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punchesco · 4 years

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Ultimate Aqua Teen Hunger Force Body Horror Masterlist

ATHF was on just before the age of streaming, so a lot of my memories of the show are fragmented half-truths from bleary-eyed 3 AM viewing sessions. Upon a disorganized loose rewatch of the series I’ve discovered that is just as bizarre and disturbing as my sleep-deprived memories recalled, so I’ve made a fun little list of all the most disgusting and vile things this beloved cratoon enticed me to suffer through.

TONIGHT!

Fry Legs

In an attempt to woo a computer repair technician he’s stalking, Frylock liquefies her boyfriend in public. He then poorly reassembles his corpse and tapes his brain into the shambling monstrosity, assuming his identity in order to marry the technician. As he’s proposing, his legs snap off like dry twigs and Cary Mean’s howl of pain is genuinely upsetting, as is the bluebird picking at his exposed brain, and the chilling implication at the end that Frylock is now permanently trapped in this decaying body. Great work all around. Also, the technician lady is revealed to be a C.H.U.D. who has sex with animals.

Hypno-Germ

Shake sits on a gas station toilet seat in New Joisey and is infected with the eponymous Hypnogerms. To be fair, this is more psychological than body horror, with Shake’s life slowly being overtaken by a persistent fantasy world primarily populated with talking file cabinets who slip him psychic commands to do things like “lock yourself in a cold, dark room”, “smear yourself with garbage and try to cross the freeway” and “eat your own dung”. Also, at the end of the episode Shake farts via his eyes.

Antenna

ATHF predicts 5G: The Episode. Aliens install a massive satellite tower above Carl’s house. It replaces any TV or phone signals with a monotonous video of two aliens passing a cardboard box back and forth, which also causes torrential nosebleeds and swelling of the cranium/eyes. Special Guest Star Voice Over Artist George Lowe.

She Creature

Carl’s pool has turned stagnant with neglect, breeding hundreds of mosquitoes as well as some huge, unidentifiable creature. Carl lets the mob use it to dispose of bodies to help alleviate his debt with them, but ultimately the Aqua Teens “help” him chlorinate his pool and install a filter. The creature is revealed to be a beautiful mermaid, who offers to give Carl an “indescribable pleasure” for 30 bucks, 50 if the Aqua Teens watch. After she swims into his penis, Carl then explodes in a torrent of eggs, as does Frylock, Meatwad, but not Shake. Not even the sea monster wanted to fuck Shake.

Piranha Germs

This one is pretty repulsive, even for me. Shake gets a job as a “viral marketer” from a floating severed head, who assigns him tasks such as eating raw ground beef with a fork from off the ground, or dipping his hands in unpasteurized milk and squeezing raw chicken before walking around a conference hall shaking hands/giving high fives with as many people as possible. Shake eventually contracts a disease that literally devours him at the cellular level, slowly disintegrating his body. The head takes Shake to the company health care provider (another floating head) who has Shake inject himself with more of the virus. Eventually Frylock takes action, hooking Shake up to a machine that “boils and bleaches the blood”, an agonizing process that lasts at least 3 days straight. That over with, Frylock tells a bloated Shake that his blood has been replaced with a highly explosive substance and promptly freezes him. A really unpleasant experience to watch overall, which makes for an excellent ATHF episode. It’s marred somewhat by the fact that its ending is essentially just a less-funny rehash of the next featured episode, and one of ATHF’s best...

The Clowning

I feel like the image above should be all you need to know about The Clowning. Carl gets a wig infected by an alien clown disease. ATHF’s writers seem to have something of a predilection towards horrible viruses, and I gotta say that Carl-centric episodes are always my favourite. He’s just such a delightfully crass and obnoxious character, the writers and animators seem to find such joy in coming up with these nightmarish fates for him. Anyway with Carl fully clownified, Frylock freezes him in the hopes of someday developing a cure. Cut to many years later with the Aqua Teens elderly and senile in a zombie apocalypse, with Clown Carl still frozen, used as a coat rack. Then he falls over and shatters.

Total Re-Carl

And here we are at the logical conclusion of this exercise, the single best episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force ever made, the one that scarred me as a teen, and the one that inspired this list in the first place.

I really love that Carl begins the episode trying to avoid talking to Frylock, to the point where he turns his lights off and hides behind the couch muttering “Go away, dammit. Just go away.” It’s like he knows what’s coming for him. He just wants to sit around drinking beer and watching porno, but these horrible talking foodmin keep ruining his life. He’s trying so desperately to have some peace, which makes what happens to him in this episode that much more horrifying and hilarious.

Frylock breaks into Carl’s house and talks him into coming out to try his new jet engine powered vacuum toilet (that, of course, is sitting on Carl’s lawn in plain sight, although Frylock assures Carl he has built a state-of-the-art invisibility curtain for privacy (a Lie)), and provides him with a care package of fiber tablets, espresso beans, and other laxatives.

After surreptitiously locking Carl out of his house, Frylock and Meatwad watch from a distance as Carl is forced to try out the new toilet and is immediately and violently sucked into the toilet bowl, his body ejected out the back as a red mist, only his head left unmulched. Frylock hooks up Carl’s head to his computer to keep him alive and to translate his brain output to text, and the little flash of dialogue we see on the screen makes me laugh every time:

The Aqua Teens then fail several times to find a replacement for Carl’s body. The first is the corpse of an elderly black man whose body immediately “rejects the head transplant” and begins savagely attempting to rip Carl off his shoulders.

The next try is easily the worst mental image I have ever experienced on syndicated television, and while I love this episode I’m thankful for the simple artstyle and the relative restraint they showed compared to later as far as gore goes.

Frylock tells Shake to order some body parts from online, but Shake buys from “we-got-us-some-medical-waste.com” and receives a soggy cardboard box filled entirely with loose eyeballs. Carl wakes to find his head attached a Heaping Golem of Eyes, which honestly sounds like a Bloodborne enemy 12 years ahead of its time. At Frylock’s behest, he takes a step forward to try out his new “legs” and Dave Willis’s voice acting for this scene still scares the shit out of me, if I’m being honest. Those screams are every bit as excruciating as I would expect for someone whose feet are made from dozens of lidless corneas.

The third and final replacement is a gleaming exoskeleton of weaponized powerarmour, which they quickly realize is a terrible idea seeing as how he just tried to murder Frylock with this eye arms. They end up putting his severed head on a RC car while Meatwad obliterates Shake with the exoskeleton.

Thanks for reading!

#aqua teen hunger force #athf #body horror #long post

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