My fellow Americans, I bring grave news to you today. Our borders are not as secure as we once thought, but despite what many politicians would have you believe, it is not imagined enemies to the South or real enemies to the East that truly threaten our way of life on this day. No, friends, the true danger lies to the North within the frozen reaches of the Canadian taiga.
Now, I know what all you Americans are thinking. “Andrew, you’ve got to be kidding. Canada? The country of maple syrup, Mounties, and accents that are just the tiniest bit foreign to our ears? The nicest, most polite, most mild-mannered country in the world?” Yeah, that’s the one. And by the way, ease up on the stereotypes, fictional stand-in reader -- I guarantee you ours are a lot worse.
It’s crazy, right? This is the same country that gave us Michael J. Fox, Avril Lavigne, Stephen Amell, John Candy, and so many other great public figures (OK, they also gave us Shatner, Bieber, and Drake, but hey, we have Trump). In the mind of the average United States citizen, Canada represents the epitome of the metaphorical good neighbor. There’s no way they could be hiding anything remotely sinister, right? Wrong. This is no conspiracy theory, ladies and gentlemen. I have evidence, and its name is Splatalot.
Before you Google that absurd proper noun, let me stop you for a moment and ask you to engage your creative faculties. You may be familiar with the moderately popular U.S. game show Wipeout. If you’re older or have an uncanny capacity for pop culture trivia, you may also know about another American U.S. game show called American Gladiators; you might have even seen the recent remake hosted by Hulk Hogan, in which case you have my deepest sympathies. If neither of these names ring a bell, then stop reading this article, follow these links, and educate yourself on the boneheaded persistence of Average Joe the American.
Done? Good. Sorry you had to witness that, but it’s necessary for the coming battle. Now that you have freshly conjured images of these two similar but more or less unique game shows in mind, try to imagine what they would look like combined. Think three parts Wipeout and one part American Gladiators. It’s a scary thought, I know, but it gets worse. Now scale back the age of all the contestants to adolescence. Are you mortified yet? You’d better be because this imagined terror is the Canadian game show Splatalot.
Once upon a time, some conglomerate of Canadian, British, and Australian television producers got the idea of creating a show almost identical to Wipeout, but with a human element similar to the gladiators in the aforementioned 80's fashion catastrophe. And, because television producers are inherently diabolical, they decided to make this a show done by kids, for kids. Except for the gladiators. Those are adults who have fully progressed through the pangs of puberty and now get paid to make the lives of Canadian children miserable.
Here’s how the show works: A dozen or so kids ages 12 and up, who we can only assume are pressured into signing up by hateful parents or chosen by lot like the Athenian youths (because no sane person would volunteer as tribute for this torture), compete in three rounds of athletic “fun and games” where they proceed through different Wipeout-esque courses made up of “wacky” and “totally not liability-inducing” obstacles suspended over lakes of water that are probably not as clean as they look and assuredly hover at temperatures just above freezing. The obstacles are covered in the slickest plastic known to man, and the kids are all dressed in the most slippery rubber suits available on the Black Market. These contestants cover a range of ages from 12 to 18 -- basically all of puberty for both sexes -- meaning you’ve got kids who are just beginning the arduous journey of adolescence competing side-by-side against young men who can grow full (if patchy) beards. Sounds pretty awful, right? But wait, it gets worse.
You thought I’d forgotten about the gladiators, didn’t you? Well, these beefy, athletic, fully-grown adults -- called Defenders in the show -- spend their time onscreen blasting the contestants with water cannons, throwing paint-filled balloons at them, spraying them with slime guns, launching projectiles at them, and shooting steam at their faces -- all while these poor kids are trying to complete tasks that require significant levels of strength and agility, which might not yet have been granted to them by the Puberty Fairy. Worse yet, the Defenders seek to alleviate their understandable boredom (after all, physically assaulting distracted children gets old after a while) by making terrible jokes and poking fun at the contestants and their repeated failures. I would tell you to imagine what it’s like to try to leap across treacherous gaps over frigid water from one tractionless obstacle to another for a full day, but thanks to the wonders of Netflix, you can see exactly what it’s like for yourself!
That’s right, folks. The whole first season of Splatalot is currently streaming on Netflix, sitting pretty on top of two stars and some change. I don’t have the space, stamina, or eloquence to regale you with every sinful aspect of this show -- unfortunately, we won’t get to the ludicrous costumes, the out-of-place Camelot theme, or the obnoxious hosts -- so, as loyal Americans and true friends to Canada, I expect you to begin educating yourselves on this evil. Because we have to stop it.
We cannot idly watch while our allies to the North languish under a corrupt system of purposeless, heartless child torture. This show does no good for anyone: the viewers cringe and moan at the sight of these kids’ repeated hopeless failures; the actors certainly hate their jobs; the winner gets no quantifiable reward -- no prize money, no trophy, no eternal glory, nothing but the chance to wear a cheap prop and read a script for fifteen seconds at the end of the episode -- and the losers? Well, we don’t get to see what happens to them, so I can only assume that the producers throw them to the lions. We cannot stand for this any longer. Canada deserves the opportunity to raise a healthy, happy generation of children who aren’t haunted by the sting of failure and the sharper sting of numerous pratfalls, faceplants, and paint balloons to the head.
I for one will not let the menace of Splatalot endure. Whether the show is cancelled, running, or on indefinite hiatus, we need to be prepared for future outbreaks -- it’s an international show, after all. That is why, from this day forward, I am going to create and sustain a program to breed superhuman children with the sole purpose of sending them to infiltrate the show, conquer it, and destroy it from the inside in the process. If you’re with me, then I gladly welcome you in the fight against one of the most spiteful and mean-spirited bits of television I’ve ever seen. Naysayers of today might call us madmen or misguided fools, but history will judge us as the men and women who stopped the Canadian entertainment industry’s reign of terror before it took over the world. Join me, fellow Americans, because at the end of the day -- whether Canadian, Virginian, or Mexican -- we are all Americans, and it is our shared responsibility to watch over our continent and protect the people of this fine land.