I-Mockery is a pop culture humor site owned and operated by Roger Barr (aka: -RoG-) that has existed online in various forms since 1996. Before then, it was a printed periodical called Visionary Darkness. Free copies of Visionary Darkness were distributed in local high schools and record shops. It later became a web site on Geocities

GeoCities

Yahoo! GeoCities is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan.GeoCities was originally founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet . In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages...

 which housed a variety of humorous articles and rants. Barr also registered other sites on Geocities under several aliases and made them all a part of the Visionary Darkness web site. After a few years of building up the popularity of these sites, Barr registered the I-Mockery.com domain name in August of 1999 to house all of his humor sites under the same roof (and to avoid Geocities' increasingly slow performance). The I-Mockery name was created as a spoof of all the corporate web sites that started with "I" or "E" at the time. The name loosely translates to Internet-Mockery.

Over the years the site has expanded greatly, but still continues to live up to its original slogan: "Dedicated to making a mockery out of all things adored by the general public. Dedicated to exposing people who take themselves far too seriously. Dedicated to giving due credit to works of genius that have never enjoyed the spotlight."

Sections

• Features (Minimocks) – This section contains a variety of earlier reviews of movies, photographed adventures featuring Roger and other staff members such as Jason Grunert (aka: Protoclown) getting into all kinds of mischief, articles about bizarre toys & food products, nostalgia and more. One of the staples of this section is the often amusing variety of animated gifs that can be found within many of the articles.

• Editorials (Visionary Darkness) – This section is a large collection of rants and raves, with topics of mockery ranging from the Gorton's Fisherman to Celine Dion
  Celine Dion
  Céline Marie Claudette Dion, , , is a Canadian singer. Born to a large family from Charlemagne, Quebec, Dion emerged as a teen star in the French-speaking world after her manager and future husband René Angélil mortgaged his home to finance her first record...
  
   to feminine shaving razors.

• Shorts – This section was created in response to the Minimocks section of the site. The Minimocks had eventually become anything but "mini", with some of the pieces being in excess of 3–5 pages long. This naturally caused delays in how often the site was updated, as many of the Minimocks would take well over a week for the writer to complete. Thus, the "Shorts" section was created as an area where similar content could be featured, but created at a much faster pace. This section also gave the writers more room to cover a wider variety of topics including parodies of the infamous McDonald's
  McDonald's
  McDonald's Corporation is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around 64 million customers daily in 119 countries. Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant operated by the eponymous Richard and Maurice McDonald; in 1948...
  
   web advertisements, and toys.

• Games – This section contains links to I-Mockery's flash games and videos, including Trick-Or-Treat Adventure, Domo-Kun's Angry Smash Fest, Castlevania: Priest Battle, Kill The Old Man From Zelda and I Will Beat Pacman! It also includes links to some of their more popular gaming-oriented articles as well as originals articles, including "Sexual Moments In Video Game History", "Nintendo: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly" and "Cooking With Popinski". Also present is I-Mockery's "Rom Hack Reviews"

• Comics – Over the years I-Mockery has produced a variety of web-based comics. First, there was "The Guy Who Can't Draw Comics" which claimed to be the world's first and only completely artless comic strip. Then came "Pixel Pals" which quickly drew in a fairly large fanbase from the gamers with its Nintendo Entertainment System
  Nintendo Entertainment System
  The Nintendo Entertainment System is an 8-bit video game console that was released by Nintendo in North America during 1985, in Europe during 1986 and Australia in 1987...
  
   character humor. In recent years, Roger teamed up with Louis Fernet-Leclair (aka: -PoX-) to create the "PickleMan" online comic book series. These are full-sized comic books, complete with UPCs and clickable hidden secrets throughout each story. The PickleMan comics are written by Roger and drawn by Louis. Recently the two unveiled a special, non-profit printed version of the comic as a keepsake for the fans of the series. The comics section of the site also features columns by Jason Grunert(aka Protoclown)("Tales From the Longbox") and Max Burbank ("Hey Dork! Let's Talk Comics!") which cover both classic and modern comic book series. I-Mockery had a booth at the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con where they unveiled some new print comics.

• Mockeries – This section contains "mock sites" that often targeted music scenesters, including ravers, punks, metalheads and goths with gags and mocking commentaries. These sites often generated hatemail (including death threats) from people involved in these scenes, lifestyles and religions. GeneralZod.net is their popular satire of what General Zod
  General Zod
  General Zod is a fictional character who appears in comic books published by DC Comics, a supervillain who is one of Superman's more-prominent enemies. The character first appeared in Adventure Comics #283 , and was created by Robert Bernstein and George Papp...
  
  , the villain from the film Superman II
  Superman II
  Superman II is the 1980 sequel to the 1978 superhero film Superman and stars Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Terence Stamp, Ned Beatty, Sarah Douglas, Margot Kidder, and Jack O'Halloran. It was the only Superman film to be filmed by two directors...
  
  , has been up to in more recent years. ElSerpento.com is their spoof of a self-proclaimed Mexican Wrestling legend who can physically beat up anyone and anything while also holding his breath for 45 seconds. Other mockery sites include "Albums That Sucked", "Cynical Greeting Cards", and "Martin Yan: Homicidal Chef".

• Forums – The forums, which reside at I-Mockery.net, have always been a hotspot for a wide variety of people, many of which who come simply to argue with others for the sake of some good laughs. For years, it was well-known that any newcomers would receive "the newbie beatdown" FROM EVIL ROBOT, WHO RULES in which all the self-proclaimed "veteran" mockers would verbally tear these people apart. These days, newbies come in by the truckload and do not seem to have to endure the same initiation mockeries that their predecessors did. The forums have gone through a variety of changes: First they were hosted in a very basic forum format with InsideTheWeb's free forum program. During this time period, the forums existed solely for readers from the Winky section of I-Mockery to argue about vegetarianism vs. meatatarianism and straight-edgers. The forums then opened up to all of I-Mockery's viewers when it moved to the ezboard software, which was free at first, but ezboard soon began charging to remove ads. With the large number of people visiting the forums, the fees eventually became too outrageous, so I-Mockery moved to the phpBB forum format until the software proved to no longer be stable. The forums are currently running using vBulletin software, which has been fully integrated with the rest of the site.

• Blog – This is where RoG updates his readers with site news.

• Weeklies – This section launched in January of 2008 and was created as an area where the writers could quickly post reviews of video games, movies, comics and music for their readers to discuss on a weekly basis.

Noteworthy material

• The Pickle Hat – The Pickle Hat became a staple of I-Mockery almost overnight. After the article entitled "Achieve Godliness With a Pickle Hat" was released, readers started sending in letters to the Gedney company requesting the pickle hats. Some people tried collecting UPCs from Gedney pickle jars, which was the original way you could get a free hat. Gedney also allowed people to simply send in $1 in exchange for one of the paper pickle hats. Combined with his goggles, Roger started wearing them with the pickle hat in most of I-Mockery's future photo pieces. This also lead to the creation of the PickleMan comic book character who also wears a pickle hat and "Wacky Space Goggles" that Roger is almost always seen wearing on-site. Currently, there are plans for a PickleMan flash game in the works and a teaser trailer has already been released.

• M.U.S.C.L.E. Revisited – This was one of I-Mockery's largest projects at the time. The goal of "M.U.S.C.L.E. Revisited" was to take all 233 of the original popular pink M.U.S.C.L.E. (Kinnikuman
  Kinnikuman
  is a manga created by the duo of Yudetamago , which is composed of Yoshinori Nakai and Takashi Shimada. The manga was published in Shueisha's Weekly Jump, and received the Shogakukan Manga Award for shōnen manga in 1985...
  
  ) toys from the 80s and give each of them names and biographies.

• Rom Hack Reviews – I-Mockery's rom hack reviews quickly became one of the most popular features on the site. It focuses on ROM hacking
  ROM hacking
  ROM hacking is the process of modifying a video game ROM image to alter the game's graphics, dialogue, levels, gameplay, or other elements. This is usually done by technically inclined video game fans to breathe new life into a cherished old game, as a creative outlet, or to make essentially new...
  
   of classic NES games, but generally the hacks that are done poorly and/or in poor taste. The first reviewed hack was called "Knife Boy" – a hack of Paperboy in which the main character delivers bloody knives to his customers instead of newspapers. The rom hacks featured here are often known for involving sexual innuendo, drugs, nazis, profanity and violence. Sometimes I-Mockery host a "Week of the Rom Hack" in which a new rom hack would be reviewed for every day of a particular week and this was often featured on the popular web site Fark.com
  Fark.com
  Fark is a community website created by Drew Curtis that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites...
  
  

• Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest – Domo-Kun's Angry Smashfest was a collaboration between Roger Barr and Tom Fulp of Newgrounds
  Newgrounds
  Newgrounds is an American entertainment and social media website. Founded on July 6, 1995 by Tom Fulp, the site primarily hosts Adobe Flash animations and games, but also features a music-oriented page, along with an art portal...
  
  . The game features Domo-Kun
  Domo-kun
  is the official mascot of Japan's NHK television station, appearing in several 30 second stop-motion interstitial sketches shown as station identification during shows.-Name:...
  
   in a quest to defeat the Power Puff Girls for getting him in trouble. There are many nods to classic video games in this title, including Street Fighter
  Street Fighter
  , commonly abbreviated as SF, is a series of Fighting Games developed in Japan in which the players pit the video games' competitive fighters from around the world, each with his or her own unique fighting style, against one another...
  
  , Golden Axe
  Golden Axe
  Golden Axe is a side-scrolling beat 'em up and hack & slash arcade video game released in 1989 by Sega for the System 16-B arcade hardware. It is the first game in the Golden Axe series....
  
  , Duck Hunt
  Duck Hunt
  is a video game for the Nintendo Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System game console system in which players use the NES Zapper to shoot ducks on screen for points. The game was developed and published by Nintendo, and was released in 1984 in Japan...
  
   and more. There are also many easter egg (media)
  Easter egg (media)
  Image:Carl Oswald Rostosky - Zwei Kaninchen und ein Igel 1861.jpg|250px|thumb|right|Example of Easter egg hidden within imagerect 467 383 539 434 desc none...
  
   hidden within the game, including an alternate ending for those who beat the game twice. In May 2009, the game was updated on Newgrounds to include trophy awards to assist people with finding the hidden easter eggs in the game.

• Marshmallow Peeps – Marshmallow Peeps have become a regular topic of discussion on I-Mockery. It started out with "The Quest For Peeps" in which the writers actually drove out of their way to find the Peeps tour bus. Then came the Marshmallow Peeps in Outer Space flash game, which was a tribute to the classic Space Invaders
  Space Invaders
  is an arcade video game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado, and released in 1978. It was originally manufactured and sold by Taito in Japan, and was later licensed for production in the United States by the Midway division of Bally. Space Invaders is one of the earliest shooting games and the aim is to...
  
  and Asteroids arcade games with a Peep theme. The site also reviewed the "Marshmallow Peeps Marshmallow Maker" machine. In late 2005, Barr was interviewed for a documentary on Marshmallow Peeps entitled Power of the Peep.

• Sexual Moments in Video Game History – I-Mockery's staff collaborated to create this large list of "Sexual Moments in Video Game History", which contains much have sexual innuendo.

• Extreme Beverage Testers – This is a review by the I-Mockery staff of Jones Soda
  Jones Soda
  Jones Soda Co. is a beverage company based in Pioneer Square, Seattle, Washington. It bottles and distributes soft drinks, non-carbonated beverages, energy drinks, and candy. Jones Soda is a carbonated soft drink that has many unusual flavors that are not offered by other soft drink makers.Founded...
  
  's line of holiday sodas, which were done with GIF
  GIF
  The Graphics Interchange Format is a bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability....
  
   animations. They have reviewed Jones' Halloween
  Halloween
  Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...
  
  , Thanksgiving
  Thanksgiving
  Thanksgiving Day is a holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada. Thanksgiving is celebrated each year on the second Monday of October in Canada and on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States. In Canada, Thanksgiving falls on the same day as Columbus Day in the...
  
  , Valentine's Day
  Valentine's Day
  Saint Valentine's Day, commonly shortened to Valentine's Day, is an annual commemoration held on February 14 celebrating love and affection between intimate companions. The day is named after one or more early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine, and was established by Pope Gelasius I in 496...
  
   sodas and the first non-Jones brand beverage so far, a Steven Seagal
  Steven Seagal
  Steven Frederic Seagal is an American action film star, producer, writer, martial artist, guitarist and reserve deputy sheriff. A 7th-dan black belt in Aikido, Seagal began his adult life as an Aikido instructor in Japan...
  
   energy drink called Lightning Bolt.

• Ivan Drago: Justice Enforcer – This game, whose story is written by Roger Barr, art by Louis and programming by BoMToons.com, is a side-scrolling beat-em-up starring Ivan Drago
  Ivan Drago
  Ivan Drago is a fictional character that appeared as Rocky Balboa's rival in the 1985 film Rocky IV. He is portrayed by Dolph Lundgren. The character and his catchphrases have gone on to inspire multiple mentions in popular culture like Clubber Lang , including in the Family Guy episode "Brian...
  
   of Rocky IV
  Rocky IV
  Rocky IV is a 1985 American film written by, directed by, and starring Sylvester Stallone. It is the fourth and most financially successful entry in the Rocky franchise...
  
  fame fighting crime in an American city populated with knife wielding robbers, Segway
  Segway PT
  The Segway PT is a two-wheeled, self-balancing transportation machine invented by Dean Kamen. It is produced by Segway Inc. of New Hampshire, USA. The name "Segway" is a homophone of "segue" while "PT" denotes personal transporter....
  
   riding executives and killer dinosaurs, eventually leading to showdowns with Apollo Creed
  Apollo Creed
  Apollo Creed is a fictional character from the Rocky films, initially portrayed as the Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of the World. He was played by Carl Weathers. Many believe his character was modeled after Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali while Rocky Balboa was based on relatively unknown...
  
   and Rocky Balboa. The game features special moves, unlockable characters and a mini-game.

• Trick-or-Treat Adventure Quest – A point-and-click
  Point-and-click
  Point-and-click is the action of a computer user moving a cursor to a certain location on a screen and then pressing a mouse button, usually the left button , or other pointing device...
  
   adventure game
  Adventure game
  An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
  
  , it is the story of a boy named Little Johnny and his quest to make a Halloween costume and get as much candy as he can.

• Rainbow Puke – An I-Mockery spin-off site which asked artists around the world to contribute pictures of puking rainbows. An art teacher at Virginia Commonwealth University
  Virginia Commonwealth University
  Virginia Commonwealth University is a public university located in Richmond, Virginia. It comprises two campuses in the Downtown Richmond area, the product of a merger between the Richmond Professional Institute and the Medical College of Virginia in 1968...
  
   assigned his entire class to participate on this site and their graded works can be seen on a special page.

• Human Centipede: The Game – In May 2010, I-Mockery released a flash game parody of The Human Centipede film which mimicked the classic Centipede
  Centipede (video game)
  Centipede is a vertically-oriented shoot 'em up arcade game produced by Atari, Inc. in 1980. The game was designed by Ed Logg along with Dona Bailey, one of the few female game programmers in the industry at this time. It was also the first arcade coin-operated game to have a significant female...
  
   arcade game.

Halloween

Halloween

Halloween

Hallowe'en , also known as Halloween or All Hallows' Eve, is a yearly holiday observed around the world on October 31, the night before All Saints' Day...

 has become one of the things I-Mockery is best known for, primarily due to their feverish celebration of the holiday each year. The entire site is redecorated for Halloween and every new article that appears on the site during this time is related to the holiday. Each year, their Halloween celebration has gotten longer. In 2005, I-Mockery's Halloween season began on September 1, giving them a full two months to create nothing but Halloween-oriented pieces.

Halloween Collection contains reviews of horror movies, product features, the adventures of "Count Pop" and other spooky things, but it also has the staff's annual collaborative "Select Your Destiny" stories. These stories haven grown in size over the years (some well over 100 pages) and feature bizarre plots, loosely based on Halloween themes and the "Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Adventure is a series of children's gamebooks where each story is written from a second-person point of view, with the reader assuming the role of the protagonist and making choices that determine the main character's actions and the plot's outcome. The series was based on a...

" children's books. Only one of the choices on each page will allow the protagonist to progress, the other choices lead to certain doom of some kind. The stories also often feature small flash games which must be completed in order to continue in the story. In addition to all of the aforementioned, I-Mockery's Halloween Collection also contains two other sub-sections: "The Halloween Grab Bag" and "The Greatest Moments in Horror Movie History".

• The Halloween Grab Bag tends to contain smaller articles covering the latest Halloween costumes, masks, novelties, candies and happenings at the time. FrightCatalog has often contributed materials to I-Mockery to poke fun at in this section.

• The Greatest Moments in Horror Movie History section covers some of the most grotesque, hilarious and memorable scenes from horror movies.

As further proof of his Halloween fanaticism, Barr also founded ZombieWalk.com as a place where zombie walks and flash mobs could be organized. He also organized Richmond, Virginia

Richmond, Virginia

Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...

's first annual Zombie Walk in 2005. He also plans on eventually filming an independent zombie movie.

Petitions

I-Mockery held large petitions on the web to get Comedy Central

Comedy Central

Comedy Central is an American cable television and satellite television channel that carries comedy programming, both original and syndicated....

 to release The Upright Citizens Brigade and Strangers with Candy

Strangers with Candy

Strangers with Candy is a television series produced by Comedy Central. It first aired on April 7, 1999, and concluded its third and final season on October 2, 2000. Its timeslot was Sundays at 10 p.m....

 on DVD. While both shows were canceled after only 3 seasons, they developed a large cult following, and I-Mockery was able to get thousands of signatures which were all forwarded to Comedy Central. The Upright Citizens Brigade personally thanked I-Mockery for its help in getting the DVD set released. In a similar manner, I-Mockery got many of its fans to vote in Amazon's DVD Decision 2006, to get the movie Gymkata

Gymkata

Gymkata is a 1985 martial arts film starring Olympic gymnast Kurt Thomas as Jonathan Cabot, an Olympic gymnast who combines his gymnastic ability with ninjutsu to enter a deadly competition in a fictional country, Parmistan...

released on DVD.

Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum

On May 1, 2009, Barr started a new live web show called Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum in which he plays the mad scientist, Doc Mock, who shows obscure public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

 b-movies and z-movies while interacting with a live audience online. Each week, a different guest (often comedians from Upright Citizens Brigade

Upright Citizens Brigade

The Upright Citizens Brigade is an improvisational comedy and sketch comedy group that emerged from Chicago's ImprovOlympic in 1990. The most recent incarnation consists of Matt Besser, Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, and Matt Walsh...

) joins Doc Mock to commentate on the movie. Other cast members include Miss Diagnosis (Marie Barr), a nurse who handles all the chat room comments, and Licky (Ethan Newberry), a one-eyed mutant who works the control booth. Recent guests on the show have included Matt Walsh

Matt Walsh

Matthew Paul "Matt" Walsh is an American actor, comedian, director and writer best known as a founding member of the Upright Citizens Brigade improvisational sketch comedy troupe...

, Paul Scheer

Paul Scheer

Paul Christian Scheer is an American comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He co-created and starred in MTV's sketch comedy series Human Giant and currently co-stars as Andre on the FX comedy The League. He also currently stars as Trent Hauser on the Adult Swim show NTSF:SD:SUV:: which he created...

, Toby Huss

Toby Huss

Toby Edward Huss is an American actor. He is best known for portraying Artie, the Strongest Man in the World on the cult hit Nickelodeon TV series The Adventures of Pete & Pete, for his voice-over work on the long running animated series King of the Hill, and for his role as Felix 'Stumpy'...

, Matt Besser

Matt Besser

Matthew Gregory "Matt" Besser is an American actor and comedian best known as one of the founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade sketch comedy troupe who also had their own show on Comedy Central from 1998-2000....

 and Nathan Barnatt

Nathan Barnatt

Nathan Barnatt is an American actor and comedian. Barnatt appeared on Comedy Central's The Gong Show with Dave Attell in 2008, on Comedy Central's GHOSTS/ALIENS pilot in 2009, and on in 2010...

. The show currently airs Thursday nights at 8 pm PST on theStream.tv. Recently, Bloody Disgusting

Bloody Disgusting

Bloody Disgusting is a website that covers horror movies with reviews, interviews and news. It is currently run by Brad Miska, and Tom Owen. According to one source, the site has 1.5 million unique visitors and 20 million page views each month. It is widely considered to be the "world's most...

 published an interview with Barr about the creation of Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum.

Staff

All the members of I-Mockery's staff contribute their time to write for the site on a volunteer basis. The following is a list of those who have worked on the site more frequently over the years:

• Roger Barr / -RoG- (founder/writer)
• Dr. Boogie (writer)
• Jason Grunert / Protoclown (writer)
• Max Burbank (writer)
• Louis Fernet-Leclair / -PoX- (artist, also did artwork for The Alphabet of Manliness
  The Alphabet of Manliness
  The Alphabet of Manliness is the debut book by American humorist and Internet personality Maddox, published in 2006. It reached the #2 position on the New York Times Best Seller List in the "Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous" category.-Publication:...
  
  )
• Marie Barr (artist, also runs StrangePuppets.com)
• BoMToons (Game programmer for recent large games on the site)

External links

• I-Mockery.com
• Doc Mock's Movie Mausoleum
• I-Mockery's Youtube Channel