#grambam36

Y'know, I thought long and hard about what rip to return to the blog with, a month away from it all. At first I felt like doing something grand and triumphant, something truly important to the channel's legacy like a Season premiere or finale, something in the spirit of A love letter to this wonderful community and my amazing friends or File Select Fusion Collab. But then I started going down the opposite path, maybe to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the Snowball Park - Super Mario 3D World post and by extension the one-year anniversary of this whole blog, I ought to feature something just as irony-filled, a subversion of all your expectations, a big meme-fest all around. That was appealing in some way, but both of these ideas felt like two opposite-end extremes of SiIvaGunner's whole, neither felt like the right way to truly embody what I love about the channel enough to be befitting for the blog's "revival." And it was then that I realized that the most explosive way I could return with was with something I'm truly passionate about, something I've had bubbling internally as something I've wanted to cover ever since the beginning, but never found the right opportunity to truly get into. A feature months in the making, is at last here.

That's right - it's time to finally talk about The Legend of Cage, and The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll.

A lot of what makes SiIvaGunner such a rewarding channel to follow is how well it remembers... just about every one of its thousands upon thousands of loose threads, ones woven since all the way back in 2016. It's as if every rip posted on the channel is bound to end up receiving some sort of tribute years down the line a la Violet Snow Memories, or alternatively rips lead to in-jokes perpetuated by individual rippers that then end up catching on as background gags alongside the channel's typical operations like with guess what​?​?​?​?​?​?​?​?. And due to its nature of allowing just about anything from anyone to be uploaded, Season 1 was when this was at its absolute peak - so many of the channel's ongoing running gags began all the way back during its first year due purely to the whims of individual rippers. The joke with The Legend of Cage stems from an in-joke with content creator Criken, wherein one thing led to another and after three years of development we'd end up receiving a texture pack wherein all faces in the game were replaced with variations of Nicholas Cage. The year was just the same as SiIvaGunner Season 1 - 2016 - and just a few weeks after the texture pack released, the joke breached the Vinesauce barrier through a stream by Vinny - and barely a week after that, the SiIvaGunner member kyokuP struck gold with Cage Town, First Day. It was hardly amidst Season 1's most popular videos - after all, it required knowledge of like three seperate rabbitholes of in-jokes and investment into Vinny Vinesauce's most recent streams at the time, but it was a bit that wound up sticking - as Season 1 progressed, more and more Majora's Mask videos wound up releasing, almost all of which continued the bit that kyokuP started.

Like a lot of these less-prominently-pushed Season 1 bits, it wound up falling to the wayside as the channel moved on with a more narrowed focus during Season 2. But, as is always the case, the SiIvaGunner team never forgets, there's always SOMEONE on there who's attached to the silliest of things - and one legend by the name of GramBam36 took it upon himself at the start of Season 3 to bring back The Legend of Cage-posting in full force. From Season 3 onward, due in huge part to the enthusiasm expressed by one of the channel's coolest rippers (seriously, this is now my 7th post on a Grambam36 rip, SUNGORE and this are only scratching the surface), one of the channel's most bizarre jokes was back on its feet - two years later, the original Criken bit, the Vinesauce stream that inspired it, had all been mostly forgotten, yet the show kept going on. Rip by rip, slowly, the soundtrack to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask grew closer and closer to completion, each of its many tracks given a Cage-ification due purely to the commitment to the bit. And, again, to reiterate: No special attention was being drawn to these rips whatsoever. Like with Collision Chaos Good Future JP [CD Beta Mix] and so many other nuggets in SiIvaGunner's back catalogue, this was purely a passion project underway as the channel's gears kept turning at standard speed. That was, at least, until the final stretch of Season 6, and the SiIvaGunner All-Star Nuclear Winter Festival.

The Nuclear Winter Festival (aka "DoomFes") is a whole other can of worms to get into that's far too large for the scope of this post, but the most important throughline to it (and the Season as a whole) was a sense of...bittersweet finality, for lack of a better word. We all knew deep down that the channel itself wasn't ending, but every part of DoomFes felt specifically focused on tying up loose ends, giving us closure to threads left dangling for all too long. The Metal Gear SGFR album, Paper Jams, the SiIvaGunner AI storyline a whole, all things that felt like coming full circle at long last - and, amidst it all, was a silly little event focused on a 6-year old channel in-joke finally reaching its climax. With The Legend of Cage: Beneath the Mask Official Soundtrack, and with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll, it was finally time to finish off what was started all those years ago. The joke of putting Nicholas Cage textures into Majora's Mask had taken three years to realize - and after double that time, the SiIvaGunner team was at last able to match the texture pack's visuals with something just as quality in a full-soundtrack remix album, with The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll sitting as the proud crescendo to it all.

It's easy to forget all of this borderline-sappy lore when actually experiencing the rip in question - It is, for all intents and purposes, the culmination of six years worth of Cagey goodness. Led by Grambam36 alongside incredible rippers like minindo of Beautiful Dreamer fame, we're at last given a The Legend of Cage rip with full-on YTPMV visuals, in turn helping depict the rip as a journey throughout the entirety of Majora's Mask, as its medley-like nature of Majora's Mask Staff Roll theme allows it to revisit some of the all-time classic Cageposts very seamlessly. It feels celebratory, of course, due to the very tone of the Staff Roll theme in general, but also due to all the aforementioned context of where Cage-posting was on SiIvaGunner during Season 6 - this event, the one effectively marking its death, was the first time this dumb running gag had really been given special attention by the channel, yet that was part of what made it all so special. I wasn't an "avid" listener of these per se as someone who hasn't played Majora's Mask myself, but I knew of their existence, it always made me happy to keep seeing them crop up - and The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll was the most perfect sendoff these rips could've ever hoped to get.

There's so much to dig into with the rip's quality itself that I don't know where to begin. The rip's opening is front-loaded with such well-done adaptions of iconic Cage sounds, the "Can-can-I get my prescription, PLEASE!!" interlude has stuck with my head ever since I first heard the rip and it only continues from there with Cage sounds being used for just about every part of the original song, the lead, the percussion, the accents, everything. Particularly in this opening section, it slots into my absolute favorite flavor of YTPMV a la The Streamer, where vocal bits from the sources used are audible to a degree where you could reasonably sing along to the song being used. It's all just as much of a delight to hear here, going through the classics of "NOT THE BEES", "A-B-C-D-E-F-K", "Prickly Pear" - yet the rip, as a collab ought to do, escalates into really fun alternate takes on Cageposting, with different visuals, different samples used in different ways, yet all still celebrating the meme's weird yet ever-present legacy on the channel.

Even a year and a half removed from The Legend of Cage's official first and last tribute on SiIvaGunner, I'm still not quite sure where it sits with the fans. The Legend of Cage: Staff Roll, as the most perfect distillation of everything the project ever aimed to be with fantastic visuals to boot, only barely cracked ten thousand views - the original Cagepost that started it all in Season 1 still just below fifty thousand. It was, contrary to the sounds used within the rips themselves, never the loudest meme, nor a very intrusive one, yet it was part of a running gag that was just so fun to see still go on years after its intended legacy passed, with SiIvaGunner's band of YTPMVs teaming up to finish the fight that a bored Season 1 contributed started. Even though it was far from the most popular gag, Grambam36 remembered and absolutely ran with it: and that, to me, is the kind of energy you can only truly get here on SiIvaGunner.

Late last year, we received official confirmation that the Electronic Entertainment Expo, E3, was no more. The signs were everywhere, as they'd failed to hold any meaningful event past the pandemic and were fumbling even before then, yet it was still kind of sad to see the news spelled out officially - that the gaming community's Christmas Day was going away forever, in favor of the more condensed, streamlined, and in general a lot less charming Summer Games Fest. And yeah, the excitement for game reveals and trailers is still prominent with Keighley's shows, though a tool he may be, but...there was a sort of memetic energy to the E3 shows in particular, the per-company press conferences that were always subtly coated in delicious cringe, those are now effectively lost. Though the show may be lost, the memories remain - and I'll always remember just how fun each of the SiIvaGunner channel's per-show channel events were, from Season 1 to Season 4 Episode 1.

I did indeed cover a rip related to the E3 show once before on here, with Take Me Home, Country Snow - a rip focusing on the ever-memetic quality of Bethesda's Todd Howard. That's a well-spread joke in the gaming community, yet Too big, huh, my nuts are too big how about that focuses on far more of an in-joke, one finally meeting its natural endpoint after years of build-up: Ridley, before his debut in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, being criticized as being far too big to be fit for the game's roster. "Bigley" became a minor meme on the Miiverse forums on Wii U/3DS, and it was just generally a very funny idea to spread about - that a character was simply too massive to ever possibly be able to be used in fighting.

It's likely that Too big, huh, my nuts are too big how about that wasn't even made with the intention of releasing after Ridley's reveal during Nintendo's 2018 E3 show, but withholding the rip to release it with the perfect timing just adds to the joke even further - the visuals of the rip present Ridley as the surprise new character, only to reveal that his character size is so astronomically big that the game literally cannot load him into a match. The rip's audio joke itself is initially based on a Season 1 classic, Vs. Meta Horat, mashing up Ridley's theme with The Nutshack theme, before taking on a very patently Twonko twist - you may recognize his name from Crompton Racing, and back when he was still with the channel he was one of the biggest proponents and contributors to making Jake Paul a recurring joke on the channel. The rip effectively turns into a - funny enough - BIGGER version of Vs. Meta Horat, still featuring The Nutshack prominently, but overriding it with It's Everyday Bro and other sources. Most notably, and funniest to me personally, is the line iconic to many Smash Bros. fans of the time before Ultimate's release - "RIDLEY'S BIG AS SHIT!".

This won't be a recurring thing, I promise, but yesterday's post just reminded me of another rip from the same event that I NEED to talk about. Despite how batshit insane it is - or perhaps even because of it - Crompton Racing is a perfect demonstration of the creativity of the SiIva team.

I feel like its easy to get the assumption when looking at some of the channel's takeovers that they kind of "box in" rippers creatively. Hell, for some takeovers like The Harlem Shakeover in Season 6, part of the point WAS to make all rips feel extremely similar, all using the same joke with little variation to it. That's of course an exception, since most takeovers only last a day and by extension only really reach around 10-30 rips total. But even within that time, I imagine its easy to think that all the content posted is going to feel pretty tangentially similar.

This sentiment applied to me back during It's "It's Everyday Bro" Day Bro, the one-day takeover discussed in yesterday's post where every rip uploaded spoofed Jake Paul's 2017 disasterpiece. Though I personally love the source and the event by extension, I'm sure there were a lot of people who grew fatigued of the song's sound, even with the takeover being just one day. Thus, to buck that trend we have whats probably my favorite rip made during the takeover - Crompton Racing.

Rather than playing solely off of It's Everyday Bro, this rip is a YTPMV of Jake Paul's entire channel - every audio source stems from one of his videos, be it vlogs or the aforementioned song the takeover is built around. Chocobo YTPMVs are almost always golden due to the good mood the source track itself instills, yet knowing just how much Jake Paul you're consuming all at once as you're listening just makes it all the funnier. These poor bastards decided willingly to sift through so much obnoxious Vlog-content to find the most apt audio sources possible to use for this one-day event, and it paid off in spades!