COMICS YOU SHOULD READ: “Squadron Supreme” (1985)

Oh, so that’s what it would’ve been like if Watchmen was written by F.A. von Hayek

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Propaganda Review: “Hate.Com: Extremists On The Internet” (2000)

Nineteen years ago, HBO and the Southern Poverty Law Center teamed up for a special about the growing white nationalist movement on the Internet. And yes … it is every bit as heavy-handed as you’d expect it to be.

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Propaganda Review — "Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism!" (1947)

Just two years after the end of World War II, a Catholic special interests group made a comic book about how communist infiltrators could enslave the United States — and in today’s democratic socialism-baiting political milieu, the paranoid ravings of 75 years ago all of a sudden don’t seem as absurd anymore.

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PROPAGANDA REVIEW: "The Angry Goy 2"

If you thought the first game was offensive — you ain't seen nothing yet!

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Propaganda Review: 'Saturday Morning Mind Control' by Phil Phillips (1991)

In which we revisit one of the greatest anti-consumerist screeds of all-time (which, naturally, is all but ignored for being, allegedly, nothing more than the maddened rantings of a hyper-religious Christian nutcase.)

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Eight Recent-Ish Kids Movies With Shockingly Adult Subtext

Believe it or not, there's a war being waged for your children's hearts and minds ... and the battlefield is at the local multiplex.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

In his 1994 book Media Virus, author Douglas Rushkoff dedicated an entire chapter to the politicization of children’s entertainment. Kids’ television shows, he said, were the perfect place to insert hardened liberal propaganda, since a.) adults never watched them, and even if they did they wouldn’t suspect the programs of pushing an agenda and b.) children, by nature, are highly impressionable and especially vulnerable to candy-coated cultural indoctrination. Rushkoff matter-of-factly describes how popular children’s programming like Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Ren & Stimpy actively attuned children to accepting nihilistic consumerism and hedonistic homosexuality as legitimate lifestyles. "By freeing its viewers to enjoy all the grotesqueness they can tolerate, [it] is a statement against this sort of repression," the author states in one of the more telling passages in the book. "It is an invitation to reawaken the child's world-view and, more than that, to overthrow societal restrictions and possibly arbitrary barriers to self-expression."

What child of the 1990s can forget the constant bombardment of eco-friendly propaganda gussied up as pastel-colored ‘toons like Ferngully and Captain Planet, nor the diversity-uber-alles message of Power Rangers and X-Men? The same way children’s entertainment was manipulated as vessels of cultural engineering back then, today’s kids-targeted cinema likewise seeks to massage the unmolded minds of our gilded youth. But what’s interesting is how the greater culture war of contemporary society is manifest in today’s youth-centric entertainment. On one hand children are being bombarded by the usual entertainment “blue pills,” with singing and dancing CGI critters warming them up to the idea of urban supremacy, socialism and “gender fluidity,” but there also appears to be an ideological counter-push of “red pilled” children’s flicks cropping up as of late - youth-oriented films that thematically criticize multiculturalism, feminism and cultural Marxism.

Think I'm joshing you? Not after you take a look at the following eight kids-targeted flicks from the last few years, which send contradictory lesson to our children on the pros (and cons) of such mature themes as diversity, socioeconomics, gender identity and the rift between individualism and collectivism in modern society ...

Multiculturalism

The Blue Pill

Zootopia (2016)

Disney’s surprise 2016 hit has one of the bluntest “urban supremacist” messages in the annals of movie history. Every rural denizen in the film is depicted as backwards, prejudiced and irrationally hostile, while the grimy, dirty cityscape is depicted as a festive panoply of vibrant, good-natured characters (among them, an overweight cheetah with brazen homosexaul mannerisms.) A celebration of intrusive government (our heroine, naturally, is a traffic cop whom the audience is supposed to adore for writing parking tickets and generating beaucoup bucks for the city bureaucracy), Zootopia implores kids to refrain from making even the most general observations about differences in people’s behaviors, asking them to chalk up all violent and antisocial acts as an after-effect of bad childhoods and even worse reactions to psychotropic medications (yes, that actually is a prominent plot point.) The blunt-as-a-sledgehammer racial harmony message might have good intentions, but the unrealistically cheery depiction of multicultural society (and one so deeply entrenched in government control, at that) just shamelessly smacks of the post-Obama liberal orthodoxy.

The Red Pill

The Angry Birds Movie (2016)

The iPhone app-spawned CGI flick is the exact, 180-degree opposite of Zootopia. Whereas Disney’s movie encouraged kids to blindly welcome diversity as a social necessity, the heroes of The Angry Birds Movie quite literally wage war against enforced multiculturalism, in the process creating a movie with so many parallels to the ongoing European migrant crisis that it seems almost impossible to write the movie’s plot off as a coincidence. While nominally based on the omnipresent smartphone game, the film revolves around a take-no-bullshit everyman (err, everybird, I guess) whose reluctance to accept his environs' mandatory diversity Tao has him written off as, you guessed it, an angry bird who must be taught how to be more tolerant (i.e., less critical) of his surroundings ... and who he's surrounded by. This all comes to a head when a fairly swarthy gaggle of bearded pigs show up out of the blue one day and mesmerize the easily beguiled townfolk with their delightfully atypical ways. Only our hero recognizes their "Trojan horse" strategy, as the hoggish invaders seek to inundate Bird-Land with their "kind" in an attempt to rob the natives of their most precious commodity - their eggs (i.e., their children's future?) Call it a video game spinoff if you wish - deep down, we all know this is about as close to a film adaptation of The Camp of the Saints we'll ever witness.

Capitalism

The Blue Pill

Sing (2016)

Essentially the musical version of Zootopia, this 2016 animated film paints the modern job market - and with it, the prospects of financial independence - as a wholly unattainable pipe dream. Under the guise of an American Idol like competition, a gaggle of miscellaneous furries - all of them down on their luck and facing at least one form of economic insolvency or  severe personal inadequacy - all try to get rich quick via, what else, the instant, monetized affirmation of their peers. Rather than teach kids to work hard, diligently and honestly, Sing promises them fame, fortune and popularity through the glitz and glamor of show business - which, as evident by the hundreds of thousands of underemployed baristas in the country, isn’t exactly the best occupational game plan to espouse to the children of the Great Recession. While there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the film’s “follow your dreams” message, it’s guarantee that doing so will make you wealthy without ever having to break a sweat is a recipe for broken hearts - and lifelong resentment of the economic system that promised them everything but gave them nothing but credit card debt.

The Red Pill

Monsters University (2013)

Pixar’s 2013 sequel is - in many respects - the most realistic depiction of college life in movie history. Although the characters may have eight eyes and three heads, the movie absolutely nails the intricacies and quirks of U.S. higher education, from the overzealous “adult learners” to the hippy-dippy art school students with no intents to ever graduate. But perhaps the most resounding aspect of Monsters University is the message it delays until the very end of the movie - that, for all intents and purposes, college isn’t necessary to live a happy life and be economically successful. Rather, the film concludes with two recent dropouts beginning life as entry-level employees, who - through hard work, grit and determination - slowly but surely find themselves climbing up the corporate ladder. Rather than posit economic success as a birth rite, Monsters University is one of the few children’s films this decade to equate fiscal well-being with work ethic - a message downright heretical to the ideological orphans of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Masculine Roles

The Blue Pill

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Imagine a scene in a children’s film in which a man repeatedly punches a female, to the point her face grotesquely swells and her shattered teeth fly across the scenery. While such is literally unthinkable in today’s cultural climate, the inverse is apparently A-OK with the suits at Disney, as Wreck-It Ralph features multiple instances of women characters mercilessly pummeling pitiful caricatures of men strictly for laughs. Not that the film’s primary plot - in which a hulking, clueless video game character becomes the protector of a snotty, unappreciative daughter-figure voiced by Sarah Silverman - isn’t without its own misandrist elements. This is yet another children's targeted film that depicts its female characters as strong, independent and intelligent while all of the male characters are depicted as brutish, ignorant and inconsiderate - in the process, painting a vivid double standard for young viewers as to which character traits are positive and which ones are negative depending solely on the gender of said character.

The Red Pill

Despicable Me 2 (2013)

Pop cultural promotion of the traditional family construct are getting rarer and rarer in Hollywood, which is why this 2013 kids flick seems to strike such a strangely countercultural tone. In Despicable Me 2, the adopted daughters of our anti-hero Gru goad him into finding them a mother, stating they are very much unfulfilled living life in a single-parent home. The Anglo-centric heteronormativity of the flick is off the charts, with a subplot revolving around a somewhat effete villain seeking to turn Gru's delightful banana-shaped Minions into a horde of slobbering, uncontrollable purple freaks, with yet another subplot positing a preteen Mexican Lothario as a shallow, conceited and unsympathetic asshole. And if that's not enough, there's even a lengthy physical comedy sequence in which Gru's date is accidentally drugged and her unconscious husk of a body is whipped to and fro on the ride home - aye, I couldn't imagine such passing muster in this, the post-SJW age of Hollywood.

Societal Integration

The Blue Pill

The Lego Movie (2014)

Some have likened the 2014 film to, of all things, John Carpenter’s rabidly anti-Reaganomics yarn They Live. Alas, while that movie was about rejecting the cattle call of mass consumerism, this film celebrates economic and cultural conformity like a Super Bowl victory parade. "Everything is awesome," the homogenized, yellow in-group sing while going through their mindless, inconsequential daily doings, spending $30 for cups of coffee and watching television programs that revolve entirely around people splitting their pants. It's not until a suspiciously Mitt Romney-looking villain dubbed "Lord Business" shows up that their trifling, meandering ways of life are challenged, which in turn, teaches children but one thing: never forget, little one, but your spiritually vacant life of mass consumerism and pop cultural absorption is indeed worth dying for.

The Red Pill

The Spongebob Movie - Sponge Out of Water (2015)

Who’d thunk the exploits of Spongebob Squarepants and Patrick Starfish would be among the most caustic cinematic criticisms of U.S. society this decade? Whereas The Lego Movie gave children a homogenized wonderland where excess consumerism gave everyone a de facto causa sui, the plot of Sponge Out of Water presents the very antithetical portrait of society in decline. In the film, Bikini Bottom is a fairly diverse environs where fish and crustaceans and porifera and the aberrant astronaut squirrel live in relative harmony. That is, until the sinister Plankton steals the formula for Krabby Patties - the denizens of Bikini Bottom's foremost foodstuff - and misplaces it, ultimately producing a city-wide Krabby Patties shortage that quickly thrusts the locale into tribalistic mayhem. Some might consider it a stretch, but it's probably not a coincidence that this film was released in the immediate aftermath of the Ferguson, Missouri madness. As both that lamentable affair and Sponge Out of Water demonstrate, when a heterogeneous culture loses that one unifying social bond - be it a shared religion, language, respect for the law or yes, even a mutual fondness for Krabby Patties - it's pretty much a given that mass devastation will ensue.

"A coincidence?" Yeah ... whatever you say, normie.

Of course, this is all mere conjecture on my part. Maybe I'm just being overly autistic and seeing patterns where no such patterns truly exist, and that the makers of these children's films honestly, genuinely had no sociopolitical agenda in mind when they were making their films. But considering the long history of movie studios injecting their kids' flicks with obvious cultural messages - not to mention Hollywood's long string of G and PG-rated offerings porting about unmistakable progressive "values" - it really wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if these movies were indeed meant to politicize viewers young enough to be in Pampers.

The interesting thing, though, is that for every obvious blue pilled movie the mainstream entertainment/media industrial complex spits out, there's usually at least one more that seeks to refute it. I couldn't imagine Pixar or Warner Bros. releasing a movie that paints European natives as victims and Muslim refugees as conniving invaders, but holy shit, we have precisely that in a movie allegedly based on a smartphone game. In a weird way, seemingly the only pro-conservative movies getting pumped out by Hollywood these days are kids movies with subversive Republican-subtext about supply-side economics, the power of individualism and, yes, the moral goods of patriotism - all of which the major studio elites are glibly unaware of, no doubt too concerned about turning every character in Spider-Man black to realize their animation departments are hitting the wee ones with junior F.A. Hayek and Ayn Rand with both fists.

Regardless, it's an interesting time to be a media analyst such as myself. With Hollywood more or less embracing SJW-dom as its one true god, the odds of seeing even moderately conservative/traditionalist fare like Hacksaw Ridge or Kingsman are sure to decrease, and since animated features and kids-targeted films are usually thought of as afterthoughts, who knows? Maybe the next great chain of New Republican Cinema will come disguised as lower-budget CGI flicks and feel-good children's Aesops. Which means hold onto your britches, James Woods - you might just have yourself plenty of voice work to look forward to over the next couple of years.

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VHS Review: Let's Have Fun! At The Slush Puppie Factory (1996)

All I can say is, holy shit, I can't believe somebody uploaded this to YouTube...

By: JimboX
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

Here's something I thought I would NEVER see in this lifetime.

Picture it: the year 1996. As a morbidly obese fifth grader, I was no stranger to the Slush Puppie (which, perhaps demonstrating the Mandela effect, I could've sworn was actually called a Slush Puppy.) For those of you out of the loop, the Slush Puppie was (and still is) a fairly popular convenience store staple here in the States. Basically, it's this giant metal tub of sugary pulped ice paired with a station containing about eight or ten squeeze bottles of various artificial flavors. The gist of it is, you get a paper cup, you fill it with the syrupy ice, and then you start topping it with different hued (and flavored) fluids. Naturally, the trick was figuring out which combination was the best. Is blueberry and pina colada the best mix, or should I go with raspberry and watermelon? Of course, you could always mix in ALL the flavors, which invariably would produce this weird, turd-black coagulation that tasted like sour grape. Or - as I was prone to - you could just fill up the cup with all of that high fructose corn syrup ice, say to hell with the flavor add-ins altogether and slake on it like a hummingbird at a nectar feeder. To say this was one of my favorite childhood memories would be an understatement; growing up in the mountains of Appalachia, sometimes that extra-extra-large cherry Slush Puppie was the only thing standing between me and death via heat exhaustion during many a 100-degree Georgian summer. 

Like every other kid-targeted consumer exploitation con job, though, the makers of Slush Puppie weren't above cajoling the wee folks into hoarding proofs of purchases, which, in this case, were called Paw Prints. Well, in the mid-1990s the company ran a promotion where if you saved up an absurdly high number of Paw Prints (I honestly can't remember how many, but I assure you it was a preposterous sum) and mailed them to the company headquarters in Cincinnati, they would send you a "free" VHS cassette showing off what the Slush Puppie factory was like. Naturally, I assumed it would be a pretty straight-laced pseudo-documentary showcasing the mixing bins and how they come up with the ideas for flavor add-ins - essentially, something you'd see on the Food Channel or something. Alas, I never saved up enough Paw Prints to acquire the damn thing, and just a few days ago ... for literally the first time in 20-plus years ... I thought about the promotion and decided to do a little bit of Internet sleuthing. And as it turns out, somebody has actually uploaded the whole damn video to the YouTubes, which, in and of itself, is something of a "lost media" miracle. But that, dear readers, isn't the shocking thing. Oh, no siree, Bob. Remember how I thought it was going to be a painfully basic, employee-safety-training-video-caliber production? Lord almighty, was I wrong in the most wonderful way possible. This thing - clunkily titled Let's Have Fun! At The Slush Puppie Factory - is actually an high-fructose-corn-syrup-spawned acid trip of pure, uncut, undiluted nostalgia and marketing incompetency, and my life is now a thousand times more valuable for having witnessed all of it with my own two eyes.

The opening shows off the Madacy Video logo (which, as fate would have it, is very reminiscent of the intro for the WWF's line of Colosseum Home Video productions.) We then take a tour of a CGI factory, chock full with all sorts of pastel and neon colored doodads and trinkets, while poorly green-screened kids pretend to surf over make-believe imagery. A crappy, corporate rock anthem plays, commanding "everybody, let's have fun" at the Slush Puppie factory, because "you've got an invitation to a cool explanation for everything under the sun." Well, that's a bit ambitious - if not absurdly overbroad - ain't it? 

The kid cast is introduced, as well as the unofficial alternate spokes-dog, Axle, as well as "special guest" Dinky G. Gush. From there we cut to a random general store. The guy in the giant dog costume asks cool white teen guy K.C. (which, presumably, stands for Koochie Creamer) why the room is so cold and he responds by telling him he's doing super important cryogenics research and shit. K.C. says he's invented something that will make children the world over ecstatic. And no, it isn't (as Axle suggests) chocolate-flavored toothpaste or electric roller blades. Anyhoo, he mixes some jugs of chemicals together and they blow up in his face. Then the dog tells him the beverage he's trying to create already exists and it's called a "Slush Puppie," which, for some stupid ass reason, this K.C. knob has never heard of before. 

Naturally, K.C. is so gobsmacked by Axle's revelation that he makes it his life's work to find out the secret to making Slush Puppies, a'la Plankton and his Sisyphean journey to determine the secret ingredients behind the Krabby Patty. Alas, Axle says only MR. SLUSH PUPPIE himself knows how to do that, which leads to our first song and dance number, in which he recounts all the fictitious dogs he admired growing up. This eventually results in even more puppet dogs joining in on the chorus, blurting "Slush Puppie, he really is cool. Slush Puppie, so cool and so pure." Also, Axle says the thing he likes best about Mr. Slush Puppie is the big "S" on his chest, but the way he pronounces it, it sounds just like he's saying "big ass" and you will laugh your ass off and probably rewind the tape five or six times to rehear it. 

After that drags on for about five minutes, Axle talks about how bad he wants to visit "Mount Slushmore." K.C. suggests they go visit the Slush Puppie factory so they go turn on a jukebox that actually doubles as a teleportation pod. Fuck, this lame-ass white nigga' can figure out how to make interdimensional travel work, but he can't figure out how to make a homemade Slurpee? 

Alike Pee Wee's Playhouse, pretty much every inanimate object on the tape sings or talks or blurts out poignant life advice, and this teleportation jukebox is no different. It eventually sends them to the top of an icy mountain, and they ski down the green-screened slopes. Meanwhile, three kids just waltz on in to the lab and start drinking mysterious fluids just lying around the place, because why not? They find this gigantic pile of telephone parts and the sassy black girl chastises the white boy for not knowing how the hunk of junk works. Then they jack into this thing called the "Axle Link" which allows them to spy on K.C. and the dog through a CRT screen. So, yeah, in addition to mastering teleportation, this K.C. fucker also managed to create Skype 20 years before Skype existed. But that raises the question - how ARE the kids able to see K.C. and Axle and talk to them when there's no camera present to record the people on the other line? Maybe there's some sort of drone-like apparatus with a camera and a microphone that follows them around and has some sort of SATlink functionality and ... wait I minute, am I actually trying to help these people with their plot holes now? Well, fuck that, and hard. 

"I said black lives matter, you honky muthafucka!"

After that the kids start meddling with K.C.'s computer and the white boy tries to take credit for figuring out how it works and then the black girl elbows him right in the ribs. Of course, nobody acknowledges this for the juvenile hate crime it is, and I, for one, am shocked and appalled. Then the white boy drinks K.C.'s mom's denture water, because he's one stupid cracka'. Then a projection of the formal Slush Puppie mascot pops up out of nowhere and all the kids just marvel at it like the Vision of Fatima. Now, is that technically breaking the fourth wall or is it supposed to be canonical? I mean, they already have teleportation machines in their world, so hologram technology by comparison should be pretty fucking simple to pull off, I guess. 

Then the little white girl steals K.C.'s mom's teeth, which is only slightly less disturbing because the teeth are those wind-up chattering novelty toys. That still doesn't negate the inherent creepiness when she drops the teeth in the white boy's popcorn, though. Not even a little bit. 

So the kids go to a movie theater and watch this "documentary" called The History of Kool and holy shit, it's pretty much the long-lost forerunner of the "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared" videos. Even better, it uses stock footage of kids playing Game Boy and random heavy metal music video clips and even a few seconds of some old bitch playing an accordion. And just wait until you see the puppet penguin holding a lava lamp in slow motion. That shit'll mess you up real good. 

In the movie inside our movie, a rat puppet shows up and tries to sell a penguin puppet a disco ball mood ring and a pair of platform shoes. Then it turns into a pastiche of an old detective movie, with the rat calling his co-star "penguin face" over and over. Then the penguin starts talking about the Slush Puppie ingredients - namely, water, sucrose and fructose. He even explains how they're culled from sugar and corn. Not only does it make the drink sweet, he says, it also helps it from coagulating. Lucky us, that leads to another damn song, complete with the kids in the theater RAPPING along to it. Man, and I thought that time that one black kid almost drowned on Nickelodeon GUTS was the cringiest thing I've ever seen in my life...

Believe it or not, this song might be even worse than the first one. "To be cool, it's gotta' be frosty, to be cool, it's gotta' be new," the chorus goes, "to be cool, it's gotta' be tasty, to be cool - YEAH! - it better not crunch when you chew." They do get bonus points, though, for using a couplet that rhymes "yuppie" with "puppy." The white boy says the movie was so bad that he wishes he had kept the receipt, and then the black girl says the rat reminded her of him, which is OK because it was socially permissible to treat white males like shit even back then. We cut back to K.C. and Axle, who have now infiltrated the factory. White boxes are everywhere, and for some reason, I just can't shake the grand finale of Child's Play 2 from my head. There, they find a TV and a giant disembodied head named Gush starts talking to them. He says he's a "Super Long Range Ultra-Scanning Helper" (hey, look at that acronym!) which means he's basically just a glorified tour guide.

Are we 100 percent sure this isn't the same guy always hawking shit on QVC?

So the double-chinned, David Venable look-a-like starts singing a song about high fructose corn syrup while images of giant metal vats are juxtaposed with images of kids singing and shit. "If I don't have a Slush Puppie, I might throw-uppy," Axle remarks. Goddamn, that dude is a fucking addict and all these motherfuckers should feel ashamed not getting him treatment. 

The disembodied head says the "recommended dose of Vitamin C" is the Slush Puppie's greatest secret. And here I was, thinking it was the fact Pajet sticks his dick in the mixer every night when the store's empty. We've got some images of people in plastic hair nets bottling up bright red juice and putting them in boxes on a conveyor belt. Then Axle has a fantasy about meeting the REAL Slush Puppie, who as fate would have it, is really just some fat-ass, bush-headed employee in a bright blue sweater. Fuck him for giving our spokes-pet false hopes. Fuck him right in the ass.

Hey, what do you know, it's time for ANOTHER song. This one is actually kinda' catchy, and all in all, I can't really say that disembodied head guy has that bad of a singing voice. Per the diddly, boxing juice constitutes "a major modern miracle, the making of a Slush Puppie," which is pretty goddamn self-exalting, even for propaganda aimed at people who poop in their pants. And it is here, at the fucking 24-minute mark of the tape, that we FINALLY catch a glimpse of one of those iconic Slush Puppie dispenser units. K.C. and Axle find Mr. Slush Puppie's office, but the sign says he's out to lunch. This makes Axle depressed and he cry-sings while K.C. fiddles with some flavor add-in knobs. After K.C. pushes a few levers in a special sequence, the Slush Puppie magically materializes out of thin air RIGHT THEN AND THERE.

Axel sees the Slush Puppie and immediately passes out from excitement. Mr. Puppie doesn't talk, but he does give K.C. a signed, laminated poster and an envelope containing the "secret of Slush." Then the disembodied head makes a few more references to The Wizard of Oz and Star Trek and then K.C. and Axel are teleported back to the lab. The kids, the nosy little shits they are, ask them if they've figured out the "secret of Slush" yet. K.C. opens the envelope and finds a riddle. "It starts with the ingredients only the best," it begins. "We test each batch, we taste we test, but the secret regretting is one you can't see, it's found in you, its found in me." The white boy thinks it's "guts," and then the little white girl tells him it's "love." And that's our cue for the show closer, a song about loving Slush Puppies (well, what the fuck else would it be about?) that sounds suspiciously similar to Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." The kids break out saxophones and K.C. even cuts a mean guitar solo at one point. "You've got to love, can't help it but to drink it up real fast," the tune goes, "you've got to love a Slush Puppie for its simple recipe." Wait, that shit don't rhyme at, like, all. 

And that's the end of the tape, kids. The credits roll over CGI factory cogs and at the very, very end there's a stinger featuring the silhouette of a fat, bald guy telling the kids they did a good job, with the letter "JAVFMAJ" on the bottom left hand corner of the screen. Hmm ... any clue what that could stand for? I'm guessing it's either "Jack Ass Virginians Fuck Many Albino Jaguars" or "Japanese Americans Vibrate Frequently Manufacturing Apple Jacks," but there's an outside chance I could be wrong on both accounts ... but probably not

Uh, no homo, my nigga'.

Since there's no IMDB page for the video, it's pretty hard to figure out who did what and what they've been up to since. Apparently, the TV head guy is named John Duncan, but there are so many people with the same name out there that making heads or tails out of who is who is kinda' pointless. I can tell you, however, that it was directed by a fellow named Gregg Page and written by three people. Again, IMDB is no help here, so if any of you people have done anything major with your lives since, please drop us a line and provide us with some scintillating deets on how awful it was shooting this shit. Come on, there has to be some great stories about working on this one - or at least, some nice anecdotes about how much Slush Puppie they would let you drink on set for free. 

Speaking of Slush Puppie, some of the interior factory shots were indeed filmed at the actual Slush Puppie factory in Cincinnati (which can be seen more in-depth in this isolated clip from that one Food Network show hosted by the dude from Double Dare.) Sadly, it doesn't reside on top of a snowy mountain like in the movie, which makes me all shades of disappointed, though.

That said, apparently the company that made the video, Pro-Kids Productions, is STILL around and pumping out material in the Nashville area. Interestingly, who is listed as the CEO of said production company? Well, it's none other than "Gregg Page," who I can only assume is the same guy credited with directing the infamous Slush Puppie propaganda. And I can only fathom the kinds of things he witnessed making this thing - if copious amounts of crystal meth and human trafficking wasn't involved, i'd be shocked to high heaven. 

It's a cliche to say something "speaks for itself," but in the case of Let's Have Fun! At The Slush Puppie Factory, there really isn't anything I can add to the discussion. It's so beyond the realm of comprehension that it kinda' becomes metaphysically above meager human criticism. It's simultaneously the least important thing man has ever created and the most significant contribution to human civilization in all of history. It's both profoundly pointless and immeasurably insightful, a complete waste of magnetic tape and a transcendent cultural high water mark. It's something that should either line a landfill or become the worship object of a mad cult, and I'm still not entirely sure which is which. Even now, I don't know if I should piss all over this tape or praise it as my new God.

That's what truly great art does to you, you know. And although it may take a few millennia for everybody else to recognize it, this VHS oddity from the 1990s is indeed a priceless relic of human existence. It might be garbage today, but mark my words ... in the year 30,559, our robotic alien overlords will consider this a historical object more valuable to understanding what human beings were really about than the Magna Carta or the pyramids combined, I guaran-damn-tee it.

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Wonder Woman ISN'T Empowering, You Dumb Broads

If you think a movie based on a comic written by a polygamist bondage fetish is a blow for gender equality, you DESERVE that 77 cents to every dollar a man makes.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@JimboX

For a moment, just think how absurd it is for someone - ANYBODY - to take pride in a make-believe person. How bereft of living, breathing role models are you to vaunt a fantasy figure as some sort of exemplary pillar of whatever you think you represent? If anything, the celebration of non-existent, fictitious people ought to be your first clue that something ain't right with the identity politics group you associate with; even grade-schoolers can recognize such behavior as patently absurd and wrongheaded.

Which is why I just can't wrap my head around why so many "feminists" consider this new Wonder Woman movie to be such a huge blow for gender equality. Sure, the movie made $100 million its opening weekend, but due to inflated ticket costs and IMAX and 3D surcharge revenue, practically every mainstream Hollywood offering these days is guaranteed to reap the same amount of dough (for those of you in pursuit of the proof in the pudding, look no further than Split and its $276 million global gross.) And - as expected - Wonder Woman's second week box office dropoff was substantial, with the movie generating barely half it's opening weekend take. By week three, the film's domestic box office take was roughly a third its bombastic opening weekend gross - rather fittingly, that same week it was dethroned from the top of the B.O. by Cars 3, a film almost wholeheartedly anchored around the juvenile male fascination with machinery.

Still, the movie has posted formidable financial numbers. Three weeks in the film's total global gross is north of $500 million, although the movie's domestic take puts it well behind the heaps of cash generated by more male-centric superhero films such as Deadpool, Batman v. Superman and the Iron Man trilogy. When the abacuses are finally adjusted, it appears Wonder Woman will have made about two-thirds what Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 made, yet only half what the latest Fast and Furious movie grossed. So yes, while Wonder Woman is - for the most part - a relative economic success, it's not like it's an aberration to see a big-budget, Hollywood offering anchored around a heroic female lead making exorbitant sums of money. The Hunger Games movies have grossed well over $1 billion, while the two most recent Star Wars films - both of which had "heroic female leads" - have combined for a global gross of nearly $1.5 billion. And of course, that discounts the pioneering work of Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, Angelina Jolie in The Tomb Raider films and Sigourney Weaver in the Alien franchise - that last one, a film that came out almost 40 years before this newfangled Wonder Woman allegedly shattered the cineplex gender barrier.

Still, the progressivist blog-o-sphere has convinced themselves that this Wonder Woman redux indeed represents some sort of poignant "female empowerment" milestone. The Guardian, for example, hailed the new film as "a masterpiece of subversive feminism." One HuffPo columnist wrote at length about how she found the film's intrinsic "fatherlessness" delightful. And at Bustle, columnist Kelsea Stahler wrote about how the film's fight scenes - essentially, the same old "Apocalypse Porn" CGI overkill we've been seeing at the multiplex for the last 20 years - literally moved her to tears because, this time, all of the wanton, consequence-less violence was being wrought by a fantasy character with a vagina instead of a penis. Interestingly, the same author described Wonder Woman as the first major female superhero film - which would be true, had films like Barb Wire and Tank Girl not been made 25 years ago (and for the record, Wonder Woman isn't even the first major D.C. super-heroine to get her own feature film - lest we forget, 2004's abysmal Catwoman and 1984's downright turgid Supergirl.) 

Rather than take these overly-emotional, hyperbolic displays of identity-politics-informed immaturity as signs of XX arrested development - lord knows, that's what the other would be saying about men who wept during The Avengers - the mass media machinery has latched onto the rebooted Wonder Woman as a genuine, "turning point" for gender equality in entertainment history. Much has been made about director Patty Jenkins - whose last movie sought to portray a psychotic murderess as a "victim" of our cruel, cruel patriarchal society - breaking the so-called "celluloid ceiling," but such is pure nonsense. Female directors like Jennifer Lee (Frozen), Vicky Jensen (Shrek), Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) and Sam Taylor-Johnson (Fifty Shades of Grey) have already made bajillions of dollars at the box office, while Kathryn Bigelow has already taken home a Best Director Oscar (which, in one of the greatest cosmological coincidences of all-time, was in direct competition against her ex-husband.) Furthermore, Nora Ephron, Penny Marshall and Penelope Spheeris have been making financially successful, big-time Hollywood productions since the 1980s; indeed, women have been making quite the pretty penny directing big-budget opuses ever since the heyday of Leni Riefenstahl in the 1930s.

The feminist jubilee also strangely overlooks the fact the script was written by a gay man, based on story by two other men - all of whom, incidentally, just so happen to be Jewish. Or the fact all but one of the movie producers is female, or especially the fact the company that made the movie, Warner Bros., is a C-level sausage fest. Lost on all these whack-a-doodle feminist moonbeams is the inescapable reality that virtually all of the money they paid to see the movie will wind up in the coffers for rich as fuck Hebrew and Asian men. Ironically, by financially supporting the Hollywood Industrial Complex, all these Wonder Woman-loving women are doing nothing but making the virtually-all-male film industry executive brass even wealthier.

Along those same lines, none of these ever-so-chipper fangirls dare dwell the notion that Wonder Woman brazenly appropriates and rewrites patriarchal Greek mythology and actually demeans the millions of men who died in the trenches of World War I by attributing final victory to a super-powered Amazon. During the film's climax, it became clear why the film wasn't set during World War II - after all, revealing Hitler to be the literal, supernatural embodiment of toxic masculinity probably wouldn't have gone over too well with those of the Jewish persuasion (and more on that interesting little angle in just a bit, readers.) 

During the waning moments of the film, I felt sorry for all of the female lib types praising the movie. It became apparent that these flashy, computer generated acts of mock heroism is all they and their-alike ovaried kin can celebrate. After all, they weren't out there with machine guns traipsing over landmine strewn fields in Danzig, and they most certainly weren't chasing down Japanese war criminals in the Philippines. As men, we can take great gender pride in the valor and bravery of Sgt. York, Audie Murphy and Jack Churchill; yet while we can look up to Dwight Eisenhower and George Patton as patriarchal heroes, women have no battlefield greats to call their own. There is no female equivalent to Bhanbhagta Gurung or Tommy MacPherson - real life individuals whose bravery, selflessness and audacity in the conflagration of war serve as eternal testaments to the willpower and grit of the species. While our grandfathers and great grandfathers were fighting Hitler and Hirohito's war machine, our grandmothers and great grandmothers were left stateside canning tomatoes and maybe putting together spare car parts. World War II - the greatest drama in the history of mankind, bar none - is littered with courageous, valiant and noble male heroes, while the best feminine icon that can be culled from the epoch is Rosie the Riveter - yet another fictitious character supposedly embodying the power of womanhood. In that, to interject a gigantic sword swinging mega-woman into the middle of World War I as the savior of the West might just be the greatest example of contemporary feminists' profound penis envy we could ever hope for. 

Of course, one must wonder if this Wonder Woman truly is a symbol of women's empowerment, seeing as how the character was created by ... gasp ... somebody with a penis. But it's not just that Wonder Woman was created by a man, it's the fact the character was created by a man with a bizarre bondage fetish who admitted his creation was meant to be some sort of perverted dominatrix fantasy instead of a bona-fide female role model. Creator William Marston - a polygamist who said he was inspired to create the iconic character after watching sorority hazing rituals - NEVER set out to make Wonder Woman a valiant, patriotic figure a'la Superman or Captain America. Instead, he just wanted to get his jollies by repeatedly subduing his idealized female form. "The secret of a woman's allure (is that) women enjoy submission, being bound," he stated in one interview. Well, so much for that feminist narrative, eh?

Thankfully, there are still a couple of decent gals out there who haven't had their brains turned to mush by all that incessant third-wave feminist claptrap. Writing for The National Review, Heather Wilhelm succinctly sums up the inherent absurdity of the identity-politicization of the character: 

"Much of the hullabaloo, however, comes from the assertion that 'Wonder Woman' will empower women and encourage the positive 'representation' of women that is supposedly so rare in Hollywood. It achieves this representation, apparently, by featuring a gorgeous woman clad in metal lingerie who effortlessly deflects bullets with her bracelets and eventually upends a giant tank. This, we are to assume, will immediately inspire millions of little girls across America to rush home and launch their own neighborhood STEM-research teams."

Continuing, she notes how the syrupy response from "feminist" film-goers only serves to reinforce the old tropes about feminine weakness.

"For everyone's sake, avoid buying into the idea that women are fragile creatures who need a thousand different obsessive gender-based affirmations just to make it through life. Despite the anxiety-laden chorus of modern feminism, they aren't, and they don't."

Rather fittingly, however, the cannibal cult of intersectional feminism might just be looking to put a damper on the Wonder Woman love-in. Even before the movie came out, the United Nations was pressured to stop using the character as an honorary ambassador of women's rights because - surprise! - she's just too damn white for some people's liking.

And then there's that old Jewish question. As it turns out, the latest incarnation of Wonder Woman is played by one of God's Chosen People, and if you think that's sitting well with the Muslim populace, think again, muchacho. 

Enter Al Jazeera's Susab Abulhawa, whose Palestinian roots give her permission to criticize Jews without everything that comes out of her mouth begin automatically declared "anti-Semitism." In an especially abrasive screed, she more or less declared Wonder Woman to be a miniature war crime because the bitch under the tiara, Gal Gadot, was a member of the Israeli army in 2006. Let's let Abulhawa herself take it from here, why don't we?

"Discussions of feminism around this film have sidelined this crucial fact about her. They've omitted the actor's cheering of wanton killing, which took the lives of 547 children in less than two months. Instead, the focus is on her impossible physical proportions. This is just another way that the destruction of our society is normalized."

Well day-umm, and here I was thinking the only acceptable political undercurrent for the new Wonder Woman flick was "fuck men!" But no, Abulhawa ain't quite finished yet ...

"Make no mistake. Zionism cannot reconcile with feminism, and such antiquated imperial feminism belongs to another era, when feminists fought for the right to vote, but only for white women."

Of course, that's a flat out lie seeing as how the ratification of the 19th Amendment allowed women of all colors to participate in the electoral tradition, but FACTS are just a part of the evil, white, Jewish patriarchal war machine, you TOOL! To finish off her spiel, Abulhawa qyotes Jaime Omar Yassin, a member of the Occupy Oakland organization:

"Feminism cannot be Zionist, just as it cannot be neo-Nazi - feminism that doesn't have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy."

Well, there you have it ladies. If you think Wonder Woman is empowering, you're actually supporting white oppression and Islamophobia. And you fine, outstanding women wouldn't want to be doing that, now, would you?

Of course you wouldn't, you thoughtful, little multiculturalists, you. Of course you wouldn't.

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