If there’s one day for appreciating highly inaccurate yet culturally significant history, it’s Columbus Day. And thus we take a look back at the collected works of Brad Neely, whose Superdeluxe series Professor Brothers and legendary viral animation George Washington predated Drunk History by months, raising the bar for all those seeking to revise historical fact in the name of comedy.
The short Cox and Combes’ Washington, a deliberately crude two-minute music video about the amazing powers of our first president (which include two sets of testicles and the ability to eat opponents’ brains), screened early as a part of the Spike and Mike Sick and Twisted Animation Festival of 2007, and became a viral hit soon after. Neely no longer owns the rights to George Washington due to its being featured in Spike & Mike — which means that it’s hard to be sure of the stats, due to its removal from YouTube (though an unofficial upload has of writing nearly 500,000 views). But Neely was able to parlay that success into becoming one of the early creators signed by Superdeluxe, and that irreverent attitude towards history into the Professor Brothers series, in which two drunken college professors take their classes through a version of the past that bears little relationship to reality. (And I’m not just saying that because their first lesson is based directly on the Bible’s version of history).
Subsequent series include Baby Cakes and China, Illinois, similarly styled animations that form, with Brothers, a complex and insane narrative. What Neely excels at is the random non sequitur, the irrelevant aside that comes from nowhere logical or sane. You have to truly admire the kind of twisted mind that would refer to Sodom and Gomorrah as “a f***ed-to-death pile of burning kaka”; it’s what they like to refer to in Hollywood as “an original voice,” the sort of talent that gets buckets of cash thrown at it.
For Neely, all that’s happened so far is a consulting producer gig on half a season of South Park, a China, Illinois compilation airing on Adult Swim last May, and a featured presence in the documentary We Are Wizards. But via email Neely said that he has a number of different projects in the works, though he noted that, “There’s not specifically anything at a stage to talk about: TV, songs and features. Everything. All over the place. All at once.” However, he did confirm that while he had completed his Superdeluxe obligations before the site was folded into Adult Swim, he has since delivered a series of 12, 30-second musical pieces for airing on Adult Swim at a some future date. As to the subject matter, he remains vague: “The band is nameless, and the series is about America now, and the series might be called America Now.” As of writing, no air date has been officially announced.
We live in post-modern times, where a public school education is a study in increased complexity — students memorize the names of Columbus’s ships in the first grade, only to hear years later about Viking ships and ancient Chinese sailors. It’s the shaken faith of 11-year-olds that gives birth to these absurdist shorts. Sure, it’s a big leap from “Columbus wasn’t the first to discover America” to “George Washington could shoot laser beams out of his eyes.” But the most exciting ideas are always generated when you ignore the facts and make up your own fiction.
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