Rockin' The Image
Sons of Butcher (2005-2006) was a Canadian animated TV show based on the Canadian rock band of the same name and starring its three members, Sol Butcher, Ricky Butcher and Doug Borski. By day they run a butcher shop, but by night they form a rock band. They may seem at first like a normal group, but in every episode the three witness or create some weird and twisted moments. It's best to leave all sense of reality at the door when you watch this show.
The animation was done entirely in Adobe Flash, except the three main characters, who had their actors' heads recorded live and superimposed in the show.
The series aired on Teletoon's Detour block for 2 seasons and 26 episodes.
The show extended into real life as the trio released three CDs and had a tour across Canada.
Episodes can be viewed on the creators' YouTube channel, Massive Xplosion
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This series provides examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Sol and Ricky's dad Arpo Butcher treated them like crap, non-stop. He never referred to Sol as anything other than "Shithead".
- Of course he still cares about them, which he shows in one episode where he comes back to life as a man made of butcher meat with a jack-o-lantern for a head to kill the greedy producer. (It makes sense in context.)
- All-Natural Fire Extinguisher: In "Buryin' The Past", when "Le Grotesque" catches on fire, Doug gets himself, Sol, and Ricky out by peeing on the fire in front of them.
- And a Diet Coke: Tends to be the punchline whenever Ricky orders food.
- Art Evolution: The second season features better-quality rotorscoping for the protagonists.
- Back from the Dead: Rudy the Janitor dies in his introductory episode, but is back without explanation in a subsequent episode.
- Numerous other background characters would die in one episode only to return in subsequent ones.
- Badass Longcoat: Doug gets one when he joins a tabletop RPG group.
- Band Toon
- Beard of Sorrow: Sol Butcher has one of these in the pilot episode, and it reappears several times through the series. He actually refers to it as his "Alcoholic Beard".
- Big Eater: Ricky.Ricky: I better take it easy tonight, I got a gig tonight. Let's go with the fried chicken teats, the breaded steak with brown 'sorce' deep fried, extra fried bacon-wrapped meatballs extra salt ok? Double fried refried panfried fries, now does that come with the chili cheese fries? It does? Ok, extra cheese, extra chili, double deep fried. Ok, triple decker roast beef sandwich, each layer a large pizza and 'torse' it in the deep fryer would ya? Also can I get a bag of low-carb 'chipes' and a diet soda, do you deep fry that here?
- Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Not only is Bigfoot real, but he also likes to dress up like a woman and play Jenga.
- Big "NO!": Sol, When he is threatened with having his Engine Room Privileges revoked.
- Bizarre Beverage Use: In one episode, Doug seems to think that whiskey is a perfectly good liquid to use to extinguish fire, no matter how many times the whiskey just makes the fires worse.
- Black Comedy Rape: One episode is about Ricky suing a pig farmer for sexual assault, not by the farmer himself, but by his pigs!
- Cloudcuckoolander: Pretty much all three of the main characters are this. The difference is simply WHAT they are cuckoo about. Sol is about the art of butchery, Ricky is about being a rock god and having sex with butt-ugly women, and Doug is about masturbation and cleaning. Of course, those are the only subjects that are constant in the series, more often then not they start going off on other subjects at the drop of a hat.Doug: Why would you attach spinning blades to a cleaning robot?!Sol: You know what Doug? I have no idea! Not one!
- Canon Immigrant: Most of the elderly characters in the show take their character models from Jay Ziebarth (aka ZEEBARF)'s popular Flash game Disorderly.
- Catchphrase: Doug with "Bitch, Are you fo' real?"
- Cluster F-Bomb: Fuck The Shit contains only six words, four of them are swears and two are just different versions of the other two swears. And it is AWESOME!
- Extreme Omnivore: Again, Ricky. In the episode where he willingly ingests a tapeworm to lose weight, he uses that as an excuse to eat anything he sees, which includes raw chickens, a blender and even a peanut butter sandwich, with tractor tires as the bread.
- The Faceless: Arpo Butcher, Sol and Ricky's dad. When he is seen in flashbacks, his face is cut from the camera and only his beard can be glimpsed.
- Groin Attack: Sol falls down a fire escape and lands on the handle bars of a bicycle so hard that it caused him spit out both his testicles or so he thinks. They're actually bull balls Ricky put in his coffee. To which he stated, "Terry? Barry?! I COUGHED UP MY BALLS!"
- Hurricane of Euphemisms: When Sol decides to find replacement balls, he asks a cook if he has any. This leads the both of them to go back and forth with different names for them. During the credits of that same episode, the two make a list even LONGER.
- I Am a Humanitarian: The hicks that run the local slaughterhouse seem enthusiastic at the idea of "city-boy bacon".
- Incredibly Lame Pun: By the truckload. In one instance, Ricky finds some field berries and utters "What are those, cherries? Wouldn't be the first time I took cherries in the woods." The musical cue pretty much acknlowedges how lame a pun that is.
- Ink-Suit Actor: Martial artist and B-movie action star Ram Punchington is voiced by and based on martial artist and B-movie action star Jeff Wincott.
- MacGyvering: One episode has Ricky and Doug making a bomb out of pig carcasses, pig excrement, a gas leak and a wick made of their own clothes. Later, they make a "Publicity Rocket 3.0" out of a corn silo, hay stacks and gasoline.
- Macho Camp: In the episode "Workin' the Steel", Ricky tries to get advice on how to score with women from two guys who fit this trope. They're fond of calling anything that doesn't fit within their view of masculinity "queer". Ricky goes along with it at first since their ways do appear to work, but after the two guys insult his music and Ricky hears the music they perform to win over girls (serenading them while playing acoustic guitar), he calls "bullshit" on them and goes back to his old ways: getting girls with rock music.
- Malaproper: Sol dishes those out non-stop."This box is like a Luigi board. Dad's talking to us from hell, and I'm hearing him loud and queer!"
- Multiple Head Case: Ricky encounters a three headed woman at the Circus while lamenting about wanting to see the Fat Lady's boobs. The woman offers to give Ricky advice under one condition, Ricky's guess at the condition? "Four-way!"
- Religion of Evil: In one episode, a priest came to Sol's therapy group to talk about the danger of cults, and what does he end up doing? Recruiting people to join his church... to be eaten by a giant silkworm so it could make silk to be weaved into a Hot-Air Balloon so he could reach God.
- Running Gag: In every episode of the first season, the Sons Of Butcher Quality Meats shop's front window is destroyed in some way.
- Sequelitis: In-universe example, Ram Punchington foregoes doing Angel Death Avenger 5, because "everyone knows sequels lose their steam after the fourth sequel", instead making Angel Death Avenger: The Awakening, which is a prequel.
- Serial Escalation: Most of the episodes have these moments, but this was best defined in the episode when the three had to explain why they were parked in a Handicapped spot so as to avoid getting a ticket. It starts with Ricky saying how he became paralyzed from slipping on a tube of lube while being a rock-god, and in order to be cured he has to drink the breast milk of the literal mother of all strippers. Doug then says how he had to pick up the cleaning of the shop, and that his cleaning was so bright that he was called by the Canadian NASA to clean up the dark side of the moon (To which he would do for tax-exempt status). Sol interrupts then saying he'll give the real story, saying that he had to take care of his paralyzed brother and realized he could find a cure by going out to sea, gouging out the eye of a Kraken, breathing through gills in his balls, finding the legendary Meatlantis so the people could grow him a spine from a spine-plant for his brother. All before they have a war a hundred years later against the Shark-People atop an underwater volcano.
- All these stories end up being pointless as they all end with Ricky being cured, so they end up getting the ticket anyway.
- Shout-Out: The band's inability to keep a drummer for more than an episode is a deliberate Shout Out to This is Spın̈al Tap.
- Status Quo Is God: Invoked at the end of one episode which had slight character development and Doug causing an entire cruise ship of people to die. This ends with Ricky saying, "Well, Why don't we all go back to the shop and pretend all this never happened. Like usual."
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Doug's baby which turned out to be an exceedingly large kidney stone.
