Unless you're like me, a human being leading a shell of a life so devoid happiness, purpose, or consistent human contact that you choose to fill the gaping hole where your soul should be with an unrelenting hatred and abhorance of your fellow man and his creations, or if you are a gorgeous playboy traveling the world having fantastic adventures and bedding beautiful women (both of those possibilites are equally likely), you probably haven't noticed that Nickelodeon, the purveyor of so many of our beloved childhood cartoons such as Invader Zim, Rocko's Modern Life and Ahh! Real Monsters!, is trying to muscle the Disney Channel out of the "stupid annoying teeny-bopper bullshit market". As it stands, when it comes to relevance, Disney has it over on Nick in spades; but when it comes to putting out annoyingly insipid bullshit, Disney ain't got nothin' on Nick.

Spectacular!, a made-for-t.v. snore-fest that aims to steal away the crown from High School Musical for being the Best Movie Musical made entirely out of Cardboard, debuted on airwaves recently and I couldn't have cared less. As a matter of fact, I could've have cared less, but that would have required some work on my behalf. Real apathy happens naturally, but when you take it to the next level, you run the risk of busting a blood vessel. I was completely williing and able to let this movie fly entirely under my radar when I saw this suckfest of a scene while channel surfing:



You're probably hesistant to press play, and I don't blame you. Here's what I'll do for you, I'll set the scene: a group of douchebags at a bowling alley (Because only douchebags go to bowling alleys. Bowling is fucking stupid) when they decide hit up one of the arcade machines, Rock The World; an obvious Rock Band knock-off, for some band quick play. They hit random song, and the song that comes up is one that is supposed to remind the main female character about her ex-boyfriend or whatever, but she sings it anyway. And then the main male character joins her for a duet, and then I guess they fall in love or something. Afterwords, I cut my balls off and threw them away, because I knew I didn't deserve them anymore.

So where do I start with this trainwreck? All this time, I've been assuming that "Rock The World" was a shitty rip-off of the Awesome Rock Band game that we all know and love, but know I'm starting to see that it is more like a chinese bootleg or a poor man's arcade knockoff made by a shitty Korean developer looking to make a quick buck on the Music/Rhythm craze, hoping that if they made a game that at the very least looked and sounded like Rock Band, idiots like the tools in this movie wouldn't know the difference and lose their shit over this retarded clone. In retrospect, that's a brilliant marketing scheme that I wish I had thought of myself.

The cabinet itself makes no sense to me: Why have one guitar, but two mics? Obviously to captilize on the game's duet feature, which the Korean developers over at Faketech had the prescene of mind to implement to really make their game stand out. Nice thinking, guys. And yet, Nikko (The main male character. Nice name, fag.) looks like he just picked up a random mic and started singing along to the song. Look--it's not even plugged in. The game itself looks uglier than Frets on Fire, and you can tell the Guitar chart was made by a dipstick (or a Neversoft employee. HEY-OH!). You'd think they'd be able to at least steal some gameply footage from Rock Band to at least make it look professional.

That reminds me of my other grip with this video. Why rip off Rock Band? And not, "Why would you do such a thing?" but "Why do you have to?" We all know that Nick is owned by The Viacom corporation, who is also the parent company of Rock Band Publisher MTV Games, so it's not like they don't have the rights to put Rock band in their movie. Not to mention that Harmonix released two tracks from the movie's soundtrack as DLC for Rock Band to promote the movie. You'd think they'd be able to return the favor and put Rock Band in their movie instead of this ass-backwards copy cat. Perhaps, the producers realized that putting something awesome (Rock Band) and something Shitty (Spectacular!) in the same space would cause an adverse reaction. The two forces would cancel each other out, causing a vortex of Dark Matter that would destroy everything in its way and kill millions. So if you think of it like that, the producers of Spectacular! had only our safety in minds when they unleashed Rock The World upon the world, truly the lesser of two evils.

and now for SUPER DYNAMIC COOKING TIME!