Tag: Winnipeg Blue Bombers

Fantasy Football

Happy New Year, everyone!

This week’s Crankshaft, spanning 2025 and 2026, celebrates a time-honored football tradition: Game Helmet Day! every year, football teams update their playbooks between Christmas and New Year’s, and give out game helmets to fans who make the best suggestions! If you get a game helmet, it is customary to wear it to bed the first night…

…in some universe, apparently.

This story is ridiculous. Even by Tom Batiuk’s standards. At least the Westview Scapegoats more or less resembled a high school football team. Even in Act II, when Batiuk was apparently getting ideas from whatever writers’ room at Disney gives us movies like Air Bud.

Writing the description of what’s honest-to-God happening in Crankshaft felt like this:

Read the first paragraph again, but imagine Ren is calmly explaining it to you, in his “the Prozac just kicked in” voice. Game Helmet Day sounds just as silly and random as Yak Shaving Day, doesn’t it?

Because Tom Batiuk giving himself awards isn’t good enough for the Funkyverse anymore. No, no, no: all awards must take the exact form Tom Batiuk requires. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers already gave Ed Crankshaft an official game ball, instead of having him arrested for barging into a secured area. The team can’t just send Crankshaft a letter informing him of their glorious decision to keep using his play! The rules of courtesy on Planet Batiuk require a second team award, even though he already got one! (Needless to say, phone calls or Internet communication are completely out of the question.)

Tom Batiuk’s writing is about as subtle as a 7-year-old’s Christmas list. It also applies to that dumb Batton Thomas interview, which is probably starting up again soon. That story exists because Batiuk is telling the world how he wants to be treated by interviewers. He expects journalists to sit in rapt attention, and let him drone on for hours about whatever boring comic book-related topic he wants. Oh, and you’re paying for his lunch. (On the plus side, it’s just Luigi’s/Montoni’s.)

Note also that the team caved to Crankshaft’s demand. When Ed asked about having his play added to the team playbook, on August 15, 2025, he was told “not in this lifetime,” as if it was an absurd request (which it was). Now he gets a permanent place in the playbook, and a peace offering, as if he were Genghis Khan. Maybe the team is trying to create a harbinger of Ed’s long-overdue death. I don’t blame them for trying.

It’s The Thought That Counts

Have you ever gotten a self-serving holiday or birthday gift? Like, a starter package for a pyramid scheme, from a pushy friend who’s been trying to recruit you for months? Or an accessory for a device you don’t have, from someone who has it, and wants you to get interested in it? Or a donation in your name, to a cause they support but you don’t?

That’s exactly what this arc feels like.

First, let’s keep in mind how bonkers this story already is. The plot mechanism is “Pam damaged Jeff’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers shirt,” which, again, is a plot borrowed from media for pre-schoolers. Replacing it might have cost $50 total, including international shipping. Instead, Pam took the grandiose step of buying two tickets to a Blue Bombers football game, without even asking anyone if they wanted to go a game.

A game in Winnipeg. Which is almost 1000 air miles away from Cleveland. Toronto is only 300 miles from Cleveland by car, would have been a much better tourism destination, and every CFL team plays a game there every season.

Pam’s “gift” of a $50 football ticket obligated its recipients to spend well over $1,000 each. The flight from Cleveland to Winnipeg starts at $650. Plus taxes, fees, hotel, meals, ground transportation, and border crossing costs. Updating passports, if you need to do this, is also expensive and time-consuming.

So who paid all these add-on expenses? And why?

  • Jeff paid the trip expenses, because he’s the only one with a real job. This would make basic sense. Crankshaft has a job, but I doubt it pays much. And it obligates Jeff to spend money he may not wish to or be able to.
  • Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because somehow he is independently wealthy. This would explain a lot. I’ve long wondered how Ed is able to buy gobs of stupid crap online, while the family shrugs off the massive property damage he causes. There are real-life stories of janitors and teachers who built impressive savings accounts over their long lives. Crankshaft doesn’t seem the frugal type, but time is on his side. A penny saved in 1940 (when he was already an adult) would be worth $3.17 in 2024 according to online inflation calculators.
  • Crankshaft paid for the trip expenses, because he’s the grownup. This would be consistent with how parent-child relationships work in the Funkyverse. Children are treated as subservient wards even when they’re in their 70s. Witness the Funky Winkerbean storyline where Holly’s mother bullies her into doing a cheerleading show where she gets seriously injured, and has to be treated a time when the family is doing home renovations, and Montoni’s is failing. Nobody ever says a word about this.
  • Pam also paid for the trip expenses, as part of the gift. This would fit Batiuk’s overarching theme of a mother wife doing having to pay penance for destroying the child husband’s special fandom object. But how does Pam have this kind of spare money lying around?
  • Pam paid the trip expenses, to force Jeff and Ed to get along better. This theory would address a long-ignored problem in the Funkyverse: Jeff and Ed should hate each other. They’re not blood relatives; they’re in-laws.

    Ed’s shenanigans – which includes water damage to Jeff’s precious comic books – have done infinitely more damage to Jeff than one ruined t-shirt. Jeff is long overdue to give Ed a The Reason You Suck Speech that would push the one from Family Guy into second place.
The joke is that Quagmire’s many criticisms of Brian are all 100% canonical.

Ed wouldn’t like Jeff either, because Ed is needy of attention, and he would see his child’s spouse as a competitor for it. Fortunately, the Funkyverse is very asexual, sparing us from a Wilbur and Dawn Weston situation.

But let’s lighten up. These two disparate, unfriendly men traveling together for a common purpose should be rife with comedic possibilities. Planes Trains and Automobiles, the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies, the original Toy Story, and family movies like Step-Brothers, mined gold from such a premise. But unfortunately, the Funkyverse is also very conflict-averse.

Instead, we’ve gotten one week on the mechanisms of appeasing a toddler, and a week on the banalities of air travel. At least Jeff’s puke-inducing Inner Child hasn’t shown up yet. But he still might.

The last possible explanation:

  • Pam wants to get both Jeff and Ed out of her life for a few days. As much as Jeff should be a tightly wound ball of hatred, Pam should be far, far worse. She’s forced to constantly indulge two idiot manchildren and their consumptive, destructive ways. Any woman would have left both of them decades ago.

    This could be a fun twist. It’d be nice to see the story cut to Pam enjoying a day of peace and quiet in the house, wearing a self-satisfied smirk that would be justified for once. But Pam is a woman, and the Funkyverse is very disinterested in women.

    But why else would she buy Ed a ticket, when he wasn’t the aggrieved party?