Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Sometimes you stumble across a show or movie, and you immediately know: this piece of art would be extra dope with some pot. Anything narrated by Sir David Attenborough? That’s almost certainly a recipe for a good time. The opposite can be equally apparent. Watching Darren Aronofsky’s claustrophobic horror movie mother! has almost certainly caused at least one stoner panic attack. The 2000s Nicktoon Invader Zim is somehow both of these extremes, and it’s breaking my brain.
On paper, Invader Zim should be a perfect stoned binge-watch. Created in 2001 and only 27 episodes long, it was released during a time when Nick was more concerned with being weird and entertaining than… literally anything else. Each episode follows Zim (voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz), an alien invader who is supposed to enslave the human race with the assistance of his robot sidekick/slave GIR (voiced by Rosearik Rikki Simons). Except there was tiny wrinkle that terrorized every one of Zim’s plans. Zim and GIR were horribly, embarrassingly incompetent. Their overwhelming incompetence was only matched by the sheer idiocy of every human around them, including that of their half-intelligent foe Dib (voiced by Andy Berman). That’s the first rule of Invader Zim: everyone is dumb.
Watching Invader Zim through elementary and middle school was my first time experiencing anything akin to a drug trip. Every frame of the series is packed with bright bold colors, sharp black lines, and aggressively jarring transitions. Anything could happen in Invader Zim: a cute class hamster could become a Godzilla-sized monster; GIR could possess a house and make it get tacos; a slowed down explosion could threaten to destroy the town like The Blob version of nuclear waste.
The fact that each of these insane disasters was accompanied by some of the funniest and most random one-liners in the history of children’s television made the whole experience even sweeter. There weren’t episodes of Invader Zim. Each 11-minute segment was an experience, a warped and loud journey through the manic mind of a creator enchanted by humanity’s unending flaws.
But there was always a dark side to Invader Zim, one that the series never tried to hide. For every quotable joke about waffles, there was a limitless supply of horror: the bulbous and slimy Bloaty’s Pizza Hog, a Chuck E. Cheese-like mascot taken to its most extreme; a bizarre curse that made the gaming-obsessed Gaz (voiced by Melissa Fahn) unable to taste anything but pork; and a whole episode that revolved around Zim collecting so many human organs he became a bloated, drooling organ bag.
Zim could be a waking nightmare, but it treated its nightmares as lovingly as it did its many bee jokes. “Rise of the Zitboy,” an episode that revolves around Zim getting a massive zit capable of hypnotizing his classmates, is still the cause of some of my queasy nightmares.
Intense horror and humor were inseparable in this cartoon, which isn’t surprising given its creator. Prior to making Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez was best known for creating the comic book universe around Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, a story as deranged as its title implies. JTHM would often switch from oddly hilarious rants to graphic violence and grim promises of suicide, strokes of which appeared all throughout Invader Zim’s brief two seasons.
Eighteen years after its release, it still seems insane that Nick gave this brilliant, bizarre man a kid’s show, and I still don’t know where Invader Zim belongs in the world of smoke-worthy cartoons. Its surely as funny as Spongebob and as delightfully weird as Aqua Teen Hunger Force, two pot staples. But there’s always been something more sinister laying beneath Vasquez’s story about a little dumb, green megalomaniac alien obsessed with doom. I’m not sure if you should watch Invader Zim this 4/20. But if you do it, you’re in for a trip you won’t soon forget.
