Mythology Gag / Vine Realms

• The giant Meat worms in the Vapor Zone are based on its appearance in Mario's Mystery Meat.
• The zoned-out Vinny face off the coast near Papa Dook's is making the same expression that Vinny did when he "died" on stream, where he went limp, spasmed a few times, and then slid down his chair. The clip has since made its way into numerous videos as a running gag.
• The time that Vinny put baked beans into a PC case as part of a charity stream gets referenced repeatedly.
• Many emotes are awarded by speaking to Varg Fren, a cute doodle Joel drew of himself in the style of PT parody QT.
• The two realistic ducks in Vinetoad Kingdom are based on Scoot and Drake, Vinny's two favorite duck characters from Animal Crossing. There is also a realistic rooster in a sweater, based on Goose.
• Most of the slimes that appear throughout the game are based on Drippy and Nutt, two mascots created for an Alternate Reality Game held to commemorate the previous year's Vinesauce is HOPE event. Drippy himself appears as a recurring fortune teller with some dialogue ranging from Leaning on the Fourth Wall to outright Breaking the Fourth Wall.
• The centipede pit in the Cave of the Cursed was added entirely because Vinny hates centipedes^note he first mentioned during his Wario Land 4 stream that he has been woken up by them crawling on him, and that they're creepy in general despite them being natural pest control and began talking about them almost every stream about two months before the Variety is HOPE event.
• The bus in the desert is call-back to Joel's charity stream of Desert Bus. The bus being crashed in the O'Sea shoreline and the driver's references to DuckTales is a reference to when Joel crashed the bus late into a playthrough while listening to the DuckTales theme.
• All of Fast Hedgehog's dialogue is taken from Vinny's surface-level interpretation of how Sonic was depicted in Sega of America's marketing during the 1990s. The Voice Grunting is also taken from those impressions.
• Dingle and Save Pig are references to Vinny's playthroughs of Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland and Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love. Dingle riding on a balloon and distributing maps drawn from his overhead view of places also references his role in his debut appearance, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.
• One NPC in Vinetoad Kingdom is based on Sponge, Vinny's Super Mario Bros. Original Character. He even mentions his droopy mustache acting like a sponge, based on the character's backstory stating he uses it to soak up all the sadness in the Mario games so they can be bright and happy.
• One NPC in O'Sea is based on Bulk Bogan, a Hulk Hogan parody created by Joel for his streams of Hard Time; his dialogue ties into his characterization by Joel as a Dumb Muscle, while his voice grunts come from Joel's various vocal performances as the character.
• The inclusion of "Toad" and "Krowno", parodies of Frog and Crono from Chrono Trigger, reference the fact that that game is Vinny's personal favorite, having played it on stream at least three different times outside of corruption and text obfuscation streams.
• Krowno's design includes elements of other Square Enix characters, such as Zidane's tail and elements of other RPG protagonist characters. The fact that the combination of Crono's hair and Zidane's tail alludes to Son Goku also references Vinny's ironic references to the Dragon Ball franchise when playing Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest XI, both of which feature Dragon Ball author Akira Toriyama as character designer (with many of his designs from Dragon Ball being recycled in those games).
• Yoda parody "Yoba" references both the infamous "Yoda CBT" video that Vinny grew oddly attached to during a Marble it Up stream and an infamous blurt-out in Vinny's chat of "COCK INJURED" during one of his streams of Dragon Quest XI (the latter of which specifically occurred in reference to a joke in the game where a group of sailors approach Serena, a healer, pretending to be injured in hopes of her feeling them up as part of the healing process).
• "Kermeat", the half-Meat, half-Kermit character, is a call-back to a photoshop made by Vinny during a stream of Kirby Super Star Ultra that led to a tremendous amount of fanart.
• The slime confused about why its "horse" (actually a fish) isn't doing so well in the desert appears to be a reference to YouTuber Waifu Simulator 27's video on how to catch salmon in a bucket in Minecraft, particularly his delivery of "oh no, the poor fish!" line (owed to his thick, vaguely Slavic accent), which Vinny played several times and took a liking to after first seeing it.
• Inside the test tubes on the alien ship are various clones of Vinny as...
  • A boot, referencing his use of the RP Guy voice to parody incessantly demanding people in chat, with the voice intentionally bastardizing his own name as "Booti"
  • His Tomodachi Life Mii Vlinny, but with a centipede for an arm, referencing both Vinny's hatred of arthropods and the infamy Vlinny maintains among Vinny and his viewerbase as a result of the character's Ensemble Dark Horse status spiraling out of control
  • A half-Joel, half-Vinny Fren, referencing the large number of viewers who jokingly— and sometimes seriously— think they're the same person
  • A duck wearing his iconic "? Block" cap, based on ducks being a huge Animal Motif for him (on account of him citing his fondness for the animals and his tendency to make aggressively phlegmy duck noises when frustrated)
  • A version of himself with a giant wrinkly head, referencing the Running Gag of Luigi having "Terminal 7" brain cancer (with one notable, now-unlisted fan animation based on the bit that spawned the gag depicting Luigi with a similarly swollen cranium)
  • A slime, referencing Vinny's reluctant association with slime girls
  • An octopus with his own head in place of the mantle.
  • An emu with a human head and a beak sticking out of its right cheek. During a game of "Miiverse Sketch" from Game & Wario, one of Vinny's prompts was called "Disturbed emu". His interpretation of it was a melancholic man with a beak growing out from the side of his face.
• The inside of the flying saucer is modeled after the bridge of the Enterprise-D with the leader's dialogue based on both Picard and his actor, Patrick Stewart.
• The saucer itself was added as a reference to Vinny's interest and/or weird dreams involving aliens, which can sometimes be the only conversation besides the game itself during a stream, as well as to Joel's own fear of aliens, stemming from an alleged UFO sighting from his childhood.
• The means of getting to the saucer - finding a red sneaker next to a rock that, when interacted with, triggers the UFO to suddenly appear above the player and abduct them - is a reference to an infamous moment from Joel's playthrough of Signal Simulator where the same thing happens as a creepy Easter Egg (though the UFO does not abduct the player in that game, merely scare them.)
• Looking out the main window of the saucer provides the player with a view of a recreation of a scene from Space Kids where the titular characters are floating in space. They can later be found in jail, recreating another scene from the game, as well as recontextualizing the girl's call for her grandfather since they're right across from Grand Dad.
• Grand Dad himself is based on the infamous bootleg 7 Grand Dad, a rip-off of The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy. It's most well known for the bizarre title and even stranger title screen of an orange-and-dark red-clothed Mario with chalk-white skin and blue hair against a solid blue backdrop. It first showed up during Joel's "Insane Mario Bootleg Games" stream in 2014, and became such a popular meme in the Vinesauce community that it bled into other streamers' communities. His dialogue is both a Meme Acknowledgement that includes Joel's perplexed and enraged initial reaction, as well as the Creator Backlash over how overused the meme became and often still is (in part due to it carrying over into the even bigger SiIvaGunner fanbase).
• Another prisoner in the area is the comically grotesque "Kursby" character created by Vinny in his Mario Artist Polygon Studio stream.
• One of the avatars is Greedo as a pickle, referencing a combination of Vinny's fondness for "gherkin"^note the European English word for a pickled cucumber, sometimes used in American English for smaller "Bavarian style" pickles as an Inherently Funny Word, the "Macklunky/Macklanky" meme that originated from the Disney+ edit of A New Hope, which became more closely associated with Vinny after a playthrough of AI Dungeon 2 where the AI became stuck in a dialogue loop, and the Pickle Rick scene from Rick and Morty, the latter two of which are paraphrased by one Macklanky NPC.
• There's a mop with blue bristles and a cape meant to look like the title character of the So Bad, It's Good 1989 direct-to-video film Creating Rem Lezar, which Vinny introduced on stream after beginning to unironically like "Higher", the song that Rem sings after he first comes to life.
• The "clab"^note crab NPCs and avatar, and the 🆑🆎 Club area specifically, are callbacks to Vinny's fondness for both the memetically popular "Crab Rave" music video by EDM artist Noisestorm and a video called "Time for Crab", the latter of which consists solely of stock images of crabs set to a MIDI of "Dear Prudence" by The Beatles.
• A highly-pixelated picture of Luigi with a long tongue appears in Vapor Zone— an image lifted directly from Vinny's Game & Wario streams, where he'd typically draw the image as a fallback idea during the "Miiverse Sketch" minigame. The specific version of Speed Luigi seen in game comes from a depiction Vinny made during his stream of Windows 93, a parody of late-90s Windows operating systems.
• Vinerizon, a tall-headed edit of a generic model from Verizon's internet speed test page used when Vinny has internet problems, is used as the icon for Vapor Zone and appears frequently as statues and images throughout the game, particularly in said area.
• One of the avatars is a blue troll named Ralph, based on Vinny's Second Life character, a parody of notorious Second Life troll Ralph Pootawn who later came back as a character in Tomodachi Life.
• Besides the various shout-outs on Papa Dook's menu, there's:
  • The Sauce Boss (the insignia on a cardboard crown Vinny won at a Buffalo Wild Wings in 2015, with a picture Imakuni took of him wearing it becoming popular among fans thanks to it being one of the only known photos of Vinny, whose public image at the time still characterized him as The Eeyore, expressing genuine happiness; the moniker is also one of the many things "V-Dub" calls himself)
  • Pasta Pizza (the description is a cleaned up shout-out to a lewd version of "Funiculì, Funiculà" which Vinny has played/sung on-stream many, many times)
  • Frooty Juice (from "Cooking With Vinesauce", a sketch video from early in the Vinesauce YouTube channel's lifetime depicting Vinny as a Cordon Bleugh Chef)
  • Spicy Water (a euphemism for alcohol which became a meme around the time of Vinny's playthrough of the remake of Trials of Mana, thanks to he and Chat devising a drinking game where they'd take a shot every time Charlotte provided the Title Drop on the game's title screen, with the gag seeing a particularly big spike in usage after this happened five consecutive times)
  • Ectoplasm (based on Vinny making up bizarre "quotes" about ghosts from Dan Aykroyd, for whom the paranormal is a known special interest)
  • Tea, Earl Grey (which he tends to impersonate any time Star Trek, Patrick Stewart, or Replicators are mentioned)
  • Beaver Smoothie (from his discussion of the Wild Wild Country documentary)
• One NPC in O'Sea is a raccoon obsessed with grapes, referencing an old viral video of a domesticated raccoon eating grapes that Joel took a liking to, playing it on-stream several times before ultimately finding that it was registered with YouTube's automatic copyright claiming system.
• The Cave of the Cursed is named after the group's word for corrupted, uncomfortable, or spooky-looking things that come up during streams (itself an extension of the wider "cursed image" meme about the same subject), and some areas have "corrupted" textures that look like a broken LCD monitor or bugged tile sprites in other games.
• Pantherk stems from Mortal Kombat Chaotic, a fangame Joel played on-stream. The fact that Pantherk's sole voice clip is not only just him saying his name, but is also mastered louder than any other audio asset in Vine Realms is a nod to a moment in the MK Chaotic stream where Joel modded the game to replace every one of Pantherk voice clips with the announcer saying his name and set the volume for these clips to the highest possible value that the game allowed.
• The plants below sign for Spa Diva are designed to resemble the emojis Chat uses to make a "Diva face" whenever she showed up (👁👄👁).
• Within the game are two recreations of Animal Crossing villagers made from edited stock images, specifically referencing villagers that Vinny has expressed disdain towards in the past, in part due to their popularity among Rule 34 artists.
  • Cherry being on a tiny island just off the coast of O'Sea, in reference to a piece of fan art by former Total Drama animator 87-Octane in the wake of the first gameplay trailer for Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
  • Raymond being locked in a jail cell in the Cave of the Cursed's prison, in reference to Vinny finding him on a Nook Miles mystery island in his own playthrough of New Horizons and outright refusing to invite him onto his island upon finding tons of sexually-charged art of him in a maid outfit on Google Images (as dressing Raymond in a maid outfit is a common practice among New Horizons fans, both with and without sexual intent).
• The SPEEN ability is based on and named after a Running Gag of Vinny's where he blurts out "spin" in a vaguely Slavic accent similar to— but not synonymous with— that used for his "RP Guy" character whenever seeing something or someone rapidly spin; Vinny has gone on record stating that the "SPEEN" voice is his personal favorite to do.
• Several of the games in the arcade at Papa Dook's are references to previous streams:
  • Mario's Mystery Meat
  • Supra Binyot Lande (a Stylistic Suck fan game that Vinny showed off during the last Sunday stream of 2019)
  • Vine WrestleMania (from the team's custom WrestleMania game characters fighting each other, which Joel shows off on his channel semiannually at minimum, usually as part of Vinesauce is HOPE)
  • Funky Scrungus and the Chunky Fungus (an arcade game made by Red-Jackal for the 2019 Vinesauce is HOPE ARG)
  • Bullet Sponge and Scumgeon (more games by Funky Scrungus "developer" ScumSoft, on the site used to promote the ARG)
  • Vinemon (a still in-development fan game that Vinny played a demo of during the 2018 charity stream)
  • Vargfren Mash (a fan game)
  • Meme House (based on Joel's The Sims streams of the same name)
• The games' publishers are also taken from famous Vinesauce moments:
  • Kojumbo, which uses a parody of the Konami logo, is based on "Hodeo Kojumbo" from the troll-post game Deadly Standing done in the style of various mobile game knockoffs of popular titles.
  • ScumSoft, the "developer" of Funky Scrungus and the Chunky Fungus, Scumgeon, and Bullet Sponge, created as part of the 2019 charity stream ARG.
  • devinchat, from the many times that a game's developer was in the Twitch chat (or someone pretending to be the developer was in chat), mainly because the streamer was playing a fan game.
• A damaged poster in the desert town claims the area is sponsored by something starting with an R in a distinctive typeface, referencing Raid: Shadow Legends. The game has a tendency to sponsor anyone on YouTube or Twitch who will accept; that it's damaged is likely due to Vinny's refusal and utter disdain for them after receiving numerous emails wrongly addressed to "John Vinesauce" or "Joel".
• A Missing Persons poster found in various locations of the game mentions a "lost catgirl", which was the Excuse Plot of the badly written visual novel Be My Master; Vinny played the VN during one installment of The Shit Show (a now-abandoned Sunday stream segment), with his bewildered reaction towards the game's writing resulting in the phrase "stray catgirl" becoming a community in-joke.
• Vinny's in-game representation swears he isn't blind after realizing he initially missed the player character's blatantly obvious approach, in reference to the real Vinny's tendency to overlook important and sometimes very hard to miss details because of his tendency to rush. His claims of being a master of both stealth and archery come from Vinny's many failed attempts at playing a rogue or thief that devolved into sniping enemies with a bow and arrow while hiding, rather than the up-close style they were meant for.
• One slime in Vinetoad Kingdom is selling "water ice" in various flavors. While this at first seems to be a case of Department of Redundancy Department, it's actually a reference to Vinny's then-recent mentions on stream of Polish Water Ice, which is a version of Italian ice that originated from the Philadelphia area.
• There is a poster in Papa Dook's advertising grilled watermelon, only available on Labor Day. This is in reference to What's Cooking SI, a prank Vinny and his friend Paul pulled on public access television before he became a streamer.
• There is a tribute to Vinny's cat Ziggy from his Minecraft stream with an epitaph reverencing how the poor thing perished while Vinny was exploring the Nether. The monument is a three block high pillar with an item frame holding the string that spawned from Ziggy's death.
  Here lies Ziggy
  May his light touch us
  As the fire touched him.

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