Investigating a cult inspired by a cartoon mouse (w/ PJ Vogt)

If a fandom exists long enough in isolation, does it inevitably become toxic or at least, very strange? This is the main question we’ll be exploring today, through a story that begins in 1989. That’s the year that Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers premiered. More importantly, it’s when the world was introduced to a sweet little mouse girl, Gadget Hackwrench. Gadget became quite popular on a certain part of the internet, and PJ Vogt joins us once again to learn about the Cult of Gadget, and the weird wild world of “Rangerphiles.” Our guest PJ Vogt is the host of Search Engine. He has previously come on Panic World to talk about whether teens were really gorging themselves on Tide Pods, and you can listen to that episode here. Check out Search Engine here or wherever you get your podcasts! Notes Interested in seeing how Ryan & PJ react to Gadget "art"? Or perhaps what Grant's producer cage looks like? Panic World is now posting video episodes to YouTube! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to our Discord? Sign up for just five bucks a month at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ryan Broderick?

  You and I, PJ, we've known each other for a while now, so I feel like I can comfortably ask you this question to start off today's episode, which is, did you have a cartoon character that was responsible for any kind of romantic or sexual awakening for you?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  This is where we're gonna start today?

• 0:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. Yeah. I thought that'd be like a good icebreaker.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  I'm really having a moment where I'm like, do I want to be honest? I guess.

• 0:24Ryan Broderick?

  I think you, I think by saying that now you have.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  I had a crush on April O'Neil from The Ninja Turtles. I had like an actual, real crush on April O'Neil from The Ninja Turtles. Like, I think that was one of my first crushes.

• 0:35Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, I was thinking about this recently as well, and I think, I think my very first one was Fern Gully from Fern.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Oh, the, she was like the spirit that protected the rainforest?

• 0:47Ryan Broderick?

  She had like a black pixie cut and was like very into the environment, and that really put me on a journey that I feel like I'm still on to this day, so.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  But when you say that, do you mean like, cause it's a little, I guess there's something for me a little bit embarrassing for myself, where I'm like, yes, I had a crush on a, a series of lines and colors, but I think what's also in your question is sort of, did this route your sort of sexual kinks or preferences? Like, do you find yourself like thinking like, oh, when I'm really attracted to someone, if I imagine them in a rainforest, like that I'm more attracted to them? Or it's just like, you had a crush on a sort of?

• 1:25Ryan Broderick?

  I don't know, PJ. Have you ever dated a female journalist?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Oh my god. Oh god. My surrender.

• 1:54Ryan Broderick?

  My name is Ryan Broderick. Joining me throughout the episode will be our producer, Grant Irving, who will pop in from time to time to talk about the cartoon characters that he's in love with. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually, reality. With us today is PJ Vogt, the host of Search Engine. Welcome back to Panic World. This is your second time on the show. How are you feeling about it?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  I'm feeling great. Thank you for having me. It is such a fun world to get to visit.

• 2:19Ryan Broderick?

  And we've picked a really fun one for you. Based on, you know, how much fun we had last year doing the Tide Pods episode. We wanted to unearth something even further back in the timeline that you might not know about. And I'm very excited to tell you all about it. It's a story that's funny, it's sad, and I actually think kind of important for understanding the world we live in now. But I want to start by asking you a couple of questions. So would you say that the internet of the 90s and early 2000s was like more idealistic or more innocent than the internet of today? Do you really believe that it is fundamentally different than it was, let's say, 30, 20, 30 years ago?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  I do. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, idealistic. I think there was a moment where there was, at least for me as a young, young, young person, a feeling of excitement about connection and a feeling that while dark things might come through the door, that fundamentally, connection would be a good thing and a lack of sort of understanding that the internet might shape us in ways we might not like, or it might even like shape the physical world in ways I couldn't imagine.

• 3:26Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so one last question to set up today's episode. Do you subscribe to the idea that like if a fandom or an online community is like left alone and isolated long enough, they like inadvertently turn toxic or weird? Like, do you feel like that's like a natural, like, is that a natural human thing, a natural internet thing? Is it overstated?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  I don't think it's inevitable, but I think it often happens. And I think it has a lot to do with the structure of the platforms. Like, I think microblogging sites fundamentally derange people. But I think that there are, I think there exists the possibility that an online community need not turn toxic, even though often it does.

• 4:04Ryan Broderick?

  I would agree with that. I don't think it is totally inevitable. I definitely like come across like old communities that still exist that are just doing their thing. But that's not what we'll see in today's story. Today, we're going to look at how the internet fandom as a concept went from something idealistic to something ridiculous to something genuinely upsetting. So really, this is kind of the story of the entire internet. encapsulated in one very weird story from the 2000s focusing on one very strange internet community. We're all set up now, so it's time to start our story and we're gonna go all the way back to 1989.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 4:40Ryan Broderick?

  The year I was born, along with Taylor Swift, and it was also the premiere of Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 4:47Ryan Broderick?

  Do you remember the Rescue Rangers?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I do. I'm not sure I ever directly watched the films, but they were such a kind of, I probably got a McDonald's Happy Meal with their toys.

• 4:56Ryan Broderick?

  So for people who aren't familiar, they're chipmunks, and they're also detectives, and they solve mysteries, and they have a bunch of animal friends. And part of their group is one particular animal friend that we're gonna be talking a lot about today, and her name is Gadget Hack Wrench. Do you know Gadget? Are you familiar with Gadget from Rescue Rangers?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I'm not, but based off the first question you asked me today, I imagine that Gadget is someone who has provoked, unintentionally or not, erotic fantasies and places on the internet.

• 5:25Ryan Broderick?

  Grant, can we pull up a photo of Gadget? I want PJ to be able to see Gadget. So Gadget is a mouse, and it's a mouse girl and an inventor, and she is a very popular character. And the Internet Gadget Archive is

• 5:45Ryan Broderick?

  a website that contains a lot of images of Gadget. This is Gadget being held by a large cat.

• 5:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:52Ryan Broderick?

  That's, that's Gadget right there.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  And I, this, this all comes from the Internet Gadget Archive, and this one was just, was just captioned as "very cute."

• 6:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. I assume it's a vor thing, because the cat looks like it's gonna eat Gadget.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, the cat's tongue is sticking outside of its closed mouth, the way that cartoons that are hungry do.

• 6:12Ryan Broderick?

  The way that you are right now looking at Gadget.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I will say, Gadget is cute. She's like an anthropomorphized or whatever, big-eyed, big-eared, cute, violet-y hamster woman.

• 6:21Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, she's, she's like, she's like a cute mouse girl. Yeah, here's another one. That is a bunch of the other characters on top of Gadget.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  It's called Pile On Gadget, and it was very popular in the form.

• 6:32Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 6:34Ryan Broderick?

  All right, let me give you some more show background. So there were 65 episodes of Rescue Rangers. Then it, the show ended in September of 1993. And from the Fan Lore Wiki, it reads, "Only a few select episodes were released on home video over the years. The show itself was out of reach for everyone who didn't have cable or pay TV. Therefore, the meta fic, the ra-

• 6:57Ryan Broderick?

  The Ranger Leon, as in like the Simileon, I guess?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Oh, like Tolkien's kind of just lore book of, this isn't even story, this is just every piece of made up information about Middle Earth. They, someone created this for Rescue Rangers?

• 7:13Ryan Broderick?

  Yes. And it, and in that lore book, they refer to this era as the Dark Age. And Ranger Files, as they call themselves, could not access the show. They basically could only remember the show, draw fan art, and of course, write fanfiction.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  And these Ranger Files, I guess they're probably, like, I was born in 1985, so this was just something I slightly missed. They're probably a little bit older than me that they would have watched on television. And in the pre-internet era, when it was gone, it only lived in their minds.

• 7:46Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. In fact, like, I kind of went through a period of this as well, where, you know, it wasn't really until I was in college, had access to high-speed internet, that the school didn't understand how to block BitTorrent on, that I was able to, like, remember shows that I had watched as a kid and then find them online.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember that miraculous feeling.

• 8:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it is like, it is sort of like remembering a dream. I remember, like, finding, like, an entire ripped DVD set of, like, Malcolm in the Middle and watching it, like, in order for the first time, and realizing, like, oh, like, oh, like, this, like, these episodes, like, have a coherent plot, you know, like, TV was just this thing that came on and then disappeared. And I think for, like, really niche fandoms, like the Rescue Rangers fandoms, the Ranger Files, that, you know, was very frustrating. But the fact that they couldn't access the media that they cared about, allowed for a lot of, sort of, strange energy to permeate across the web. So in 1996, there's a Usenet group called alt.fan.furry, which is a major hub of furry

• 8:48Ryan Broderick?

  activity, which are people who like to dress in animal costumes, sometimes for sexual reasons, sometimes for not.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  Are furries both into costumed creature, to being in costumes and cartoons? Is it a separate, like, like, they're both under the same umbrella, but are the, but are the people in costumes also into the cartoons? Or, or is it a separate thing?

• 9:11Ryan Broderick?

  I think you're looking at it backwards. So it's basically like, if you are a furry and you identify as a furry, you're drawn to cartoon characters, particularly cartoon anthropomorphic animals. And you have an interest in that early. So it might be Sonic the Hedgehog, it might be Looney Tunes, something activates that for you. And then you go online and you discover the community and a lot of them use like an avatar or a persona, a persona for furries. And you create one. So you say like, I'm a silver fox and I wear a lab coat. And then you kind of like role play as that in different spaces like Discord or Twitter or whatever. And then you, if you have the money, you might create a costume. There's an entire class hierarchy of furries where like the most expensive ones have like

• 9:56Ryan Broderick?

  air conditioning units inside of their suits and stuff.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  On this TikTok channel, I was seeing furries talking about their fursuits that were like $20,000. I was really surprised and impressed.

• 10:04Ryan Broderick?

  Obviously, there's conventions, you know, and you can, you can see them setting up the foundations of how we all use the internet. Uh, the biggest furry con started in 1999 and it's still a regular event to this day in Pennsylvania. Of course it's in Pennsylvania, obviously.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Where in PA was Anthrocon?

• 10:21Ryan Broderick?

  It's, it takes place, it's in Pittsburgh.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Okay, that's the other side of the state for me.

• 10:25Ryan Broderick?

  Right. And this, this reminds me of like the theory. So Anthrocon is 4th of July weekend every summer. And the next season of The Pit takes place in Pittsburgh during 4th of July weekend. And people are wondering if Anthrocon's gonna make an appearance.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  We should be so lucky.

• 10:39Ryan Broderick?

  It would be awesome. Um, so, I mean, you've been down a lot of the similar internet roads that I have over the years. Obviously, you've probably had to deal with the furry community before. Like, what is your kind of like overall background in this world?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I don't, I'm not like, I don't deeply understand sort of the origins of furries. My view is, for people who chronicle the internet and try to figure out how to feel about it and how to process it, furries can be a challenge because the simultaneous realities we're trying to hold in our head are that, I think, Most of us are feel that what adults want to do consensually with other adults is okay, and people shouldn't be judged. And it's a little, there's something like, a little funny about sort of people wearing animal costumes. And so, on the one hand, you don't want to be a jerk or a bully, and on the other hand, you don't want to be so right-thinking that you're not like, "This is kind of silly." And so, I try to hold the idea of furries

• 11:34Speaker 01

  in my own mind with the right amount of respectful gentleness, and like, "This is kind of funny." Like, for a while, the algorithm was serving me, just like, furries, it was a, it was a, someone's TikTok or Instagram reels where it was someone just interviewing furries about the cost of their very expensive fursuits at a convention.

• 11:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Um, and they were very expensive. And I just found myself being like, "Oh, it's nice to just get information about these people who I'm never entirely sure how I'm supposed to feel about, other than, don't be too mean."

• 12:05Ryan Broderick?

  I, I did a big project interviewing them years ago, and like, the thing that was really apparent in talking to them is that like, many of them work in like, very stressful, sometimes like traumatic, jobs. Like, it's a lot of like, EMTs, soldiers, police officers, nurses.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Really?

• 12:22Ryan Broderick?

  It's a lot, yeah, it's a lot of people, through the interviews that I've done over the years, it's a lot of people who use the fursuit as a way to kind of like, separate themselves from themselves, which I think is why they're such a good fit for the internet. Like, in a lot of ways, the, the core furry experience of like, putting on an avatar, is what we all sort of do now, online. And whenever I sort of talk about furries, I always just say like, "Yeah, they're really, yeah, they can be very weird, but they're also like, hardcore early adopters." And in fact, our, our researcher, Adam, came across a document that I have been poring over for the last few days, because I think it's un-goddamn-believable, and I'm gonna show it to you right now. Uh, so you, you just, you have to see this. Um,

• 13:05Ryan Broderick?

  so what you're looking at right now, is a page that furries created after 9/11 to check themselves in as safe.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Wow. Furry status quo.

• 13:16Ryan Broderick?

  And like they have like statuses like escaped WTC back home finally and they also have like a run through of like who was in the World Trade Center like from the early furry communities.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Wow, so this was this would have been September 2001, online furry community, just like any community checking on themselves, but there were furries in New York City and some who even died in the towers and this is just like a community touching base.

• 13:42Ryan Broderick?

  From what we could see, there was at least one, a furry named Lisa, who who was confirmed to have died in the 9/11 attacks and like it is such a fascinating, this is such a fascinating document because it is now just like a core feature of most social platforms, like an ability to check in, like I mean, Facebook launched this 20 years later, you know, like and furries had a homebrewed a way to do it within, I mean, I think if you look at this, like they figured it out within like two days, like some of these check-ins are like the 13th.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  It's also a really just nicely put together spreadsheet, like it's just very readable and well organized, something that as I get older, I appreciate more.

• 14:23Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's a, so whenever I sort of talk about furries, I always just have to make the point that like most of the things that we do on the internet every day now and like the core experience of being online, they were very early.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would just, the other thing I just want to say I appreciate about furries, it's like, I think most people, or at least most people that I love, have a part of themselves that doesn't conform and that is strange, or like orthogonal to society, and most people keep that in their private life, and I like that furries are like, I mean, this is a basic thing to say, but I like that they're publicly weird, because I think when you see people being publicly weird, it gives you permission to know that it's okay, that in whatever way you're strange, that is human and in a weird way, universal.

• 15:06Ryan Broderick?

  Right, so that's furries, they're organized, they're early adopters, they have like a very specific thing that they do, and I just want to establish that to make it clear that like we're not talking about furries, like there's obviously some overlap here, but this is a very different, separate thing. So.

• 15:23Ryan Broderick?

  In 1998, there's a fan campaign to get The Rescue Rangers on VHS. And Disney was resistant because they did not typically put animated TV shows on VHS. This was the late 90s and that was still kind of like a weird idea. The campaign lasted seven years. And finally, in 2005, Disney relented and put The Rescue Rangers on VHS. And there were a bunch of campaigns like this at the time that were not successful. One person tried to start a Rage, it was called Rage. And it was called-

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Curtis Yarden.

• 16:01Ryan Broderick?

  Similar kind of mentality here. So this was a campaign directed at the more problematic section of The Rescue Rangers fandom. Stands for Ranger Files. They have, they have to stop calling-

• 16:14Speaker 01

  I feel like, except for Bibliophiles, File is just a kind of, you can't use it as a suffix anymore.

• 16:21Ryan Broderick?

  I've heard a couple movie podcasts recently referring to themselves as Cinefiles. And I'm like, guys-

• 16:25Speaker 01

  I can't even leave you alone with film.

• 16:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, come on. So this, yeah, so Rage, the name of this campaign stands for Ranger Files Against Gadget Erotica.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:36Ryan Broderick?

  And so this is, this is the main issue here, which is that like this fandom has been left alone. They've been completely forgotten by the Disney Corporation until like at least 2005. They can't even access the media that they all remember seeing. So they're like trying to like conjure this like collective dream. But many of them do remember being very turned on by Gadget. And their only access to Gadget is the fan art and fanfic that they're able to access in these early internet communities.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  But then the community of people, and it's, it's very sort of silly to refer to them this way, but like, they're in a very narrow way kind of activists, like pop culture activists. They are trying to-

• 17:12Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  leverage a corporation to do something they want to do. And they're having the problem that activist communities sometimes have, which is to say like, we need to do some gatekeeping within our movement because we're all on this in one way. And there's some people in our group who are going to kind of make us look bad if they become the voices that speak. Like, we want Disney to put Rescue Rangers on VHS, but not in an erotic way.

• 17:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, we cannot be horny freaks and have Disney take us seriously. And this was the idea from Julie Bin. And actually, Grant spoke to Julie. She says she barely remembers being involved. And the community's vibes were so weird that she eventually stepped away. But she said that she does occasionally splurge on gadget merchandise. And I assume it's non-erotic gadget merchandise.

• 18:04Ryan Broderick?

  So before we get to the break, where we'll be talking about another group of people, across the planet, actually, that start to get involved with the Rescue Rangers fandom. I wanted to check in and just like, see if this rings any bells for your own reporting. Like, do you feel like you've stumbled across like a rabbit hole like this before? Of just like a forgotten patch of the internet that is like, kind of devolved into chaos?

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yes, that particular contour is one. The feeling of like, we are far away in the hinterlands, where a group of people have communally become very strange, is a feel like that is both, weirdly, is recognizable to me. And also, every time I encounter it, I kind of savor it.

• 18:50Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, do you remember any specific ones?

• 18:53Speaker 01

  A friend of mine, I mean, this isn't as, honestly, like, deep as what you're talking about. But a friend of mine, recently, we were talking about the question you asked in the beginning of like, do online communities necessarily devolve into chaos? And a friend of mine had pointed out that the Reddit forum for Zen Buddhism is highly contentious. And there's a big fight about sort of which form of Zen Buddhism is the correct form. And just what's funny about it is that if you think about the mind you imagine of a, that a precept of Zen Buddhism would have, or the average Reddit forum, and like, which flavor would win in the pile? Reddit form is very much apparently one of those. It is a part.

• 19:33Ryan Broderick?

  I recently had this experience because like, obviously, like, I follow a bunch of subreddits around like pop punk and post hardcore and different kinds of like, alternative music genres. And so I got like, recommended via algorithm, the subreddit for the band Say Anything. When I watch, you know that band, uh, from Scrubs. And, uh, I did not realize that the entire fanbase for Say Anything hates the lead singer of Say Anything and has been obsessively chronicling his Instagram and had like, calling CPS on his children and have like, created a private subreddit to stalk him and like, hate him dearly. And it felt like lifting up the rock and being like, what the hell are you bugs under there doing? Like, it was a wild experience.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  I have to say, that is a specific feature of 2025 internet that I have encountered a lot and don't understand, which is like, not always, but more often than 50/50. It seems like fandoms end up being more about hating the thing they're organizing around than liking it.

• 20:36Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And I don't know if that's sort of the way it's hard to show up every week and be like, I still like Say Anything. Like, it's kind of like, the more interesting opinion always wins. And the more interesting opinion is, I hate this, or maybe the guy's horrible. But I've seen it a lot.

• 20:52Ryan Broderick?

  Apparently, he vapes a lot on stage.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  I don't think that that's a crime.

• 20:56Ryan Broderick?

  Among other, there's other reasons.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  He's the most hateable man, though. Like, I disagree with.

• 20:59Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, he is. But we don't have time.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  He's the moderator.

• 21:05Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, we don't have time to talk about Say Anything right now. But I know what you're saying, and I've seen this too. And I don't totally understand it. Like, I don't understand the people who use snark subreddits.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:17Ryan Broderick?

  Like, I don't, I don't get it. Um, and, and I don't think I'm like, particularly mentally healthy myself. But like, the idea of like, spending all day long obsessing over something like that, I don't totally understand. Which is where the story ultimately goes.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Heroic job hosting, I have to say, Ryan.

• 21:38Ryan Broderick?

  But before then, people are gonna take this cartoon mouse very seriously. Some could even argue, uh, they're gonna start treating it very religiously. We're gonna be talking about that in Act Two of today's episode. But first, a word from our sponsors, Disney+.

• 21:59Ryan Broderick?

  If you had to imagine a country that would like march on the street to demand like their favorite cartoon be like put on the air, sort of like mobilize physically around the love of a children's cartoon, adults, obviously, what country do you think that that would be happening in?

• 22:13Speaker 01

  The one that we both live in.

• 22:15Ryan Broderick?

  You are wrong. You are incorrect there.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 22:17Ryan Broderick?

  1996, Chippendale begins airing in Russia for the first time, along with other Disney shows like Winnie the Pooh and Duck Tales.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh. This is fantastic.

• 22:39Ryan Broderick?

  This is an ad spot announcing that they finally have American cartoons in Russia.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Gosh.

• 22:46Ryan Broderick?

  It is like kind of easy to forget the Berlin Wall had fallen like seven years ago. So this is like kind of a big deal. So a Russian Chippendale fandom forms quickly. It ends up growing and coalescing online the same way the English language one had. And of course, just like, you know, this is like a real testament to like how silly the Cold War was because our Russian Ranger File brothers immediately got horny for Gadget. And I think that's really beautiful. I think that's really beautiful. In 2001, we find the earliest mention of people talking about Gadget beyond just like the regular perverted way they talk about Gadget. The Russians get a little more involved with Gadget than

• 23:30Ryan Broderick?

  the Americans do. And they come across and they create a webpage which they describe something called gadgetism by a user who went by Sergey Griss. And I believe Grant's gonna pull it up for us and we're gonna have you read the English translation here.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  I'm gonna regret reading that.

• 23:49Ryan Broderick?

  Probably.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Okay. The purpose of this work is to attempt to analyze gadgetism from the inside. What is it about the little painted mouse that attracts us? She doesn't boast about her beauty at all, as if she could very well. She doesn't play the fool and always does everything in her power to help her friends. She's a good and very loyal friend. And finally, Gadget is a brilliant inventor capable of inventing anything out of nothing. And the main thing is that despite all her self-sufficiency, Gadget still really needs friendly support. Really meaning she doesn't pretend to be helpless in order to play on feelings and thus manipulate her friends. Personally, it seems to me that this alone is enough to consider Gadget an ideal creature.

• 24:28Ryan Broderick?

  And then there's like a bunch of winky faces. All right, pull out so that PJ can't see where we're going. I don't want him to see what we have planned today.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  I would never look.

• 24:36Ryan Broderick?

  Don't look. Don't look at all of the questions that I have to be reminded to ask you. So, do you find this moving? Do you feel like this is an accurate description of this mouse girl that you were introduced to the existence of about 20 minutes ago?

• 24:51Speaker 01

  I will say that what I find myself feeling a little bit of relief is that it's not like... It's a person trying to understand their desire, which is a very normal human thing. And they're not like Gadget's sort of like chipmunk body is so like whatever. They're like, there's something about the character or spirit being represented here that moves me. I don't know why it moves them erotically, but I do find it a little bit moving that someone's like, there's something that my... There's something I'm looking for and it's being represented in this story. And I'm trying to understand why and articulate it to a community.

• 25:28Ryan Broderick?

  I'm really glad you said that. So let me read you the next part of that. So it reads, "I think that Gadget is the embodiment of a dream for guys who want a girl that is not just an object for satisfying their sexual needs, but a faithful and devoted friend, equally able to give support in difficult moments or stand by them shoulder to shoulder. Therefore, it is quite natural that a character like this can stir something in our soul and not just touch us, but inspire us to strive for something better, purer, brighter, higher." So gadgetism is not about a love for a little cu...

• 26:03Ryan Broderick?

  Gadgetism is not just a love for a little cartoon mouse, but a desire for higher harmony and to become at least a little better than we are.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Okay, so I want to ask you, as an anthropologist of the internet, do you think that what's going on here is in fact that

• 26:21Speaker 01

  somewhat kind of feminist ideals are being expressed through the adoration of this kind of chipmunk totem? And/or do you think

• 26:33Speaker 01

  that this is just like people trying to make their horniness virtuous?

• 26:40Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. What I would say is like, this to me reads exactly like any guy I knew in high school doubling down on a joke.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is just people messing around?

• 26:55Ryan Broderick?

  So this is actually halfway into the second act of today's episode, kind of the question. And we're gonna be circling around this whole episode. But my initial understanding, when I learned about gadgetism in the early 2010s, was that this was an elaborate prank. But we did some research, so we've got some facts for you. So in 2002, there's the founding of a Russian Rescue Rangers hub online. It's called cdrrhq.ru.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:31Ryan Broderick?

  That is Gadget right there. That's Gadget Hack Wrench.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 27:35Ryan Broderick?

  In her little jumpsuit. And...

• 27:37Speaker 01

  Can you just say something about Gadget?

• 27:40Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I think that the animator who animated Gadget made, I'm not gonna say a profoundly sexualized creature, but like a slightly sexualized creature. Like, I don't think these people are just like... Aroused by a brick wall, like gadget is a little bit womanly. I'm not saying that I practice gadgetism, but just like to defend these strange people. Like, you know what I mean? Am I, should I not be saying this? But do you know what I mean?

• 28:08Ryan Broderick?

  One, not to victim blame gadget.

• 28:13Ryan Broderick?

  One of my longstanding beliefs is that like what we think of as absurd or insane internet behavior is almost never illogical. Like even the most outrageous hate campaigns have ever come across, there has to be a kernel of reality there. It doesn't come from nothing. It, I mean, they, they fizzle out if, you know, without something there. So yes, I would say that gadget is an attractive mouse girl. Yes.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Like literally that's all I mean. And I'm not, I'm not defending anything. I'm just like, there's like, like, there's like, I'm not going to say more. I'm, I'm just not going to say more. I've said enough.

• 29:00Ryan Broderick?

  So this website used to also hold a contest called the Golden Nut Award.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 29:06Ryan Broderick?

  And if this is a joke, people put a lot of time into it. There's like an exhaustive amount of fan fiction out there. Fan generated images of gadget. This is active for about 10 years and in 2002 gadgetism really takes off. And just to zoom out one more time, this is pretty separate from the rest of the furry community. In 2005 is when Furaffinity launches. Have you, you're familiar with Furaffinity?

• 29:33Speaker 01

  I am not familiar with Furaffinity.

• 29:35Ryan Broderick?

  It is the largest website for furry art and furry discourse. It is still going. It is very active.

• 29:44Ryan Broderick?

  In 2010, furries migrate to Reddit and they start to communicate there and obviously on Tumblr and then all over social media.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:54Ryan Broderick?

  Kind of around the same time as us. And meanwhile, over in Russia, the gadgetism community starts to spread as well. So in 2009, there is the launch of the VContact is Russia's version of Facebook.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm familiar.

• 30:08Ryan Broderick?

  And that is when the main gadgetism project

• 30:14Ryan Broderick?

  kind of breaks through, and that is called Radiant Gadget. And here's the group's description, which has been translated into English. Who hasn't watched the cartoon Chippendales Rescue Rangers? Who hasn't been captivated by this red-haired mouse? I thought she was blonde, but okay, whatever. A small mouse in a lilac jumpsuit, a graceful figure, unique blue eyes. Hair is sometimes red. Okay, yeah, sometimes light golden, sometimes almost chestnut. An exceptionally hardy creature, and at the same time gentle and fragile. A sensitive soul that has experienced both the despair of loneliness and the joy that its existence on Earth brings concrete and considerable benefit.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Who among us hasn't felt that way?

• 30:57Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and the group is still active.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:02Ryan Broderick?

  It's been going since 2009, and it does list CDRR, Chippendales Rescue Rangers HQ, the Russian site that we just showed you, as its official website. So it seems like that's where this all starts is just to put it all together for people who are listening. Chippendales Rescue Rangers launches in Russia. A website launches to talk about the show. They get really horny for gadget. They start developing that into like, kind of like a religion. And then it spreads to VContact, which is Russia's Facebook. That's the order of events.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And their view, at least as they stated, is that like the erotic feelings they have for a cartoon mouse are about the sort of qualities she represents more than anything else.

• 31:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so this group gets real horned up in Russia, right? And they join like the larger social media world, which leads to a lot more activity and engagement in the physical world, which leads to a lot of attention. And Grant, just play the video.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  What am I watching?

• 32:07Ryan Broderick?

  So you are watching Russian guys holding tiki torches, marching at night, holding kind of like an Orthodox Christian style cutout of gadget hack wrench.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  This really feels like either a really good bit, or a very strange religious ceremony. Like it's nighttime, there's something monkish.

• 32:28Ryan Broderick?

  Welcome to the question that we have been wrestling with, putting this episode together.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Wow, whatever. Maybe it's both. Like, maybe for some people it's a joke, and maybe for some people it's not. And maybe the joke gives some people a place to exist.

• 32:43Ryan Broderick?

  Congrats PJ, you just unlocked maybe the most coherent description of how culture online works.

• 32:51Ryan Broderick?

  It is also why I have come back to gadgetism over and over throughout the years, because I think it is, in many ways, kind of like the original, is this a bit? Do people believe this? It's a fascinating, fascinating conundrum. And just to read a couple of the comments underneath that video, one user writes, "At least one normal religion has happened, not like all the Orthodoxy and Islam."

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Oh, boy.

• 33:19Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, boy. "I hope they're just kidding. It already seems like everyone in this world has gone crazy, and I'm 10 years old."

• 33:29Ryan Broderick?

  And then finally, "Such disturbing music, I want to shit myself."

• 33:33Speaker 01

  I've never had that feeling when music disturbed me.

• 33:36Ryan Broderick?

  I've never... Well, one time I sat on a bass amplifier, and I tuned it to drop C, and I played it, and I did all my shit myself. But that's a different thing.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 33:43Ryan Broderick?

  So, yeah, I wanted to hit the brown note. In February 2010, the gadget, the cult of the radiant gadget breaks into English. It finally gets picked up by English blogs. And this is like that moment where there's a bunch of kind of like early travel and culture writers who are just like... Weird thing in Japan, weird thing in Russia. Like, this is very early 2010s internet. I think a lot of this has sort of been forgotten, but like, this is like, right around when people are like, "The Russians are doing crocodile," which is like heroin combined with gasoline, which, by the way, Grant, we should definitely do an episode on. That'd be disturbing to look back on.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  But it's a moment where the early social media, international cultures are encountering each other, trying to make sense of each other, and things that are happening maybe at the fringe in one culture that are either a joke or very, like, marginal are being countered by, like, say, Americans encountering Russians, being like, "This is what Russians do!" And maybe some Russians do, maybe some don't, but like, it's a moment of novelty and some misunderstanding.

• 34:47Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and I think most importantly, it's being done by amateurs. It's like, being done by like, an American expat in Russia. It's being done by like, an American expat in Japan. And then, it's happening vice versa. Like, it's people who have websites, have early blog roles, and they're just like, "Maybe my readers back home might find this interesting, and I don't have all the context, but I've got some photos, and I've got some descriptions that people told me." So, from this article on EnglishRussia.com, it reads, "She," meaning Gadget, "is the divine being, the most untouched and perfect sibling of the great god on earth," says one of the participants. "Why do I love her? It's a stupid question. How can't I love the goddess? She is strict, cute, optimistic, and her level of technical knowledge is unachievable

• 35:32Ryan Broderick?

  for a mortal being. Those are just a few of the testimonies of the sect's followers."

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 35:38Ryan Broderick?

  So, this is a photo of one of the followers who has made Gadget out of a circuit board.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 35:45Ryan Broderick?

  And I guess sometimes she does have red hair. Interesting. I wonder canonically what the reason is for that.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  For the changing hair?

• 35:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, why is she constantly changing her hair?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Sometimes you like blondes, sometimes you like redheads, Ryan. What's, I mean, they're covering their bases.

• 36:01Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, well, in Catholicism, you know, like, God can be anything and everything, so maybe, like, Gadget can have all hairstyles.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  This assumes a world in which Gadget was created surreptitiously as a religious icon by, like, Disney Corporation.

• 36:17Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, well, I'm saying, when Gadget created herself...

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 36:23Ryan Broderick?

  Within the show. Uh, yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  The immaculate Gadget conception.

• 36:28Ryan Broderick?

  The immaculate...

• 36:31Ryan Broderick?

  I'm not Googling that one. So, uh, yeah, so obviously this article goes really viral. I- in terms of like whatever viral was back then. And one, one user who's sharing it writes, "I'm Russian and my English isn't very well. I found one pic with Gadget in the web a couple of days ago on a popular entertainment site with a little article of who she is and her story. From that moment, I just fell in love with her. I look on her and think, what would I like to be changed in her?" I, I think he means like, I don't know, okay. And, "Understand nothing." Oh, what would I want to change?

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Oh, what would I change in her?

• 37:10Ryan Broderick?

  In nothing. "She's perfect. In our dirty world, in our dirty world, she's the only angel. I absolutely understand the man who started the cult because Gadget gives us all hope that there's the endless beauty in our world, the ideal girl, which will never meet in reality. I love you, Gadget." And assuming this is not a bit.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:29Ryan Broderick?

  And like, that is hard to do. And, and it's a question I think like anyone writes about the internet just has to wrestle with all the time. There is some interesting similarities here to like what would eventually become like incel speak, uh, in a lot of this stuff. And, and, and I do think that like,

• 37:46Ryan Broderick?

  when we talk about kind of like the radicalization of men online, it's all very serious because like it has to, you have to sort of take it seriously. But because you have to take it so seriously, a lot of the weirder stuff like young men were doing online into, in the 2000s gets memory hold or not talked about as much. Where like, they're obsessing over cartoon women that they like. And they're like fighting about niche media. Like, i- it is a stepping stone to what becomes later like a massive global social problem.

• 38:14Speaker 01

  Right. It's like, but you both want to be able to, I don't know, to understand the problem, maybe sometimes you have to hold it lightly. And it's funny, like I hear what you're saying, which is like, assuming this person isn't joking, which we'll never know. There is something, some dark foreshadowing in that they're like, everything is shit, except for this one idealized woman form who doesn't exist.

• 38:35Ryan Broderick?

  Yes.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Everything else is shit. Like you can hear dark and ugly stuff in there. And also, you're like, This person's eroticizing a rodent. That is funny.

• 38:44Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, yes. This is, this has like been my, my major problem with like mainstream coverage of the internet for decades now, which is that like to get a full picture of what's going on, you have to be able to talk about how silly it can be. But like someone, like, like, like an extremism researcher on CNN can't be like, "Well, it all started when a bunch of Russian men got really horny for a cartoon mouse."

• 39:10Ryan Broderick?

  Like, you just can't do that. You can't, and yet. And yet, you, you should. So after the march, which, you know, was kind of like a weird religious ceremony, uh, in 2010, you get the holy texts, of course. Like with the start of very many religions, uh, there are two competing doctrines of gadgetism. Uh, but let's do a little Bible study. So first, we're gonna read from the Book of Enlightenment, and then we're gonna read from the Basics of Gadget, the, the two texts we're, we're discussing.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 39:39Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, I'm gonna read one passage here for you, which is from Book One, Chapter Three, Negative Energy Flow. "Essentially, a deity is a disembodied consciousness possessing a mind of its own. Moreover, this mind is equal to the sum of the minds of believers, since it is their collective energy that creates and nourishes this structure. If believers wish for war, then the deity will be belligerent. In our case, we love Gadget with all of our heart and soul. We believe that she is kind, smart, beautiful, sympathetic, and thus, our goddess, absorbing all these qualities through our energy, appears so."

• 40:10Speaker 01

  It's funny, it also, actually, I have another friend who sometimes points out to me, he's like, "You know, maybe there are some downsides to mostly getting rid of organized religion that we did not consider at the time." Where it's like, people seem to have a need to worship things. Um, and, you know, obviously, like, the, the abuses of larger organized religions are documented. But then you delete it, the, the urge to worship remains, and then you have this, which like, honestly, like, I don't know how many people reading or writing this are joking or not joking, or if the people who aren't joking are getting some kind of spiritual fulfillment, but...

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I guess at the very least, you could say it's very strange.

• 40:54Ryan Broderick?

  Just to summarize, the points you've made today are that

• 40:57Speaker 01

  Gadget's hot.

• 40:57Ryan Broderick?

  Gadget was hot and asking for this.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 41:01Ryan Broderick?

  And that you don't like how secular our society is. That's interesting.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I sound like the most like strange like cartoon conservative. Where it's like, like a Disney fundamentalist.

• 41:14Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, it's interesting. If you put it all together like that, that's interesting.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  Here at the end of my career, I'm having so much fun.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  I was just about to ask if you're happy you've come on.

• 41:26Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  I always enjoy my time in panic world.

• 41:31Ryan Broderick?

  This, this is a section from the basics book. So it reads that the internet cult gave fans an opportunity to make their feelings for Gadget, not just an individual fixation, but a directed action with the support of the entire gadgetism, or in Russian, I guess it's called Geigekoslov Brotherhood. Brotherhood, I think, is really a crucial term there. Amidst an atmosphere of brotherly love and understanding, after all, if Gadget loves her fans, then the fans can spread that love between each other. The foundation for the whole endeavor is love for Gadget, and the highest form of love, without a doubt, is worship.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  We're very strange here, right? My like ability to try to thoughtfully process is being tested at this point. I'm just like, this is just very strange.

• 42:21Ryan Broderick?

  It is strange, yeah. Grant?

• 42:24Speaker 02

  It's strange, but after thinking about this for way, way too long, it's like a deeply logical story where it's like, you start off with like, with horniness. Then you get fan culture. And that that fan culture convinces itself to be, become cultish.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  This is just the logical conclusion.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  And because it was like, like, because it was early internet that people like actually left their houses sometimes, they, they try to codify it into actually making it a, like a thing with texts.

• 43:01Ryan Broderick?

  I mean, maybe, i- if we're assuming that this is legit, sure, but I think it is, I think it is very likely that there's a, like PJ sort of had mentioned, like that mix of like, for some people, they might be taking it super seriously. For a lot of people, they might just be doubling and tripling down on irony because it's funny. Like, especially like in this time period, that was such a thing to like never break K-Fab. I, like, the, like, I would almost say like the biggest difference between the internet of then and the internet of now, is that like back then, you didn't ever break character online.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  That's very interesting, but I'm like, it's so, so many words. Maybe people were way more bored, but they, they-

• 43:47Ryan Broderick?

  I could show you some 4chan threads that, yeah, no, I, I, I, I'm not going to read from these books because like, there's just no point, but all you know is that there are two different types of gadgetism and they're fighting with each other. It's your typical fandom drama. It's, but don't worry about it. But before we go to our, our next ad break, PJ, how are you feeling about all of this?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Unsettled. Unsettled.

• 44:15Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, but not profoundly unsettled. I'm feeling like, uh, as a connoisseur of all the strange places the human mind can go, I'm enjoying being in, uh, I would say like an especially strange rabbit hole.

• 44:30Ryan Broderick?

  Our next act is a little darker.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 44:33Ryan Broderick?

  This has been fun. You know, this has been like a fun little rump.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  We're going somewhere else.

• 44:36Ryan Broderick?

  Things are gonna get a little darker here, yeah. Um, but before we do that, we're gonna hear a word from our sponsors. Who do you think the hottest Disney character is right now, PJ?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Do you mean hottest, most popular, or hottest, most eroticized?

• 44:49Ryan Broderick?

  Eroticized.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  And not in my view, which Disney character?

• 44:51Ryan Broderick?

  In your, in your personal view, yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  I have no view.

• 44:54Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, another word from Disney Plus.

• 45:02Ryan Broderick?

  Okay, so you've done a bunch of these internet shaggy dog stories before.

• 45:09Ryan Broderick?

  How do you think this is gonna go bad? How do you think this is all gonna go bad?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  God, I like...

• 45:17Speaker 01

  I mean, my big, my fear, and I almost don't even wanna speak it out loud because it's so dark, is that if for you, this is a parable about kind of the fun house... One of the... Everyone right now, not everyone, but many people who think about the internet right now are thinking about sort of the problem of men online. Or like, the way I think of it is more, there's not a lot of great models for how to be a man in a socially constructive way on the internet. Like, the people that wanna sort of tell you anything often wanna steer you in a direction I think is not so good. And the worst version of that is violence. And so there's a fear in my head, I literally don't wanna say it out loud, that like somehow

• 46:02Speaker 01

  this goes to violence. I'm hoping that when you say dark, you mean something else.

• 46:06Ryan Broderick?

  Like the Rescue Rangers riots of like St. Petersburg, 2009 or something?

• 46:12Speaker 01

  I'm honestly picturing something worse, but let's say that that's what I'm picturing.

• 46:15Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. You're... Oh! Like a Branch Davidian kind of like, everyone drink the Kool-Aid kinda Heaven's Gate thing?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah.

• 46:22Ryan Broderick?

  Okay. Well, it doesn't go there, but it's still gross. Well, first we're gonna do a little detour. Uh, so in the 2020s, furries love gadget, obviously.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:35Ryan Broderick?

  Everyone loves gadget, but they're not gadgetologists, gadgetists.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  So furries' love of gadget is more like, either perhaps it's slightly sexualized, or just like, we're furries, this is a furry like creature, we're not worshiping gadget, but gadget is a legible kind of figure that would appear in our universe?

• 46:52Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, and also like, some context is like, the early furry communities were very based on existing characters and like drawing characters to look like existing characters. Like, people who would dress up like Mickey Mouse, or Bugs Bunny, or whatever. I think modern furry culture has moved far beyond that. I found like a photo album of like a furry meetup from like the 70s, and they're just wearing like knockoff like Looney Tunes.

• 47:17Ryan Broderick?

  Like suits.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  I didn't know furries went back to the 70s. That's really surprising to me.

• 47:20Ryan Broderick?

  It started with like, trading comics. Cause like, modern Comic Con culture starts with like, comic trade meetups in the 70s and 80s. And that's when you start to see the first early, I mean, most fandom culture kind of starts then.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Is this an offshoot of cosplay?

• 47:36Ryan Broderick?

  I, I think they're just like, parallel evolutions. Like, they're, they're both kind of happening around the same time. I haven't seen anything to say that like, one inspired the other. It's just like, people are, they're meeting and they're talking, uh, in the, in the 70s, 80s, around pop culture. So, Gadget has inspired softer furries, to this day. Like, it's not all bad. Uh, Dean Doddrell is a character we're gonna talk about right now. A big Chippendales Rescue Rangers fan. Uh, obviously super into Gadget. And his main focus though, Dean's main focus, was Foxglove, which was a bat character that appeared in Chippendales Rescue Rangers.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  Okay. And was this sort of like a sexy lady back character?

• 48:17Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, not my type, but, um,

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Some people-

• 48:21Ryan Broderick?

  Kind of like a, kind of like a pink voluptuous bat.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 48:24Ryan Broderick?

  I guess you could say. For, yeah, here's a photo of Foxglove.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Exactly as described. A pink voluptuous bat.

• 48:31Ryan Broderick?

  So, uh, this is from the WikiFur entry on Foxglove. WikiFur being the Wikipedia for furries. "Many thought she would be a perfect addition to the Rescue Rangers, even though after the end of the episode, she simply disappeared, never to be mentioned again on the show. Entire websites were created, they were dedicated to Foxglove based on this single appearance. Much porn is made of her, according to WikiFur.com."

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Can I say a theory about, uh, the eroticization of Chippendales Rescue Rangers?

• 48:57Ryan Broderick?

  Sure.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  I can't prove this, but I suspect that had Chippendales Rescue Rangers been published just a little bit later, in an era where it never disappeared from culture, where it was just like, "There's a new show on Disney+, it's an animated show, you can watch as a kid." The fervor of the eroticization would not have been the same. That some of what seems to be going on here is that people are being offered something, you know, imaginary characters they have a relationship to, and then those characters are disappearing. And it's like, the pulling away, the disappearance itself, is doing something. I real, like, the fact that they're like, "This bat was only in one episode, then the bat was gone." Like, I think something's going on there.

• 49:42Ryan Broderick?

  So what you're saying is that at the center of love is longing.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  I think at the center of desire is longing. I think that if you take something you have an attraction to and you put an obstacle there, it's an amplifier. And I think that when those cold-hearted Disney corporate executives were refusing to syndicate to VHS, they did not understand what fire they were stoking.

• 50:05Ryan Broderick?

  I think we did not totally understand what it meant to beam images and sort of stories into people's homes. And like, not really think about it. There was no, this bat character like appears one episode, and the people who made that show have no ability to find out that people liked it.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Or what complicated reactions people were having to it. Like,

• 50:28Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. Like, it's unheard of now to create media and have no feedback from the audience. But back then, there was no way to do that.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Which in some ways seems like a blessing.

• 50:37Ryan Broderick?

  I would almost say yes. Definitely a blessing. So Dean Dodrell gets really obsessed with Foxglove, gets really obsessed with Rescue Rangers. And he creates a mouse girl character that looks

• 50:51Ryan Broderick?

  like Gadget, but like with bigger boobs, basically. Kind of also looks like a Sonic the Hedgehog character, kind of like in that world, you can imagine it. He also works as an animator on the Jazz Jackrabbit games, which are

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Oh, I loved those games. Not in a sexual way, in a normal way.

• 51:07Ryan Broderick?

  So this is a selection of Dean Dodrell's work right here, so you can look at it. It's very Sonic. It's very

• 51:14Speaker 01

  But also very like, I find these a little uncomfortable. Like, they feel like, yeah, I find this uncomfortable. It's like too

• 51:21Ryan Broderick?

  It's a little too much.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  It feels like a painting of like a bodacious woman that a motorcycle guy would have in the 80s on his motorcycle, mixed with an animal that you would see in a Disney thing. Like, there's something in my brain that just goes like, no, no, no. For me.

• 51:39Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah. So he's working on Jazz Jackrabbit. You've played these games?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They were sort of like Sonic-style. I think you played them on a computer, but it was like Sonic or Mario, but it was Jazz Jackrabbit. It was shareware, so you could play the first level for free. I played them a lot, actually. They were Epic or Apogee.

• 51:54Ryan Broderick?

  But you didn't pay for them?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  No, no, I was a shareware guy.

• 51:57Ryan Broderick?

  So you think that we should have a less secular society? You think that women should dress more conservatively unless they're gonna get attention from the internet, and you don't pay for video games?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  No, I don't pay creators.

• 52:09Ryan Broderick?

  That's...

• 52:10Speaker 01

  You don't pay creators?

• 52:14Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, man, okay. I think we've successfully ended your career, so it's time to close out the episode. This guy is gonna create another game where another furry creature is inspired by gadget, we think,

• 52:29Ryan Broderick?

  which is all to say that some gadget lovers do go on to make fun games that PJ can play at home for free, which is super cool. And honestly, it's just kinda neat to see like how this culture just reverberates across the internet. Like, this is still ongoing. But now we've gotta talk about the dark side of this. Uh, so in 2022, Chippendales finally goes on Disney Plus, and they also released kind of like that Roger Rabbit-y-style live-action hybrid movie with Chippendales. Do you remember this?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 53:01Ryan Broderick?

  It's... It's like a Lonely Island movie, essentially.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 53:05Ryan Broderick?

  With Chippendales. Yeah, here. Here's the trailer.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Just wanted to remind you guys I'll be at FanCom this afternoon. Hey, watch out!

• 53:13Speaker 03

  I'm keeping myself fit and, you know, my updated, modern look. Don't you think you'd have more fans here if Chip did these events with you? I hadn't thought about him in a while. I should give him a call, see how life's treating him.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Life is the worst. That's so strange.

• 53:29Ryan Broderick?

  So that is Andy Samberg...

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Oh, this is like relatively modern.

• 53:33Ryan Broderick?

  And John Mulaney. So this is 2022. So Andy Samberg and John Mulaney are voicing the Chippendales Rescue Rangers, and it's all about like how they're washed up, and it's like a hybrid, live-action-y, animated movie.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Interesting. How did the sort of desire-filled, quasi-parodic, humor-religion people take this?

• 53:57Ryan Broderick?

  See that you uh, don't read Garbage Day, that's fascinating.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  I do read Garbage Day.

• 54:03Ryan Broderick?

  Well, you don't remember an article in Garbage Day from 2022 all about this, titled 4chan CO is in a Spiral, uh, which is great, cuz I didn't remember this either until Grant found it. So, uh, as I apparently wrote at the time and have little no memory of because I was in a gas leak from 2020 until 2024.

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Same.

• 54:24Ryan Broderick?

  Here is the deal, 4chan has a board called CO, which is for comics and cartoons. It's one of the older communities on the site and I'd estimate about 60% of the content there is about being horny for various cartoon characters. And they go berserk over this movie. They get so angry. Um, here is one post, let me explain. Gadget was a character that represented the sexual awakening of an entire generation and having her explicitly portrayed as in...

• 54:54Ryan Broderick?

  Right, right, I remember all this now. Um, so, this is a, so, okay. Gadget in the movie is portrayed as being pregnant.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Oh, that's complicated.

• 55:09Ryan Broderick?

  Well, it gets more complicated.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Because they're in this whole thing of like Madonna horror with her and...

• 55:15Ryan Broderick?

  There's no way you can guess specifically though, why her being pregnant is so...

• 55:21Speaker 01

  Uh, well, I mean, their whole thing is like, the world is a fallen place, women will betray you. Gadget is perfect and the, the thing that is kind of messed up, I think sometimes in all masculinity, internet masculinity, some masculinity is this idea that like, men should desire women, but if women like have desires, if they come to those desires, they are defiled. Like it's a, that's a very old idea. And so is that the thing that she's like, for Gadget to be pregnant, Gadget must have had sex? Which I don't like thinking about, but not in the way they might be mad about it.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love, how are they doing?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  They're great, 42 kids and counting.

• 56:04Ryan Broderick?

  You see, the movie, uh, shows that Gadget was impregnated by the bug character Zipper.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:14Ryan Broderick?

  Here's the, here's one screenshot from a 4chan post about this. He fucked her. He infected her womb with his shit orbiting, hand rubbing insect seed. And you know what? She loved it. She begged for more. I'm not reading anymore of this. It's so fucking gross. Uh, did they consider for a second how this would affect her hordes of loyal fans? Of course not. They have no shame. They pulled the rug out from under us.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  This is so nuts.

• 56:43Ryan Broderick?

  Let me explain. Gadget was a character that represented the sexual awakening of an entire generation. And having her explicitly portrayed as being impregnated by a filthy insect that feeds off excrement with its maggot vermin abomination offspring is the equivalent of a very racist term in there. Spam posting on this website. It is in fact Disney's way of imprinting demoralization, cuckoldry porn on an already disenfranchised millennials. And it is truly and nakedly evil. I will not give a single penny to them and I refuse to watch this learned helplessness conditioning propaganda. Shame on Disney.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Wait, so they're, they have like racist sort of no mixed race couple rage about a cartoon bug? Having impregnated a cartoon chipmunk?

• 57:34Ryan Broderick?

  Uh, yeah.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Okay, that sounds like the internet. That sounds like part of the internet.

• 57:38Ryan Broderick?

  That is so, and...

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Crazy. Like, sorry. That's like, it's like, it's like I draw a square on the wall and I leave you alone in the room long enough.

• 57:50Ryan Broderick?

  And you see...

• 57:50Speaker 01

  You get horny for the square. You start to work with the square. And then 20 years later, I walk in the room and draw a circle. And you're like, no!

• 58:00Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, that's exactly it.

• 58:01Speaker 02

  I, I just, I just want to get this on the record. Ryan didn't even read the worst of the, of the internet comments. There's one that I've just been pulling up to people at parties just to watch their face melt from reading it. Uh, and I have to live with that forever because of this.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  Grant, I hope you get hazard pay.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  If listeners want to do this to themselves, they can email me and I will send it to them. But we will not be repeating it. PJ, I'll send it to your way.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 58:31Ryan Broderick?

  But wait, but wait, because there's one more piece here. So one user on 4chan writes, it's a green text. So like every line is like a different part of the story here. So it says, Russia is losing the Ukraine border in the last few days because the army is too busy preparing for the Rescue Rangers movie. Ukraine celebrates, thinking they've won. Think again. Rescue Rangers movie sucks. Putin blames the Western powers for ruining the waifu of his generals. Russia crashes into the West like a tsunami wave. WW3 is caused by literal rodent waifus and Disney being hacks.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  This is so...

• 59:08Ryan Broderick?

  I want to put this all together.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:09Ryan Broderick?

  Rescue Rangers debuts in the 80s.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:12Ryan Broderick?

  People can't get access to it. They all kind of collectively realize that they're horny for this mouse girl. They start talking about her and they get really obsessed with her. Then the show debuts in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And they also start getting really horny for her. And suddenly we have like an East-West religion manifesting around this cartoon mouse girl. It then continues to grow and spread and kind of evolve and darken in the way that everything on the internet has like evolved and darkened over the last 20 years or so. A corporation which for years, decades resisted ever leaning into this. Now realizes the power of fandom, but they don't understand it. So they like create like a postmodern twist on the original IP, thinking that like everyone's going to love it.

• 59:57Ryan Broderick?

  And part of that postmodern twist made by people who have no context for how weird and dark the online community has grown in the years of negligence and isolation, then start effectively a race war.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Someone in a room somewhere in California who was doing a script writing job that they were probably mid-level enthusiasm on was like, what do we make out you're pregnant? Having no idea the level of toxic rage they were detonating in a in a world that has landed in a very strange place.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's like...

• 1:00:33Ryan Broderick?

  If you come back to the central question, which is like, is this a bit? Is this not a bit? I would say 70% of it is probably not a bit.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  That rage did not feel like a bit to me.

• 1:00:45Ryan Broderick?

  No, no, no, these guys are having like a full on racist meltdown. Like about a cartoon mask girl and her bug husband.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Like, there's something in the human psyche here that I can't quite articulate, which is that they are having a racist meltdown and

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Gitmon's not a race. Like, Bug is not a race. It's like so pure that they're just like, there's an us and an other. And this feeling of sort of neurotic rage at the, it's really like,

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  this should be in a laboratory. Like, this should be studied. There is something to learn here that is, uh, deep and strange.

• 1:01:23Ryan Broderick?

  The, the voice actor for Zipper is black, but I don't think that that, I, I would sort of, I would sort of hesitate to say, like, I think it is largely like the idea.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I am sure that part of the way to understand this is like anti-black racism. Absolutely. And additionally-

• 1:01:40Ryan Broderick?

  No, now I'm trying to like imagine like, what's the right Chad? That could impregnate Gadget without pissing everybody off, which is like a horrible train of thought that I'm having in my head. Like, I'm trying to go through the characters-

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Who is the sort of like-

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  They wanted it to be Chip. They, they all thought that Chip was the only one who deserved.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Her. Not even Dale?

• 1:01:57Ryan Broderick?

  Cause like, no.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Dale's a beta?

• 1:01:59Ryan Broderick?

  Dale's like, Dale is a beta, but, but,

• 1:02:03Ryan Broderick?

  yeah, I mean, that kind of makes sense to me. Like, this idea that they all see themselves as Chip. They all see themselves like getting Gadget. And then like a bug gets with her. Because they've made like this like post-modern update to the show where Chip and Dale are washouts. So like to them, it's like the attack on like the Western man.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  You know, there's days where my mind does not feel like the easiest place to live and- There's minds that are much worse places to live.

• 1:02:36Ryan Broderick?

  I would agree with that, yeah. I...

• 1:02:40Ryan Broderick?

  I'm trying to put myself, like, I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of a person who would be having a racist meltdown about two cartoon characters having sex.

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  And not even human cart- like, it's not even like, the cart-

• 1:02:52Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, you would be fine if it was humans.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  I, that would be bad as well, and I'd be like, okay, that's like, I've encountered normal racism in the world, it exists.

• 1:03:01Ryan Broderick?

  Sure, no, people are racist to, to human cartoon characters all the time, that is true.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  But this is like, you're even like, it's so crazy, it's so like, man, this world.

• 1:03:11Ryan Broderick?

  I think it's exactly what you said, which is like, if you leave someone alone in a room, and they just start to like, get horny, and then worship the thing that's making them horny, and then like, time goes by, and the world catches up, and then they like, freak out, and there's an intergenerational moment right now where like, large corporations are realizing the internet's really powerful, and they kind of half-understand that people on there are talking about things that they own, and they're trying to capitalize on it, but they have no context for it, and half the time, they don't understand what they're stepping in, and I'm not sure that like, a racist 4chan meltdown about the Rescue Rangers remake is like, gonna affect their bottom line, but I guarantee you, like, the actors in it are probably gonna get dog piled, we see this with like, Star Wars stuff and things

• 1:03:54Ryan Broderick?

  like that all the time, like, so it's, it's not, it is really silly, and it's really goofy, and to understand the context takes like, an hour of talking it through, and it's still kind of confusing, but like, there is some utility in understanding this stuff, I think.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like, I don't know what the answers are, and I think those are things we're investigating, but, you know, pop culture is like, a common dream we have, but it's a dream that we all walk away from with different feelings, some of them strange, some of them hateful, some of them fine, some of them funny, and I think it's just a very weird moment where these properties, which have been common dreams for so many years, are now, the dream machine's being turned back on, and people are discovering that what they thought it meant might ne- it may not be what, you know, this guy thinks it meant, but also that the meaning these people have taken away from it is so dark and strange, you know? At some point in the 1980s, somebody decided that the chipmunk lady character would have a kind of mature female body.

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  And maybe they knew what they were doing and maybe they didn't.

• 1:04:55Ryan Broderick?

  Oh, she's mature.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  She looks like an adult. She looks like she's been through puberty. This is what I will say. Like, I think we can recognize.

• 1:05:01Ryan Broderick?

  You think girls that go through puberty are mature?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. I'm never getting out of this line.

• 1:05:07Ryan Broderick?

  So according to this, uh, according to this, canonically, gadget hack wrench in the original run is 17 years old.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Okay. So below the age of consent, also.

• 1:05:17Ryan Broderick?

  I, yeah, I would say so.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  So, I don't know. It's just like you never, no one who generated this culture could ever have imagined that this is what would happen. And like, I don't know, we can't unplug or reboot the internet. But I wish we could just pause it for a second.

• 1:05:34Ryan Broderick?

  I also think it's really important to point out here that none of this that we've talked about, the levels of insanity that we've gone through today, involved an algorithm at any point.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  No, no one did this. Like, human beings did this to themselves and each other. It's not that like TikTok or Twitter or anything like made this happen. This is message where this is the internet that's supposed to be, that I often feel nostalgic for.

• 1:05:55Ryan Broderick?

  It's an impulse that I've been trying to kill in myself, actually, for the last year. This idea that like, it was one time better. If you're in the business we're in, which is, you know, getting people to subscribe to media, it's very easy to be like, we got to return to the better times. Pay me and I'll tell you about the better times, which were before. And it's like, I don't think they were better. Like, maybe algorithms have accelerated some of this stuff, or like, opened it up to more mainstream audiences. But if you dig back into any of these stories, like, they're, they all end up weird like this.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  I can't prove it. I still think it was better. I think that these things existed on the margins and what's happened is like, the worst things that amplified. But to your point, I do agree, like, it wasn't some time where strange or ugly things didn't happen, or where some of the ways, like, I think it's totally good that if you're a furry, and this is a thing that you enjoy, you can find another furry somewhere else and feel less alone. And it's a bummer that also, if you're into chipmunk race war, instead of being the only person who has those ideas, you can also connect with like-minded lunatics and make each other crazier. And I agree, that predates the algorithm. And we built something that changed society without understanding we were doing it. And now, we're here and we have to figure it out.

• 1:07:08Ryan Broderick?

  I think that is as coherent of an ending as we could ask for with something like this. I want to thank you for sitting through this and dealing with this. How are you feeling right now? What's your general emotional level? Where are you at?

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  I've really enjoyed myself. I like learning about things, even things that are dark.

• 1:07:29Ryan Broderick?

  And for the, I mean, most of this wasn't that dark until it got racist, which I think is a real good summation of the internet, actually, in the last 30 years.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  The third act of many internet stories.

• 1:07:38Ryan Broderick?

  Exactly. And then it got racist. If people want to follow you on the internet, PJ, where can they do that?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  I would love if people would check out my podcast, which is called Search Engine. I make it with a team of wonderful, brilliant people, and we try to answer all sorts of questions, including questions for our listeners. So if people have questions that are bothering them, they can send them to us and we might track it down for them.

• 1:07:59Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you very much for coming on the show. This was a blast.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. It was really fun.

• 1:08:04Ryan Broderick?

  Panic World is a production of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstedt is our production coordinator, and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumis. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes, along with our producer, Devin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer, Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. Demezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Mary Ann Kuga is their Director of Marketing, and Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her

• 1:08:42Ryan Broderick?

  at [email protected]. Lastly, here's my advice for you: chill out and touch grass while you still can.