Hidden Details: This Game's Dinner is... (Patreon)

This week's comic was one of those comics that lean very heavily on the final panel, both the joke and the amount of hidden details. So let me just get the few hidden details in the first four panels out of the way so we can quickly move on to the real meaty stuff, ok?

The K. in King K. Rool apparently stands for "Kaderius". I Googled "sophisticated boy's names" and this one was in the K category. I liked it. Nobody is allowed to call him Kaderius though, since he's royalty. Not even Sakurai, as you can see.

The book King K. Rool is reading is The Enormous Crocodile by Roald Dahl. Amazing book, especially with the Quentin Blake illustrations, but it wasn't originally my intention to use this book. I wanted to make him read something super sophisticated and boring like War and Peace or something, but I also wanted to make it crocodile-related. I hoped for the best when I googled "books with crocodiles" I just about only got this one. So I let go of the sophisticated book-idea and just went with Dahl's classic.

The meal that King K. Rool is getting ready to eat looks like a little pile of decomposing meat. Because it is a pile of decomposing meat. Crocodiles can't chew their prey. So they drag their prey under water and let it soak for a few days somewhere under a log or rock or something similar. When it's nicely soft, and rotten, they swallow their prey without the need to chew! Neat, huh? King K. Rool might be a king, but he's still a crocodile, and Sakurai, who is an excellent and thoughtful cook, knows it.

Okay, we're done with the first four panels!

I am taking a deep breath while writing this. I don't know what counts as a "hidden detail" in the final panel since every little joke is easily missable, but I've made a nice selection. Here we go.

Samus is getting angry at Ridley for eating chicken wings. For some people, it might be a bit vague why. It's because Samus was raised by the Chozo, a race of super intelligent bird-like aliens. Samus clearly disapproves of eating birds, so she gets angry at Ridley because chickens are basically the same as Chozo. You following me?

Yoshi has eaten Nana, the pink Ice Climber. Popo, the blue one, is visibly distraught. You might recognize that fish on Nana's plate as well. It's that one fish from Spongebob who is now a meme. Can't make a comic without a little meme magic in there now, can we?

Moving on along the length of the table:

Mewtwo is moving his cutlery with his Psychic powers. The food he's eating is a Pokéblock (food from the third generation Pokémon games) and a Poffin (food from the fourth generation Pokémon games).

Pichu, or Blackrose, as he prefers to be called, is being carried away by a bunch of Pikmin, commanded by Olimar. Yes, they're trying to eat him. Pikmin is actually a VERY cruel game: you make those little murderers kill an animal and when the deed is done, they carry the corpse of their victim to their home and consume it to make more Pikmin. Yuck.

Are you wondering why the Villager is eating bamboo shoots? Shulk definitely is. That means that shulk probably hasn't played Animal Crossing: New Leaf. In that game, you can buy bamboo shoots to decorate your town with. But you can also just eat them. I know bamboo shoots are edible, but in the game it looks super weird.

This one is pretty obvious: Wolf is enjoying a nice roasted duck (not my opinion by the way: I'm a vegetarian and I think ducks should enjoy swimming and chilling and not being eaten) and the duck from the Duck Hunt Duo does NOT approve seeing his brethren being eaten by a wolf. The dog doesn't really care by the way, he's just enjoying his dog food.

Snake's "dinner" is a cigarette. This is partly because snake is COOL and it's also based on the Metal Gear Solid 4 loading screen, which features Snake smoking a cigarette.

Falco is pecking at seeds and corn like any bird would. This actually makes very little sense since Falco is a falcon which is a bird of prey. They don't peck, they rip their prey apart with sharp beaks and talons. But a kid I used to play Melee with always said "Oh no, not the chicken" when I picked Falco so in my head, Falco has always been somewhat of a chicken.

The other spacie, Fox, is ripping open a garbage back in the background. Foxes are known to scavenge and steal food from the trash in some countries/areas so I thought it'd be funny to make Fox give in to his primal instincts and eat a bit of trash.

The Inkling is looking very doubtful at the plate of calamari that's flying through the air after Sakurai slipped on a banana peel. Because she's a squid, of course. And calamari is fried squid.

Also, among the food that Sakurai is dropping, there's a bottle of Lon Lon Milk from the Legend of Zelda series. Who ordered milk for dinner, you ask? My answer is: I don't know, you can decide for yourself.

And lastly, if you pay close attention to the background in the cafeteria, you'll notice that the stylized windows have the "cross" from the Smash Bros logo. Isn't that cute?

And with that, I THINK I've revealed all the hidden details in this busy panel and the rest of the comic. Although I have to admit I sometimes forget details I added while I was busy drawing, so I might have missed one or two.

I will see you all next week again. Take care and have a great weekend!

- Abel