Too Many Cooks: The Legend And The Legacy, One Year On

Admit it, millennials: we are a community built on nostalgia. Our cultural currency depends almost entirely on conversations that begin, “Remember when?”. We observe anniversaries of increasingly dubious distinction: Back to the Future Day. May the Fourth Be With You. Ernest Goes to Jail turns 25 (April 6, obvs). We sicken me.

With all the fuss over Marty and Doc time-travelling to our recent past, we almost missed a milestone that actually meant a damn. Finally, an opportunity to celebrate a true seismic shift in the pop culture landscape: the first birthday of Too Many Cooks.

How would we have forgiven ourselves if we let this landmark in storytelling go unremarked? As the Lumière brothers immediately extinguished shadow puppetry and pantomime with their recording of workers leaving a French factory back in 1895, Too Many Cooks’ writer-director Casper Kelly has made needless all other existing forms of art. One year later, the reverberations can still be felt.

What And Why Was Too Many Cooks?

On October 27, 2014, Adult Swim did as they regularly do: they unleashed a strange, eleven-minute vignette unto its audience. It was 4am; an undiscriminating hour in which only those deadened by early-morning television — or televisual enhancing supplements — would receive it. (Adult Swim takes over for the Cartoon Network at 8pm every night in the U.S.)

The short would startle those who happened upon it, either that morning or during one of its later reruns in-between episodes of Childrens Hospital or Robot Chicken. But Too Many Cooks – like the characters contained within its ceaseless opening credit sequence – would not be restrained to the hour in which it had been intended. Initially, it shifted the makeup of our global consciousness with a tiny ripple, not unlike the ripples that first split Pangaea; today, it can boast more than nine million views on YouTube, and one whole planet, changed.

For those who’ve not witnessed it, it’s both totally self-explanatory and absolutely inexplicable. Also, Smarf.

What is it that makes Too Many Cooks so irresistible? Is it the pitch-perfect spoofery of shows we collectively grew up on, from Family Matters to G.I. Joe? Is it the endlessly ear-wormy theme tune? Is it that each actor is credited by their real, perfectly ordinary, and perfectly strange name? (i.e. Will Dove.) Is it the barrage of grisly violence that takes over? Is it the fact Lars von Trier plays a pie? Or is it that Casper Kelly tuned into our appetite for the television tropes of our youth and ingeniously mutated our memories into a shared nightmare, a punishment for always looking backwards? The experience of Too Many Cooks is akin to watching Buzzfeed have a Jacob’s Ladder-esque pre-death fever dream.

Like all profound works of artistic excellence, the answers for Too Many Cooks do not come easily. But its long-lasting effects are clear.

For instance, we can directly attribute the rebooting of Full House to the success of Too Many Cooks. Though it had been mulled over since mid-2014, Netflix only made Fuller House official in early 2015, once Too Many Cooks had exploded our preconceived notions of a “full” house, and cleared the way for mainstream acceptance of a “fuller” one.

The Republican presidential candidates also call to mind Too Many Cooks. I mean, don’t the names Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Rick Perry sound precisely like they should belong in that credit sequence? America might have done a spit-take if the veritable clown car of contenders (23 in total) had rolled up before the Cook family introduced the idea that “too many” was “just enough.”

Even the participants in the video have enjoyed a career boost. Case in point: teen actress Katelyn Nacon hadn’t been Google searched once before the debut of Too Many Cooks. By November, she’d been Googled 18 times. In March of the following year, Nacon had booked a recurring role on The Walking Dead.  The Googling increases.

Will Adult Swim Ever Be Able To Outdo Itself?

After Too Many Cooks’ viral success, Adult Swim was suddenly encumbered with a unique predicament. Everyone was watching, most for the first time. Would any of their follow-up infomercials and short films withstand such scrutiny, or would they “spoil the broth”? Could any match the achievements of Too Many Cooks, either in terms of virality or cultural cache?

Sadly, no.

Technically, first off the block was The Newbridge Tourism Board Presents, though that was based on pre-existing bits by Best Show host Tom Scharpling and Jon Wurster. So, the first real original short after Too Many Cooks was In Search of Miracle Man, starring reliable comics Rich Fulcher and Matt Besser.

In it, they seek a mysterious figure known only as “Miracle Man,” bothering normies on the street for their thoughts on the cult figure, as well as their rate of masturbation. Things escalate, predictably. The same can’t be said of its viewership; it managed a little over 100,000 hits on YouTube.

Smart Pipe followed. A straight up-and-down satire of a tech infomercial — with that scatological streak you know and love — Smart Pipe sells a toilet enhancement that logs (pun!) your fecal “metadata”. Timely, sure — but it only clocked up 500k views on YouTube, compared to the 9.2 million of Too Many Cooks.

Shortly after Smart Pipe came Book of Christ, which targeted Adult Swim’s favourite whipping boy: evangelical community television.

Spruiking a holy book penned by a particularly confessional Jesus Christ – admitting a hit and run and sharing his pick-up tips – it culminates in disturbing carnage. (If this is your first time watching Adult Swim shorts, you’ll have noticed by now that most end with the death of every character.)

December 2014’s Unedited Footage of a Bear came closest to matching Too Many Cooks’ heights, with 1.8 million hits. Depending on how you measure the success of an Adult Swim production, some may even consider it superior; specifically, those who rank them by how much terror-vomit is induced.

Adult Swim closed out their year with Frank Pierre Presents: Pierre Resort & Casino, an in-house hotel introductory video that, again, descends into pure horror. It stars Tim & Eric’s buddy Ray Wise as Pierre, a mogul oblivious to the growing threat of the Native American ghosts he’s dishonoured and will inevitably be slaughtered by.

In 2015, Adult Swim produced a new Steve Brule short, Bagboy, a sequel to Dinner with Friends with Brett Gelman and Friends, titled Dinner with Family with Brett Gelman and Brett Gelman’s Family, and Mastodon: Asleep in the Deep. That’s it. All good, yet all extensions of pre-existing brands, and none as indelible as Cooks.

Adult Swim may never match Too Many Cooks, which is precisely why we must always honour its memory every October 27.

Keep looking backwards. It’s what Smarf would have wanted.

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Simon Miraudo is an AFCA award-winning writer and film critic for Student Edge, RTRFM and ABC Radio. He tweets here: @simonmiraudo.