I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "Judge a country not by its accomplishments, but by the way it trains its uneducated to grill burgers."  If I'm right, which is possible, then after seeing Grill Skill, we as a country should be judged fantastically insane.  Grill Skill is a training video that was somehow smuggled out of the Wendy's hamburger grilling camp.  It was never meant for civilian eyes.

The video begins with the late Dave Thomas giving a motivational speech about the pleasures of 100 percent beef and square-shaped meat patties.  Keep in mind that this is before Mr. Thomas had hired an acting coach or a speech therapist.  They either filmed this when he was medicated, or there's an android wearing the founder of Wendy's skin and making training videos disguised as him.  You might have seen a movie where an undercover cop has to slip an encoded phrase into his conversation with the drug dealers to signal that the operation has gone to hell.  Every line Dave Thomas delivers sounds like that.  He's so awkward on camera that each moment felt like a SWAT team was going to burst through the window.  The video would have had more personality if they let the Wendy's wet floor caution stand host it.  Little did I know that I was only five minutes away from horrors unimagined.

What gets especially unnerving is how Dave pronounces "old fashioned."  It's the most common word associated with his hamburgers, but when he says it sounds like he's filled his mouth with oatmeal and punched himself in the stomach.  For example, "When I founded Wendy's, I made it my goal to make the best old flppblggbbppbb hamburger in the bidness."  Four minutes later, speech impediments would be the last thing on my mind.

Dave's love of beef is boundless.  He describes the beef patty's freshness, shape, saltiness and how its flatness causes it to hang over the edge of the bun.  He goes on to explain "people will like that."  Dave may talk like a robot, but it seems like he genuinely appreciates and believes in everything ground meat and its byproducts can do.  However, his love poem to beef eventually degenerates into propaganda.  He goes on and on about how Wendy's creates new worlds of delight by allowing customers to choose toppings and something about how pressed and salted patties can cure pancreatic cancer.  I wasn't really listening since I was thinking about how nice it was that in two minutes I probably WOULDN'T be in a battle against a living nightmare for my own sanity.  It turned out later that I was so, so wrong.

The video cuts to a Wendy's employee, Bill, who is called over by his supervisor Mary.  Mary has decided that Bill is ready to move from fries to the... grill.  There's a strange pause in the dialogue here as if Mary was expecting Bill to kiss her feet in celebration of this great honor.  To his credit, he doesn't care.  The next part of the video seems like it was written by Dave Thomas because Mary describes in detail the majesty of their ground beef.  And again to his credit, Bill totally doesn't care.  To complete his training, Mary leaves Bill in the breakroom with a VHS tape.  That's where life as I knew it reached out of my VCR and kicked me in the balls.

Next time you're in Wendy's and you think one of the employees doesn't take your cheeseburger seriously enough, cut them some slack.  They've seen the gates of hell.  As soon as Mary is gone, the TV in the breakroom goes haywire and launches out a magical flying head.   It shrieks at Bill, "I AM THE DUKE OF THE GRILL!!!" and sucks him into the television.  What Bill was not told during his time as a french fry cook is that all Wendy's grillers are trained in a bizarre world inside the breakroom television through the use of rap.  That's right.  Rap.

Before any explanation can be given to Bill, the Duke of the Grill is dancing circles around him and playing air guitar on a metal spatula.  Just so you're picturing his dance correctly, try to imagine a black person making fun of how a white person might try to dance like Michael Jackson.  Now imagine he was deaf and you've switched the music on him without him knowing about it.  And why not — go ahead and imagine that his genitals are hooked up to a high-powered electrical current too. 
What I'm trying to say is that he's not very good.

His rap is worse.  The Duke of the Grill's raps about every painful detail of grilling hamburgers.  For example...

"Now workin' the grill ville it ain't soooo tough, but first of all you gotta check yo stuff!

Like a grill that's set at two five oh, and the meat and the cheese are ready to go!

Meat's got grain to it just like wood; follow the arrows and lay it down like you should!

From front to back, lay it down! Place it evenly, not scattered all around!"

This goes on forever.  There are literally thirty-four lines of rap devoted just to flipping over your burgers and mashing them down with your "tool."  Your "tool" is Wendy's rapper lingo for "spatula," and its importance is made clear when the Duke of the Grill proclaims, "YOU GOTTA HAVE YOUR TOOOOL!" then plays more air guitar on it from four different camera angles.  His entire rap lasts about seven minutes, and as with all bad music, if any of the lyrics could be pantomimed with a metal spatula, trust me, they were.

The madness reaches a breaking point when the Duke of the Grill explains to Bill why Dave Thomas' genius robot mind demands they smash the burger patties flat with their tools.  He mentions something about shrinking which is all the meat patties themselves need to spring to life and start singing.  "We start shrinking!  When we hit the grill!  You know we will!"  This is repeated many, many times.  Badly computer generated or not, singing meat is scary.  If this video taught Wendy's employees anything, it's that the first thing you do with meat is check to make sure it doesn't have a mouth.

After the Duke and his backup hamburgers finish their song, Bill slowly repeats the entire thing, getting a little bit funkier with each line.  After that, an entirely new rap starts about how to add cheese to what we've learned and how grillers laugh in the face of danger, as long as that danger is just people wanting hamburgers.  The singing meat slabs also have another song; this time about the five stages of beef readiness.  It supports my theory that I am and always will be terrified of them.

Thankfully, four songs about flipping hamburgers are enough to graduate Bill back to the real world.  He reappears where he was as if it was all a horrible nightmare, and Supervisor Mary says, "I see you finished the tape.  Do you have any questions?"  Now remember that Bill was just, without warning, transported to a tiny grill inside a TV by a rapping madman's head and his singing ground beef.  And his answer to the question, "Do you have any questions?"... "No."  No, he did not have any questions, which was probably a good idea.

If even half of their lyrics are true, rappers have killed thousands of us.  However, Grill Skill does more than pay rap back.  In fact, after Grill Skill, I think the rap community may have to kill a king or monarch just to even out the amount of injustice we've done each other's people.