![]() |
![]()
Born: 1952 Weight: 237 lbs. Real Name: Vodka Drunkenski Type of Laugh: Guffaw Favorite Non-Vodka Spirit: Casper Favorite Drink: "Pride of Brezhnev" Pride of Brezhnev: Diet Squirt and Ethanol Favorite Gulag: Murmansk Armed with his burlap boxing gloves and the gayest Speedo in his collection, Soda Popinski first appeared in the original Punch-Out!! Tour after the rematch with Piston Honda. His belly laugh actually frightened me as a child, but not as much as his weird "rubbing his knees together thing" does as an adult. In the arcade tours he went under his real name of "Vodka Drunkenski" but this name was amended for the home version in an empowering display of international diplomacy. The Soviet emissary to the Nintendo Capitol obviously was more persuasive than his counterparts from elsewhere in the world, since the game depicts among other stereotypes, Glass Joe's French timidity, Von Kaiser's German aggression, and Mr. Sandman's eight-foot schlong. |
Origins When an albino buffalo is born in the United States, it strikes chords of both jubilation and reverance in every American Indian because as true as the mighty waters flow, this has been known for generations to portend extra loose nickel slots until the next cash tornado giveaway. Similarly, the Soviet people were worked into a state-controlled frenzy whenever a red-skinned child was birthed in the motherland. To celebrate, the Kremlin would add one smile to each household's annual allotment of 13. Those families that enjoyed two touchdowns worth of smiles in 1952 had an infant Popinski to thank for this, although almost all of them certainly didn't, since their "thank you" quota was only one per year to all non-embalmed Bolshevik revolutionaries. What to do with these chosen children cloaked in the color of the party was a point of huge contention within the empire. From the Duma to the KGB, everyone had their ideas of what they should be trained to do. While the most level-headed responses suggested destinies of "cosmonaut" and "naval commander," the notoriously corrupt government usually ended up screwing things up and pumped out an embarassing amount of Olympic cross country skiiers and Black Sea fortune tellers instead. Not surprisingly, Popinski, who originally was supposed to captain the actual spacecraft to be used in the planned bombing of the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, was instead relegated to video game boxer. WVBA I Every character in Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! was an individual freak show within the much larger and more elaborate farce. This section could be pretty much the same for each boxer: Talk about how bizarre he was, highlight his most obvious idionsyncrasy, and then vigorously attempt to conceal my thorough speculation on his sexual prowess, or lack thereof in the case of Flamenco, Joe, and Tyson. ![]() Unless you were distracted by Bald Bull's hideous face or slipped into a coma while fighting Von Kaiser, it's pretty likely you hadn't been knocked down before this point in the game. It probably scared the hell out of you when the crowd started blinking like Las Vegas, Mario and the words on the screen were imploring you to get up, and the haunting music let you know that some bad shit was going down, similar to when they start playing Lamb of God songs on the Price is Right when Plinko losers are fed to alligators. On top of this sensory cacophony, Soda Popinski stood in the middle of the ring and laughed at you like he just fucking stole the Empire State Building from Carmen Sandiego. It's at this point that most novices threw the control and fled the premises with good reason: When a seven-foot communist is laughing uncontrollably next to an Italian plumber counting down to your death, all within the confines of a ring surrounded by hundreds of people having a mass seizure, your thoughts probably should shift towards self-preservation and away from tapping the A button really fast. After some struggles, everyone eventually got through Soda Popinski, either through intense perseverance or by getting one of their friends who was good at the game to come over and knock his state property ass out in the first round. Soda did do a good job of taking a lot of the fun out of the game though, for the countless fat kids whose one shot at athletic glory was winning Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! The original plans for Soda to start slapping a random fat kid's gut in celebration of a win were mercifully scrapped, but I don't think that his "Now you lose, Little Debbie-fueled barn animal!" laugh was that much less hurtful. WVBA II
Soda, apparently saddened by his menacing image in the first go-round, has softened up his persona here. Trying to be a good example for the children and recovering communists worldwide, Popinski has vowed only to laugh at people getting hit in the groin (possibly by his fists) and at zingers fired by Martin Short when he's a guest on the David Letterman Show. Doc Louis "Nintendo's push to pimp the commie in the 80's was obvious, since the only way to scare the white man more than sending him to the hood was to tell him the Soviets were coming. My push to employ him is similarly obvious: He offered to bring rubels, which I confused with "strudels," and now I'm under contract to employ the son-of-a-bitch." Leonardite "I am still a little unnerved by Soda Popinski, kind of like how I don't trust that former Soviet iron worker who emigrated to my block this year. Both of them claim to be capitalism-loving peers of the American people, but I don't have any other neighbors that throw molotav cocktails into my car when the Wilson kids try to sell their Dixie cups of flat lemonade for an admittedly unreasonable twenty-five cents." WVBA II Match History
|