Children are famously stupid and easily influenced. It is therefore paramount for toy manufacturers to get efficient commercial in front of their eyes. However, advertisement aimed directly at children is heavily restricted or even illegal. To go around this, companies started to build cartoons or around their toy lines. The most famous example is no doubt Transformers,1 but there are many others. Like Monster high. It’s a web series started by Mattel in 2010 to sell its series of dolls of the same name.
The concept is that a bunch of more or less classical monsters send their offspring to the same high school. There, they get up to the usual antics for American high school comedies. In this particular episode, the trainer of the cheerleading squad is unhappy with their performance and has them cheer at every possible competition to get some practice. Even at the city chess championship.
A bunch of zombies are crowding around a chessboard. There is no clock, so I have my doubts about the official nature of this championship. The position does not assuage that fear:2
This is monstrous! It’s also pointless, because neither side is going to win this. This doesn’t deter the cheering squad, though:
Cheerleaders: Two, four six, eight,3 one more move it’s checkmate!
No it’s not! This queen on f4 is going to be taken, after which black has a material advantage but, since that advantage is a king, cannot win. In the meantime, one of the zombies has picked up the queen on f4 to make a move, but the squad chimes in again:
Cheerleaders: One and two and two and three your queen’s in total jeopardy!
And now the position has completely changed!
It’s still impossibly stupid, but it has changed. There’s no queen to be in jeopardy, though. The cheerleading finally comes to an end here, because the zombies, fed up with their noise and nuisance, close in on them in a most threatening fashion. Understandable. Not only did they callously disturb the sacred silent to salient to our game, but they might also spread the news that they don’t actually know the game.
Realism: 0/5 This show seems unremarkable in both writing and characters, but this scene demonstrates a serious lack of attention to details.
Probable winner: Nobody. First white has no king, then black has no king. I can respect the republican spirit, but not on the chessboard.
1. [I can only assume that everybody watched it because they suspected it was about matrices.] ↩
2. [Diagram-editing power.] ↩
3. [At leat they can count the number of rows and columns.] ↩