Noids Do Not Have Sex With Doodles

If there’s one thing the internet has taught me, it’s this: people are horny for cartoons. Boy do they love those fuckable doodles. The internet’s Rule 34 states "If it exists, there is porn of it," but the corollary may as well be "also, when we say 'it,' we mostly mean cartoons."

And you know what? Why not? It's not my particular thing, but I'm defiantly anti-prude, so y'all freaks have fun with your ink and paint hotties. As fantasies go, the most unfulfillable are also the safest. Plus, considering how ingrown desires tend to be, I get it – we consume cartoons mostly throughout childhood, as our squishy brains are still forming. At a certain point, the innocence of youth shades into the raging perversity of adolescence (before settling into baroque adult kinks), and a young person’s fancy turns to wondering "does that cartoon... you know... do IT*?"

*This time "it" means sex.

An anecdote: "Wavelength" is basically a party game about, well, getting on people’s wavelength. You pick a card with two extremes – hot/cold, friendly/unfriendly, good song/bad song, etc. One player randomly spins a dial, to set a rough target on a spectrum, seen only by them. Once that information is re-hidden, the player gives their teammates a word or phrase that they believe will help them hit the selected target –for example, if it’s hot or cold, and the target is way over to on hot side, they might say "lava" or "Dev Patel in The Green Knight." The rest of the team talks it out, trying to interpret where to set the needle for that exact level of hotness, and then the answer is revealed and everyone argues about what would’ve been a better clue (the molten guts of a Hot Pocket). 

Of course, there's no absolute "right" clue, which is where the fun comes in. Success depends on how well you can match the assumptions of the clue-giver. Are they rating on an absolute spectrum, where the coldest thing is the cold depths of space, and the hottest J-Lo’s dance in "Hustlers?" Or are they thinking more prosaically, focusing on the coldest and hottest things they might encounter in day-to-day life, like ice cubes vs. a lawsuit-winning cup of McDonald's coffee? The beauty of the game is looking into your teammate’s eyes, and thinking, "What kind of weirdo are you?"

Anyway, now that y'all get it, let's make a belated return to the point. One night, playing with friends, I was the clue-giver. My card read "Unsexy Animal or Sexy Animal," and my secret target was about 75% sexy. I thought hard for several minutes, turning over all my options, then decided to go with my gut.

"Gadget, from Rescue Rangers."

That evening the teams happened to divide along gender lines, men vs. women, and – after a surprisingly short debate – my fellow (literally) teammates set the needle. I revealed the target, and they had gotten it exactly right. Gadget is 75% sexy. The votes were in. The people agree. She might not be the absolute sexiest animal (that’s fox Robin Hood from Disney’s Robin Hood). But Gadget Hackwrench’s mouse-next-door charm cannot be denied. She’s got pep, a can-do spirit, and a modest purple jumpsuit that does nothing to hide her un-mouslike figure. Just as my generation of hetero women came of age watching Labyrinth and wondering about Goblin King Bowie’s spandex crotch, I guarantee you that a surprising number of my hetero male contemporaries did the (far more confusing) math about sex with a wrench-toting rodent. 

At this point, half of you are thinking I’m inviting you too far into my perversities, and half probably think I’m kink shaming (or at least mocking). Honestly, it's neither. While, all things being equal, I'd prefer – you know – a human being; I certainly GET it. If you draw something that could be sexy, someone’s gonna find it sexy, and that’s the beauty and wonder of our weird-ass brains. That doesn’t mean I won’t find it a little funny – but I’m not pointing AT anyone. I’m laughing because it shows the folly of human beings pretending we’re not big, dumb, crude flesh-bags at heart. If drawing two big half-circles and then putting some smaller circles inside can turn someone on, just because it kinda looks like boobs, then maybe we’re not the noble creatures we mythologize ourselves to be. Maybe we just wanna squeeze those circles. 

The movies have always known we were freaks for cartoons. One of the earliest animated stars was Betty Boop, and her whole deal was sexiness, what with her cutesy voice, tiny flapper skirt, visible garter, and doe eyes so huge that she gave Charlie Brown a run for his money in the macrocephaly department, just to find room for them.

So humans wanna bang toons. What’s that all about? Is there a downside? I mean, for actual humans, the downside is mostly paper cuts, but what about for human characters who share the screen with toons? And meanwhile, what of the toons? Do they want to fuck us? We have a limited sample size of movies that speak on this important topic, but here’s what I’ve observed:

Beloved Disney star Donald Duck almost CERTAINLY wants to fornicate with human women, if 1944's The Three Caballeros is any guide. Intoxicated by the singing of live-action Mexican recording artist Dora Luz, Donald fantasizes that he’s a bee diving into flowers encircling Luz’s face, in a sequence that Georgia O’Keefe called "a little much." To counteract the intensely vaginal nature of Donald’s reverie, his south-of-the-border bird pals José Carioca and Pancho Pistoles show up to confuse Donald's lust by dancing with Carmen Molina’s gams composited in as their bottom halves, proving that – even for ducks – sexuality is a spectrum. (And as silly and ironic as that last sentence was? No joke: fix your hearts or die.)

Anyway, the sequence/film ends with fireworks exploding, which might lack the dry elegance of Hitchcock’s "train in a tunnel" from North by Northwest, but puts the message across all the same. I’m pretty sure this is meant to be Donald’s fantasy, and he doesn’t actually achieve fireworks with Dora Luz or Carmen Molina, so the scientific conclusions we can draw are negligible. 

The evil toon in the animated/live action film Evil Toons (1992), is… well… evil, so we can’t extrapolate any healthy relationship data from it. When it enters the human world (via an incantation from an enchanted book), the first thing it does is sexually assault one of the film’s scream queen leads, which isn’t funny, so I won’t dwell on it. I only mention it for thoroughness, and as a reminder to not expect sensitivity from Fred Olen Ray, director of such films as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold, Bikini Hoe-Down, 13 Erotic Ghosts, and, or course, Tarzeena: Jiggle in the Jungle – as well as a surprising number of cable Christmas rom-coms. I guess the guy has range?

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) is where cartoon horniness stops messing around and starts getting real. Jessica Rabbit honestly looks less like the Tex Avery bombshells that inspired her, and more like one of those old Playboy gag panels from the 60s where some guy who looks like Wallace Shawn says something libidinous about his secretary in front of his wife, and we’re all supposed to laugh, because the joke is their love is dead. This was back when Disney had its Touchstone Pictures wing, which was kind of like a fake mustache and non-specific accent they could hide behind, to be like "That-a cartoon lady with the big boobies wasn’t done by family-friendly Disney, no sir! It was-a me, a very adult studio who can make sex jokes, a-ok for you!"

Anyway, everyone’s horny for Jessica, the hourglass ginger with Kathleen Turner's throaty purr, but no humans have actual sex with her. The closest is when she and novelty magnate Marvin Acme play pattycake, which her husband Roger treats as an even bigger betrayal than traditional cheating. 

And honestly, I it. If I discovered my wife was sleeping around, I’d be like, "Okay, some needs clearly aren’t being met. We can figure this out." But if she was sneaking around to play pattycake? That would open up a lot of questions. Questions like "What?" and "Pattycake?" and "Do you... do you not know what 'hand stuff' means?" 

For a real look at the perils and pitfalls of cartoon and human sex, you have to go to the world’s primary text on the subject: 1992’s Cool World, a movie that plays like a comic a 13 year-old wrote after seeing Who Framed Roger Rabbit and having a pixie-stick and Heavy Metal magazine-fueled fever dream, with a dash of Fleischer Brothers just to confuse things.

The film stars young Kim Basinger, baby Brad Pitt, and younger-but-still-looks-like-a-Neverending-Story-rock-person Gabriel Byrne, and concerns the titular Cool World, a cartoon realm that comes to Byrne as a vision while he’s in jail for murdering a man (!) who fucked his wife. These multidimensional perceptions inspire him to draw a popular (?!) comic book called Cool World, and is subsequently magically transported to the real Cool World by Bassinger’s "Holli Would." The suggestively-named temptress seduces him, despite the efforts of Brad Pitt as the resident sex cop. Turns out, noid-doodle fornication allows Holli (and other doodles) to turn human and live in our world, but it also causes the two worlds to start collapsing in on one another, leading to a big fight over a magical spike atop a skyscraper, that acts as kind of a "world plug," that’s too baffling to describe.

If none of that made any sense, congratulations! You understand exactly as much of the plot as if you’d watched the entirety of Cool World, a film with the narrative coherence you’d expect from a screenplay that was written to be hard-R horror, and rewritten as a PG-13 comedy behind director Ralph Bakshi’s back...shi.

Also, apparently Bakshi never really gave his animators a script, but just told them to animate whatever they thought was funny. Which is why every frame of Cool World in Cool World is stuffed with random cartoon mayhem – bits with no bearing on the business at hand – whether that's a bunch of mice beating up a cat, or a cartoon wolf bugging out at a sexy girl, or… I dunno… a bunch of cute rabbits farting on an anvil that crushes a dog’s head. And these shenanigans play on a cartoon loop while My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult blasts on the soundtrack. Rare is the line between "worst" and "awesomest" thing you’ve seen so paper thin. 

I was drawn to Cool World because I was about 14 when it was released, and I recall a lot of full-page ads for it in comic books of the time. The poster showed Bassinger’s character (cartoon form), in an alarmingly short white dress, cartoon butt cocked beneath, peering back at the reader, coquettishly, as if to say "Check it out. I snuck into an X-Men comic and stole some fetish wear from Emma Frost," with a big tagline that said "HOLLI WOULD IF SHE COULD," which is a pretty horned-up thing to find in your issue of X-Factor. 

Not that I was mad at it. Some people who were mad? Residents of real-life Los Angeles, who didn't like how the producers erected a giant cartoon Holli atop the "Hollywood" sign's terminal "D." Not because it hijacked Hollywood’s monument to its own glamor via the producers' giant erection. They minded because they paid property taxes.

I spend so much time on Cool World because it’s the one movie about cartoons and humans fucking that offers a thesis statement on the topic – namely: "don’t." 

That statement comes from kindly cop cockblofficer Brad Pitt, who collars Byrne’s character to sternly tell him "Noids do not have sex with doodles." Which is extremely good advice for someone who knows what the fuck noid and doodle means, but maybe not the best advice to give to a new Cool World resident, who would like respond to that sentence with a witty "Whaaaaa?" 

I mean, "doodles" I get – you doodle a cartoon. That’s intuitive. Noid’s a bit more of a poser. I guess it means humanoid (?), but that’s not the first thing that springs to mind when you hear the word. Especially considering that, from the years 1986 to 1989 (a mere three years pre-Cool World) the claymation mascot "The Noid" starred in a series of "Avoid the Noid" commercials for Domino's Pizza, and the character had proved so wildly successful he even starred in a couple of video games. Where's your platformer, Little Caesars guy?

In fact, (and this is sadly true) Domino’s only retired the character after a mentally ill man with the last name "Noid" thought the commercials were literally telling people to avoid him and took a bunch of people hostage in a bank. Thankfully no one was hurt, but the larger point is that America had just gotten over NOID FEVER. If Brad Pitt had told me that I couldn’t have sex with doodles because I was a noid, I would’ve said, "Oh no – I see your error. This happens all the time. I’m not him. People just think I am because I wear this red, rabbit-ear onesie," and then I’d have gone and done the dirty with a few doodles with a clear conscience and a song in my heart. 

It’s weird that Cool World’s message is "don’t fuck them sexy toons" (And it really is the message, insomuch as there IS one: Byrne’s coupling ends with disaster, and Pitt’s happy ending is that he turns into a toon himself, so he can finally bone down with his toon girlfriend, whom he’d been afraid to touch, in a real Rogue-Gambit "it's complicated" situation). It's weird because most of Cool World is about trying to convince the audience that we want to have sex with this hot, horny toon – to say nothing of the marketing, which was entirely based on toon-fuckability!

Cool World spends 90 minutes on lovingly-animated cartoon upskirts, before going "Nuh-uh-huh! Regular humans stay with regulars, and toon humans stay with toons." Not to downplay real life trauma by comparing it to a grade-Z Bakshi joint, but only to shine a light on the weird attitudes of a lot of mainstream entertainment – it kind of makes the whole film feel like a racist anti-miscegenation message, which is emblematic the kind of unpleasant moral doubletalk I’ve noticed in a lot of culture that seeks to titillate before giving the rubes a comforting return to "traditional morality." Bleh. If Holli would, and Holly could, then just let Holly do it already. Who cares.

Not that I recommend you date a toon. Too much drama.

For earlier posts, check out the archive. In my other life, I’m a podcaster. Listen to my show The Flop House, here. In my other other life, I’m an Emmy-winning comedy writer. If you’re looking to staff, get in touch! And if you love the newsletter, you can always consider tipping me, by enrolling in the paid tier!