This flash cartoon was uploaded to Newgrounds in 2002. I embedded this YouTube clip because back in 2002 it was socially acceptable to have your flash video play noise immediately (This was back when it was also understood that you’d have one window open at a time generally).

Now, I will point out now that you will need to dedicate six minutes to watching “Ark and Kerrigan: All Your Pie” in order for this post to make sense. If you don’t, I’m going to be relating my life to something you’ve never heard of.

The story goes like this – I probably first saw this cartoon around 2004 or so. I remember finding it funny, but I can assume that I hadn’t watched it in around 11 years up until last week when someone posted it up on Tumblr (I don’t remember if it was done ironically or not). I ended up watching the whole thing again not necessarily out of nostalgia – It hadn’t been an incredibly important thing to me when I was growing up, not like Homestar Runner or Angry Video Game Nerd – but more out of the surprise that I remembered every line.

I grew up on video games and internet humor like this. This is probably why my mind is a constant stream of like 4-5 second clips and I never get to feel and appreciate the silence that I so, so badly desire. “All Your Pie” takes up way too much real estate in that constant Russian-spy-radio-station-except-with-dumb-shit that is my typical internal monologue.

When someone talks about cooking a pie, I always think “Don’t You Eat this Pie” in the voice of the girl character, Kerrigan. To be fair, I don’t live in a literary version of rural Nebraska from the 1890’s so I don’t know that many people who do this (Evidenced by the fact that I used the term “cooking a pie” one sentence ago) and I don’t often think about it.

I watched this video well before I watched The Simpsons’ “Last Exit to Springfield”. The particular scene referenced (Dental Plan/Lisa Needs Braces) didn’t make sense to me until I watched that episode, but the bit from the Simpsons is still great today (It’s a good example of the humor that Family Guy really drove into the ground, making a joke run on too long). When anyone talks about dental plans, or health plans in general, or unionization and insurance benefits, needing braces or hell, a free keg of beer, that scene will worm its way into my skull for a few seconds.

If I use the phrase “self-control” by itself I will say it the way that Ark says it in this video. I don’t even find that line funny but it will not leave me.

This is the weirdest one. When Ark turns this song on the radio and starts moving along with it, he makes a specific hand motion at about 3:27 into the video on the words “Don’t Go”. I will catch myself doing that almost any time that I hear this song, the theme from Kingdom Hearts, a game I never even played, (and it’s not that often, but often enough for me to notice and for me to have been shocked when I realized where that came from).

If you learned anything from this piece, please understand that I was really, really impressionable when it came to basically any entertainment as a child. I go through the same thing with Homestar Runner all the time, sure, but I didn’t think my life would have changed in even minor ways due to the influence of “Ark and Kerrigan: All Your Pie” from 2002. I don’t even know what the two characters are supposed to be, or how they’re related, or if they’re in an amorous relationship or just friends who live together and eat pies or something. “Ark and Kerrigan: All Your Pie” was something I could’ve gone the rest of my life and just thought “oh yeah, I remember that” the same way I remember that cartoon with all the Badgers or that Sears Air Conditioner commercial, but I’m glad it let me learn about myself.