Eighteen years ago, two people came together to make something extraordinary. Their names were RTsharpshooter and Hyconafisterosticate (hereinafter RT and Hycon), and what they made was a web series called The Super Awesome Adventures of Hunk. When RT’s channel was deleted, these videos were lost, but YouTuber Pseudiom has just uploaded all these episodes to Archive.org [1]. Ladies and gentlemen—TSAAoH has returned.
The show was a 2007 parody of Resident Evil 4. It follows the exploits of RE4 fans’ favorite security officer, affectionately known as Mr. Death, or Hunk, as he murders and quips his way through the most undead escort mission of its decade, using footage from the actual game. It is violent, offensive, and hilarious. As Pseudiom mentions in his video [2] on this topic, part of the fun of watching TSAAoH now is the remarkable 2007-ness of it all: a comedic style that he dubs Rawr-Wave, after the popular contemporary joke, “Rawr means I love you in dinosaur.”
Even apart from this aspect of digital antiquarianism, however, the series was funny and dynamic enough in its own day to rack up more than 1.2 million views. And let me clarify: Rawr-Wave represents a whole spectrum of humor, and TSAAoH lies at the extreme opposite end from anything that could be called cute. Episode 2, for example, begins with a disclaimer that the show contains an excessive use of the word f___, and that persons of a sensitive nature should probably f___ off.
Running from 2007-2009, TSAAoH is made up of ten episodes of around ten minutes each—but the first episode unfortunately has no audio due to copyright issues, so there’s really only nine. Plus a two-minute Halloween special. And trailers. It’s all a bit scrappy, but that is truly part of TSAAoH’s charm, if you’re the sort of person who finds this sort of humor charming. It’s definitely a crude show in the vernacular sense of rude, but also in the technical sense of unfinished, unrefined—as in the case of crude oil.
C.S. Lewis once said that the audience of any creative work contributes 50% of the experience, based on what they themselves bring to the table. I’ll concede that TSAAoH might leave room for the audience to contribute a bit more than 50%— it’s a show with vast potential, but a lot of it is, well, not quite optimized—but you can see the quality of the humor improving as the show continues. It’s almost like sitting in the room with RT and Hycon, sharing in the creative process as they craft their ridiculous tale one upload at a time—performing, as it were, without a net.
And now for one more detail that may intrigue or dissuade you, depending on your own proclivities: TSAAoH is, sadly, an incomplete series. No one knows why the show stopped after ten episodes; but it leaves off on a cliffhanger, and it’s been unresolved for the last sixteen years. Part of our hope in republicizing this all-but-forgotten show is that maybe—just maybe—RT might somehow return. Hycon is still around, and Pseudiom has been in contact with him, but his collaborator has mysteriously vanished from the online universe.
But even if RT did return. . . could episode 11 possibly live up to the hype? J.R.R. Tolkien died working on a sequel to The Lord of the Rings—but isn’t it for the best that it was never finished? How could it not have been an anticlimax? The final episode of TSAAoH would have to be the Citizen Kane of YouTube to avoid being a letdown—and, as we’ve said, part of the fun of TSAAoH is its very imperfection. We seem to be up against a sort of Heisenberg uncertainty paradox: the closer episode 11 comes to being perfect, the further it gets from being the show that we love.
Here’s the thing, however: I don’t care. Even if the last episode turned out to be not all that great, it would still be a not-all-that-great episode of The Super Awesome Adventures of Hunk. RT, if you’re out there, and if you’re reading this—come back to us, man. Even in these sad latter days of the world, there are those of us who still believe.
Sources:
1: https://archive.org/
2: https://www.youtube.com/
Norman Grey is a co-founder of urd-thlol.blogspot.com and a member of the mysterious writing group known only as the Triptych. He has rediscovered joy since TSAAoH came back to the Internet.