Welcome to the first installment of The Tyler Effect's award-winning new mini-series, On Hobos, Available on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc.
“The only thing we have to fear,” Franklin “DelaNoLegs” Roosevelt was fond of saying, “are dirty, gin-soaked Hobos.”
Roosevelt, the nation's first electric president, had it out for Hobos from day one. His wealthy ancestry and aristocratic upbringing brought along with it a natural disdain not only of the poor but also of those whose roots were both shallow and only absorbed booze.
Riding the clout of his surname, Roosevelt began his career in politics by serving in the New York state legislature, where his sweeping reforms helped cripple New York City's Tammany Hall machine, a gargantuan building-sized amalgamation of cogs and gears and pistons and flame that waged constant coal-fired war against King Kong, NYC's most famous mayor until Giuliani. His success here led Woodrow Wilson to hire him as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, until Roosevelt resigned, citing personal reasons. Here it is believed that Roosevelt first started his feud with The Hobos.
Some say that Roosevelt had always hated Hobos, with their stench and their lack of dental hygiene and their devil-may-care freedom. Some say that a Hobo once bested Roosevelt in a game of lawn tennis, whereby young Franklin was forever shamed to have been walloped by such a dirty yet spry creature. Some say that FDR actually liked Hobos, keeping several nearby at all times for political and social consultation. But they were all wrong.
Roosevelt's undying and unwalking hatred of Hobos began at sea, during his time as Naval Secretary. It was in May of 1920 when, by chance, Roosevelt's passing battleship sailed by a junk belonging to the famous Sea Hobo, Captain Hambone Strange. Captain Ham-Strange followed the battleship to port, latching his junk to the back of it with a length of rope fashioned out of lint and chicken marrow. At port, which mysteriously was located in Lebanon, Kansas, the gentle and drunken Sea Hobo kindly asked Secretary Roosevelt if he could perhaps spare a swig of brandy in exchange for a sturdy lint and chicken marrow rope. “Best you'll find,” slurred Captain Strange-Bone, and he was right, for it was the only of its kind ever to be made, for all eternity.
When Roosevelt declined, upturning his nose, the enraged Hobo Captain mustered up all of his strength, vomited on Roosevelt's snakeskin shoes, and laid an ancient SeaBo curse upon him, a curse which would take revenge on FRD's legs, legs Captain Strange hated so much, legs The Captain did not deem fit for the sea. “If ever from this Sea-Life you sever,” recited Hambone, his eyes black as pitch and the cries of his Dolphin Army audible throughout the harbor, “Forever will your legs work never.” Outraged and confused, Roosevelt stomped off, cleaned his shoes, and resigned from his position as Naval Secretary soon thereafter, in July of 1920.
Just a little over a year later, while on vacation, Roosevelt fell ill with a condition the doctors foolishly identified as the poliomyelitis disease. Roosevelt, however, knew differently. He thought back to the brine-crusted Sea Hobo that, a year and one month prior, had enchanted his legs. He knew that, as soon as he resigned from his position of Naval Secretary, he had enacted the ancient and unknowable rites of the SeaBo, a dark, moonshine-centric magic which Roosevelt would never understand and could thus never reverse. All Roosevelt could do was seek out an undocumented scientist who attached to Roosevelt a pair of blasphemous mechanical legs, legs that could support Roosevelt for short periods of time, all the while sapping his life from him until they returned to the sitting position, a mysterious chair with wheels that served as a rough prototype for today's modern Segway scooters.
That very day, FDR vowed to take revenge on all Hobos, land and sea alike. In roughly 12 years time, Roosevelt would be president of The United States, and, now more machine than man, the time had come to enact his Hobo eradication program, A New Deal.
But The Hobos weren't about to go down without a fight.
Stay tuned for the next installment of The Tyler Effect's financial disaster, On Hobos, before the government finds out what the hell is going on.