The Death of Mr. Moonpie

I first blogged about Mr. Moonpie more than ten years ago and about six years I recorded an entire podcast about the guy, but for those of you new to the party, here’s a brief recap of the life — and now, death — of Mr. Moonpie.

I grew up connecting to computer bulletin board systems (BBSes) run by other people, but didn’t set up my own until the mid 1990s. Named after a line from an Ice-T song, The Gas Chamber BBS quickly became one of the more popular underground bulletin board systems in the Oklahoma City area. I loved almost every part of running a BBS, but occasionally I had to deal with people who abused the system (or were simply annoying).

One day while Susan and I were out visiting garage sales, we ran across a four-foot tall stuffed banana. We thought he was so funny that we immediately purchased him (for a dollar) and brought him home. Due to his resemblance to the logo of a certain marshmallow sandwich treat, we named him Mr. Moonpie.

Soon after, I created an account on my BBS named Mr. m00npie, and the legend was born. Anything I didn’t want to do, like banning users I didn’t like or kicking people offline for downloading too much, I no longer had to do — Mr. m00npie did it for me! The fact that Mr. m00npie wasn’t a real person was, at least for a short period of time, a closely guarded secret. As in jokes go, I told a couple of people who told a couple more people, and eventually everyone who was a part of our inner circle was in on the joke. Mr. m00npie took on a life of his own, and quickly became the board’s mascot.

Approximately a year after I launched The Gas Chamber, I discovered another online world — the internet. Droves of BBS users flocked to IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and before long I had set up a “bot” (a series of scripts) named simply “m00npie” in our little corner of IRC (#405). m00npie the bot consisted of hundreds of phrases, triggered by words others typed. For example, if someone typed the word “weather” in a sentence, m00npie would respond with a randomly selected response from his database (“Raining cats and dogs, I hear!”). m00npie was a far cry from real artificial intelligence (it was closer to the old Eliza program in spirit). Over time, m00npie’s responses became filled with more in jokes and goofy references that those of us in the know found hilarious.

In 1996, Mr. Moonpie (the real, stuffed version) suffered two serious injuries. The first took place at a party I threw and (perhaps foolishly) provided free beer at. As the party dragged on and the beer continued to flow, a couple of the party’s attendees decided to physically beat the crap out of Mr. Moonpie. What did Mr. Moonpie ever do to them???

Save for a few busted seams, Mr. Moonpie emerged mostly unscathed from the drunken assault. Unfortunately for him, more pain was waiting just around the corner. Later that summer, Mr. Moonpie must have looked at my dog Leroy cross-ways, because one day while Susan and I were at work, Leroy chewed off half of Mr. Moonpie’s face.

Still, Mr. Moonpie marched on. In 1996 when Susan and I moved to Spokane, Mr. Moonpie came with us. He was such a staple of our local BBS scene that even after BBSes began to succumb to the popularity of the internet, Mr. Moonpie’s popularity lived on. While in Spokane, I made no fewer than three different short films, all starring Mr. Moonpie. One was a parody of Cops, one was a parody of X-Files, and the third was a parody of the OJ Simpson trial. Each one was roughly ten minutes in length, and there was a longer piece planned to bookend and tie them all together that never got finished. Keep in mind that these were made before digital editing and video hosting were available to most home users. The videos were crudely cut together through the use of two VCRs, with over-dubbed voices and extremely crude computer graphics inserted for placards.

By the time Susan and I moved back to Oklahoma in 1998, Mr. Moonpie’s life began to slow down. When Mason was born in 2001, I put the big stuffed banana in his room, but a couple of years later Mason was done with him, and Mr. Moonpie was sadly relegated to life in the garage where — I hate to say it — he’s spent the past fifteen years.

As we were packing up the contents of our garage last weekend, I spied Mr. Moonpie slumped over in the corner, a former shell (or peel) of himself. The remainder of his eyes and mouth had cracked and flaked off, leaving him faceless. Enough beads had leaked from his split seams that he could no longer sit upright. Worst of all, he was absolutely covered in cobwebs and tiny sacs of spider eggs. It was time to let him go.

I’ve owned Mr. Moonpie for longer than Susan and I have been married, and I can’t say I didn’t get my dollar’s worth out of him. Mr. Moonpie provided us with almost twenty-five years worth of jokes and inspiration.

God speed, ya’ bastage.