Life is full of little embarrassments. Toilet paper on your shoe, forgetting a co-worker’s name, eating an entire bowl of fake plastic fruit in front of your girlfriend’s parents and then denying that it happened. We’ve all been there. You move on, apologize, and buy new plastic fruit if necessary. But for Todd Coulstring, life would never be the same.
It was an average Monday night. Todd and his boys – Brandon, Corey, and Justin – were on their way to a gentleman’s dinner. Todd allegedly had an in with the bartender at Buffalo Wild Wings and the vibe on the car ride over was jovial to say the least. Todd regaled his boys with familiar stories about the time he had to take a shit at a Faith No More concert and how he was one of the naked dudes at Woodstock ‘99. To those who knew him well, this was “Classic Todd.” But when “Testify” came on the radio, everything changed in an instant.
“He was all like, ‘Lights out! Guerrilla TESTIFY!’ as if everyone in the car would not realize the subterfuge at play,” Brandon recalled. “I was embarrassed to call him a friend. I deleted his number from my phone while he was still sitting next to me, and I texted my wife and told her to remove him from our Christmas card list.”
What was even more unnerving was the fact that Todd didn’t even say “my bad” or “ahh shit.” According to multiple reports he made no mention of the blunder and immediately became preoccupied by the air conditioner settings. Upon pulling into the parking lot, he dropped his boys off, stating they should get a table while he looked for a spot even though there were multiple empty spots. He has not been seen since.
After an outpouring of support on social media, Rage frontman Zack de la Rocha had this to say about the incident. “Super disrespectful. I mean ‘Testify’ was all about the Marxist Conflict Theory and American media’s blindness to global inequality and ‘Guerrilla Radio’ was about how the American media shapes our presidential elections. Not the same thing at all. Plus one is all like ‘Nur nur nurnur nur nur nur nur nurnur’ and the other’s all ‘Nur nur nur nur nur nur whoosh whoosh nur nur.”
If anyone knows of Todd’s whereabouts, please contact The Hard Times so that we can further investigate how an otherwise ordinary man could get two obviously different singles from “The Battle of Los Angeles” confused.
Ken Addleburg may have been written as a comic relief character who has a borderline incomprehensible accent of indeterminate origin, but he’s still arguably the most responsible and well-adjusted adult in the “Home Movies” universe. That doesn’t mean he’s anti-fun, though—he just knows his moshing etiquette. He knows that willingly jumping in the pit means consenting to getting a bit roughed up. He also knows that deliberately targeting people outside the pit with your flailing limbs is a dick move.
Josie Small doesn’t know what crowdkilling is due to the fact that she’s a literal infant. Her only concerns are eating, sleeping, and shoving marbles up her nose. There will come a day where she’ll be able to comprehend the fact that she exists and look for a way to cope with it just like the rest of us. But it’s unlikely she’ll find that solace in crowdkilling. If anything, she’ll become an unfulfilled artist like her mom and brother.
Performing arts camp counselors Mike and Miguel are voiced by John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants. If you see someone crowdkilling at a TMBG show, either they drunkenly stumbled into the wrong venue or the end times really are upon us. Either way, Mike and Miguel wouldn’t approve.
Mr. Lynch is about as square as they come. Can you imagine a middle-aged elementary school teacher with a pencil-thin mustache and a bowtie going anywhere near a hardcore or metalcore show? He wouldn’t condone a harmless circle pit, let alone crowdkilling. Just seeing a kid in an Asking Alexandria t-shirt would be enough to make him start lobbying for stricter dress codes.
Paula Small is a single mom raising a baby and an eight-year-old on a teacher’s salary (when she has a job at all, that is). You think she wants to go anywhere near a hardcore show after a long day of putting food on the table? You think she wants to be involved in crowdkilling discourse? She’s far more likely to go home, have a glass of wine, and go to bed before 10. And you know what? Good for her. Leave her alone.
Dr. Fizzel is an anger management counselor (one voiced by the late, great Mitch Hedberg, no less)—so he strongly opposes violence in all its forms. He hates crowdkilling and he’ll be sure to let you know it. Let’s be real—he probably loves Fugazi. But much like Fugazi, he may come off as a bit sanctimonious for some. To make matters worse, he often talks over his patients. Still, you can tell his heart is in the right place.
Like Dr. Fizzel, Nurse Kirkman is a medical professional. Wait—school nurses have to take the Hippocratic Oath, right? Well, assuming they do, she’d never openly condone crowdkilling. She already has to deal with puke, snot, scraped knees, and probably more puke. The last thing she needs is kids spin-kicking each other in the face at recess. However, she might quietly make an exception so long as Coach McGuirk is the one on the receiving end.
At first glance, Cynthia seems like your run-of-the-mill ballet kid. But she’s actually quite active in her local alternative music scene. More specifically, she works as a choreographer for the metal band Scäb. That said, she clearly takes her craft very seriously, and probably wouldn’t support dancing being used as a means to hurt bystanders. The only thing she kills is Brendon’s ability to not make a complete fool of himself.
Dwayne fronts the previously mentioned band Scäb—and he’s actually pretty chill as far as metalheads go. If anything, Dwayne’s liable to get crowdkilled while simply trying to cross his arms and nod his head to the music in peace. The dude is all about the vibes. Plus, he wrote a whole-ass rock opera about Franz Kafka. Do you honestly think anyone who will go to bat for crowdkilling has any idea who Franz Kafka even is?
Brendon’s dad Andrew is a strange case. He’s not exactly the most present father in the world, but he’s not a complete deadbeat either. He does fun things with his son when he’s not busy being a lawyer, but he’s also content to peace out of that son’s life for long periods of time. This will probably give Brendon a complex that pushes him towards the punk scene in the first place. As for Andrew himself, he’s unlikely to defend crowdkilling—especially in the legal sense. He mostly deals in out-of-court litigation.
Just because Junior Addleburg has the exact same voice as his father doesn’t mean he always shares his old man’s values. To be fair to Junior, he’s a pretty good kid. In fact, he’d probably be the first one to help you up if you were to fall down in the pit. But his peers aren’t the best influence on him. You just know Eugene is filling his squishy little head with some crap about how crowdkilling is just part hardcore—and anyone who doesn’t like it doesn’t belong in the scene.
Melissa Robbins is undoubtedly the most reasonable and level-headed of the main trio of “Home Movies” characters—under normal circumstances, at least. Her rationality tends to go out the window when things get personal. She’d never be okay with crowdkilling strangers. But if you’ve wronged her in the past and she spots you just outside the pit, you’d better fucking watch yourself.
Main protagonist Brendon Small is a rather naïve kid, but he’s never been one to advocate unnecessary violence. That said, he is still a fictionalized version of his creator/voice actor—who fronts his own cartoon heavy metal band, let’s not forget. So, Brendon has definitely been around crowdkilling in his life. He won’t openly support it, but he will absolutely film the chaos if he thinks it’ll make for good b-roll.
The thing about Clarice is that while she’s not actively malicious—far from it, in fact—she tends to just smile and go along with whatever Jimmy Monet (her douchey mooch of a boyfriend) wants. She won’t explicitly defend crowdkilling, but she also won’t say a word as Jimmy laughs at Dwayne for catching an unwarranted elbow to the eye. To her credit, though, she at least had the good sense to ditch Jimmy in the end.
