The Ryndex

Dear Filthy Law Enforcement Worm-Babies,

I have a confession. This weekend, I used approximately three clicks to find and use an Internet Pirate TV station broadcasting back-to-back episodes of Invader Zim.

Some of you hardier pirates out there are probably laughing at my naïveté. I didn’t journey into the seamy underworld of the internet, rubbing elbows with crackers and outlaws. There weren’t any passwords. I just started Winamp 5.05, brought up the Media Library, clicked on Internet TV and selected a channel advertising Invader Zim. A few seconds later, and I was watching his hilarious earth-invading antics, free and commercial-free.

“Fool! My fellow hideous inferior human pig-smellies are insulted by this constant slander!”

You may not have heard of Invader Zim. I knew it was a cartoon with a following, but that’s all.

As it turns out, it’s so much more.

Zim comes from the Irkin empire, ruled by the Tallest (Kevin Macdonald lends his voice). Since Zim is quite small — and since he personally botched Operation Impending Doom — he’s being excluded from the subsequent Operation Impending Doom II. However, since “invader’s blood marches through [his] veins like giant radioactive rubber pants”, he has been assigned to investigate a small, out-of-the-way planet. Ours.

He disguises himself as a “perfectly normal human worm baby” and goes to school, where the resident outcast mini-mulder, Dib, is the only one to realize that the new green-skinned boy is an alien.

There’s also a zany little robot disguised as a dog. Not a wacky sidekick, but a pointless, randomly screaming robot that brings meaning back to the word “zany”. His name is GIR.

Unlike our other favourite cartoon, the funniest lines aren’t quotable — it’s all in the delivery. “I am Zim!” and “That’s stupid.” and “You’re crazy.” and “Delicious! Delicious! I am normal!”. The voice talent is excellent, the animation is enjoyably expressive and the music is thumpingly invasion-tastic.

“I have already stuffed my normal human belly so full of delicious human FILTH that I could not eat another bite.”

There are also piggies and garden gnomes.