601billionlazer

"I'm just kidding, this isn't a blue balls rip. However, you're going to wish it was. I warned you."

Can you IMAGINE being 601billionlazer and getting this rip for Secret SiIva 5?? You hear the silly blue balls and go oh, haha what fun, what a great little bit Madinstance, you always outdo yourself so its fun to see you've taken a funny step back here - only for the truth to be revealed and all hell to break loose? You hear the backing change and think, I swear I recognize that, there's no way he actually did it - the banjo comes in with a gleefully sinister pluck and reaffirms your suspicions. Madinstance fucking did it. The first proper rip uploaded as part of Season 7 introduced the year with a fucking bomb. I will Never be a Redneck.

And look, I've covered some One-Winged Angel rips on here already, One Winged PSYcho - V​.​S. Sepsyrop and Hen'yoku no Piraman - the latter even being made by Madinstance as well - but I feel like it needs to be stressed how thoroughly deranged this rip in particular is. We ALL know Cotton-Eye Joe, if not the original American country song then ABSOLUTELY the world-famous 1994 Eurodance version - one that, funny enough, was recorded by a Swedish band. Indeeds, its oddly befitting: A culture clash between my homeland, and the nation where a majority of SiIvaGunner's own audience and contributors live - the result is that ALL of us knew well what Cotton-Eye Joe was, a piece of our childhoods for some, or at least for me. Yet its prevalence on SiIvaGunner had been comparatively tame in comparison to that popularity, only appearing in some modest mashups and melodyswaps in Season 1 - seven whole years before Madinstance deployed the nuclear option. Realizing that this overplayed icon of a song even had the ability to be remixed in such a fashion positively blew my mind - I won't sugarcoat it, I will Never be a Redneck completely floored me.

And like, in some ways its to be expected, right? Madinstance is incredible, he continues to show up on here with rips like Initial Deluxe (I've Just Raced on this Course Before) and Fell From a High Place (Reprise) for a reason - his prowess for these large-scale projects feels like it shouldn't even be humanly possible. I remarked back in Hen'yoku no Piraman just how much the recent trend of One Winged Angel rips impresses me, how each one feels as if the ripper is truly showcasing their worth whilst dedicating it all to the glory of a single meme. That still stands, yes, but to apply it to a song that otherwise had near-no prevalence on SiIvaGunner, no standard set for how remixing it ought to go: To have my FIRST ever time hearing Cotton-Eye Joe pitch shifted be in this absolute behemoth feels downright criminal. And its even crazier how it WORKS the whole way through.

The amount of touches present to make this feel as cohesive as it does is staggering. The chorus' titular line of "Cotton-Eye Joe" replaces the use of "Sephiroth!" in the base track perfectly, the original song's violin instrumental breaks between the chorus and verses are pitch shifted into the ominous tone of One Winged Angel's equivalent instrumental breaks, the banjo going off the shits in the longer break from the main melody midway through the track...really, its incredible how much of the original track's excitement and danceable fun suddenly sound so ominous, with changes so deliberate, substantial yet conservative enough to not lose the Cotton-Eye Joe feel - this ALWAYS sounds like the right amount of both tracks in balance. I love how the song's chanting "Hey-hey-hey-heyys" suddenly sound akin to One Winged Angel's latin choir song, how the vocals of the chorus repeat in a somewhat staggered, haunting way near the rip's end - like Beautiful Dreamer or My Dr. Eggman Can't Be This Evil!, its remarkable just how drastic the change of tone becomes through rips like this.

Last week, for my "Character Archives" series, I finally pulled the trigger with the aptly-named [FILE-07] and wrote about the SiIvaGunner channel's mascot: Grand Dad. The funny Flintstones have been there since the literal first day of the channel's life, in a way representing everything that the team has aimed to achieve for the channel during its run. Yet one part I only briefly covered in the aforementioned post was the very fascinating evolution that Grand Dad as a channel meme has undergone over these past eight years. To outsiders to the channel, it may appear as if we've been laughing at the same tired joke for close to a decade - yet as things so often are on SiIvaGunner, the truth is far more densely layered, and arguably even more stupid. And in my eyes, no rip on the channel better encapsulates that ongoing growth than Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), a time capsule of almost five years by now.

Back in the beginning of Season 1, the appeal of Grand Dad as a meme was incredibly simple to understand: You expect one song from clicking on the video, and are instead met with one of the most globally recognizable melodies in the world. It's not that the Flintstones melody has some sort of inherent comedic value to it, like with The Nutshack and rips like Too big, huh, my nuts are too big how about that, nor is Meet The Flintstones the kind of piece to really evoke fierce emotions the way Snow Halation does in rips like Violet Snow Memories. As the very first joke made for the SiIvaGunner channel, the appeal in Grand Dad lay almost entirely in the novelty of the melodyswap alone. You as a viewer will be aware of The Flintstones theme, and you may even be aware of the Vinesauce bit that inspired the channel - and from that, the surprise of hearing the tune from a video game song you weren't expecting to, most often done with surprising authenticity to the game being ripped, was the extent of the bit.

The problem here, as you might already be able to tell, is that this joke is very reliant on the first impression, the initial surprise of not expecting the funny Flintstones to show up. That kind of surprise is something the team would continue finding new ways to evoke even in these first few months of the channel's life, resulting in a huge amount of all-time classic, inventive Season 1 rips like the great seaweed, Be Cool, Be Wild, and Be My Girl, and of course: Athletic Doctor. Yet as these kinds of new and fun ways to surprise people kept being explored, Grand Dad rips still kept coming - it had become a fun exercise for new rippers to learn, a simple melody to play around with. And even just a few short months in, I distinctly remember the reactions toward these rips beginning to feel more...tepid. Within the team, legendary rippers like Triple-Q had gone vocally against leveraging the joke further: all of which slowly escalated into the meme becoming derided as played out and tired. We'd get phrases like "Funny 7" and "Epic Flintstones" tossed around in an ironic tounge-and-cheek fashion, forever immortalized into the rip of Season 1's finale, Epic Flintstones. It felt as if, across the channel's nine months, Grand Dad had now lived a sufficient life, going from hero to the channel, to a bit of a punching bag, but one we were still left sad to see go.

And then the channel...y'know, continued.

With Season 2, as I've covered on posts like ULTRA S+G, the channel was now taking itself and its lore just a little bit more seriously. Grand Dad was still a little bit of a dated thing, yet with the notion of the channel's fate hanging into balance, he came to be as a sort of symbol for the channel's spirit, an icon to rally behind. By the time Season 3 rolled around, all of these views on the meme had wholly coalesced into outright ironic reverence. Videos like Unusual Circumstances and tons of rips made during the Nostalgia Takeover (see Fragile Snowman (Remastered)) in particular emphasized just how bizarre the fanbase's supposed adoration of Grand Dad and the funny number 7 was - and we the fans nodded, laughed and agreed! We all knew Grand Dad wasn't *genuinely* all too funny anymore, but somewhere in that storm of irony-fueled laughs it felt, at least to me, as if we sort of forgot the importance that Grand Dad was meant to hold on the channel, the ways in which it so beautifully encapsulated everything the channel stands for. And that's when this story takes an interesting turn.

In April of 2019, Season 4 of SiIvaGunner was officially well under way - and all eyes were, of course, on the newly-announced King for Another Day Tournament, covered on posts like Theme of HOBaRT. This month in particular gave us the first-ever real "SiIva Direct", a spoof on Nintendo's series of video announcement reels, only now of course focused on activity on the SiIvaGunner channel. It was as mentioned mainly focused on reveals for the still largely under wraps tournament set to come later in the year, yet amidst all those reveals and the announcements of some albums, one of the headlines stood out amidst the rest: The announcement - a week ahead of its release - of a lone high quality rip. That, of course, being Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix). Now remember, this is still the same channel that releases on average six of these videos a DAY - and all that this announced rip was explained to be was a basic, ancient, old-ass, everyday Grand Dad rip. Surely, we all thought, there was a twist ahead: this rip was going to have a character reveal for KFAD, or this rip was going to be the start of some larger ARG, or contain some sort of crucial lore!! Even as the Direct ended, it stayed in the back of my mind...

And then the day came, April 7th. Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), as scheduled, lands right into our laps. And, shock and awe: It is quite literally exactly what it was advertised as. Waluigi Pinball, from Mario Kart DS, with the melody swapped to the Flintstones theme. Just the same as it had been as far back as Season 1. The drop of this video wasn't really hyped up more than its announcement, it wasn't as if this was the only video to drop this day, but it still felt like a lot of eyes were on it, yet the reaction wasn't really angry, or even tepid, so much as it was just a fair bit baffled. "I like how we all expected something huge but it's just a normal decent rip", writes one commenter: "I knew that there wasnt gonna be any special joke", writes another: Largely, though, people were of course dropping in a lot of ironic excitement for the rip, feeding off of the reputation Grand Dad had gotten. It was like Season 1 had never left! Or, well...

...the thing is, when you listen to Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), when you give it a genuine listen, you realize just how far the channel has come since Season 1. Sure, its grown in more extravagant, ambitious ways as well, but in Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), all SiIvaGunner viewers got to oh-so-subtly notice just how much better the team had gotten at ripping even the simplest of concepts in the few years since the channel's inception. A good number of early Season 1 like the original release of Violet Snow Memories were once taken down from the channel due to their off-key sound, and even the ones that stayed are often noticeably rough in sound, sufficient in getting the joke across yet failing to really stand up to any scrutiny. We'd seen rips get bigger and bolder, projects growing to the scope of projects such as The 2:28 Collab and SNES Mini Circulation - yet in a way, it was as if we were missing the trees that built this forest. In Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), the melody swap plays along to a melody so erratic in tempo, with such strange instrumentation, to where you just KNOW right off the bat that a less experienced and less knowledgeable ripper would have made this sound completely off-kilter back in the days of Season 1. Yet the ripper behind Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), beardfear, only got his start on the channel just a few months prior toward the end of Season 3, doing simple melody swaps much in the same vein as the ones Grand Dad had inspired hundreds others to do back in the channel's humble beginnings. The spirit of Grand Dad, even though all the mockery and irony surrounding it, was still continuing to inspire new rippers on the channel. It still so concisely and effectively represents everything that SiIvaGunner as a channel and as a team aims to achieve - and I feel like with Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), tongue-in-cheek as it were, we got a gentle reminder of just how much this ancient meme really means to all of us. From my perspective, seeing this unfold, this was the first point at which we began to start actually...like Grand Dad again?

It wasn't as if we automatically began finding the meme as funny as it had been in Season 1 or anything, nor did all of that lighthearted irony-posting really ever cease. Yet in the years since, in Season 5 and 6, it felt as if we'd all come to understand just how important Grand Dad as a figure is to the channel. By the time Season 7 was declared to be an entire YEAR dedicated to the guy, all hints of the irony that used to dominate discussion in the comments on Grand Dad rips felt as if it had completely disappeared. So many years had passed, not just since Waluigi Pinball (Beta Mix), but since the days when the meme had even started becoming derided to begin with, to where it just felt normal to present and view Grand Dad as a figure worth celebrating on the channel. He's the one who started it all! He's the most clear-cut embodiment of what the channel represents! But more than that, I feel as if by Season 7, we had all begun to realize just how far the channel had come, just how many years it had now been trucking along for - and just how impressive it was that it could all still be traced back to that one little melody.

After this, however, the burnout finally set in and I had to set things aside. I occasionally worked on SmashUp over the next few months, but work didn't really pick back up until November. Most of the characters who made the cut were either made or finished between Thanksgiving and the start of January. Why nothing after the start of January? Well, it's simple.

That's right! Those greedy fucks over at 2K decided to shut the servers for the game down. Being a mostly offline game, this doesn't affect most things, but one thing it does affect is that images can no longer be sent to the game using their online tool. This is bad for creating characters with complex or distinct textures; many wrestlers featured in SmashUp! use this function to some degree. This was already delayed from September 2024, so I lucked out, but it didn't give me a lot of time to finish every thing. It also meant that the new logo for SmashUp! 2 needed to be a bit of a rush order, but thankfully the wonderful @cherrystar-art was able to complete the task in time, as she had last year.

Since people always ask me about who got cut, a short list is as follows:

Jeffy (problematic)

Puppymonkeybaby (too many animals next to 8-Bit Beast, Naxx, Doge, Brainless Kitty)

Kuromi (too difficult to make look good)

Omori (made and forgot about him oops)

John Notwoodman (looked funny, but might show up in the future)

Inspector Gadget (got cut because getting his jacket accurate was too difficult. At one point a female version of him got made because the women have better jacket choices, but it wouldn't show up in-ring because of quirks of the game, and what is Inspector Gadget without the jacket?)

Burnice, a popular request, was never seriously considered as a contestant, especially since by the time most people were asking, the project was almost done. Also, complex anime designs look bad without putting in a lot of effort. Maybe next time, if WWE 2K25 wills it. (Disclaimer: the following image was made on a lark way after the fact.)

Once all the characters were done, it was time to record the matches. Well, not before giving all the new people entrances and movesets, but I don't have fun stories about that. Here's some fun inside scoop about the matches though:

Gedagedi vs Numberphile was one of the first non-Rumble matches that got decided. It was brainstormed and recorded before Numberphile got resurected, which is why the video still treats him as being dead.

Nutshackwoodman34 vs Naxx & Doge was (I believe) suggested by @keeby10 during the production of the Susie ARG and, by extention, Mystery of the Silcret Gunner. Reader was actually considered for the first SmashUp, and even had a wrestler started in his image, but the motivation to finish him wasn't there until work on NSWM34 content started up again. Despite the idea for Reader narrating the match being conceived as early as January, it was the last thing recorded for the video, and was edited days before its debut.

The Halfway-to-Halloween match was inspired by the potential idea of an SGW Halloween special which never panned out (maybe in the future). Despite being the most obscure entrant, The Mummer was actually one of the first wrestlers created for SmashUp! 2.

I don't have much to say about the Grand Rumble, but I will note that having Gangsta Mario at 7 and The Other Grand Dad at 17 were intentional. I also tried to keep to a good balance of old and new wrestlers, and most of the cuts and returns were decided on by an internal poll.

I also flirted with the idea of SmashUp! 2 having a "Fanchannel InVasion" angle starring crossovers with channels such as TTGD or Vavr, but this also never panned out because I was too scared to ask for permission, or something. I guess Barbie kinda sorta came out of this idea, but she was kept because of the movie tie-in event and SiIva more or less creating Scary Barbie!!!111!!!!. Maybe in the future?

Outside of the aforementioned Nutshackwoodman34 match, editing was slightly more straightforward this year than the year before, partly because of the experience of the previous year and the ability to re-use elements. That being said, it was still hella stressful to get done good and on-time. But I guess I did it? There's a few parts that could've used more time looking over, which were mostly the victim of an event you will read about in two paragraphs.

I would also like to quickly talk about the commentary team. Trofflesby and SSB_Seal both reprised their roles as Breen Gonda and Randall Shields, respectively, and I don't know about you, but I think this year ended up even better than the last. It was also wonderful working with @alexrochonva for the role of the ring announcer, even if it was basically me just giving him a list of lines and telling him to go to town LOL. While Chase Beck was meant to return in the role of a commentator, logistics didn't quite line up in the end, but I do hope that he can appear again in the next SmashUp (sorry again Chase I will make it up to you eventually). I would also like to shout out Janne Sala and Willie Weasel for reprising their roles as Naxx and Doge, especially since Doge hadn't appeared on SiIvaGunner in over half a decade. AND ZACH BECAUSE HE IS FUNNY

Unfortunately, tragedy struck the literal day before SmashUp! 2 was meant to be premiered. While I was working on the final touches of the video, one of my laptop's fans started malfunctioning, and while I was able to get the video rendered out and on YouTube, it was very stressful, and unfortunately put a damper on the premiere for me. But, people seem to like the end result, so maybe it was worth it? IDK. I don't like that my computer almost cooked itself to death, so. Right now I'm waiting for Micro Center to finish repairing it but fingers crossed that it goes ok (please send thoughts and prayers).

pictured: footage of my laptop fucking dying