What Are The Best Hyun-Jin Ryu Noodle Ads To Watch This Holiday Weekend?

If you're like most Americans, you're planning on spending the long weekend ahead with family and friends, reflecting on and paying tribute to the sacrifices of our men and women in uniform and watching videos in which Dodgers pitcher and large adult son of Incheon, South Korea, Hyun-Jin Ryu eats piping hot noodles in various cartoonish situations. This is a normal and good way to spend your holiday, and a great way to remember that it's unwise to eat noodles when they're still way too hot, which is the lesson that Ryu refuses to learn in his series of advertisements for Ottogi Noodle. Or appears to learn. It's not exactly clear what's happening here, for instance:

But we must presume it involves the noodles being either too hot or extremely good. Either way, these ads are a terrific way to remind yourself and those you love that there's nothing that beats a great big bowl of ramen. What follows is the official Vice Sports Ranking Of Hyun-Jin Ryu Noodle Ads For Memorial Day Weekend 2015.

1) [This space reserved for any future noodle ad in which Hyun-Jin Ryu and Juan Uribe tuck into a bowl of noodles and wind up recreating the spaghetti scene from Lady And The Tramp]

2) The One With Fake Clayton Kershaw In It

It's best to ease into Ryu's noodle oeuvre, which gets both alarmingly visceral and rather alarmingly psychedelic pretty quickly. A good place to start is with this comparatively accessible offering in which Ryu eats a bunch of noodles with apparent difficulty—this is a recurring trope, for reasons that are honestly somewhat opaque—while his teammates cheer him on. Not his real teammates, unfortunately, although there are some similarities between the extras pumping their fists while Ryu demolishes a big pot of Jin Ramen and the ones that do so at Chavez Ravine. Nothing legally actionable, of course. Anyway, it's not like Clayton Kershaw copyrighted this look.

So now we're warmed up. Let's go deeper.

3) The Really Spare, Tim & Eric-style One

Ryu, like any great pitcher, knows that there's no reason to complicate things when all the stuff is working right. On this day, there was no need for special effects or the jittery, Just Injected Freebase Red Bull Into Your Eyeball vibes of his other ads. Everything was right where it needed to be. On these days, you just set up a camera and let Ryu knock down a big bowl of noodles, complete with lots of extremely well-mic'ed slurping, sighing, and other sounds of animalistic devourment. Mix in some loathsome slo-mo and stuttering Tim & Eric-style cuts, and you've got something intensely unsettling. Yes, it's a masterwork. More importantly, it just works.

4) Hyun-Jin Ryu Is Going To Throw Noodles At You

Your consciousness is stretched out, now, and you are maybe getting a little hungry. It is time to go big. Open your mind. Envision a world in which the rules of time and space no longer apply to Hyun-Jin Ryu, who uses his newfound omnipotence to wing cups and piping-hot bowls of noodles at people all over South Korea. With great power comes great responsibility. With great hunger comes a cry for noodles. Hyun-Jin Ryu is here to help with this. He is everywhere, flinging noodles to everywhere else.

5) Hyun-Jin Ryu Has Become Noodles, The Destroyer Of Hunger

You are ready. Your mind is open, now. Your consciousness is limbered up. You have entered into a deeper communion with these noodles, with their spokesman, with the concept that bowls of ramen can be thrown great distances if the person doing the heaving is pure of heart and sufficiently large.

You will feel this change in your body, as well as your mind. You may be sweating, slightly. You may be weeping. Do not turn away from this. Go towards it. Submerge yourself in the noodles. You are going in, now. You are going home, now.

Welcome to noodles. Have a good weekend.