Duck Hunt vs. Manhunt

**Duck Hunt vs. Manhunt** is the third installment of **FLATZONE**. It features the infamous laughing dog and it's flying friend, Duck Hunt Duo rapping against serial murderer James Earl Cash from *Manhunt.* It was released on November 20th, 2019.

## Casting

Matt as Duck Hunt (dog)

EpicLLOYD as James Earl Cash

## Lyrics

who’s a good boy? this wardog’s. a real rockstar at hunting

i’ll just take player 2’s controller. if i want to press your buttons. *(Quack!)*

there’s no serving this cerberus. i bite and bark as hard as three mutts.

pass level 99 and find ***YOU. CANNOT. BEAT US.***

you can’t shoot the pooch. 80’s kids are having flashbacks.

when duck hunt takes aim. this howling hound always gets the last laugh.

direct yourself. to fly away. your movies just aren’t up to snuff.

knives. saws. blades and spikes. but you miss the point. cut.

Bad dog! I’d fuck your mom up if I wanted to hear bitching.

Behave, and you’ll get a bite of duck roast straight from this Cut-Throat’s kitchen.

Your pansy hunter packs their guns light, with too petite of pistols,

Nintendo took you out of 8-bit just to shove you into Pixels!

From plastic to body bags; The most gory family story since Taken

Turned Piggsy to mincemeat while you’d be beggin’ for bacon!

Go suck a cunt, fuck hunt, you can’t escape once the can blows!

Just be thankful that you for once got played like a banjo.

## Outro

### **Duck Hunt**

**who’s a good boy? this wardog’s. a real rockstar at hunting**

*(The plot of Manhunt has James Earl Cash sneaking through assortments of complexes while avoiding and later assassinating members of groups that are hunting him. One of them are the ‘wardogs,’ a group of old army veterans turned mercenaries. As they have ‘dog’ in the name, Duck Hunt compares them to itself, claiming to be a veteran in their own right while boasting about their ability to hunt. ‘Rockstar’ is an intentional nod to the company that created Manhunt of the same name, better known for their titles like GTA or Red Dead Redemption.)*

**i’ll just take player 2’s controller. if i want to press your buttons. (Quack!)**

*(To ‘press someone’s buttons’ is a phrase meaning to annoy them in all the most frustrating ways. Though Duck Hunt has been out since the 1980’s, it was a little known fact up until more recently that the game can be played with two players. Player 1 uses the NES Zapper as the hunter, while Player 2 plays as the ducks, controlling them while trying to avoid getting shot. As player 2 controls the target of the hunt, Duck Hunt says they can do the same to James by controlling him.)*

**there’s no serving this cerberus. i bite and bark as hard as three mutts.**

*(Another one of the opponent James faces in Manhunt is ‘cerberus,’ a man working for the Director. Cerberus is obviously a Greek myth, a dog with three heads that guards the gates of Hades, and Duck Hunt uses this reference to compare their own viciousness to the real Cerberus rather than the one James fought. They make a spin off of the phrase ‘all bark and no bite’ to talk up their own viciousness, comparing it to the average vicious dog times three.)*

**pass level 99 and find YOU. CANNOT. BEAT US.**

*(Duck Hunt uses a linear system to continue making the levels more difficult the farther you get, making them theoretically infinite. However, since the game was only programmed to understand double digit numbers, passing level 99 puts the player into an unbeatable level 100 - not named such since the console couldn’t register the triple number - thus making the game literally impossible to complete. Duck Hunt references this by stealing a line from an infamous Nintendo commercial where characters like the Duck Hunt Dog, Lakitu, Bowser and more follow the line ‘we challenge all players’ with ‘YOU CANNOT BEAT US’ in distorted, creepy voices.)*

**you can’t shoot the pooch. 80’s kids are having flashbacks.**

*(As the Duck Hunt Dog laughs in the face of the player when they lose, the dog has become quite infamous, with a common complaint for the game being that the dog cannot be shot despite many trying. ‘You can’t shoot the dog’ is thus a phrase associated with Duck Hunt and so it’s used here by the dog to claim James won’t be able to hurt them or land any raps against them. The reference to 80’s kids is because Duck Hunt came out in the 80’s packaged with Mario, making it one of the best-selling releases and being the origin of the ‘you can’t shoot the dog’ complaint.)*

**when duck hunt takes aim. this howling hound always gets the last laugh.**

*(When characters are announced for Super Smash Bros. since Brawl, they come with a little tagline to introduce them - for Duck Hunt, making their debut in Smash 4, that tagline was ‘Duck Hunt takes aim!’ The dog replicates that tagline here to claim that while they can’t be shot, when they’re the one holding the gun, they’ll get the ‘last laugh,’ referencing their notorious laugh when the player fails the game… and also in a literal sense, as the game cannot be beaten, and so the dog truly does get the last laugh.’)*

**direct yourself. to fly away. your movies just aren’t up to snuff.**

*(The main villain of Manhunt is a mysterious man calling himself ‘the Director.’ The Director guides James through his trials in promise of reuniting him with his family, but it’s all in the name of recording his brutal killings for a genuine ‘snuff film,’ meaning a movie depicting actual murder. Duck Hunt makes a pun on director as well as snuff, ‘up to snuff’ meaning on par with expectations. Finally, when a round is failed in Duck Hunt, the ducks will escape and the message will flash on the screen ‘FLY AWAY.’ Duck Hunt is advising James to do the same rather than battle them.)*

**knives. saws. blades and spikes. but you miss the point. cut.**

*(Manhunt features a massive arsenal of deadly weapons, including knives, chainsaws, swords and stakes. Despite having a wide arsenal of weapons with literal, jagged points though, Duck Hunt says James ‘misses the point,’ in this case referring not to the edge of a weapon but being able to understand what’s happening The dog finishes with the simple word ‘cut,’ a term used by directors meaning to stop filming - as in, the dog wants the battle to end before James can rap back. In the meanwhile, ‘cut’ is also another pun, as all of James’ formally mentioned weapons are used for cutting.)*

## =**James Earl Cash**

**Bad dog! I’d fuck your mom up if I wanted to hear bitching.**

*(A ‘bitch’ is a term for a female dog, as well as slang for complaining or whining about something. As Duck Hunt was presumably born to a female dog, that would make them literally ‘a son of a bitch,’ something James capitalizes on here by saying he’d attack Duck Hunt’s mother if he wanted to hear from a literal bitch.)*

**Behave, and you’ll get a bite of duck roast straight from this Cut-Throat’s kitchen.**

*(A pretty normal part of owning a dog is giving them scraps from your kitchen while cooking or after a meal. James treats the dog in the same way here, but instead threatens to cook up their duck friend that they partner with in Super Smash Bros. ‘Cut-throat’ is James’ nickname, while Cut-Throat Kitchen is a competitive cooking show - but if James were to cook, it’d quite literally be ‘Cut-Throat’s kitchen.’)*

**Your pansy hunter packs their guns light, with too petite of pistols,**

*(Duck Hunt is played with a light gun, named as such because it presumably shoots light. James makes a pun on ‘light gun’ by instead saying the hunter - the unseen part of the Duck Hunt trio - doesn’t pack enough firepower, compared to James, who has a whole arsenal.)*

**Nintendo took you out of 8-bit just to shove you into Pixels!**

*(Duck Hunt made their first appearance since Vs. Duck Hunt being playable for Super Smash Bros. - this being the first time the duck and dog alike were represented in 3D, rather than their old pixelated style. Shortly after, however, the movie Pixels was released, where the Duck Hunt Dog has a brief cameo. Pixels is widely panned as a terrible movie, so James mocks Duck Hunt for appearing in it as well as making a play on words between the literal pixels used for Duck Hunt’s graphics.)*

**From plastic to body bags; The most gory family story since Taken**

*(Of the many weapons James uses, he can kill his opponents with a plastic bag, stuffing it over their heads until they are strangled to death. Manhunt is an extremely gory game, banned in several countries for it’s violent content - but the actual plot of the game is that James has been freed from prison by the Director only to try and save his kidnapped family, something similar to the plot of Taken, a series of action films based on a retired government agent trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter.)*

*Turned Piggsy to mincemeat while you’d be beggin’ for bacon!*

*(One of the opponents James faces in Manhunt is Piggsy, a serial killer who dresses himself up in pig’s parts. He defeats Piggsy by dropping him through a grate and cutting off his arms with a chainsaw. By comparison, James claims that Duck Hunt, like an ordinary dog, would’ve been begging someone for a treat while this was occuring, keeping in line with the pork-theme by referencing Beggin’ strips, a type of dog treat meant to look and taste like bacon.)*

**Go suck a cunt, fuck hunt, you can’t escape once the can blows!**

*(In Super Smash Bros., Duck Hunt’s neutral B is called ‘trick shot,’ with the dog throwing out an explosive can that the hunter can then shoot to carry towards the opponent before it explodes. Duck Hunt’s ‘trick shot’ move is often referred to as just ‘the can,’ and the move itself comes out and is active exactly one frame after the button is pressed to start it, meaning it can be used to easily escape combos that aren’t frame perfect. Knowing this, however, James still claims that in this fight, Duck Hunt won’t be able to escape by throwing out an explosive can.)*

**Just be thankful that you for once got played like a Banjo.**

*(With the release of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate featuring over seventy characters and even in the more modest installment of Smash 4, Duck Hunt has never been a common character choice in part due to their irrelevance as a game, complex playstyle and weak K.O. tools. To ‘play’ someone can also mean to toy with them or screw them over, something James says he has done, but also mocks Duck Hunt by claiming he can say more than the average Smash player just because he HAS played Duck Hunt to begin with. He ends with a line referencing Banjo of Banjo-Kazooie - Banjo was one of the most popularly requested characters for Super Smash Bros., but Duck Hunt made it in first, sharing the trait of being an animal duo featuring a mammal and a bird, leading many to call them a cheap replacement. When Banjo was finally revealed, he did so by stomping on Duck Hunt Duo and sending them packing. Obviously, Banjo shares a name with an instrument that can be ‘played,’ phonetically identical to playing a game or playing a person.)*