Y’know, Liquid does have a point. Ask a kid these days who the heck Bugs Bunny is and you’ll get a blank stare, but Big Chungus? The morbidly obese rabbit that rose to prominence in 2018 as a humorous way of describing overweight video game and cartoon characters? Everyone knows who Big Chungus is, and that’s all through the power of memes.
That’s what Liquid is trying to explain at the end of Metal Gear Solid, just after you shoot enough missiles into Metal Gear Rex. At least, I think that’s what he was trying to explain. I sort of zoned out after the first 15 minutes of Liquid’s speech. It started off about nuclear proliferation, then genetic engineering, and then there was this two-minute digression about memes and Big Chungus.
We gotta give Tom Schalk some credit though: he does an amazing Solid Snake and Liquid Snake impression. And noting that Big Chungus's rise to fame came from a 3.4-second clip some time back in the 1940s? Incredible. Inspiring. It really does show how memes have become more powerful than truth or even meaning.
So powerful that Big Chungus is even making his way out of memes and into honest to God video games. At the end of March, World of Mayhem, a fighting game based in the Looney Tunes universe, announced that Big Chungus would arrive in the game as a playable character.
It was sort of an April Fools thing, but also totally not an April Fools thing.
And if you’re looking for Metal Gear Solid news, Konami might have finally given up on trying to make MGS games without Kojima on board and is looking to license out the IP. That’s just a rumor, though, so take that news with a grain of salt. Or a Big Chungus-sized salt shaker.