Rat to E4
- Paulie
- Feb 26, 2023
- 6 min read
Paulie here, just a little note: We passed over 100 readers this week, which is quite fucking lovely! Thank you to everyone who’s been reading week in, week out and a very warm welcome to those who have joined us recently. Rat Depot relies on word of mouth to grow, if you enjoy anything you read or hear, please consider sharing it with your friends. It doesn’t cost a single penny to do but means the world to me and the people who collaborate with me that are sharing their work with you. Thanks for being here.
If you frequent Instagram or Tik Tok videos, you may have recently been the victim of some really badass phonk edits of chess games. The phonkification of anything remotely cool in short form video content is a plague. One that I am infected with. I recently went to the gym and caved, throwing on a phonk playlist to see what the vibe was. Within minutes I was benching a rowing machine, auditing my finances in my head and writing this letter. Since the release of The Queen’s Gambit (2020), chess has seen a massive resurgence in popularity, both from people wanting to play and to watch. Twitch streaming chess players have become micro-celebrities, with far more reach than ever before. Twitch streamers who traditionally made other content have also turned to the game, including people like Charlie White who beat fellow streamer xQc a short-lived mentee of none other than chess grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura. Needless to say, chess has become a bit of a media melting pot; from sexy TV depictions, to high-profile Twitch tournaments to even the humble chess phonk edit of a knight doing cool L-shaped horse-ry.
But even before Anya Taylor-Joy taught people how sexy chess could be, chess was sexy. Let’s explore chess in a variety of forms, and then everyone can challenge me on chess.com and ruin my ELO.
Geri's Game
As established in a previous letter, Pixar - especially early Pixar - rips. One iconic Pixar short which has perhaps been shelved in the archives of our brains, is Geri’s Game from 1998. Directed by Jan Pinkava - who would go on to co-direct and co-write Ratatouille (2007) - the 5 minute short won the Academy Award for Best Short Film.
The eponymous Geri, an adorable old man, takes approximately 5 minutes to play chess with himself in a leafy liminal park, slowly tottering from each chair in order to play each turn. In either chair, Geri’s mannerisms change - one Geri plays his moves quickly and has a youthful arrogance, while the other takes time to put his glasses back on so he can see the board, weighing up the moves with more scrutiny. As glasses Geri proceeds to get his wrinkly cheeks clapped by youthful Geri, the older gent fakes a heart attack in order to switch the board around, thus defeating himself. Geri then hands over a pair of dentures, presumably the winners prize. Geri puts the dentures in and grins to himself.
