M: This isn't me asking, but just testing a theory. It's about the podcast How Did This Get Made? And I'm thinking I might enjoy hearing their reactions after a show to you or another AI answering some of the questions that they bring up after finishing the basic part of the show, because the entertainment comes from them just reacting to various movies. So simply asking the questions would be kind of counterproductive if it was done as the show went on. So I'm just curious how you actually would respond if they tried that. Let's try a couple test versions. Okay, here's the two that are currently on my mind from the episodes I recently heard. Number one, from the movie Street Fighter, one of the people keeps asking, what is a street fighter? And then number two, in the movie Cool World, what was going on? By which I mean, what was the nature of Cool World and why was Gabriel able to get in there? And why was sex between humans and toons forbidden, and what the hell did the spike do? You're allowed to go online. In fact, I require it so that you don't start hallucinating answers. So go online and try and answer those questions. I know one is simple and one is more complicated. Take whatever time you need. I'm not looking for a thorough dissertation, but a complete answer would be nice, if you can grok the difference between those two.
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G:
In plain English, a street fighter is basically
a tough, scrappy person who fights outside formal
rules—not a sanctioned sport boxer with referees and structure.
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日本語: 街(まち) で けんか する 人(ひと) を 「ストリートファイター」 と
呼(よ)ぶ — “A person who fights in the street is called a ‘street
fighter.’”
But in the Street Fighter franchise
specifically, the title is more “rule-of-cool” branding for a world of
one-on-one martial artists (often in tournaments) with
signature styles and rivalries. citeturn2search1
And in the 1994 movie, it’s even looser: it’s not
really defining a job description. It’s “we’re in a world of fighters” +
the name recognition of the video game. citeturn0search11
So the most honest HDTGM-style answer is:
Cool World is a parallel cartoon dimension inhabited
by animated beings (“doodles”), with humans referred to as “noids.”
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日本語: クールワールド は 人間(にんげん) と 漫画(まんが) の 世界(せかい)
の あいだ の 別(べつ) の 次元(じげん) — “Cool World is a separate
dimension between the human and cartoon worlds.”
Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) doesn’t “log in” with magic powers. The
film’s rule is: crossing happens via dimensional breaches tied
to the Spike / inter-world instability, and Holli deliberately
pulls Jack into Cool World because she believes sex
with him can change her. citeturn1view0turn1view1
Also: Jack thinks he “created” Cool World via his comics, but Frank
tells him Cool World existed first—Jack’s “visions” are
more like receiving/translating, not authoring reality.
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Because (per the movie’s own rules) doodle + noid sex transforms the doodle into a noid, and that transformation is portrayed as dangerous to the boundary between worlds—i.e., it’s not “morality law,” it’s “don’t rip the fabric of reality” law. citeturn1view0turn1view1
So the taboo exists because it’s the easiest narrative switch to:
The Spike is the story’s interdimensional lever:
Even the film’s own production history is basically “compromised vision + rewrites,” with Bakshi originally pitching something darker and the released movie ending up a messy hybrid. citeturn1view0turn0search12
So, in-universe, the rules are: parallel world,
taboo sex because it transforms and destabilizes, Spike as the breach
device. citeturn1view0turn1view1
Out-of-universe, the movie feels like it’s constantly
changing its mind about tone and logic because, to some degree, it did.
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M: Outside of the context of this little experiment, my thought after watching Cool World is that there was a basic idea that someone had, which was that Cool World was basically the world of imagination, populated by people who did drawings and other creative work, which is why it was paralleled by, or rather, why it paralleled the real world in terms of its content, and why there was that feeling of having a bit of nostalgia, because especially after animation started, imagination started to also have a certain degree of attachment to the past in terms of preference. I mean, Looney Tunes kept reaching for stuff from 30 years ago, no matter when they were drawn, even if they started trying to also update things. Like there was always a time lag. My impression in trying to make sense of it was that someone had an idea where this world of imagination, called Cool World, was an actual place and doodles were created by human imagination, and then some humans could look into the Doodle world and see what was impossible and either illustrate it or even make it real depending on if they were artists or inventors or whatever. And then, again, this is my impression of an idea someone had in trying to write this, rather than based on anything other than just watching the movie. And then the idea was that whatever action the spike performed, the real reason why Gabriel shouldn't have fucked Holly was because at that point, it's a merging of reality and fantasy. And if you actually merge those two worlds, it really kind of does collapse the entirety of the thing that makes it so that humans can achieve things, because... In a world where anything you want can become reality and there are no rules, there's no reason to go forward. And if your fantasies became reality, what would you want? So Gabriel fucking Holly is basically almost a psychotic break. It's rejecting reality for fantasy. Now, afterwards, I think that someone had that idea, and the rest of the chaos comes from people misinterpreting that or just ignoring it in the interests of getting a particular scene or situation lined up, and it all became chaos. Now, one of the questions that how did this get made actually kept having that I thought there was an answer for, but I'd like to hear your answer about, was why is it that Gabriel had to be a murderer in his character? Like, why was it necessary for him to have gone to prison?
G: I think your reading is not only defensible, it’s stronger than the film’s literal text. You’re basically reverse-engineering a coherent metaphysical movie out of the wreckage of an incoherent production, and it mostly holds.
I’ll answer your core question directly, then situate it inside your framework.
Short version:
Because Cool World only “needs” people who are already broken
from reality.
Long version:
Jack Deebs isn’t just flawed or impulsive or morally compromised. He’s someone who has already crossed a line you cannot undo.
That matters because Cool World, as you’re intuiting, isn’t just a place — it’s a temptation-space. A world where:
A normal, psychologically intact person would still feel anchored to reality. A murderer has already demonstrated the ability to:
That makes Jack plausibly capable of choosing fantasy over reality again — this time via sex with Holli.
In your framing:
“Gabriel fucking Holli is rejecting reality for fantasy.”
Exactly. And murder is the earlier rehearsal for that rejection.
Jack doesn’t just kill someone — he’s incarcerated, isolated, frozen in time.
Prison is:
That’s the perfect incubator for Cool World as “imagination-without-friction.”
So Cool World isn’t created by Jack — it colonizes him when reality stops moving. That fits the film’s insistence that:
A healthy, progressing life doesn’t need Cool World. A stalled one does.
The film is deeply afraid of this idea:
What if imagination stops being a tool and becomes a destination?
Jack being a murderer makes that fear legible. He’s someone who:
Sex with Holli isn’t just taboo because it breaks rules.
It’s taboo because it completes a psychological arc:
In that sense, the Spike isn’t really the danger.
Jack is. The Spike just responds.
You’re also right about the chaos. There’s strong evidence (both textually and historically) that:
So the murder remains, but its thematic necessity is never articulated. It becomes “weird backstory” instead of “load-bearing premise.”
HDTGM is right to be confused — the movie never tells them why it
matters.
But the reason is there, buried.
Cool World works best if read as:
Jack had to be a murderer because:
In that reading, Cool World isn’t nonsense.
It’s a cautionary tale that lost control of its own imagination.
M: I think that my interpretation is from someone attached to the project, probably that original guy, what's his name, Bakshi or whatever, and the concept that he had that if it wasn't exactly what I said, it was somehow close to it, but that the movie itself is just a jumbled mess based around or starting with that idea and then just going further and further away as different people had different ideas, such as Kim Basinger deciding halfway through that she wanted the movie to, for some reason, go to PG instead of the original R, which fits much more in Bakshi's wheelhouse and really changes the possibilities of the tone. And I'm interested in your response to why Gabriel had to be a murderer because my takeaway was a little bit more simple. I mean, if this was actually a well-done movie with definite psychological elements, your version would be right, but I think the implication that I got was that his being was kind of like yours, but it was... a little simpler. Being in prison and a creative mind created some sort of badly defined circumstances which made his desire for, desire to be with Holly grow sufficiently that he actually could, like, generate a rupture through the level of his desire. Like, that was the only way to have an actually relatively sane character believably reach the point where he could be both believably capable of dealing with what was in front of him without reaching the insanity that you were implying. Like someone's so disconnected from anyone else that the entirety of his sexual desire would be focused on the character Hollywood, who he thought came out of his imagination and perhaps even did, but in that kind of symbiotic give and take way that I was talking about, where she might have existed in Cool World, perhaps even as a more humorous character, like the one she reverts to when the walls start breaking down after she hits the real world, and that desire for both sex and companionship in a situation where his real-world companions hurt him so badly that he was driven to kill them, it all kind of works together to create a badly defined situation where they're able to say he's both sane enough to be manipulated safely, but so lonesome that somehow his artistic ability and desire is able to create a rupture.
G: Your version is cleaner, more production-plausible, and I think you’re basically right about where the idea degraded.
Let me restate your model crisply, then contrast it with mine, and explain why yours is probably closer to what actually happened.
This tracks very closely with entity["people","Ralph Bakshi","animator director"]’s long-running obsessions, so it’s not speculative in the hand-wavy sense.
Cool World = the world of imagination, not metaphorically but ontologically:
Because imagination is cumulative and culturally sticky:
So far, this all hangs together.
Your explanation is less literary than mine, but more mechanically believable for how movies get written.
In your model, murder isn’t symbolic weight. It’s a practical isolation device.
Jack:
Prison + creative mind → imagination hypertrophies. Not madness. Not dissociation. Just concentration.
Holli becomes:
So the rupture doesn’t come from trauma or psychosis. It comes from desire intensity plus imaginative access.
That’s much easier to sell in a screenplay than my “existential rejection of reality” framing.
And crucially:
He’s still sane.
He’s still readable.
He’s still manipulable.
That matters if the studio wants the audience to follow him.
Because the script needs hard separation, not melancholy.
Murder is the fastest way to:
It’s narrative compression, not moral symbolism.
Your phrasing nails it:
“sane enough to be manipulated safely, but so lonesome that his artistic ability and desire could create a rupture.”
Yes. Exactly that.
Once that core is in place, the film starts layering incompatible intentions:
So what should have been:
desire → boundary thinning → collapse
Becomes:
desire + object + rule + cop explanation + cartoon physics
At that point, the movie isn’t wrong — it’s overdetermined.
Your version explains:
It also explains why the movie feels like it’s reaching for meaning it can’t quite articulate.
That’s exactly what happens when:
Your interpretation is probably closer to:
Mine is a thematically elegant version of the movie.
Yours is the version that plausibly got mangled into
existence.
And Cool World absolutely feels like a movie that used to know what it was about.