The 10 Horny Re-Boots You Must Binge
To the majority of Americans who don’t haven’t necessarily been keeping obsessive tabs on the Archie Comics Empire, the CW’s Riverdale might have come as something of a minor shock. Gone are the days of Archie, Betty, Veronica, and Jughead just moseying around slowly in a convertible after eating cheeseburgers. Now we’ve got dark secrets, murder, a high school teacher’s sordid affair with a student, lusty betrayal, and it’s all coated in a patina of small-town horniness! Twin Peaks for tweens, or whatever!
Whether Riverdale is a good show is for the moment immaterial. People are talking about it, decoding it, admitting a grudging respect for the audacity of such a project. The “dark-and-gritty” reboot feels like a reboot as old as time, but Riverdale takes such a trope and raises the stakes. Re-imagining Archie as a walking boner may have inadvertently kicked open the door for a Sexy Reboot Arms Race the likes of which we’ve never seen, replete with grim and lascivious interpretations of our most cherished characters, our most prized memories. Below we list a few of our favorite potential shows of this new vanguard of purposelessly racy fare.
The Magic School Bus
The Magic School Bus universe is re-imagined at a high-school on the wrong side of the tracks. Former tough-as-nails yet disgraced police officer Ms. Frizzle takes a job teaching remedial science to a group of troublemakers, including sports-obsessed loudmouth Ralphie, volatile nerd Arnold, and a vaguely Hispanic boy named Carlos. Their discovery of the Magic School Bus ignites a love of science in all three of her prized pupils…and leads to a forbidden love triangle between Ms. Frizzle, Ralphie, and Arnold. Carlos, meanwhile, steals the Magic School Bus and travels to Syria — where he takes the titular bus of witchcraft and sorcery and drives through Bashar al-Assad’s body, learning about organs and blood and disease and other such things. Ms. Frizzle is played by Calista Flockhart, in a career-defining role. TL;DR: Lots of nudity, lots of fucking in a school bus that has magical properties. A very, very nasty show.
Bananas in Pajamas
B1 and B2 have dropped out of college and are bartending to make ends meet, but they find themselves caught in the doldrums of existential dread. They decide to sell their house and go off in search of other bananas in pajamas: Surely they can’t be alone in this universe. They find a mysterious town deep in the Australian Outback exclusively populated by bananas in pajamas. It’s a close-knit, picture-perfect community and they are quickly embraced by the townsfolk…except one day B1 notices none of these other bananas in pajamas have shadows, while at the exact same time B2 realizes none of them show up in photographs. Cancelled after one season for gratuitous nudity — even by HBO’s standards. “Bananas are phallic, and pajamas have bedroom connotations; what did you expect?” asked executive producer Martin Scorsese, upon learning of the network’s decision. “Did you expect something tame? Something without fucking? Fucking is good.”
Rugrats
Tommy Pickles is a star basketball player who suffers a horrific injury, costing him his scholarship at Duke. Exiled to a wheelchair for the summer, he notices that his Uncle Drew has been acting more unhinged and suspicious than usual. Tommy’s former best friend Chuckie is now a loner, one who is becoming perhaps dangerously interested in alt-right news sources. The series hinges upon Tommy’s inability to choose between dating Lillian or Susie, and also convincing everyone that Uncle Drew has murdered his wife. It will be described as “Friday Night Lights meets Rear Window meets Friday Night Lights again.” There is plenty of fucking and everyone is pretty horny (especially Chuckie, who never fucks save for in elaborate dream sequences reminiscent of those Sopranos bottle episodes), but the show overall is kind of a bummer.
Salute Your Shorts/Hey Dude
These two iconic Nickelodeon shows have been combined and nobody really knows what’s going on, except Donkey Lips is played by Dave Franco and he can’t stop explaining that he’s not actually a donkey. It will run for eight successful if unremarkable seasons. This show will be mostly notable for its catchphrase: “I’m cumming, how ‘bout you?”
The Family Circus
The beloved comic strip is revamped to fit modern times. In actuality it has nothing to do with its nominal source material, unless the comic was secretly about a family who are slaves at a circus. The protagonist is an aspiring filmmaker named Dawson who likes to hang out by a creek and cry. Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson co-star as ghosts who speak in working-class Boston accents and want Dawson to oppose the draconian policies of an imaginary fascist President instead of crying by his stupid creek. Dawson doesn’t want to, though.
Captain Planet
The Planeteers, five stupidly attractive multicultural teens, fight pollution with the help of magical rings and their mysteriously hued benefactor Captain Planet (Norm Macdonald). Unfortunately, during a party at a lake house being thrown the weekend before the Big Game, Captain Planet is viciously murdered, which naturally leads the Planeteers to attempt to solve his murder. In addition to this, they must all fulfill their pact to lose their virginity by prom night. The “Who killed Captain Planet?” storyline is never satisfactorily resolved — because they realize they don’t care about that blue nature freak — but they all end up losing their virginity. (Original soundtrack by a Bruce Springsteen cover band.)
DuckTales
Billed as an unofficial reimagining of King Lear, this new incarnation of DuckTales finds Scrooge McDuck dying, in the process of choosing to which of his 17 year-old nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) he will bestow his fortune. Unfortunately, they are awful shitty jerks and are already plotting to steal his money — but on the plus-side of the ledger, at least they’re all very attractive (for ducks) and horny (for anyone). Family friend Webigail “Webby” Vanderquack and Dewey are going steady, even though he’s having an affair with the new mysterious transfer student whose name is also Webigail (it’s a common female duck name, OK?).
Screech from Saved By the Bell makes a cameo as the principal of their school. He is also duck, albeit a different kind of duck. This is noted, but respectfully.
Teddy Ruxpin
Many of us from the 1980s recall Teddy Ruxpin as a disarmingly friendly teddy bear that you could insert cassette tapes into, tapes which he’d dutifully narrate back to you. This 21st century millennial Teddy Ruxpin (nicknamed “Rux”), however, is a fiendishly handsome bear in his second year of community college, who as yet hasn’t picked a major. He’s just lost his loyal best friend, Grubby, to a blimp accident, and — apologies for burying the lede here — he’s also a serial killer. Yet in a twist, he only kills other serial killers who also happen to be college-aged bears. Starz allegedly forked over $100 million for the pilot alone, and good thing too, because this serial killer bear show turns out to be the most successful TV series in history.
Teddy Ruxpin’s father is played by Corey Feldman in a bear suit. He always says things like, “Corey Feldman time!” and “You gotta pay the dick tax!” and “I want to orgasm on the breath of the wind!” Which seems annoying, but he’s the show’s most popular character by a country mile.
The Berenstain Bears
The revamped Berenstain Bears focuses on the fault lines dividing American society. Conservative Papa Bear wants to get rid of all black, polar, and panda bears. Disciplinarian Mama Bear, meanwhile, believes in a centrist neoliberal order that worships civility and decorum about meaningful change. Brother Bear is a closeted gay high school football player who has recurring visions of an alternate timeline in which his family’s name is spelled slightly differently. In the first episode, Squire Grizzly’s mansion is burned down by sexy arsonists, leading Sister Bear — who by the way is a crack addict — down a dangerous road. In the final season, Teddy Ruxpin murders the entire family because he thought they were serial-killer bears. One thing about that Teddy Ruxpin guy is that he quite often makes mistakes.
Tetris
The most ambitious of the “sexy reboot” slate of shows is definitely Tetris, a single-camera sitcom based around a group of horny friends who just really, really, really love playing Tetris. When they’re not playing Tetris, they tend to make out and tell one other that they love one other and that they’ll always be friends and “Anyone want some pizza?” and things like that…but at the end of the day it’s all about playing Tetris. Tetris is life. Due to declining ratings blamed on the series’ lack of direction, Danny DeVito is added to the cast as the voice of Tetris itself. He makes his debut in the arc “Tetris Talks Back,” which is about how Tetris, the video game about shapes, talks back. He speaks in a sort of “jive” voice, a choice that is widely derided.
Sophia Bush plays an Anthropology professor, who, in every episode (except the pilot, when the role was played by Maggie Grace), says the popular line, “Hey you guys in the back! Stop playing Tetris in my full classroom! If you want to play Tetris, please play Tetris somewhere that is not my full classroom. Hey, I’m talking to you, cocksuckers! Stop ignoring me, you ugly mooks. I’m gonna eat your Game Boys, I’m gonna eat your butts.”
