Everything Is Terrible’s Kidz Klub! is a stilted, disorienting nether-realm

Everything Is Terrible // Photo by Jim Newberry

The long-running video and art collective Everything Is Terrible disseminates some of the most brain-melting video content out there.

While their YouTube channel and various social media feeds are a consistent pipeline of clips sure to bring forth memories of fuzzy VHS tapes watched in your youth, it’s the Everything Is Terrible extended features that are their bread and butter.

Mixing, mashing, and blending a series of thematically-linked vids, the Everything Is Terrible features compile endless pieces of forgotten ephemera into a psychedelic retelling of the American myth that is both hilariously sickening and endlessly compelling.

Their last collection, The Great Satan, was a massive joy to behold, but their latest, Kidz Klub!, tops it with singing, dancing, and strangely-stilted acting kids from the video netherworld.

It’s an appropriate project for a group that has also collected over 35,000 Jerry Maguire VHS tapes with the idea that one day they’ll be turned into a pyramid in the desert.

Ahead of the Everything Is Terrible’s Kidz Klub! stop at recordBar on Thursday, February 10, we spoke with the collective’s Commodore Gilgamesh about the art of the found video and how it translates to a live show.

The Pitch: In terms of what your archive looks like and the material you have to work through, how much of it is physical and how much of it is digital at this point?

Commodore Gilgamesh: Most of it starts as physical. We have digitized an enormous amount of footage, but we’re not archivists—we’re idiots. We’re artists. Crazy people. We often have to go back to the physical sources because we’re better at keeping those around than keeping digital files. I would say we digitized 95% of everything in the last couple of years for the purpose of putting into Kidz Klub! It’s an impressive amount of physical media that we have in our lives.

Everything Is Terrible // Photo by Jim Newberry

Are these things sent to you? We have to assume that every tour involves hitting thrift stores and things of that nature, but  surely some of it just shows up at your houses.

I’m going to be a little self-deprecating today. We made a mistake and we started asking people for Jerry Maguire VHS tapes, instead of asking people for footage that we could use. No one thinks to send us real things and it’s kind of maddening, ’cause when you’re in the thrift store buying 20 Jerry‘s, you pass all this beautiful footage.

But no, we don’t really get that much. We have a few really old, supportive fans who’ve been doing it for years who will send us tapes or give us things. For the most part, it’s all stuff that we dig up ourselves.

Having spent a lot of time in thrift stores over the years, it’s clear there are certain videotape covers indicating something’s going to get real weird. Is that how you search things out?

When we started in 2007 or so, we were really into 1987 to 1990, and now our go-to is 1997 to 2001. It’s just changing all the time and we’re sick of a lot of the stuff that we find on VHS in thrift stores. Honestly, I’ve been buying mostly DVDs for the last few years. That’s a pretty recent shift.

One of the things about Kidz Klub!—and I don’t know if you watched the movie or you noticed this—but we have tons of old kid’s clips that have been in circulation with Everything Is Terrible for years. We got kind of sick of them, so we kind of ended up cutting a lot of the stuff that we always go back to out of the movie. The reason we make things the way we do is because of our extremely short attention span. We get bored pretty quickly.

The great thing about Everything Is Terrible videos is that they have a constructed storyline of sorts. Where does that storyline come from?

We’re making this because we want to address indoctrination and propaganda and basically build a reverse set of propaganda to deconstruct everything that has been programmed into all of us. There is a natural hero’s journey narrative that a lot of these things fall into that mimic a similar beginning, middle, and end—so that story can just come from the footage.

Then there’s our own desire to subvert that and fuck with that.

All these things are competing with one another, and then there’s just this very weird thing that comes up, where some of it–even though the messaging might be something that we find destructive–we’ll absolutely love the costumes or whatever. There’s just a multitude of different intentions, all just swirling around into this soup, which is why I think it feels so intense to watch. It’s a lot of things that are happening at once.

Everything Is Terrible // photo credit Jim Newberry

The projects from which you draw specifically have this sense of creative purpose, despite how awful they turned out. There’s this quote from Leonard Maltin—the idea that nobody ever sets out to make a bad movie, and there are always good ideas and intentions behind everything. Does it seem the appeal for you all is finding the silver lining or the needle in the haystack in these source films?

I would take that quote even further: there is no such thing as a good movie or a bad movie. One of our contributors said this years ago, and I thought it succinctly summed up what we’re up to here, and it’s just a matter of finding something that isn’t special and hasn’t been deemed special. We make it special.

That can go in all kinds of different directions. It can be a piece of messaging that we find totally just inappropriate, destructive, or bad for humanity and then lifting that up and being like, “Look at this, look at these mistakes that we’re making.” It could be a beautiful piece of set building or puppetry in one of these children’s videos and lifting that up and being like, “Look at this craftspersonship: it’s amazing!”

I think it extends all the way to the Jerry Maguire project where it’s like, “This is a discarded object,” that we are like, “No, no, it’s sacred. Let’s bring it back and worship it.” I think that really summarizes what we do—of just pointing to what happens in this world of mass production and consumption and destruction.

We’re just throwing things away constantly—ideas and images and all this stuff. It’s just constantly being turned to waste. I think it’s a central theme for us is: “Slow down, look at this. What does it all mean?”

When I’ve tried to explain an Everything Is Terrible show to people, the only thing that I can think of is, “Have you ever seen Captured by Robots?” It’s a rock show, but it isn’t. It’s a film screening, but it isn’t.

I’ve been explaining it for 15 years as that I make stuff but, “I don’t know what it is. Yeah, sure. I’m an artist, whatever.” It’s all so dumb. I think that limiting things is what makes things boring. So it’s like, yeah—if you’re going to be a rock band, also be a puppet show. If you’re a puppet show, also be an experimental documentary.

Push it. If you’re given a stage and given an audience—which is such a blessing—you might as well fill that moment with as much inspiration, beauty, creation, whatever you can.

Everything Is Terrible’s Kidz Klub! is at recordBar on Thursday, Feb. 10. More details on that show here.

Edit: a previous version of this interview referred to Commodore Gilgamesh as Commander Gilgamesh,