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Oct. 6, 2020 - Louder with Crowder
23:06
Surviving the Leftist Mob | Doug TenNapel Guests | Good Morning #MugClub
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Today on Good Morning Mug Club, we have an interview with Doug TenNapel.
He's a comic book artist, he created some of the greatest video games from your childhood and mine, and yeah, Stephen did an entire interview with him.
During this interview, Doug plugged his Kickstarter for Earthworm Jim 2, the graphic novel.
So, the problem is, that Kickstarter has ended.
I know, sad story.
Today, for you, Doug has opened an Indiegogo campaign so that you can still back the book and get your copy.
So, if you enjoy the interview, if you're familiar with Doug's work, or if you'd just like to support one of the best artists and storytellers going right now, go to Indiegogo, search for Earthworm Jim 2, and back the book.
I hope you enjoy this interview, and I'll get off the screen.
Thank you so much.
I wasn't super familiar, like months ago, with the name until it was Audio Wade and Quarter Black Garrett said, Earthworm Jim.
I said, Earthworm Jim, that's my jam.
I think that was the first game that I ever beat as a kid.
That's a hard game, too.
Yeah, it's even harder on Sega compared to Super Nintendo.
Sega's the way to go.
No.
Genesis.
Genesis.
Way to go.
I get it.
You thought you were cool with Mortal Kombat, avoiding your parents so they didn't see the fatalities, but the truth is the gameplay was... It was for homos!
Now, talking about that, speaking of Earthworm Jim, our next guest, he created Earthworm Jim.
He's created all sorts of video games, comic books, cartoons.
He's voiced them as well, which I want to ask him about.
He is right now running a Kickstarter campaign for Earthworm Jim 2.
Fight the Fish is a sequel to the comic book.
Caught a lot of flack lately.
People talk about attempts to cancel, and I always say, why don't people stand up to them more?
Well, this next man does, and he has the ground to stand on.
Mr. Doug TenNapel, how are you, sir?
Oh, I'm so good, Steven.
Thanks for having me on.
I appreciate you so much.
Huge fan.
Don't say it.
I'm a monster fan of you.
I watch you guys all the time.
And of course, I'm a friend of Quarter Black Garrett.
Hey, buddy.
What's up?
Are you guys?
You guys been talking?
Yeah.
I actually did the design for his trading cards on the first Earthworm Jim campaign.
Really?
I didn't, yeah.
He designed a 90 card set.
Wow, well that explains why he wasn't working on the show, Doug.
Hey, that's not true.
I did him off time.
What, are you just going to keep him a day raider, or do you want him full time?
Because he's going to be on the open market soon.
He is amazing, I will say, about Quarter Black Garrett.
He came in, we did the Golden Ticket Sweepstakes, and I've talked about this, where he came in and he wasn't quite there for editing because he didn't have the experience, you know, at that point, but we just loved his attitude, and so we brought him back for whatever we could do, and then he would build these full freaking costumes and animatronic things, and we go, Garrett, you can do this?
He's like, well, yeah!
He said, alright, okay, you're hired!
I just did it on the side.
And then he comes in and the next day it's like a fully accurate R2-D2 replica made from pots in a recycling bin.
We hired you to be creative.
We didn't know you were a creative freak.
My bad.
But we didn't know he was like arts and crafts creative.
We didn't know we were hiring a partner from Michaels.
I'm such a super fan that as another tribute is that on the last Bigfoot Bill campaign I did a half Asian Bill sticker for Bigfoot Bill.
Oh wow!
Maybe we can get some of these things and sell them on the site.
Or, you know, obviously, you can sell them through our site.
We're always surprised at the buying power of our site, because we sold, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars of the David Dorn shirts.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Still going.
Which, by the way, Ann Dorn wanted us to know that it's going to a scholarship in David Dorn's name.
Oh, so cool.
So that was her decision, not ours.
All right, well, Doug, sorry we got off on not the wrong foot, but who is it?
So explain to people who don't know you.
Kind of what your background is, obviously everyone sort of knows Earthworm Jim, but your involvement, and then we can get to, you know, why so many people want to hurt you.
Sure, sure.
So Earthworm Jim is my biggest hit, obviously, from the early to mid-90s, but I also did The Neverhood and Skull Monkeys is another video game I did for DreamWorks.
I've worked for every major studio doing games, and then I started doing comic books.
I did the book Gear, Creature Tech, These are all books I ended up selling into Hollywood for millions of dollars.
I started selling the IPs in, and they didn't know I was a Christian.
I've always been vocal, but just there wasn't an internet to get the word out.
Right.
And then that also opened up doors into television.
So I was an exec producer on the Earthworm Jim animated series, and then I did a show version of Gear, the comic book, for Nickelodeon called Cat Scratch.
This is before it went full blue hair LGBT over there.
Oh, I thought it was maybe a little bit of a send-up to, you know, a little wink and a nod to Ted Nugent, who also would be one of your allies.
Yeah, Ted Nugent, Cat's Got Your Fever.
It's a great song.
Yeah.
And then, so I've just always done video games, TV, and so when people say that, like, conservative Christians aren't that creative, that raises my hackles a little bit because I've always operated on the front lines of the world.
That's where I want to be.
I want to leave the 99 to go after the 1.
I'm trying to find people.
Who maybe have never heard the gospel or never seen a Christian creative out in the depths of Hollywood and video gaming and comic books.
And I've done 20 graphic novels.
Those are long form comic books.
Right.
And this Earthworm Jim 2 is my 20th.
So I got the rights back just for the book and started doing crowdfunding to kind of
protect my career and do it independently.
Well, I think what's interesting is, you just mentioned this, you came at it honestly in that you made it in an industry.
At that point, people didn't really know that you were a Christian, as opposed to,
I don't wanna say grifting, but there are a lot of people who effectively,
like as a stand-up comedian, I performed at a church once,
and it was because my friend was a youth pastor.
It was like some kind of a graduation.
And then he told me, we had, and I won't name names, so-and-so in here,
and these were people I'd never heard of.
He said, they clean up making millions of dollars doing the church circuit,
but they've never been comedians before.
They go, no, they just were pastoring a church, and they started being comedians.
There's a big difference between making it work because you sort of use, I don't wanna say a gimmick,
but you know that you're performing just for that niche and happening to be a Christian,
where your values define you, but making it in the deepest talent pool,
which not only did you do, but Earthworm Jim, and not that that's the only thing you've done,
but for me growing up, that is a marker in my childhood.
That was one of the most iconic games.
You had Mario, and you had Sonic, and then Earthworm Jim came in, and surprisingly as a Christian guy, it was considered edgier for me as a kid, Earthworm Jim.
Yeah, the first thing I saw of yours was your imitation you did of Tom Cruise.
So before I knew you were a Christian, I knew you were funny and you were talented.
And to me, that's a high compliment when someone likes your work because of your clip.
You don't even know what talent is.
You've done the research, as I have done the research.
Do the fake laugh. You gotta do the fake laugh.
I can't lie.
I don't know if he could actually fake laugh.
I don't know if he could actually...
I'm sure he would have like a, he would have a 7 by 70 cigar just because he's more comfortable with it.
By the way, we're smoking a pipe and cigar because we found out that we both share, we are brothers of the leaf and the briar.
Not the leaf that you have in your belt buckle.
But sorry, but continue.
Yeah, it was, it was considered edgier though too.
Earthworm Jim, I remember as a kid, like there were some things, it wasn't Mortal Kombat, but I remember as a kid, you know, with Christian parents being like, Oh, I don't know if I want them to see this level.
There's boogers.
Yeah, we were very into Warner Brothers cartoons and Tex Avery, you know, the classic Warner Brothers stuff and the music we listened to.
We were into Weird Al and They Might Be Giants and Cake.
This is all kind of 90s stuff.
Yeah.
And we just wanted, you know, video games were not very creative at the time.
And so we wanted to bring in something a little more Like non sequitur, freaky, funny.
And the tech side of, this is the tech side of Earthworm Jim that really doesn't get enough credit.
It was so hard to cram that much art into a cartridge because you're talking about an amount of memory of like a postage stamp, you know, like a floppy disk.
So the tech guys were able to compress the art so well that it gave us way more frames of animation that allowed us to put in more gags and more humor.
Right.
Yeah, and then they had, like in N64, they had the expansion pack.
Kids don't appreciate this now.
Their phone has more technology than we had in all of our systems and computers, for crying out loud.
First time I found out what an emulator was, when computers had gotten good enough, I said, I can have all my Super Nintendo games in a folder?
On a disc?
Come on!
So you've worked in the industry for obviously a very long time, and I want to get to kind of our connection with Andrew Breitbart and Big Hollywood.
But first, so what is it that has pissed people off about you?
I know you've had the LGBTQAAIP silent F after you recently, a quick search.
Why?
I mean, if for us you're tips, you'd think you'd be friendly.
Yeah, they've been after me since the beginning.
I oppose gay marriage.
I've said that gay marriage is between one man and one woman.
That would not be gay marriage.
Marriage between one man and one woman.
A gay marriage between a man and one woman would be weird.
With the gender spectrum now, who knows?
That could be an accurate statement.
Really, the basics of my disagreement with them is over the marriage issue.
And that I don't endorse, so I won't endorse.
Obviously in animation and even on my graphic novels I've had gay crew members and trans crew members and there was never a problem with them.
It's with specific cancel culture groups that are online organized behind the scenes.
There's probably 30 of them in some Discord or forum somewhere where they all launch their attacks against all of my vendors and try to get me cancelled.
So on Kickstarter they'll send a You know, 30 emails a day to Kickstarter to try and get them to remove my campaign.
Anytime one of my Scholastic books would come out.
You know, Scholastic, this is hostile territory.
Like Scholastic, they have a rainbow.
Their name is in rainbow when they launch their books.
Right.
I just thought that was innocent because I was a kid looking through what effectively it looked like a coupon or flyer.
And I was like, oh, look, a new Bernstein Bears.
I'll get that in a mere nine and a half weeks.
And they're all full Black Lives Matter now, you know, they all give their donations to Black Lives Matter, Kickstarter, all of my vendors, Image Comics, Indiegogo, you know, we're all on YouTube also.
And so, to me, it's really just anti- Specifically conservative Christians, because they'll give a Christian a pass if you're okay with gay marriage.
And if you're okay with, you know, abortion or whatever, then you're the good kind of Christian.
Basically they're okay with Christians like Rob Bell, you know, who are going to hell.
I guess I'm here because love wins.
Love wins, and I'm on fire!
Oh, it really is a pit!
I thought this was figurative!
Little on the nose, God!
What we're seeing the last five years really is a a ramping up of and the mainstreaming of political correctness
because this is all stuff I heard of in the 90s and I just thought it was like some little
campus joke. They were like, Doug, political correctness is coming and they're going to get you. And I'm
like, no, they're not. They're a bunch of freaks on a campus somewhere. Right. And now you've
seen them come into full fruition in mainstreaming politics, even dragging both parties over
to the left.
And you see it in the church.
You see it all over the church now.
Yeah.
And in major businesses that are doing the rainbow logo and the Black Lives Matter logo on, you know, taking over their corporations.
And now you're just seeing the mainstreaming of it.
And I don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future, but I put my career in, I'm here to do my best, and then I just put the rest of my career in God's hands.
I'm here to fight, and as soon as He wants me canceled, I'll get canceled.
But until then, I'm going to be as vocal as I can be.
And it's sad that, you know, I've been really disappointed.
I'm disappointed in the church with Black Lives Matter, with COVID.
When gyms and other businesses are opening up and churches refuse to congregate, I go, all right, you don't deserve my tithe anymore.
I'm going to find a church with balls.
And especially when you consider, if I'm not mistaken, wasn't it your latest Kickstarter, though?
Didn't it go from like zero to entirely funded in 13 minutes?
So there's a market out there, but Christians are afraid to speak up.
And I'm more disappointed with them than I am with people who don't know better.
I agree, and this goes back to the Mug Club, too, is we need to hear the support of our people, need to come out and back us so that—vocally, even, because it's—and you need to write in and say, I'm backing because of this, and good job, guys.
I'm thinking of you.
I'm rooting for you.
Even if you're not a Christian, I'm saying we need to hear from you guys.
Usually, it amazes me how many guys on our side are just quiet.
It's too easy to go along to get along, and it's time to fight.
If you don't speak up, you're going to lose.
You're going to lose everything, your freedoms anyways.
The church is always going to be fine.
I don't know.
You're going to lose the ability to speak of it in public.
Yeah.
I don't know if the church will always be fine, because I tell you what, I think the worry was for a long time for the church, they would say, well, we don't want to speak out politically and lose our 501c3 status.
And in California, you know, AudioAid has made this great point that really that speaking out is just meeting, right?
That's illegal in California.
At least it was for a long time.
That's the new punk rock, you know, rage against the machine.
Actually, Morello is endorsing the machine that prevents pastors and church ladies from meetings, so I don't know at what point he stopped raging.
The most punk rock guy is now John MacArthur, who rebelled, you know, and said, we're going to church.
And Doug Wilson up in Moscow, Idaho, they're going like, we're not wearing masks.
I'm going like, yeah, someone's alive.
Someone's here still breathing.
My church here in Tennessee is full-on compliant, like social distancing.
My daughter goes to Lipscomb University.
This is like the Church of Christ conservative campus, like Duck Dynasty, you know, Church of Christ.
And they're like, all the students are all like, LGBT, Black Lives Matter.
She's all, Dad, you'd be in shock.
This is in Tennessee.
They went for Trump in the primary.
Well, you know what's interesting is you mentioned that.
I think we can both be very clear.
I have no problem with LGBT people being in the church.
I have no problem with people who disagree.
But the problem now is this isn't just someone who has a certain attraction or someone who feels that they're a different gender than their biological.
We won't even get into that.
The difference is now this group is a political wing that is trying to actively remove anyone who doesn't accept They're sometimes anti-scientific narratives wholesale.
It's like, hey, you're welcome in the church.
Just like people are welcome in the church if they're shacking up and living together.
But we're not going to say that that's God's plan.
We believe you should get married.
Hey, you can prefer a different kind of friction.
We don't care how hairy what you rub up against really is.
But it doesn't mean that the Bible, the Word, changes.
But you're welcome here, and hopefully we'll try and work on this together.
But the difference is now those people are saying you shouldn't exist.
In the industry, as you work in the entertainment industry, and now they also want to, of course, we see this, destroy the churches themselves by removing their tax- You can't feed your family unless you agree, and I'll make that other statement on LGBT2.
Any gay person that I know, I'm a way worse sinner than you, saved by grace.
I'm way worse than you.
I'm not saying I'm better than any LGBT person, but there is a difference, just like Black Lives Matter.
We're all against racism, but Black Lives Matter is a neo-Marxist movement, and so is the LGBT movement.
Same thing with environmentalism.
They've been taken over by formal Marxists who are pushing this ideology.
So that's what I'm fighting.
That's what I'm at war with.
Not an individual person who is struggling with sin or has a problem with it.
I mean, I just really feel like I'm one of the worst people I know because I know myself
Right, yeah, I think that's everybody.
Worse than all of you.
The only person who didn't feel that way was Jesus.
Imagine that, his internal dialogue was just like, I'm awesome.
No wait, don't say that, because then you need to humble yourself.
I'm alright.
He's all, my truth is actually the truth.
What does my truth mean?
I know everything!
No, that's a very good point.
And, you know, people also need to understand that Marxism, that people actually read Karl Marx, it's a distinctly anti-God theology.
It's a distinctly atheistic, hopeless philosophy.
And a big part of it is replacing the idea that the cultural, the central figurehead of God, and replacing the God-shaped hole that people have in their lives with government and this idea of forced community.
You may not be that version of a socialist, communist, or Marx, but that is its origin.
There's no denying that.
I think a lot of these people don't know it, and that's why they say it's black versus white, rather than actually virtue, freedom, versus enforced atheism and nihilism, long term.
That's something that we learned from Breitbart back in the day, sitting at his knee, is he saw all of this coming because he knew, he read so much of Marx.
He actually went to the source.
and understood where all this is going. It is a materialist philosophy, so it
it tends to be rooted in materialism. This is something that Prager always said,
is the thing that Marx always says, is like everything is about money. That's all that he
ever understood was like that money and power. Right. And there's no supernatural or immaterial
truth. And you start to see their marching orders that they go under, it starts to involve them
going to power centers and going to areas that control money.
Right.
Now, what's very interesting is they're obsessed with money, for this idea of the bourgeoisie, this idea of this upper class who have all the money, and it shouldn't be that important.
Everything is about redistribution.
It's about how people who have more time for leisure, if they're paid enough, will be more happy, be more productive.
It's about how this money should be spread, what social safety net, and with Jesus's give unto Caesar what is Caesar and God what is God.
All right.
The sort of man who doesn't have a place to lay his head.
Right, exactly.
And they could cancel you and I today and take all of our money.
They can't take your wife, they can't take your kids, they can't take your freedom.
They can't take so many immaterial things, but all they know is just, I'm going to get Crowder by take, I'm going to de-platform him on YouTube, and then he'll be as miserable as me.
Well now they are trying to take your kids.
They want, that's why they're going after the public school system, and they want to disallow, you see this group at Harvard, right, because of COVID, a lot of people realizing, hey, my kid's learning more effectively with homeschooling, and I actually like spending time with my kids rather than dropping off at daycare.
So you had these committees come forward and people from the Ivy League saying, no, no, no, no, we need to make sure that now we have control over homeschooling, where they learned that biological sex is a figment of their imagination, you know, so on and so forth.
I believe that's in the curriculum somewhere near the back.
Yeah.
So it really is.
Remember people saying this is slippery slope.
Oh, this is just a dot.
They're not coming for your kids.
Now they're coming for your kids.
Yeah, they they know that you're not worthy to raise your own kids.
They're the smart people to come in.
But just brainwash them.
My kids, they got a classic education, so we call it ruining our kids.
They've been ruined.
Ruining them with the great American classics like Twain.
I never read any of that.
As a kid, I never read any of that.
And I was raised in Canada, granted.
The only classic we read was Lord of the Flies.
It's a good book.
And everything else was, I remember looking back, was a book called Tears of a Tiger, my junior year, and it was a total social justice thing.
And I didn't even know, I was reading it like, ah, really, man, the cops are really beating on this black guy.
That was my review.
You know, at this point, I might have been in the 10th grade, I do not like it when police officers beat up black men because they are racist.
Give me an A, please.
You read Lord of the Flies, and then you saw it paraded before you in reality in CHOP.
Right!
I know!
That's exactly what happened.
We were just concerned that we had Quarterback Garrett wear his contacts because we didn't want people to start a fire and take his glasses.
That broke my heart as a kid, what they did with Piggy, and then I remember I watched... Yeah, it's messed up.
And you know what?
That's actually a perfect analogy.
You know, a lot of your games and a lot of your graphic novels... Sorry, I almost said comic books.
I'm that cretin.
No, you're allowed...
I'm a cartoonist.
Okay.
I'm like one old hoity-toity graphic novel.
You get something like a thing about that.
But, you know, you inject humor into it quite a bit.
I remember reading Lord of the Flies and it really bothered me once they killed, spoiler alert, Piggy.
And then when we had to read it out loud in class, I got that portion, I read it, and I started laughing uncontrollably.
And I hate to use this sort of self-psycho analysis, but it was definitely because I was uncomfortable with something that it really bothered me as a kid.
It was traumatic.
And so I decided to deal with it with laughter and then making jokes about it, which is kind of an important thing people understand.
Making a joke about something doesn't mean you're making light of it.
Sometimes it's just a processing mechanism.
Yeah.
And, you know, you're a comedian.
You don't care who laughs at your joke.
Any laugh is good enough.
Right.
So we're publicly trying to, I think, alleviate the suffering of our audience.
Like, you bring some joy and some happiness.
And I want Earthworm Jim to be enjoyed by everyone, including ideological opponents.
I'm not trying to... I never say, like, If you're on the left, don't buy my work.
I want to seduce you.
I'm going to make you laugh.
I'm going to give you a good time.
I'm going to give you a good value for what you pay me for, and I want to put on a great show.
That's our ministry.
That soundbite's going to be taken.
I want to seduce you, and the LGBT people are going, baby steps!
We got him!
We got him!
Yeah.
I will sit in the bathhouse with you and read you my books.
Oh my gosh.
You don't know how strong of a gay conservative contingency you have.
Right now they're all biting their knuckles like that time Brad Pitt came over the hill in Legends of the Fall.
They're going... No?
No one else?
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