Life On Bogota is a Minecraft Let's Play series starring Zisteau and his friends/family. It's an unusual and very memorable series, marked by dark, somewhat esoteric humor, frequent detours for surreal side-quests, and the interactions between the various players. These are:
- Zisteau, the central player, whose perspective we the series view from.
- Dogdoc
- Nimmrod, who joins in episode 6.
- Stickicide, who joins in episode episode 9.
The series ended rather abruptly on May 3rd, 2012, after just 30 videos. It has largely been forgotten, but has something of a cult following due to its distinctive, unique atmosphere and style of comedy. Imagine Aqua Teen Hunger Force or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, talking place in Minecraft (with a healthy dose of Howard the Duck and Transformers), and you have the idea.
Tropes in this series include:
- Added Alliterative Appeal: The players' names are Tyler, Tanner, Troy and Ted.
- all lowercase letters: dogdoc's name.
- And I Must Scream: Nimmrod is briefly trapped in an enormous spiderweb which will take him ages to fall through. Zisteau, for his part, puts on some elevator music while watching the descent.
- Author Appeal: Zisteau has a passion for 1980s camp, with special attention to Howard the Duck, The Fly (1986) and Transformers. As with his Mindcrack series, his houses tended to be vertically-focused, with numerous levels atop one another.
- Bizarrchitecture: While trapped in Cleve Land, the group builds and lives in a home they call Brundletower, a tower made of giant mushrooms with a staircase at the front which resembles a fly's proboscis (hence the name).
- Booby Trap: Stickicide sets up an obvious trap consisting of a circle of door around a pressure plate. If you step onto the plate, all the doors close at once, trapping you, and setting off the TNT below you. It's left out in the open, so nobody else falls for it... but then one their dogs walks in.
- Butt-Monkey: dogdoc is the primary victim of the group's jokes.
- Comedic Sociopathy: the main source of humor in the series.
- Cool Gate: The teleporter to Cleve Land is a rail surrounded by a tunnel of glass and lava.
- Creation Sequence: "Resurrection" and "Dark Influence."
-
Crosses the Line Twice: Everything that happens to the group's pet wolves. - A Day in the Limelight: Stickicide and his creations are the focus of "Stickiscape". The only person to appear in the last episode is Zisteau.
- Due to the Dead: The running gag of the wolves' repeated deaths is often followed by their funerals, usually with a mocking headstone and eulogy. At one point Zisteau attempts to fill a snowman's grave with snow, only for Nimmrod to object that this is akin to filling a human's grave with flesh.
- Elaborate Underground Base: Stickicide has one by the end of the series.
- Formula-Breaking Episode: After being a relatively normal multiplayer series for ten episodes, the group is inexplicably teleported to another world (Cleve Land) which they then set about escaping from in a much more actively comedic and structured adventure than we'd seen before.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: All of the characters, but especially Zisteau and Nimmrod.
- In-Series Nickname: Z for Zisteau and Stick for Stickicide. The obscure extra group member alluded to in the final episodes is at one point compared to one of the Marauders from Harry Potter.
- Kick the Dog: The group is constantly killing both their own and each other's pet wolves quite callously. Some memorable cases include:
- One dog accidentally being walled off inside of a structure; they realize it a while later but never both trying to save it.
- The example mentioned under Booby Trap.
- While most of these deaths can be explained as accidents, the instance where Zisteau beats their defenseless pet snowman to death, apparently for fun, can't be.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: Stickicide has one beneath a mountain.
- No Ending: Ended without much note, just as the group were planning to build an ambitious amusement park project.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: The series is mostly a vanilla Minecraft multiplayer series, until the Cleve Land arc, which lasts six episodes and takes place in something resembling an adventure map.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The Cleve Land arc occurs because Minecraft's 1.8 update had just been released and Zisteau wanted to have a new way to experience it.
- Rule of Cool: The reasoning behind the group's home being built on a cliff face above a lake.
- Running Gag: Several:
- The players killing their pet wolves, accidentally or otherwise.
- During the Cleve Land arc, references are constantly made to Howard the Duck and The Fly (1986).
- Making statues of other players when they aren't present for an episode to fill in for them, starting with Stickicide being replaced by a pumpkin-headed scarecrow during the Cleve Land arc.
- "Fungal punch" becomes a euphemism for virtually any action, after Zisteau gets injured by a giant mushroom growing too fast.
- The players killing one another over cookies.
- The Siege: The group accidentally ends up spending an entire episode trapped in a village being attacked by a horde of slimes, appropriately titled "Slimepocalypse." As it turns out, the real danger is the iron golems.
- Techno Babble: Stickicide's plan to rescue the group from Cleve Land consists of a lot of discussion of "flux capacitors" and dimensional tears.
- Ungrateful Bastard: As soon as Stickicide arrives to rescue the group from Cleve Land, they immediately start mocking him and his plans (not that this is unusual behaviour for them).
