Update Day! We all love Update Day, don’t we? Every Wednesday, we all love to shop for the best Wii games when the Wii Shopping Channel gets updated with new games to buy. And, of course, that was the genesis of sketch comedy group Nirvana The Band The Show‘s little skit about surfin’ the Wii Shopping Channel and singin’ along. Refresh your memory if you will:
Since November 2020, one person named Quinn has been operating a Twitter account called “Wii Shop Wednesday”, which tweets out the sketch every Wednesday, accompanied by “Wii Shop Wednesday Wisdom”, an additional tweet that imparts wise words to its followers. Wise words like this:
As of January 17th, the account is closing down for good, meaning that those of us who look forward to the song on Wednesday (alongside other, similar accounts, like Mermaid Monday, Thursday… what a concept, and Daniel Craig saying “ladies and gentlemen… the weekend“), we’ll have to rely on “It Is Wednesday My Dudes” instead.
We DMed with Quinn to find out why Wii Shop Wednesday is going out of business for good. “Full honesty,” they said, “the thing that pushed me over the edge was Out Of Touch Thursday getting suspended.” This was a Twitter account that published a clip from anime Lucky Star, with the characters dancing to Hall & Oates’ ‘Out of Touch’, but was hit with a copyright strike at the end of 2022 and was forced to delete all posts containing the song (although they have since resumed posting it).
“[Out Of Touch Thursday’s] suspension was shocking enough to make me re-evaluate why I was running this account,” Quinn told us, “and it made me realize a sort of rift had grown between me and my audience.” It was out of a love for Nirvana the Band the Show, and in particular, creator Matt Johnson (he’s the one who’s not singing the song in the sketch) that the account was created in the first place, Quinn says, “[but] I realized most of the account’s followers didn’t give a sh*t about that.”
But even despite most people only knowing this one sketch from Nirvana the Band, or, indeed, Nirvana the Band the Show, Quinn found joy in the account, especially when it came to Wii Shop Wednesday Wisdom. Unlike a lot of comedy day-of-the-week Twitter accounts, Wii Shop Wednesday does not schedule its tweets — it’s all Quinn.
“In the earlier days of the account, I actually put in a lot of effort and made fun variations on the video, but for whatever reason that just made people angry,” Quinn says. “After that, I decided it would be fun if every week I included a little piece of life advice, a song lyric, or a movie quote that I had been thinking about, mainly for variety’s sake. Even when I started to get disillusioned, it never felt like work, considering it took five minutes, once a week.”
And for those of you who are wondering — Wii Shop Wednesday’s 47,900 followers might seem like a boon, but it hasn’t translated into personal gain for Quinn. “This interview is probably the closest I’ve come to “””mainstream success”””,” Quinn tells us. “The main thing that kept me going was a wish for more people to watch Nirvan(n)a The Band The Show. It’s painfully unknown, and I felt like if even one person was inspired to watch the series (through whatever means necessary), I’d have done my job.”
So, in memory of all the good times Wii Shop Wednesday has brought us, here’s another taster of Nirvana the Band the Show about a jingle for a genderless burger experience:
Thank you for everything, Quinn and Wii Shop Wednesday. Oh, and one last thing from Quinn: “if anyone involved with [Johnson’s production company] Zapruder Films sees this, I would sell out in an instant for tickets to the BlackBerry premiere.” Actually, wait, me too.
