As far as anyone knows, I’m the Internet’s Leading Expert on Vehicular Anthropomorphization; it must be true, because it says so, right there, 20 words or so to the left. I take this position very seriously, because I know that many, many people look to me for guidance when they encounter an anthropomorphized vehicle. They know that I have preferences, say, about how eyes are portrayed on automotive faces, or how faces should be applied and adapted to trains. They also know that I like – no, need – to know about developments, innovations, and atrocities in the vehicular anthropomorphization space, which is why this tweet proved to be so important: it revealed to me the unspeakable horror of Bilakuten, a Swedish children’s show whose name translates to “Car Emergency.” In that aspect, I suppose it’s kind of right. In every other aspect of how it makes vehicles appear to be living beings, it is very, very, possibly dangerously wrong. I suggest laying down a dropcloth before continuing, because there will be many terror-induced spit-takes and unplanned emissions of urine.
Bilakuten is described like this on SIMKL, which I think is some Swedish video site:
Fantastic vehicles get vital assignments. Fires must be extinguished, cats must be rescued, houses must be built, thieves must be caught, trees must be harvested. To their aid, the fantastic vehicles have the equally fantastic children. Together they create a slightly better world.
Now, I don’t hate this description; a show about vehicles, fantastic ones, even, helping to rescue cats and build houses is great. I also like that expectations are kept nice and low, ad the machine/children partnerships are described as resulting in a “slightly better” world. No need to get any kid’s hopes up too high – it’s just going to end up slightly better.
My problem is with the bizarre and alarming way the vehicles are granted life. Just look at this lineup:
Dear god why? This is what they’re showing Swedish children? Has any Swedish child managed to sleep through a whole night without waking up and screaming bork bork bork or whatever sweet little Swedes scream in terror? Let’s look at one of these up close:
Gaaahh! Shit, I even knew I was going to put this here and it still made me spit Yoo-Hoo-and-gin all over my screen. Who decided to use this method of making a face on a vehicle? The headlights and grille are right there to use to make a face, like this, which took me 91 seconds to make:
But no, someone decided it was a better idea to split the head open at the windshield and make that a colossal gaping maw filled with denture-like human teeth the size of fire hydrants and a vast, pulpy tongue, and then let a pair of massive, glistening eyes erupt from a painful-looking swell of oddly flexible metal. This fucking truck looks like all it has ever wanted to do is find you and eat you, delighting in the feeling of your bones grinding to paste between those massive molars.
Hey! Maybe I’m not being fair; maybe it all makes sense when you see it animated? Okay, that’s reasonable. Let’s look at a clip from an episode:
(Violent spray of liquid) Aaaaaaaaauuughhh! What the hell! Why didn’t I warn me? Why are they so freakishly flexible? Why do they dart about like insects or lizards or some unholy hybrid of both? And is that a weird variant of Axel F they’re playing for the song? Should I be concerned for that little Fiat 500-beast? And why the hell does this have to exist?:
Why? Why have you forsaken us, oh lord? Why does a gelatinous garbage truck with what feels like a hungry, toothed anus with eyes exist? Why are its teeth like that? Why does it have teeth? Or eyes? Is it another being inside the truck, or is it just another head and mouth on the other end of the truck? Make it go away! Now! Please!
Hey! Who put that here? No, no no no god no nope nope nope.
It’s simultaneously lazy anthropomorphization and terrifying. They’re just slapping eyeballs onto windshields and then making the whole front end of the car open into some kind of mutant crocodile mouth with massive human teeth? Why was this path chosen? Do they not love their children in Sweden?
Are these Ariel Atom-like race cars supposed to look like dragons? Maybe? I suppose that could be cool if they, you know, weren’t so fucking slithery and serpentine and disturbing?
This is sort of an achievement, I suppose. They’ve managed to make boats and planes and excavators and cars and trucks and buses all new previously-unconsidered nightmares, which I suppose is an achievement? Maybe the Swedes are training a generation of super-children, unable to be scared or even phased by any sort of nightmarish semi-mechanical beasts. Is this a warning? A harbinger of a world dominated by Swedish lizard-big-rig cyborgs, built by Scania and with an unquenchable thirst for human blood?
Maybe? And maybe this is a warning.
God help us all.
Bork,Bork,Bork Indeed. You even neglected the umlauts, I see why DT takes issue. Clearly “Feurd de Feurd” is called for here.
Translation; Ford the Fjord in a Ford.
Why you show me that? Where did I put my flashy thing? I can never remember…..
Every day, we stray further from God…
Their work in the aviation space is the most disturbing, that plane and helicopter are creepy as Hell! I like how one of these appears to be just a Dodge Ram.
Jesus wept, that’s terrifying!
Also, thanks for the rabbit hole of Swedish Chef videos. The one about popcorn was outstanding!
I am of partial Swedish ancestry and I fucking love that garbage truck. Like I saw it and it stirred something deep in my soul. Or maybe it’s some kind of meatball demon inhabiting the spot where my soul would otherwise reside?
It’s Lemmiwinks!
We could expand that to Leading Expert on Vehicular Anthropomorphization and Recognition.
That’s right: LEVAR. Because Geordie would be proud of the general nerdery that goes on in here.
Pro tip: about the only time Yoo-hoo is palatable with alcohol is when you mix in Kahlùa and vodka.
mind, it helps if you actually like Yoo-hoo
Who doesn’t like Yoo-hoo?
“The primary market for YooHoo is people who haven’t had a YooHoo in a while.”
WTF? As a person of Swedish decent again, WTF? This shit is just weird. Therapy should be required.
Too Much Tongue! Creeeeeepy
That’s what she said.
Gaaaah!!!
These kind of remind me of Mr. (or Mrs.) Chinigan. I used to do that for my kids when they were little and they were simultaneously horrified and delighted. I guess the Swedish kids are experiencing the same kind of emotional one-two combo. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, here’s a video I randomly grabbed from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf0mOj_Fys4
I can see a lot of these vehicles going 140 mph, blaring Dancing Queen, the eyes turn demonic and you get run over. And after that the teeth are chomping on you like celery.
“You’re a bad car.”
https://youtu.be/-OXylWiZ-9c?t=322
Sweden ain’t all meatballs, massages, ABBA, and Greta Thunberg. Have you ever seen a Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal?” Scary stuff. His whole catalog is filled with abusive fathers, crazy mothers, murder, suicide pacts and more happy stuff like that. And he’s their most celebrated filmmaker. Alfred Nobel of Nobel prize fame? Swedish, and the inventor of dynamite and patenter of nitroglycerin. Boom! I like SAABs and Volvos, and Ann-Margret as much as the next guy, but that Celsius guy with his weird temperature scale? You don’t even know how hot or cold it is unless you double the reading, subtract 10 percent, then add 32. Who has time for that? And Bjorn Borg, it’s right there in the name, Borg! Resistance is futile people! Don’t even get me started on Pippi Longstocking, what a freak. Makes Roald Dahl’s stuff look like “Hop on Pop.” This is a country with a seriously dark, chewy center inside it’s pop star candy shell. And speaking of candy, the Vipeholm experiments were a series of human experiments where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were fed large amounts of sweets to provoke dental caries, otherwise known as cavities, to study the relationship between sweets and dental decay. Lots of good info, but, you know, medical ethics. In 1968, 20 percent of all Swedish women over 50 were toothless. Not anymore. But maybe this obsession in rooting out dental decay explains the scary choppers on the anthropomorphized vehicles in Bilakuten. They’re proud of their teeth now. That’s my theory, and I’m sticking to it.
Don’t forget Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and all that sick shit Steig Larsson wrote. It sounds like an absolutely wild place to live. I’m a little envious.
I’m with you on all of that except Celsius. 0 is freezing, 100 is boiling, 50 is a nice hot bath, 20 is the threshold for wearing shorts and a t-shirt.
Kelvin is a better scale for science, because it actually starts at zero, but Celsius makes more sense for humans.
Fahrenheit is a mess based on freezing some antifreeze and humans being 96 degrees. It is, with all due respect, garbage.
“As far as anyone knows, I’m the Internet’s Leading Expert on Vehicular Anthropomorphization; it must be true, because it says so, right there, 20 words or so to the left.”
Jason—regardless of anything else, that right there is just a fabulous sentence. I daresay I’d put it right up there with that one Hemingway short about lightly-used children’s footwear, in terms of raw literary cleverness.
*Chef’s kiss*
I think the Turks might just have a point – should we really trust these people with the top secret NATO launch codes? I thought shit got weird in Norway, but I’m starting to wonder if they’re the normal former Vikings
I could have gone my whole life without seeing that garbage truck.
That was straight nightmare fuel.
I thought the airplane was even worse
Some of them have a sort of 21st century Clutch Cargo thing going on. Yeesh. At least the characters on Clutch Cargo were human (more or less).
It kind of makes me wish I was patient and clever enough to dub new dialog on them.
Every time I looked at one of these, I thought it was the worst one. And then another one was worse. And another.
In terms of actual quality, that Ram crew cab is the worst. They literally stuck a porta potty on the roof and drew a face on it. Why were they so set on keeping the Ram front end unmodified? They don’t even have Rams for regular sale in Sweden!
What a horrible day to have eyes…
“Looks like I picked the wrong day to stop sniffing glue.”
“Huh-huh huh. Don’t bogart it dude.”
https://youtu.be/7gpVj5_DF5Y?t=13
Is it the Swedish that always get praised for the fact they all just intuitively know how to drive well? Maybe that’s because they’re clearly taught from a young age to not have a fear for vehicles.. yeesh.
Face it, Torch, Swedish kids are just a lot tougher than you.
I mean if we are taking bets I will throw my car parts fund on a swedish toddler over torch. Sorry bro.
Yeah i am okay with the friendly smiles sponsored by the swedish dental association. Now the Swedish Blonde Children of the corn ripping poor helpless cars apart? Never.
I don’t like that garbage truck one bit.
Skrämmande!
Also “Why didn’t I warn me.” I’m stealing that.
The are preparing Swedish kids for our AI rulers.