INVADER ZIM Fact #17

My home. The home of my people. My awesome people.

Since I decided to commit to these entries a day, more and more people have written in, not so much to say that they are loving or hating what I am writing, but to ask why I would even be writing these at all.  Now, I’m not the sort of person that relates to the desire to sit down and write a letter to, oh, say the Keebler elves and ask why they’re wasting their time on making cookies when they should really be focusing on their crackers – I just don’t have that kind of interest in things, but I’ve gotten that kind of question often enough to know that some people really do think that way.  Don’t believe me?  Here’s a snippet from one such message that popped up on some other site:

Dear Jhonen,

Big fan.  Love what you do.  Saved my life in highschool.  I’d be dead and pregnant by now if it wasn’t for Fillerbunny.  Been reading your ZIM facts on your blog, and I’m wondering why you’re wasting your time making E.L. Fudge cookies when it just seems like a waste of your talents.  I’m way more into the Club Crackers you make.  How do you fit in that tree?  I’ve seen photos of you at conventions and you look a lot bigger than normal elves.

Oh, I see what happened there.  I pasted a bit from the wrong letter, but it sorta works, considering what I was getting on about.  The letter I was going to pull form concerned a concerned fan who hated to see me wasting my time writing what they considered to be something demeaning to my good name or some such thing.  I imagine they see me the way some look at master ninjas who spend way too much time at pet shops punching hamsters in the face.

Dear Master Ninja,

Big fan.  Love what you do.  Didn’t actually see it happen (because you’re that good), but the way you murdered all of the people in my village was just superb.  I’d be dead and pregnant by now if I had not fallen asleep in the bushes before you appeared in a puff of smoke and attacked everyone I love and then raped their dead bodies, inseminating them with your supernatural seed that apparently makes the dead fertile. I work at the Cinnabon across from the pet store in the mall, and I’m just wondering if maybe you’re wasting your time punching the hamsters when there are so many other people to assassinate.

Seriously, ninja, what the fuck is up with you?

I’m not comparing the skill level of what a master ninja does with what I do with words.  If anything, I’m just having fun and making horrific mistakes along the way as opposed to utilizing techniques that I have mastered through rigorous training, and that’s what’s key here – regardless of whether or not one or a zillion people are reading this stuff, I’m having a good time writing it.

If I didn’t spend these last weeks writing on this journal, detailing the behind the scenes INVADER ZIM infos, I’d still be writing for some reason or other, just maybe not for mass consumption.  I’ve plenty of things I’ve written just to put words down, the way people hum or do impromptu dances, following a flow, a stream of impetus simply to get something out of your head or limbs.  The fact that why I am writing here, on this journal,  about one of the things I worked on way back when, is helping to make the world more livable and humanity just a bit better is just the icing on an already enjoyable cake baked, not by Keebler elves, but by a some cosmic caretaker that shined just a bit more light on me than the rest of his creations.

Well, I’m glad that’s outta the way.  Now you understand why everything here is so wonderful and amazing, despite it often being a confusing mess.  Nothing wrong with a person having fun AND undoing the crimes of ignorance.  Sure, sometimes it hurts channeling just as much awesome as I do through my brains and fingers, yeah.  And I mean it actually, physically hurts, on top of the obvious psychological wear and tear that is the natural result of being so amazing.  I wear special gloves and a helmet to keep the radiation from what I do from just withering away my surroundings, not unlike the way Cyclops wears that visor or shades to keep his laser beams from annihilating everything he looks at.  I do this because I care, dammit.

And I think that care is obvious!  As I’ve said, there are a LOT of rumors about INVADER ZIM, and it is important work I do here in clearing away some of the worst ones.

Today’s entry is dedicated to simply stating which of the many rumors are wrong and which are right.  A machine gun round of ZIM FACTS that will leave the cave troll of lies riddled with holes like a Swiss cheese troll.

RUMOR?

1.  Voice actor, Rikki Simons, upon completing his final voice session on the show, vanished for two weeks.  After the manhunt was called off, the fears of Simons’ death looking more and more like a reality, his wife, Tavisha Simons went in to the studio to plead and beg to be told just what we had done with her husband.  By this point rumors about the way we ran the show had already become commonplace, and allegations of foul play were commonplace.

Tavisha, a broken wreck of unanswered questions, decided to go to the very top of the parking structure, a three story deal that overlooked the burning wastes of Burbank California.  Her plan?  To jump off and  kill herself.

Animation capital USA, Burbank CA.

The story goes that Tavisha, having climbed up on the ledge overlooking the street below, paused for dramatic effect, imagining whatever music in her head was approaching its crescendo, the best point in a song to leap to your demise.  It was during that pause that she heard the weeping.  Somewhere, there was somebody weeping, and so she turned to survey the top level of the paring structure, uncovered and sun-bleached.

Rikki was sitting in his car, sobbing and crying, and, from the look of it, had been doing so for three weeks.

Tavisha ran to the car, and tried the driver’s side door.  It opened, and out spilled her half-dead husband, along with three weeks worth of human waste.  “THE DARKNESS!  THE DARKNESSSS!!!” Was all he could manage before going silent, the atmosphere of the world outside of his sealed windows shocking his system the way it would any system adapted to breathing in human waste.

I’ll admit, those recording sessions could get pretty intense, as we only had so much time to fit in what I wanted, and I wanted a LOT.  That last session, by its very nature, was incredibly important to me, and perhaps I went a bit far in getting what I needed out of my actors, and perhaps Rikki paid the ultimate price for my demands.

When he recovered enough to be able to speak again, he spoke of finishing his voice session, walking up to his car and simply breaking down, feeling overwhelmed by what he referred to as “An overwhelming, demonic sadness that could not be vented.”

Well, that story is TRUE.  FACT.

RUMOR?

2. Plenty of rumors about how I zoom around the studio on a tiny Power Wheels Jeep, screaming at the various crewmembers to do this better, do that faster, stop crying as my Power Wheels would roll over their feet and so on.  At the show’s height of popularity, pulling in audiences of five, maybe ten viewers, my ego had gotten so out of control that I felt justified in no longer needing to walk ever again, choosing to pick various Power Wheels conveyances depending on my mood for that day.

I’d just motor about the halls and lanes of the offices, grinding over whatever was in my way, screaming at people through a bullhorn and caning anyone that wasn’t doing their job properly.  Why people would endure any such treatment I can only guess at, and if I had to guess at it I’d say it was because it was still better than working on fuckin’ Rugrats.

As the show’s popularity waned, with America no longer thinking GIR’s signature catchphrase “I gone done a doody in the pantry!” was worth wearing on shirts and hats and such, the crew, sensing a need for alternate employment in their futures, no longer felt putting up with my tyrannical shit was worth it, reaching a head one day when they all rose up against me, working together the entire lot of them to overturn my tiny Power Wheels Humvee spilling me across the floor.

Everybody gasped, their rage replaced by shock and revulsion.

My legs, not having been used for years, normally hidden away by plastic and rubber, had atrophied, shriveled and gone noodly from lack of exercise and light.  The bones had become like dildo rubber, wobbling every which way.  Even then, my comedy genius was working in the background, telling me to, as soon as I could, make a note that “Dildo Rubber” was a good name for a band.

Anger had turned to pity, Loathing to disgust.  I pulled myself along the ground, my hideous, gummy limbs dragging uselessly behind me.  The crowd around me recoiled, the circle widening to get away from me.

All but one person.  Miyuki Hoshikawa, former revisionist turned board artist for the show, stood there, a shotgun hanging limply in sickened sympathy where just moment before it had been pointed at my heart.  I dragged myself over to her, grabbing the twin barrels and lifting them to my temple.

“NO!  I CAN’T DO IT!” Miyuki cried in her adorable Japanese voice, breaking down, understanding what I wanted her to do.  She wept, shuddering.

I locked eyes with hers, nodding, letting her know that it was okay.  She COULD do it.

And that’s when she blew my head off.

This story is TRUE.  FACT.

Okay, well, it was only two facts for today, and not quite the machine gun barrage I was planning, but two huge holes in the cave troll is still better than one, and especially none.  For all you know, each volley went right into the troll’s eyes, blinding him, sending him stumbling into a store display of soup cans (this is all happening at a grocery store).  It may not have killed him, but now he’s sprawled on the floor, covered in soup cans and everyone is just laughing at him.  I know I’m proud.

–ZIM FACTS. Here’s why—