sketchy means to obtain it the latter way), but I did finally find that old video and found software that will play it!

    In my research about the play, I have come across several cast lists posted in old scanned yearbooks. The Eliminator is always cast as male and played by a boy, understandably so given how TB portrayed the character and what he probably considered to be true about Limmie at the time (I mean, TB co-wrote the play). In the videotaped performance I have (thanks parent of student at Walnut HS in Illinois in 1990) however, the Eliminator is not present. Les runs into previously established-in-the-play character Tracy in the computer lab trying to hack into the school computer. Hmmmmm…

    Granted, this performance may have been short male performers and Limmie is a bit part. Heck, Crankshaft is played by a girl doing a killer Selma Diamond impression.

      1. The actor playing Les Moore in the image looks more Act I Les Moore than Act I Les Moore ever did

        1. The kid playing him does a good job being equal parts incredibly insufferable and hopelessly nebbish, a perfect Act I Les. It helps that it’s a pretty hammy role and the kind of part the right kid can dive into and make funny even when the lines aren’t funny. Crankshaft is the same.

          Dinkle is a huge part of the play and that is a tough role for a high schooler to play, pompous and over-the-top but also deadpan. It doesn’t help that Dinkle is almost always set up as a straight man and has hardly any lines that are even trying to be funny.

          Here’s a choice scene:

          Girl 1: Oh no! There’s Les Moore! He’s been trying to ask me out to homecoming for weeks now. What should I do?!

          Girl 2: Oh, just make some kind of excuse or something. But whatever you do, don’t (unintelligible).

          Girl 1: Why?

          Girl 2: He tapes everything you say…

          Girl 1: Is that legal?!

          Girl 2: I don’t know, but did you hear what happened to Cindy?

          Girl 1: No, what happened?

          Girl 2: Well, Les asked her out and she shot him down. So he went and brought a sex discrimination suit against her.

          Both: OH NO! HERE HE COMES!

          *they run away as Les runs toward them saying “hey! hey!”*

          1. Also, after getting some bad advice from Funky and striking out with several uninterested potential homecoming dates (he tries to charm one, a cheerleader who asks him to pay her for the date, by shouting “I’m not wearing any underwear!”… the audience goes absolutely bananas over that line BTW), Les runs back to his hall monitor desk and… uh…

            Yeah, that’s the machine gun “prop” from the long-running Les-hall monitor gag strips that Les is examining closely.

            And Act III’s Westview HS’s parents thought Wit was too edgy…

          7. That’s Funky with the trombone next to Dinkle.

            I apologize, I typed something to that effect up and must have deleted it or something before I posted.

          8. Homecoming!Funky looks eerily similar to Canon!Funky in Act II and Wally Winkerbean in Act III

  8. Wait…

    “Beam me up, Scotty…there’s no intelligent life here!”

    Is that actually a Batiuk-authored line?

    Or was it a 70s/80s example of an already-existing meme that Batiuk expropriated?

    Gotta be the latter, right?

    1. I’m at least 99% sure it’s the latter. I’m not sure when the shirt is from (the resolution is too low to make out the copyright date, and I can’t afford one of those CSI/NCIS magical “enhance image” computers), but a cursory search finds references to the phrase from 1985, and it almost certainly was around even earlier than that.

      If Batiuk originated the phrase – and did so on a piece of merchandise, not in the strip itself – I’ll eat a Montoni’s pizza.

      1. I first saw that line in Mad Magazine. One of their special editions included a set of stickers and the beam me up phrase was on one of them.

    2. Way back in the day, I used to see “Beam Me Up Scotty, The Coke On This Planet Sucks” T shirts for sale on various Jersey shore boardwalks. But I had no idea it meant blow, I thought they meant Coca Cola. I only got it years later. I have no idea who did it first, however, but we’re talking mid-late 1970s here.

      1. Epicus, you’re an east coaster. I hope you can help me with something. Have you ever heard the phrase “You’re full of coke”? My uncle, who lived in Massachusetts, used the phrase as a playful way to say he didn’t believe me, always with a smile and speaking in a growl.

        Me: The Cleveland Indians are winning the World Series this year!

        Uncle Jim (Red Sox fan): Aw, you’re fulla coke!

        I always thought he was saying “coke” as in Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola can make you burp, i.e., gassy. I always assumed it was a way to say you were “full of hot air.” Alternatively, it might have meant cocaine. Though it does seem an odd thing to say to a child, “Aw, you’re full of cocaine.”

        He was a navy veteran of WWII, and worked for the railroads. He passed away in the 1990s.

        Do you have any idea what else it could it mean? Anybody? I seriously doubt it had anything to do with the production of steel.

        1. i’ve heard “coke” used to mean “any soft drink.” I think that’s a northeast thing.

          my grandfather used to say “you’re full of soup” in the same way.

          not exactly what you asked, but i believe every bit of knowledge helps.

          1. Using “coke” to mean “soft drink” is a Southern thing; in the northeast, we usually say “soda”.

            Assuming WordPress decides to show the image, a map showing where people say “soda”, “pop”, or “coke”:

          2. My mother grew up in a town north of Boston on the New Hampshire border. My family moved to Ohio when I was six. Not long afterwards my friends and I were out playing in the backyard when Mom offered my friends a cool drink. No one took her up on the offer. I informed Mom that in Ohio soft drinks are called “pop”. Mom had offered my friends a “tonic”. They thought she was offering them medicine or tonic water. Mom and I still chuckled about that years later.

            “Tonic” could be just a lesser used variation in New England. When I lived in Columbus a lot of people said “soda”.

            Similarly there’s jimmies vs. sprinkles.

        2. I’ve never heard that one before. Around here, “full of coke” usually meant “the guy” just came back from NYC with a glove box full of cocaine. I knew a lot of sketchy types back in the day, so don’t judge me.

          There was a weird period in the very late 70s into the early 80s where cocaine was becoming sort of “respectable” in a faddish kind of way, like how marijuana did in the 60s and again in the 90s. Certain counterculture magazines would advertise cocaine products openly, like little bottles, spoons, and even cutting agents. Seems so depraved now. But people actually wore T shirts like the aforementioned one, and the infamous “Cocaine” done in the Coca-Cola logo style.

          1. As a sports fan, I remember it well – the death of Len Bias went a long way to making cocaine uncool.

          2. No judgements. Reminds me of an incident in high school. Apologies if I’ve shared this before.

            A friend on the basketball team was accused of smoking pot and the vice principal was going to search her locker. If she were caught she would have been kicked off the team. In a panic, she asked me to hide her pipe. Like a dimwit, I said I would and hid the pipe in my dresser drawer at home. The following day there was a note attached to the pipe in Dad’s handwriting, “I’d like to know what this is all about.” Mom, who sometimes seemed part bloodhound, smelled it. Rather than get in trouble, I spilled the beans and my parents believed me. Then my parents, being parents, called the school and told them what happened. My friend was kicked off the team and had to spend a week of school in a disciplinary classroom. I kind of beat myself up for not putting the pipe in a sealed plastic bag, or throwing it away. She felt betrayed and ended our friendship.

            Later that year she decided it was a good idea to light up a joint on the school bus. The school decided enough was enough and expelled her for the rest of theyear. She had to repeat her junior year. Sometimes you can’t save people from themselves. It’s too bad because she was a good player.

        3. I’m guessing that this is a minced oath: a polite, playful, child-friendly way of saying something *much* ruder that he thought you were full of (and an expression he didn’t want you to pick up and repeat.) Same with BJr6k’s grandfather and his “full of soup”.

          1. What you are saying makes sense. My uncle used the “full of coke” expression all the time on others as well. People in my family and extended family were weekly churchgoers who frowned upon swearing. There was very little tolerance for swearing in my house. As an adolescent, my Mom once scolded me for using “pissed off” while describing a fight at the bus stop. Lighten up, Ma.

            I was curious if anyone else knew of the “full of coke” expression. Uncle Jim’s and BJr6k’s grandfather’s versions were a cleaned-up way to say someone is full of (s-word). The what they’re full of may vary.

            I always wondered “Why Coke?”

            Thanks.

        4. I was born in Florida and lived there for 34 years. It was never called anything but “soda.”

  9. And so the Act 1 Eliminator’s story ends not with a gaming bang but a hacked “wah wah wah”. Funny how hacking becomes “his” last defining trait, basically cannibalizing the role of the sentient computers in some way, making them more subservient.

    Funny that you draw the comparison to Boba Fett, because as someone who still calls the bucket head my favorite Star Wars character (tied with the sand-hater Anakin himself), I was able to recall a very amusing anecdote that parallels the Eliminator even further: In the years before the Disney buyout, as the prequels and their byproducts fueled novel and comic writers to keep going nuts with the “Legends” of the expanded universe, Boba Fett had a slew of adventures both before and after the original trilogy. In the before era, one comic saw it fit to establish he had had a wife and daughter, and this was accepted with the nebulous notion that he walked out on them eventually. In the post-movie era. it was of course ensured that Boba survived the sarlacc pit he fell into in the movie and continued to menace rebel and Jedi heroes. including a chain of appearances in the “Young Jedi Knights” kids books where he fought and was outsmarted by the Force-sensitive children of Han and Leia, among other noble heroes.

    But this innocuous string of appearances ended up being more interconnected than anyone realized. As the writers of this era sought to tie up loose ends and keep building up Boba’s epic mythology (particularly one Karen Traviss, who did much to flesh out his heritage of Mandalorian culture to be one of the best in the galaxy, and saw to it that Boba eventually became their “Mandalore” leader), Boba’s wayward wife and daughter returned, and it was revealed (retconned) that the daughter, Ailyn Vel, had actually been impersonating her father in a string of appearances where it was deemed the character was too “out of place”. This meant all those times Boba had fought young Jacen and Jaina Solo in “Young Jedi Knights” was not the true skill of Fett himself, but merely his very skilled offspring who was doing bounty hunting work under his name, who had the ultimate goal of tracking her father down and rather brutally thank him for not being there for her and her presumed-dead mom.

    How did this end for femme-Fett-ale, you may ask? Well, it ended with her dead, killed in the Legacy of the Force book saga that reintroduced her as she was made a fall guy for an assassination scheme and then killed by ol’ Jacen Solo himself (who was on track to fall to the dark side himself over the course of said series and become Sith Lord Darth Caedus). But no worries, she had had a daughter of her own over the years, and it turns out her mom had been stuck in carbonite for decades but was eventually thawed out, so by the end of the series epic Mandalorian leader Boba Fett was a happy family man after all.

    The moral of the story is that Star Wars and the Funkyverse have at least two things in common: They are delightfully stupid and they have funny robot/AI characters.

    1. they have funny robot/AI characters

      The sentient school computer is one of TB’s most entertaining characters in Act I… but it’s got nothing on Vuffi Raa.

    2. Oh man, the hours of my life I’ve spent dissecting Karen Traviss with my homies. Good at writing military stuff. Really decent nuts and bolts prose style. But Gary Stus for DAYS. And she writes romance just like Tom Batiuk. Like a robot who doesn’t understand romantic love quickly pairing everyone up based on arbitrarily assigned affinity scores.

      We actually have slang based on her name, Travissing, which we use to mean a writer going through the same point or idea over and over again (sometimes in the mouths of different characters) rather than growing and developing those things or saying something new.

      That shit is common and natural in a first draft, but should be cut out when you get to the editing phase.

    3. Andrew:

      Speaking of robots…

      This all sounds like the Marvel position with Dr. Doom. If you didn’t like his appearance in a story, and felt that “it wasn’t the true Dr. Doom,” well, maybe it was actually a robot (a Doombot!) standing in for him, while the real Lord of Latveria was doing much greater things elsewhere.

      When you’ve got diplomatic immunity, you’ve probably got other things as well.

  10. I only have one piece of FW merch, my Crazy Harry mug, which I won in a parody strip contest. Les was reaching for a bag of something in the kitchen cabinet, and I labeled it “Lisa’s Ashes”. Needless to say, it was a smash hit. It was actually the second SoSF contest I’d won, but I deferred the first time, as I was new and no one at SoSF liked me very much at first. But I showed them. I showed them all! BWAAAHAHAHAHAHA!

  11. There’s a mention in the CS Gocomics comments today that the entire run of FW is going to be hosted on Gocomics. Apparently, this was revealed by Tom in an email newsletter. Can anyone here confirm this?

    1. Can confirm! Straight from the horse’s newsletter!

      “This next bit of news is in answer to all of you who’ve been asking if there’s any chance of Funky Winkerbean landing on GoComics. Well, the answer to that is yes it will. You’ll be able to follow Funky there starting from year one and continuing on through all 50 years of its long epic run starting in the early Fall. Fortunately, I don’t have to do the work of adding all of those strips to the site because I’m busy enough right now putting together the strips for Volume 15 of The Complete Funky Winkerbean. Pulling together the three years of strips from 2014 through 2016 isn’t as onerous as it sounds, and, in fact, it’s a lot of fun revisiting and spending time with those years again. Speaking of Volume 15, here’s a sneak peek at some cover roughs for that book.”

      2. It’s like he WANTS this site to continue! Does he… has he come to understand we’re actually his biggest fans?!

        1. I’ve always wondered about this myself. FW was the only strip I know of that received daily, wall-to-wall coverage, with a level of nitpickery that was almost hard to believe. Perhaps he was actually flattered in some twisted way. I mean, probably not, but it’s fun to speculate about it.

    2. For one thing, I’m hoping that WHEN the FW strips get on GC, they better not use that god-fucking-awful color palette that the Crankshaft strips on the site from 2003 – 2009 have

      1. Also, waiting for the FW strips to finally show up on GC is going to be extremely painful for me

    3. I also subscribe to the newsletter and can confirm. I confess to being one of the folks who contacted tombatiuk.com to inquire if there was any way to bring the Funky Winkerbean archive to GoComics. His answer at the time was, “While there are no immediate plans to bring Funky to GoComics, I’m not ruling it out for the future.” I don’t know what made him change his mind, but I’m glad it did. I was a reader of Funky Winkerbean Vintage on the Comics Kingdom and was sad to see it disappear.

      I find it funny that the announcement of the Funky Winkerbean archive coming to GoComics was secondary to the announcement of his new YouTube channel. He sure has his priorities. TB seems to be trying to check all of the social media boxes. Good for him. I’ll be curious to see what he posts. Hopefully it won’t be just promoting his books.

      Coming soon, Tom Batiuk twerking on TikTok.

      1. Coming soon, Tom Batiuk twerking on TikTok.

        The thought of Batiuk doing that makes me wanna puke

      2. In case anyone was wondering, there have been no new tweets (posts?) from TB’s T̸w̸i̸t̸t̸e̸r̸ X account since December 2022.

        The same month Funky Winkerbean was put out of its misery. Probably just a coincidence.

  12. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    If I were the lady who’s drink was ruined by Crankshaft, I would’ve punched him in the jaw

    1. Still Today’s Funky Crankerbean

      Crank: How was I supposed to know that

      (I’m back from my vacation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I thought my familu were going to stay from Wednesday to Friday and leave on Saturday, but we stayed from Wednesday afternoon to this morning, it was rather uneventful for me besides the fact me, my sister and my dad went to a art museum)

  13. Today’s Funky Crankerbean

    Crankshaft: Guys, this isn’t the exit.

    Keesterman: We have to take a fat shit.

    (I imagine for some reason that crankshaft sounds like Denis Leary)

    Meanwhile in Mary Worth:

    Wilbur dreams he’s a fish, which I call Fishbur (I HAVE BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORDS)

  14. Related to The Comic Strip Formerly Known As Crankshaft: a few old strips I have (I got them from CK before Crankshaft was removed from there

    “Jerk With a Heart of Gold” does NOT fit Ed Crankshaft, but the tropes “Fat Bastard”, “Insufferable Imbecile” and “Karma Houdini” do

    I did the math and the library fee is $10920, no wonder why Lillian shit enough bricks to build a small house

  15. Today’s Funky Crankerbean:

    I think the strip would be slightly better if Crankshaft wasn’t singing

    1. Sure, but he’s not. We’re just supposed to have that song be present in the back of our minds as we look at the strip.

      Cheap wistful nostalgia with a Beatles backdrop is as uninspired as it gets, but it is giving the primary audience exactly what it wants. It also doesn’t rely on using ancillary characters and a backstory which is unexplained and self-contradictory, so it’s better than Eugene being put out to the pond. It’s still pretty lame on the whole, regardless.

  16. I did my weekly dive into GC’s political cartoons. It’s the second week that, apparently, COMMENTS ARE BANNED. Yes, on the political strips.

    Soon to be everywhere on GC?

  19. I’m hoping the wits, wags, and cards of SoSF will have a go at this one.

    For the second panel I was thinking of something like this, but it didn’t really work for me:

    “Once Old Red Hat tried to pay me with a sock full of coins!”

    “What did you do?”

    “I dumped it out over his head! We all had a good laugh watching him scrabbling on his arthritic knees chasing pennies!”

    1. Ah, nostalgia.

      In *Amazing Spider-Man* #45, Marvel invited the reader to write a panel at the end of the story, as Spidey left the Connors family (Curt, Martha and Billy).

      The title of that issue is “Spidey Smashes Out,” and elsewhere “Spidey Saves the Day” (#40) and “Spidey Smashes Thru” (#107).

      Do you we want to live in a world where “Crankshaft Crushes It” or “Crankshaft Confounds Expectations”?

      Or is this, as a t-shirt would have it about Frankie, Crankshaft’s World and we just live in it?

      “Crankshaft-Man, Crankshaft-Man, Does Nothing a Crankshaft Can/Causes Traffic Jams Oh So Much/Responsible for the Death of Pop Clutch…”

  21. I’m new to this site, and I apologize if this is old news to everybody, but:

    The Eliminator actually was a boy. In three 1982 strips his off-panel mother calls him Donald.

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