Nerding Day: Mary Kate and Ashley in Action – Fast Food Fight! (Patreon)

In the early 2000s, corporations could, and did, stick Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen’s face on any product and sell it to tweenage girls. I know because I was one of those girls. If Mary-Kate and Ashley said the Iraq war was kewl, I would have enlisted at 14. I almost did after reading the Mary-Kate and Ashley Navy propaganda book.

It was rare that Mary-Kate and Ashley had a miss. The twins’ content mill ran 24-7, employing graduate students to write scripts for Playstation games where Mary-Kate and Ashley are cursed by a mall witch or writing episodes of their cartoon show where all of the horses in the world might disappear. Oh, did you not know Mary-Kate and Ashley had a Saturday morning cartoon where they starred as twin spies with exotic, secret code names (Misty and Amber)?

Mary-Kate and Ashley In Action! Is the most factory-farmed TV show in existence. It feels like a bowling alley nacho cheese-flavored product– fun, but you get why they can’t technically call it cheese. The twins work for an organization simply called Headquarters. They have a talking beige robodog dog sidekick to help them solve horse crimes. Their main villain sells evil makeup. They reuse the same plots repeatedly. For instance, all the world’s elephants start to disappear in an episode shortly after the horse problem is solved! That’s probably why the show only lasted one season.

Still, a little thing like the show being unsuccessful wasn’t going to stop the Mary-Kate and Ashley machine from whirring into action. They produced a line of dolls doing sporty things like parachuting, snowboarding, and extreme scootering, something that counted as a sport in 2001. It’s impressive how the cartoons look nothing like the girls, and the dolls somehow don’t look like either.

Sure, the show may have flopped after one season because it was poorly written, BUT that doesn’t mean there still wasn’t material there to be mined. The capitalist vampire that suckles on the Mary-Kate and Ashley profits wouldn’t be satisfied unless it sucked this franchise dry, so it churned out a line of early reader books based directly on the scripts from the TV show. This is a classic Mary-Kate and Ashley tactic previously used in their VHS movies and book series. Maybe science should study how every Mary-Kate and Ashley idea existed across all media, in all states. Anyway, we’re talking about “FAST FOOD FIGHT.”

They used the same terrible scripts from the TV show so that they could reuse stills from the show in the book. No new artwork was necessary! And these stills really make you say, “Yeah, I get why this show went down so quickly.” For example, you get to see that while Mary-Kate and Ashley dress normally during the show, their fellow secret agent friend, Terry, wears a full SCUBA suit all the time for no reason.

The suit is never mentioned. During the episode, they’re simply meeting up with Terry for a nice dinner at his Aunt and Uncle’s restaurant, and this guy wears a suit that Iron Man would call a bit much to no comment.

I feel like even the poor writer, who definitely didn’t get paid enough to translate the script into a book, felt like they should acknowledge they were working with subpar material. The plot of the episode/book is that two brothers have opened up a restaurant and it’s very popular. So Mary-Kate and Ashley are worried they’re using mind control on their meals. There is precedence for this in the show as Mary-Kate and Ashley’s arch nemesis Renee La Rouge previously used mind control makeup. The author even takes a moment to remind us this plot line has been done before, and they’re aware of it too.

“Wow, it’s crazy that the same things keep happening to us over and over again with only slight plot variations, isn’t it,” said Mary-Kate.

“Slight enough that it counts as an entirely new work of fiction, according to our lawyers! Recycling is kewl,” Ashley replied. “Elephants are not horses, our representation always says!”

The weird thing is that there’s no mind control going on at all. Mary-Kate and Ashley fucked up and wasted a massive amount of government resources, manpower, and robot dog fuel investigating what turned out to be a really good restaurant. Essentially, they saw a line out the door at a Chili’s and called in the FBI.

Americans eat a lot of fast food, and now they’re going to a new fast food restaurant. Suspicious. They go undercover, assuming their Misty and Amber personas at Quick Food, and become friends with brothers Donnie and Danny, who own the restaurant. While working, they analyze the food by having their robot dog eat it. Yes, the robot dog has to eat and is constantly hungry because Headquarters designed him to be cute, not functional. They could have made him a robot person or a gun, but no, they created intelligent life and then made it suffer the indignity of being taught to fetch. “Eat this and tell us if we’re right about it being poison, robot best friend.”

Since there is no problem for Mary-Kate and Ashley to solve, the book hard pivots into a parable about being nice to your siblings. The brothers running Quick Food start to argue. Things get intense. Health codes are massively violated.

Eventually, the brothers engage in a prank war that escalates to near death. “Kids, be nice to your siblings or they’ll drown” is an intense moral but it gets the point across.

They don’t make it in time, and Danny perishes in a watery grave. No, sorry, that’s from my fan fiction based on this book, based on a cartoon, loosely based on the lives of two teen girls. Danny is fine, but the flood ruins the Quick Food restaurant. Their parents show up and are like, “Wow, can you believe it was a bad idea to encourage our sons to get along by purchasing a restaurant for them to run together? First, we’re under investigation by the teen CIA and now a flood! Oh God, now the robot dog is pooping in the dining room!? He’s a robot. Why does it need to do that? Unless… did someone fill it with poison?”

Mary-Kate and Ashley look at the mess they happily watched these teenage boys make and say, “Well done, I guess. All in a day’s work for Misty and Amber. No need to thank us, Donnie and Danny’s parents. So sorry they can’t get along, because we actually get along great!

I’m so glad they stuck around to dunk on Donnie and Danny. That’s the kind of chaos Mary-Kate and Ashley should sew. They tried to go to dinner with a friend, declared the line a national emergency, and ended up starting a family feud that will last generations.

It’s so weird for a cartoon to present a problem at the beginning and then reveal the protagonists were just wrong and there was never a problem at all. It’s like if Mystery, Inc. went to examine a house that might be haunted and learned it was just old. No ghost, no criminal disguised as a ghost. It’s just a regular house this time, you guys. Whoops! Then at the last minute, they tacked on a quick moral about not starting forest fires because, hey, the show has to end somewhere.

You know, I think they could still do something with Mary-Kate and Ashley in Action! Maybe a podcast reciting the books, transcribed from the TV show? The horse isn’t dead yet, it has only disappeared, and I know just the girls to find it.

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This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Supreme: Mack Miserable, who is also known as Misty Amber to his many dead enemies.

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