Awful lot of cringey logophilia admissions in this thread. Looks like this thread hits a little too close to home for some Kiwis? I can't say I was expecting that, how strange. Anyways, time for another Logophile Spotlight; today's person blurs the line a bit, but he's obsessed with classic television so I say he's "close enough".
Logophile Spotlight: Erik "MGHSHour" Mokracek
Buckle up, today's spotlight is a weird one that's going to take us to places you probably don't want to go. That's fine, just keep the windows rolled up and don't make eye contact with anyone, because it's time to enter the world of "
MGHSHour".
Erik Mokracek is a 34-year-old (as of 20 October 2014 according to
his Wikipedia page) resident of New Jersey who's obsessed with classic television, the American shopping mall circa 1980, and childrens' cartoons. Specifically, in regards to classic television, Mokracek is fixated on old game shows; in case you are wondering, his screenname "MGHSHour" is an abbreviation for "
The Match Game/Hollywood Squares Hour" which was on the air for literally less than one year in the early eighties. Mokracek is the owner of the fictional classic television channel Classix.
"We're at our best, with Classix."
Currently, Classix has 136 subscribers on YouTube.
Clearly, Mokracek is a fellow with all the trimmings of someone who's not all there. Get out your bingo cards.
Classix, Inc.
(Note: This VO was done by someone other than Mokracek
.)
Classix is perhaps what Mokracek is most well known for, and that's saying a lot. Classix is a fictional television channel that, by my best guess after research, would theoretically air nothing but old game shows. That and, well, old toy stores and malls? I apologize if I am doing a poor job explaining, however one of the things that Classix, a television station, is apparently able to do is revive shuttered toy stores. Here's
a "revival trailer" for Kiddie City, a store that went belly up in the early nineties. Also, Classix is capable of
reviving dead radio stations too, because fuck you that's why. At Classix,
we're at our best. Damnit.
Classix is in direct competition with TV Land for viewership, apparently, so Mokracek put together not
one but
two promo spots advertising his channel over TV Land using the "Sega does what Nintendon't" catchphrase. As we say in the television world, "Classix does what NintenTV Land".
Also, Mokracek's station apparently caught the attention of others in the past as the comments on this sing-song
"we've got it all" promo show. It's worth noting that apparently Mokracek has either had multiple channels or has deleted some content at one point as mirrors have cropped up for videos not listed in the MGHSHour account.
Classix, Inc. Original Programming
(Excerpt from
The Emmy Show.)
The shows that air on Classix can only be described as
a literal god damned nightmare. The clip above is an interview between Emmy (from
Dragon Tales) and Christopher Reeve...
post horse riding accident. This excerpt from
The Emmy Show will be the longest and most uncomfortable six minutes of your life, I guarantee that, and what's worse is that there are still
three more parts of this bullshit.
Classix,
where we're at our best, proudly presents the following original programming for your viewing pleasure:
- Ash Ketchum Feud (Part 1, 2, 3)
- The Candy Vault (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- The Child World $100,000 Shopping Spree (Part 1)
- Classix Action News (Part 1)
- Digimon: Tai's Date (Part 1)
- Don't Sit Down (Part 1)
- The Emmy Show (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- Fun House Halloween Day (Part 1)
- Gambit (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- Hollywood Squares (Part 1, 2, 3)
- Jackpot (Part 1, 2, 3)
- Jason (Part 1, 2, 3)
- Penny's Mall (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- Sale of the Century (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)
- Sandy's Best Halloween Adventure Ever (Part 1)
- Scrabble (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
- Strike It Rich (Part 1)
- Tic-Tac-Dough (Part 1, 2)
- Toy Talk (Part 1)
- Trick or Treat (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- Trump Card (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- What's Your Play? (Part 1)
- Winning Streak (Part 1, 2, 3, 4)
- You Bet Your Twinkie (Part 1)
- You Can't Do That at Wal-Mart! (Part 1, 2)
Bumpers, Idents, & Commercials
Mokracek has uploaded a ton of crap to YouTube. Most of these videos are idents and bumpers that understandably would accompany the programs aired on Classix assuming that they existed in some tangible form. He also uploads commercials for various things, the video above is probably my favorite one.
There are a ton of others, however, so here's a hand-picked selection of some of my personal faves:
Everyone still with me? Fantastic. We haven't even looked at the Classix website yet. Forget everything you've just read and seen because it only gets worse from here:
Erik's Mokracek's Game Show Saloon / Classix
If you can make it through the mess of broken links and 403 errors there's a lot of bizarre content all over the place with a heaping helping of that creepy "web rot" that affects the functionality of old sites as their code is deprecated away and the content said code references is deleted or moved. There's more here than it may seem, so I'll provide some of the more "interesting" pages here.
First things first, let's just cut straight to the
BIOGRAPHY page. He's unemployed (to the surprise of literally no one I'm sure), but he aspires to work in the toy department of a store. Honestly, I appreciate the sincerity; there's a certain childlike wonder about toys that this guy never outgrew and now, even though he's well into his thirties, he just wants to work in a toy store.
Much like a certain lolcow we all know and love, Mokracek obsesses over friends of his that were female in nature. Further down the biography page is a detailed list of every single time his friend Kimberly visited him. There's also a
KIMBERLY PAGE worth checking out where we find out that when they met, Kimberly was
FUCKING SIX YEARS OLD.
By the way, once you're done vomiting check out the
SANDY PAGE to read about a girl who was as young as
three. He also has links to pages for girls named Britnee and Courtney, but they are 404 links. He also has AIM screennames and email addresses named after them. Makes his obsession over Molly Hale kinda fucked up now, doesn't it?
Fake Edit: I found the
COURTNEY PAGE after doing some URL guessing.
I'm sure we all need something to bring us back into reality. How about we take a good long gander at the
FRIENDS PAGE? At first, I thought the two question marks that appeared was some kind of meta humor that came about from web rot, but then I scrolled down and saw a bunch of
Dragon Tales pictures, so that kind of tied everything together for me. For all I know, his only friends since the show's debut in 1999 have been Max and Emmy. Except for, you know, when he was banging kids.
Speaking of banging kids, here's a link to his idea for a
TICKLE ME EMMY DOLL. At first I thought this was yet another page that had deteriorated leaving only a picture of Emmy as some kind of sick joke. Surely, you're thinking the same as well. Do me a favor. Open that page up again, hold CTRL, and press A.
I'm so sorry.
Dragon Tales is something that Mokracek is extremely fond of, let's just address the elephant in the room. For posterity, here's the Classix
DRAGON TALES PAGE. There's nothing particularly entertaining here, just the fact that the show premiered in 1999 and he was apparently still in high school at the time. Having been born in 1980 that would've made him 19... so either he failed a grade or was held back or possibly started school late due to development issues.
Everything Else Too Short for a Section
There's a lot I wanted to cover in this post but I feel like this has gone on for far FAR too long. Here are three final things I wanted to share that weren't significant enough to warrant their own sections.
Grammy-Winning Pianist
Inexplicably, in the middle of his rambling on about game shows and kids he's stalked, Mokracek expressed a sincere desire to play the piano. He even made up a page about it (
PIANO PAGE). Apparently, he is able to actually play the piano and makes references to playing for various places around town. He also wants to win a Grammy award and is convinced that you get "a gold medal" and "$5,000" for doing so. I'm not so sure the Grammy's work that way...
The highlight of this page is the phrase "as many pianists know, a piano can be played without electricity or batteries". Fantastic. A runner up would be the fact that he wants to name his debut album "Friends Walking Piano Cake".
I've been informed from an insider source that his hit single "Walk Walk Chair Sit Emmy Toy Channel" was leaked, you can hear an exclusive cut
here. [Warning: Jump scare.]
Mokracek's Make-Believe Game Show Schedule
Originally I was just going to ignore this page because it looked like yet another string of random drivel but then I noticed something slightly off. All of his make-believe game shows have the most
amazing names. Below are some of my favorites, you can see the rest on the
GAMESHOW SCHEDULE PAGE:
- Who Wants To Be A Luxurious Dragon Tales Fan
- Dragon Tales Potato
- Press Your Luck Until You Die
- It's Your Chance To Eat On The Bus
- Tickle Man
- The Prize Is Rigged
- Touch The Fire - The Interactive Game
- And my absolute favorite... Jeoparsmart
I will admit to you with complete sincerity that I would watch the fuck out of
all of these.
The "Shopping Quest"
Also like a certain lolcow we all know, Mokracek has a Quest™ of his own. Unlike Chris however, Mokracek funnels his desires into consumerism and relishes in the days of his youth where he'd spend all day at the mall buying crap. Some time around January of 2013 he became overly nostalgic about this period of his life and posted
a video talking about his plans to buy old PS1 games. This in turn segued into
a tribute to PS1 games. This
then turned into
a whole ordeal about what he'd buy and where.
This led to
another tribute.
Four videos into this mess Mokracek finally realized "holy shit I'm on a quest or something" and posted a video titled
My Shopping Quest Since January 4 1999. (Similarity to
a poem from our favorite lolcow unintentional but noted.)
Then
one more tribute.
Let's take a look at how that quest is going by consulting the
VIDEO GAME PAGE. Wow. 21 games, including the million-seller
Need for Seed 2. Wait a minute...
In Closing
I don't really know how I feel about MGHSHour. In closing I'd say he's definitely 16 bits shy of a Super Nintendo, but his obsession not just with kids' cartoons but the actual
kids from them rubs me the wrong way. There was a lot that I dug up which set off my Chris Hansen alarm, and he seems to have a weird mindset around "sitting next to" girls and how much they like to walk. I guess in a way it's equal parts sad and disturbing.
I mostly became captivated with this person because his love of
Dragon Tales hits a bit too close to home for me. My hubby, whom I am a few years older than, was also in high school when this cartoon came out and he's also a huge fan of it. This might sound silly (or sad if you're an evil person), but he and I once went to one of those live stage shows of
Dragon Tales and he considers it one of the best things we've done together. Reading about MGHSHour is kind of like a window to hell regarding the other kinds of people who are "too old" to like this show.
Mokracek apparently
responds to people who mess with him, and was uploading videos as recently as 3 weeks ago, so there's a decent chance he'll say something to you if you leave comments on his videos. I wouldn't recommend doing so.
I leave you now with the legacy of MGHSHour:
(Also: The more I typed up and worked on this post the more I realized that this may do better as its own thread, or possibly maybe even in the Pooh's Adventures thread. Not sure though, but I wanted to post this anyways because I had put a lot of work into it. I hope you enjoyed it!)
]
. It's nice to discuss them finally.
