The story of Mr. Moonpie is included in my book Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie, but here it is again, paraphrased.
Running a BBS was a lot like running a business, and as such there was a lot of work that went on behind the scenes — stuff like cleaning up file and message areas and maintaining the user base, daily tasks that end users typically never thought about. Unfortunately a lot of these functions (such as scolding or kicking off abusive users) were rather unpleasant. That’s why I hired Mr. Moonpie to do those things for me.
Mr. Moonpie was, in reality, a four-foot tall stuffed banana. Susan and I bought him for a dollar at a garage sale back in 1993. Running a BBS was supposed to be fun, but there are always a few people out there who insist on acting like jerks and being rude. I hated dealing with these people directly, so instead I created an account named Mr. Moonpie and did administrative my dirty work through him. If people took offense or got mad at the way I handled things, they would get mad at Mr. Moonpie instead of me. For a long time only a handful of my close friends knew that Mr. Moonpie wasn’t a real person.
The legend of Mr. Moonpie took on a life of its own. Yaun-Ti (the ringleader of TBH405) drew pictures, wrote songs and crafted stories about Mr. Moonpie. As digital pictures became a reality, I slowly began leaking pictures of the real Mr. Moonpie (the stuffed banana) to the public. In 1996 I even made a movie starring Mr. Moonpie and myself. The film featured several short parody skits. (I’m pretty sure I have the only copy of said film.) On IRC (#405) I created a Mr. Moonpie bot that people could chat with (and get abused by). For a short period of time I even started rumors that Moonpie and I were starting a band, and leaked pictures like the following:
Mr. Moonpie (on bass) and myself (on guitar).
Unfortunately, Mr. Moonpie went through some hard times. Two events in particular scarred him for life. The first was at a party, where Yaun-Ti and fellow TBH405 member Prong had a little too much to drink and decided it would be a good idea to slam dance with poor Mr. Moonpie. His stuffing was never quite the same after that, but the barrage of bodyslams and pile drivers were nothing compared to the injuries he would sustain a few months later when our dog Leroy ate Mr. Moonpie’s face. I’m not sure what would provoke a puppy to chew off a stuffed banana’s silk-screened face, but he did. Mr. Moonpie was left with one eye and only part of a mouth. Still, he carried on.
When my son Mason was born in December of 2001, I handed Mr. Moonpie over to him. The banana physically dwarfed Mason, but the two of them got along swimmingly. Now, fifteen years later, Mr. Moonpie sits propped in the corner of Mason’s room, occasionally coming to the computer to check his e-mail from time to time.
Mr. Moonpie, today.
Dumb trivia: The original spelling of Moonpie’s name was actually “m00npie”, with a lowercase m and two zeroes.