★★★              By Ambrose Vok                    October 20, 2090

My colleague Daphne Despondént of the Saratoga Cynic received a call a few weeks ago from an old friend now living in Rabat. This friend had been working for the estate of a recently deceased Moroccan oligarch whose mansion was requisitioned by the United Nations as a military headquarters for the ongoing war against the Galilean Moons. It fell upon the friend to clear out any personal or sensitive belongings in the mansion before the generals moved in, and this led to her discovering behind the bathroom wall, underneath a stack of tattered Beaver Hunt magazines and deformed Happy Meal toys, a dusty hard drive with the label “THE TRUTH.” Inspection revealed that the drive contained a movie, and at this point the friend contacted Daphne, the acquaintance of hers who knew the most about film, to ask whether this was worth anything. As it turned out, the contents of that drive were worth quite a bit, as the movie in question was the mythical director’s cut of the 2051 film Wonder Girl and the Super Puppies.

The children’s film didn’t make much of an impact when it was first released nearly 40 years ago. It’s a straightforward story of an eight-year-old superheroine who adopts a litter of stray puppies. As she soon discovers, the puppies each have their own superpowers, a result of the experiments their mad scientist breeder had performed before leaving them on the street. Together, Wonder Girl and the puppies battle the megalomaniacal corporation that threatens to put the neighborhood lemonade stands out of business. The film underperformed at the box office and was generally forgotten, until several years later when an internet group of film dumpster divers began noticing strange aspects of the film. The art direction that filled out the city’s streets contained at several points references to the Phobian genocide that had occurred a few years prior. There are bizarre jump cuts between scenes throughout the film that might imply certain bits had been cut out at the last minute. From around the film’s one-hour mark onward, Wonder Girl’s tongue appears to be replaced by rushed CG whenever visible. At times the puppies start barking and the characters seem to understand them with no explanation given for why. All these abnormalities led the internet investigators to theorize that there was another version of the film, and that it had been suddenly scrapped at the eleventh hour and replaced by the unremarkable version released in theaters.

By itself, this wouldn’t have meant much. Yes, these aspects of the film were strange, but film sets are uncanny places where weird things happen, and these parts of the film could have just been unorthodox solutions to unforeseen problems. Besides, internet denizens cook up wild theories about secret movies all the time (remember the whole craze about Neil Breen returning from the dead to make an adaptation of the gospels?), more for the entertainment value of a compelling mystery than out of actual evidence. But what made the theories about Wonder Girl stick was that the film’s director confirmed them. Marvin Hellenreich had enjoyed a moderately successful career as a television director before landing the gig for Wonder Girl, but was fired just before the film’s press tour began, a point when a film is usually finished. He never worked in the entertainment industry again, and did not surface at all in public life until two months after the internet theories arose. On July 13, 2059, he posted a video to his Panopticon profile testifying that he had made a very different movie for Real Human Not a Robot Pictures, and when the studio executives saw the film they panicked, fired him, blackballed him, and rushed out a much safer version of the film. He insisted that what he called “The Moldy Tongue Cut” of the film existed, but no one who knew about it had the guts to back him up on it. He also said in the video that “they’re out to get me,” and “I’m taking a huge risk just posting this,” and appeared frenetic throughout. Four days later, he was committed to a mental institution where he was diagnosed with severe schizophrenia. Three months after that, he died of an aneurysm. Most assessed the situation as a delusional man spurred on by the internet’s sleuthing to make himself the victim of a massive conspiracy. But as we now know, Mr. Hellenreich was telling the truth, and the internet theorists were right about everything.

To say that newly discovered Moldy Tongue Cut of Wonder Girl and the Super Puppies is an entirely different movie from the theatrical release would be a gargantuan understatement. This cut of the film transforms a throwaway piece of banal children’s content – the kind of thing you put on the holovision just to shut your kids up while you surreptitiously get zonked on technogoat sedatives – into one of the most grotesque things I have ever seen. To just give a taste of the sheer depravity of this film, let me explain why this version of the film is called the Moldy Tongue Cut. As you might expect, it does have a connection to the uncanny CG tongue in the theatrical release. As it turns out, there is a scene in this version in which Wonder Girl finds herself at an orgy run by the puppies and attended by most of the city’s rodent population. She gets swarmed by a cluster of rats and squirrels, and wakes up to find she has become infected with nearly a dozen diseases, several of which manifest on her tongue, which for the rest of the film is practically its own ecosystem of gyrating fungus. It’s a feature so disgusting and also so completely irrelevant to the rest of the film that I can only sit back in shock and wonder how this ever happened.

Here are the answers to a few more of the mysteries the theatrical cut of Wonder Girl left us with: the Phobian genocide references present throughout the art direction feel much more in place within the context of the Moldy Tongue Cut’s depiction of Rochester. While the theatrical version tries as hard as possible to make its setting something like an extension of Sesame Street, this version makes it far more akin to Taxi Driver. The film has an entirely different color grade that emphasizes the grime and sludge of the city, and the shots are framed wider (apparently the theatrical cut punched in on most of the designed wides), highlighting a background of blight and unrest, with more than a few random murders populating the mise-en-scène. The bizarre scene transitions in the theatrical cut do indeed mask deleted scenes that constitute an entire subplot, one that also explains why characters sometimes seem to understand the dogs. As it turns out, some of the puppies actually gain the ability to speak partway through, and when they do speak, they reveal themselves to have some political beliefs, particularly about Norwegians, that would have made Rush Limbaugh look progressive. Amazingly, the Moldy Tongue Cut does still follow the same main story as the theatrical release, about saving the lemonade stands, but frames its story in the polar opposite way. The guiding principle Mr. Hellenreich seemed to be using in constructing this version of the film was to make it as repulsive as possible at every opportunity.

The obvious question that follows: why? Why make a film about a child superhero and her adorable puppy sidekicks into a roided-up video nasty? Was its director high on moon meth or just plain insane? What was the impetus for a cut like this existing in the first place? Unfortunately, because the director of this cut is dead and studios like Real Human Not a Robot are notoriously opaque with everything that goes into their films, we will probably never know. On a charitable interpretation, the film’s juxtaposition of an innocuous premise with some of the most distasteful material I have ever seen could have a message attached to it, that of how genuinely horrifying stories are sanitized in the media landscape into something palatable to a middle-class audience that won’t cause any discomfort. If this is the case, the ultimate fate of the film itself being sanitized and marketed to that very audience is quite ironic. Perhaps this was meant to be pure exploitation, or perhaps Marvin Hellenreich just had a very twisted sense of humor. Whatever the case, the Moldy Tongue Cut is here now, and we have to deal with the consequences of it being out in the world.

All that said, the Moldy Tongue Cut is probably the better version of Wonder Girl and the Super Puppies. It is certainly the more stylistically cohesive one; it has a much clearer organizing principle behind it. Why such a principle was chosen is beyond my ability to decipher, but it is still there providing a center for the film. The original release of Wonder Girl and the Super Puppies was an unremarkable film, destined to be forgotten were it not for the specter of another version surrounding it. The Moldy Tongue Cut will not be forgotten. It certainly pays off whatever grand expectations those who preached its eventual arrival set for it. Should you go watch it whenever it becomes available to the public? If you’re into depraved, gruesome content, then you probably should. I cannot predict how any individual will react to Wonder Girl and the Super Puppies’ Moldy Tongue Cut, but I can guarantee that they will not be bored.