Real Ultimate Power
|
|
Internet_ninja.JPG
The Official Ninja Webpage: REAL Ultimate Power!!! is a humorous website created by "Robert Hamburger" about ninja, whom he constantly describes with superlatives typically used by adolescent boys, such as "totally sweet". The site has become very popular and has generated large amounts of attention including hate mail, as well as a number of parodies. Hamburger describes ninja through three "facts":
- Ninja are mammals.
- Ninja fight ALL the time.
- The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.
The site contains a variety of dubious information on ninja, including a timeline of ninja throughout history ("4.5 billion years ago: Ninja discover flipping out and thus God gives them dominion over everything totally sweet"), as well as illustrated instructions on how to commit seppuku using a frisbee. It also details, by means of several mock-up CNN and MSNBC news articles, a fictional lawsuit brought against Robert Hamburger by a mother concerned that the website was negatively influencing children.
The sheer amount and some of the contents of the hate mail section, apparently including at least 1 self-proclaiming "Ninja Soke" (master), which might actually be Soke David D'Antonio "Fujita" (http://www.geocities.com/bufusite/) and at least 2 people "representing all martial artists" or even "having actually studied ninja" suggest that some of the hate mail is actually fake (apart from the fictional lawsuit) or that the response of some people to the site's content was rather irrational and exaggerated.
While Robert Hamburger is certainly a fictional character, the website's true creator is a UCLA student named Robert Alan Hornbacker Jr, as shown by links to RealUltimatePower's original location on his university webspace. Real Ultimate power is currently hosted by A+ hosting in Las Vegas, IP 64.235.39.152.
RealUltimatePower has also been referenced in the Battlefield 1942 mod, Killer Commando by its use of the Ninja vs Pirates theme in the gameplay.
Much of the humor associated with the Real Ultimate Power website is obscure, drawing on the common youthful obsession with ninja by elementary and junior high school-age children. There are also several nods to another ninja humor site, Ninja Burger (which slightly preceded it in Internet history), such as: a banner on the site which shows a ninja "hook(ing) you up" with french fries; references to seppuku (normally reserved only for samurai, not ninja); and the author's taking the last name of Hamburger.
| Contents |
Real Ultimate Power's secret?
It might be interesting to note how Real Ultimate Power actually contains a self-referencing parody of itself (http://www.realultimatepower.net/ninja/hippo.htm) which replaces all "Ninja" references with "Hippos", by effectively showing how merely changing subject on a carefully planned but apparently nonsense page can actually be equally funny and more adequate for more than one subject. The fact that there are parodies of Real Ultimate Power about mostly everything including e.g. president George W. Bush or All Your Base Are Belong To Us, which change very little of the original text and pictures but still yield a powerful comic effect are further proof of the point.
Book
REAL Ultimate Power, The Official Ninja Book (ISBN 080652569X) was published on July 1, 2004. It was published by Citadel, and is 193 pages.
The book's humor is rather darker than that of the RealUltimatePower.net site, with footnotes including psychological evaluations of Robert Hamburger and interviews with his parents. It paints a somewhat tragic, perhaps autobiographical portrait of an isolated, roughly middle-school-aged young boy seeking refuge in his alternate reality of ninja versus pirates; "Robert Hamburger" is shown to have neglectful parents and severe but easily handled behavioral issues, with fantasies of kidnapping and defective relationships with almost everyone except the book's editor and his dog Francine.
The product description (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/080652569X/qid=1119387555/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-6776726-6843334) posted on Amazon.com reads:
- Dear Stupid Idiots,
- A lot of you have been saying that I don't know anything about REAL ninja. But that's a bunch of bull crap! You dummies don't know anything. And maybe YOU should get a life. I bet a lot of you have never even seen a girl naked! You idiots believe that ninja had some "code of honor". Yeah right! If by "code of honor", you mean "code to flip out and go nuts for absolutely no reason at all even if it means that people might think you are totally insane or sweet", then you are right. But if you mean a "code to be nice and speak nicely while sharing and not cutting off heads", then you're the biggest idiot ever!!!!!! So if you have any brains, you will shut up and get a life. So go shut up, you stupid idiot.
- No thank you,
- Robert Hamburger
See also
External links
- Real Ultimate Power website (http://realultimatepower.net)
- The Official Real Ultimate Power Parody Directory Webpage (http://brianx.com/realultimatepower.html)
- Holy Shit Ninjas! (http://home.mountaincable.net/%7Erandomferret/HOLY%20SHIT!.swf) A music video inspired by Real Ultimate Power.