Everything is Terrible! Welcomes You to "Kidz Klub"

Everything is Terrible! prepares for “Kidz Klub”

The art and video collective brings their latest movie collaged together from video deadwood to Gasa Gasa on Wednesday night.

For every Sesame Street and intelligent, attenuated, well-crafted piece of children’s programming, there are weeks of low-budget, preachy foolishness mouthed by fuzzy socks with ping-pong ball eyes. The best shows open kids’ eyes to the amazing world of possibilities outside of their houses, while the worst tell them that most of those possibilities are dangerous, people are predatory, and the most important thing they can do is learn to obey and conform.

Everything is Terrible! created its most recent film, Kidz Klub, by editing together clips from the latter, and it will be the backbone of their stage show when they come to Gasa Gasa on Wednesday night.

Everything is Terrible! (EIT!) rakes through our cultural backwash to see what happens when it is decontextualized, recontextualized, or simply given a wider airing than it originally received. In many way, the collective is the natural byproduct of Blockbuster Video stores, which carried not only the hit movies of the day but the second-rate knock-offs created to appeal to those who got to the store too late to rent the movies they really wanted. One of EIT!’s signature art pranks/installations was the Jerry Maguire Video Store, which they stocked with more than 14,000 copies of the Tom Cruise movie that they acquired over the course of 16 years.

It started organically in 2014 with a throne of Maguires, and people who saw it began to participate by sending EIT! copies until they had enough for the store. Currently, they’re collecting Maguires with plans to build a pyramid.

The New York Times quoted an EIT! statement: “Seeing thousands of Jerrys finally reunited will forever destroy the viewers’ previous perception of culture, waste and existence as a whole. The Jerrys are a beautiful thing.”

YouTube has made the products of EIT!’s cultural archaeology more broadly accessible. They’ve been doing it for almost 15 years, and the viral splash made by some of their early uploads convinced them that the project had legs. Commodore Gilgamesh said in an email interview, “Duane was obviously one of the most exciting videos from our early days, but of course Cat Massage is another that really got us going!”

In “Duane,” an interviewer on a pre-teen dance show in the 1980s asks blonde, well-coiffed Duane about his style, then cuts to him doing a spotlight dance, radiating smugness as he tries to bite Michael Jackson’s movies. They edit the clip to lock in on his more serpentine moves, and as is the case with the best viral videos, you can’t put your finger on quite why you return to it, but you do. You can see so many cultural battlegrounds in 10 or so seconds of his Aryan self-satisfaction. “Cat Massage” is more obviously all kinds of wrong as a woman tells us what her barely responsive cat thinks as she explains how to massage it.

In those signature videos, their editing hand is less obvious than it is in Kidz Klub, which collages together more than an hour’s worth of material to create a surreal narrative with clips stitched together so that voices from different shows reinforce or contradict each other. Their sensibility is clearly influenced by DJ culture and particularly artists like Girl Talk, The Avalanches, and DJ Shadow who make the found nature of component parts central to the project.

“We are turning propaganda against itself,” Commodore Gilgamesh says. “Taking this old garbage, ignoring copyright laws and turning it into something beautiful and magical is a radical act of rebellion in itself! We are trying to undo many of the things that we were all raised to believe. The oppression of capitalism, religion, colonialism, war mongering, and environmental degradation are all tackled through our movies and live shows. We do it in a way that is still fun and funny and doesn't feel too preachy.”

Because they’re working with found footage, they try to approach the material ethically. It’s easy to make fun of everybody and everything when their products are shitty, and a good laugh can be powerfully tempting. They try to take a more humane approach though, banging on people who deserve it and treating those whose best simply isn’t that good more kindly. As creators, they’re sympathetic to the people who put in a lot of work to get something made, but “if someone is actively hurting people/society, we'll lampoon them,” Gilgamesh says. “We will never get a cheap laugh at the expense of a person's appearance or momentary failings. It is more about ideas than individual people and we always try to punch up and never punch down.”

There was a time when EIT! focused on footage found on VHS, but now they draw from DVD and digital sources as well. In part, that broader net gives them access to material they want to take a swing at, but also because their audiences have changed over the years. Video footage from the ‘80s and ’90s that once had nostalgic resonance isn’t as meaningful to the next generation, and without that connection, EIT!’s weaponizing of it doesn’t have the same pop.

“I think that there is a window of nostalgia that works in the viewer's mind,” Gilgamesh says. “If it is too old, it doesn't work to trigger what we're going for in people. While everyone is laughing and singing along, we utilize nostalgia to show people the horrors of our world and hopefully push them to be critical of the culture that we've all created.”

For the tour, they have created live characters that have their own motivations and relationships adjacent to the movie. That means traveling with costumes and performing in spaces that are not equally prepared for a stage show. “We've made this so much harder on ourselves than we had to!” Commodore Gilgamesh says.

“When we first started touring back in 2010, we were mostly doing movie theaters that expected a Q&A with the filmmakers, and we came out in these ridiculous costumes to do a fog-filled cult ceremony! It has always been more important to us to build a universe than to explain to anyone what we're doing. And that's what our live shows do! We take our fans on a magical journey!”