What's inside this 25-year-old can of Spider-Man Chef Boyardee is scarier than any supervillain
Aux Features great job internet
People are desperate for entertainment right now. They’re tired of endlessly scrolling through streaming platforms. They’ve given up on the one jigsaw puzzle they own. They’re sick of pretending they like baking. People want excitement. People want a thrilling narrative. People want to see a man open a very old can of Spider-Man pasta and show them what’s inside.
Thankfully, Matt Carracappas, the man behind the vintage pop culture merch repository Dinosaur Dracula, is here to give the people what they want.
“I put the can opener to work, unsettled by the rust, but emboldened by the lack of noxious fumes,” Carracappas writes, meticulously detailing his ill-advised adventure into the toxic depths of mid-90s cross-promotional delicacies. As an avid collector of nostalgic oddities, he’s no stranger to the weirdness of pop culture mashups. But getting Chris Sarandon to read a Ninja Turtles coloring book, as he did recently, is presumably far less of a risk to one’s health than opening this can of ooze. Still, he soldiers on.
“They say tragedy plus time equals comedy, but there’s nothing funny about 15 ounces of Spider-Man Pasta reduced to a rotted 3-ounce chunk,” Carracappas writes as readers gaze into the gnarled rock that was once your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man with mini meatballs in tomato sauce.
It’s about as happy of an ending as you can get considering this could have ended like the opening of the Ark of the Covenant. Plus, if you’re willing to look deep enough, you may even be able to find a metaphor hidden in all this.
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28 Comments
Truly now we are all starved for entertainment, figuratively and literally. Stay safe.
History Channel has already ordered two seasons of ‘Ancient Pasta’.
I’m getting deja vu.
https://thetakeout.com/25-year-old-can-of-chef-boyardee-spider-man-pasta-opene-1842918316
https://io9.gizmodo.com/please-do-not-eat-the-25-year-old-can-of-expired-spider-1842926406I look forward to Jezebel’s take, but I wish Deadspin, Splinter, and Fleshbot were still alive to cover it too.
Hi, sorry to hijack your thread again but your impersonator really loves Westworld and he’s back in my replies (exactly the same rant on AVClub and io9 posts – https://io9.gizmodo.com/1842963441
What’s insane to me is who takes the time and effort to create an impostor account for another commenter? I truly don’t understand this world we live in.
Even more insane – who takes the time to do it literally hundreds of times?
I wonder if one day, as he creates the account “dreeemiliolizard0″, he’ll say to himself, “Huh. I’m just not getting the same old thrill this time.”
Seems unlikely. He’s got enough new schtick to be President.
Reported. Thanks. It’s not a bother. It takes seconds to cut and paste his discussions page into an email.
I just feel bad about hijacking your threads OT. I’m sure this is not what you wanted to talk about here. If there is a better way to let you know about him let me know.
What you are doing is perfect. It’s quick and easy.
Jalopnik should have a post about it any hour now.
David Tracy would be the only one interested, I think.
The instigator, meanwhile, is finding this all HILARIOUS.
Dinosaur Dracula on Twitter: “lmaooooo https://t.co/2Jxi42pYDp” / Twitter
I really enjoy how the writer of this article helpfully repeats, verbatim, the contents of each tweet. Like, I didn’t quite get it the first time, and am incapable of scrolling back up. Such a life-saver!
On a somewhat related note, one of my favorite youtube channels is by a guy who opens and tastes test survival and military rations from recent years, all the way back to 19th century. He does it with a mix of history and humor, and it’s great for a chuckle and a bit of insight into the way armies are fed in war and peace time:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2I6Et1JkidnnbWgJFiMeHA
Steve is the best. A brave man indeed.
Now I’m wondering if anyone has a 25 year old chili mac MRE they can open for comparison.
Still not as disturbing as the time it was revealed that Gwen Stacey cheated on Peter with Norman Osborn and we got to see Peter imagining the Green Goblin’s O-Face.Or the time when Spider-Man: Regin, a story set in a an alternate future, where it was revealed that Peter killed MJ with his radioactive semen.Or Mark Millar’s Trouble. A story about the teenage sex lives of Peter’s Aunt, Uncle, and parents which also implies that Aunt May is Peter’s biological mother.
Is there something about Spider-Man in particular that attracts terrible revisionist takes, or do all superheroes get these kind of awful stories heaped on them?
Any long running series will have at least a few duds every now and than. It’s just that a lot of Spider-Man’s more infamous ones happened in the past decade or so.
All three of these happened between 2003-2007, outside of the past decade.And these are hardly “duds”. Along with Spidey making a deal with the devil to trade away his marriage, they are often on the short list of “worst Spider-Man stories of all time.”
Ah Trouble. I remember it getting shitloads of hype before it launched in mid-late 2003. It was impossible to get a copy of it at my comic shop because the first issue sold out immediately. Marvel pitched it at the time as an attempt to get back to the romance comics which were popular in the 1950s.The backlash didn’t begin until the whole Aunt May might be Peter’s mother thing happened in one of the later issues of it.
He didn’t eat it? What a rip-off.
Exactly!
It was the rust that killed it. The hermeticity was compromised.
Looks delic—VOMIT!!!!
If it had been really dangerous, his YouTube Personality Sense would have tingled.