Post by mhberest on Oct 21, 2006 23:14:58 GMT -5
Political correctness be d**ned!
I am currently creating a graphic novel/comic book about a robotic hero with a human consciousness coming back to our time to rescue a scientist, and the scientist, having been a Child of the Sixties notices how much is rescuer is like Eighth Man, a Japanese cartoon about a similar superhero.
The fact is, though, my superhero, Andy (short for android—forgive the lack of inventiveness) rescues people and subsequently gets metaphorically crapped on by them. In a time in the future when robophobia (don’t worry—that term doesn’t appear in the story) is rampant, Andy does what he later describes as a “one of those warm and fuzzy rescues of a child from a burning building.” When he hands the child, safe, to the arms of her mother, the mother gives a how dare you touch my child look and begins to walk away, giving no thanks or any kind of comment.
Unlike your regular cartoon superhero, Andy loses it and uncharacteristically yells out after the mother, “Hey lady, I can take her back up there and leave her if that’s what you’d prefer!!”
In the part I’m working on now, Andy gets one side of his face smashed by the very android he had adopted 800 years earlier to keep from being disconnected, after which, Andy plummets and hits the Earth’s surface. We see him lying motionless under a pile of debris for a suspenseful moment, after which he thinks, “The pain—I can still feel the pain. Not so fast, Earth, don’t dig a grave for me yet.”
The cartoonist R. Crumb has noted he never does his drawings with the idea of conscious messages, that what the comic is about reveals itself to him as he draws it. Today I began looking at what my comic is revealing to me, and it’s about Eighth Man, but also Popeye, Underdog, the great depression, and not taking the option of hauling ass.
The comic has a physics professor whose appearance and characteristics are mine, and that confuses me. He is the one rescued by Andy. Yet when Andy smashes into the Earth it will be the professor who digs him out.
Who’s the victim? Who’s the hero?
As I’ve said many times many other places the last three years have been an almost comic chain of consecutive disasters. It’s hard not to feel like a failure in such circumstances, but my therapist repeatedly tells me, I need to take heed of the fact (1) I have not committed or attempted to commit suicide; (2) I haven’t mentally broken down to the point of needing a conservator; and (3) I haven’t just run away and become a homeless person, dazedly pushing around a shopping cart filled with useless things collected from garbage dumpsters.
In other words, I haven’t given up and I haven’t turned tail and run from my villains.
I realize I see this in Andy. He tries to help, it blows up in his face, not because of anything he’s done, yet he gets up and continues what he was doing.
These values, this philosophy, however, had to come from somewhere.
Well, it came from those horribly violent cartoons the political correctness police have shielded the generations of children coming after me from. Children now are protected from having to state, As Cartman states in the South Park movie, “That cartoon has warped my fragile little mind.”
Well, I think by now if you read what I write you know I’m pretty warped. But rather than talk about that, I want you to now consider two cartoon scenarios no one has ever seen.
1. Popeye is nearly beaten to death by Bluto. He pulls out his spinach, then looks at it and says to himself, “Why bother, it may not work this time, and I’ll just have to keep facing these situations again and again. Better to get it over with than try to spit in the wind.”
2. Eighth Man has managed to smoke one of his energy renewing cigarettes and escaped from a death trap a moment before the thing would have killed him. As he flies into the air, he says to himself, “I was sure lucky to get out of that. Those guys are crazy! I gotta get out of here before they try to do something else to me.”
You may replace the heroes in these scenarios and their respective strength-givers, with any of the variety of cartoon and comic strip beings who similarly possess their stash in case of trouble (sidebar: did you know marijuana was nicknamed spinach in the early 1930’s?): Underdog and his energy pill, Roger Ramjet and his proton pill, Sinbad Jr. and his belt, the Mighty Thor and his stick, the Mighty Hercules and his ring, etc.
Now, there is one other thing all these cartoons share other than a popeye and a spinach. They’re all to varying degrees extremely violent. Sometimes the violence is silly, as in Roger Ramjet, but sometimes it can be pretty explicit and genuinely scary as in Eighth Man and Popeye.
Many of these cartoons have disappeared from syndication, or if revived, the heroes are now peaceful souls who resolve their differences without conflict. Well, all except Eighth Man.
Eighth Man After—the anime revival from the late 1990’s--has our friend Tobor going into fits of psychopathic rage because of psychological/technical problems adapting to being in a robot body. Nonetheless, you will only see such cartoons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, a show where these toons, verboten by PC from the children’s hour, can be indulged in, in their Johnny Quest violence and Betty Boop sexuality until you get your boopadoop taken away.
Children have always played rough with each other—especially siblings. For some reason people in the late 1960’s became convinced that violent cartoons evoked increased levels of violence in the little darlin’s. Like someone in Stalin’s Russia, one night a cartoon would disappear and never be seen again, permanently imprisoned in some far off anime archipelago.
Other cartoons would stay, but have mysterious continuity gaps, or abruptly early endings. I remember a cartoon, I think it’s by Bob Clampett, where a flea ends up carrying off Elmer Fudd and his dog to eat them. Elmer’s cat sees this and says, “Now I’ve seen everything!” He then chooses to take his own nine lives, pulling out a revolver and shooting himself in the head nine times to end the cartoon.
When I saw it recently, the cat says, “Now I’ve seen everything,” immediately followed by That’s All Folks against WB cartoon title backdrop.
Now, I saw the original ending, and never have I once considered shooting myself in the head nine times, nor do I know of any cat who’s considered it. What makes me different than today’s brats—er—sweethearts? Why was I allowed to be brainwashed while they weren’t? What did we ever do to convince anyone we even had been brainwashed by these cartoons?!
I hope you don’t mind if I generalize (but if you do, it’s my essay, so tough), today’s youth is unusually fatalistic or concerned with themselves before anyone else. A teen superhero of today might indeed take the involuntary suicide route Popeye took in imaginary scenario #1. Or he may feel prompted to skeedaddle, he’s not going to take on any prehistoric monster that came from outer space, sent by the Martians to destroy the human race. The FBI is helpless, it’s 20 stories tall. What do we do? Who do we call?
Well, not me, buddy, it ain’t my concern. I never go to that city anyway. Of course, Popeye and Eighth Man might try to resolve their differences in a peaceful manner with Bluto and Dr. Spectra. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me cartoon, ack ack ack ack ack!
There was a reason why Popeye was transmographied—a little by Elzie Segar, a lot by Dave Fleischer—into the hero who eats the spinach and saves the day.
If I had to characterize the Great Depression, I’d say it was like the last three years of my life multiplied by 100,000,000. Even the upper middle class teetered on the brink of destitution.
FDR’s answer was fireside chats, but Segar’s and Fleischer’s was to create a feisty little guy who never gives up, stands his ground and fights, and always wins.
Some thirty years later, we and the Japanese were both trying to figure out how we could be symbiotic business partners when just twenty years earlier we’d been lethal enemies.
We’d not forgotten Pearl Harbor, no. Nor should it be. But if I had to say which of two events—the attack on Pearl Harbor and the dropping on atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—left the greater mass psychological scar, I’d say it was the A-Bomb.
I don’t want to go into whether the A-Bomb was evil overkill on our part or what was deserved in retribution for Japan’s attack on China and the Pacific. I do know the previously unknown effects of exposure to radiation made the A-Bomb’s impact last into the next generation and its many babies born with birth defects.
I also know that regardless of the situation, you must not give in, stand up, and go on. As long as we’ve opened the vaults of my movie memories, there was a Japanese film shown on American Public TV which was about a teacher and the class she taught, soon separated because of a prank of one of the children that backfired. The film followed what happened to teacher and class.
It had the soap opera volume of tragedies—it seemed no one in the class did not die or have some horrible sickness or injury. But regardless of whether it looked too melodramatic when seen through American eyes, the last scene was universally meaningful. It showed the teacher, now a middle-aged woman, still peddling down a rural road on her bicycle to teach at the next school she went to.
You do not give up. You face your tragedies. And you go on.
Eighth Man saw the significance of such symbolism, too More apparent in the original Japanese-language version of the 1960’s version was the fact that it was pretty clear the country that supplied so many of the villains Tobor fought was America—us.
That’s a shocker. Or is it?
Was the issue where the villains were from or whether the hero would not give up, would revive, not run but fight, and win against bad guys? Was it something the Japanese needed to see as much as Americans needed to see it in Popeye in 1933?
Those questions were irrelevant to me then. They made no sense to a child of eight watching cartoons on TV. All I knew was Popeye and Eighth Man were fighting bad guys.
But I could understand that the two imaginary cartoon scenarios where Popeye and Eighth Man simply shrugged at an amoral world would never happen. Never.
It didn’t matter what was done to them—brutal exposures to forces more than enough to kill someone—they didn’t give up. They still had faith in their respective talisman, as well as themselves, they stood their ground and fought ferociously even when it seemed even with the spinach or cigarettes they could still lose. That sense of will, of unshakable belief in one’s self, was really the thing that made them win.
Yes, these cartoons warped my fragile little mind. They deluded me into believing I was the captain of my fate, I was the master of my soul.
Some day, when the victim can no longer count on heroes for rescue, the victim must become the hero himself. That’s what I learned from those awful cartoons, and that’s not what our “heroes of tomorrow” are learning from current animators and their castrated politically correct cartoons.
No, I haven’t seen it all yet. And you know Andy in my comic book is going to win.
Copyright 2006, Michael Berest. All rights reserved.
I am currently creating a graphic novel/comic book about a robotic hero with a human consciousness coming back to our time to rescue a scientist, and the scientist, having been a Child of the Sixties notices how much is rescuer is like Eighth Man, a Japanese cartoon about a similar superhero.
The fact is, though, my superhero, Andy (short for android—forgive the lack of inventiveness) rescues people and subsequently gets metaphorically crapped on by them. In a time in the future when robophobia (don’t worry—that term doesn’t appear in the story) is rampant, Andy does what he later describes as a “one of those warm and fuzzy rescues of a child from a burning building.” When he hands the child, safe, to the arms of her mother, the mother gives a how dare you touch my child look and begins to walk away, giving no thanks or any kind of comment.
Unlike your regular cartoon superhero, Andy loses it and uncharacteristically yells out after the mother, “Hey lady, I can take her back up there and leave her if that’s what you’d prefer!!”
In the part I’m working on now, Andy gets one side of his face smashed by the very android he had adopted 800 years earlier to keep from being disconnected, after which, Andy plummets and hits the Earth’s surface. We see him lying motionless under a pile of debris for a suspenseful moment, after which he thinks, “The pain—I can still feel the pain. Not so fast, Earth, don’t dig a grave for me yet.”
The cartoonist R. Crumb has noted he never does his drawings with the idea of conscious messages, that what the comic is about reveals itself to him as he draws it. Today I began looking at what my comic is revealing to me, and it’s about Eighth Man, but also Popeye, Underdog, the great depression, and not taking the option of hauling ass.
The comic has a physics professor whose appearance and characteristics are mine, and that confuses me. He is the one rescued by Andy. Yet when Andy smashes into the Earth it will be the professor who digs him out.
Who’s the victim? Who’s the hero?
As I’ve said many times many other places the last three years have been an almost comic chain of consecutive disasters. It’s hard not to feel like a failure in such circumstances, but my therapist repeatedly tells me, I need to take heed of the fact (1) I have not committed or attempted to commit suicide; (2) I haven’t mentally broken down to the point of needing a conservator; and (3) I haven’t just run away and become a homeless person, dazedly pushing around a shopping cart filled with useless things collected from garbage dumpsters.
In other words, I haven’t given up and I haven’t turned tail and run from my villains.
I realize I see this in Andy. He tries to help, it blows up in his face, not because of anything he’s done, yet he gets up and continues what he was doing.
These values, this philosophy, however, had to come from somewhere.
Well, it came from those horribly violent cartoons the political correctness police have shielded the generations of children coming after me from. Children now are protected from having to state, As Cartman states in the South Park movie, “That cartoon has warped my fragile little mind.”
Well, I think by now if you read what I write you know I’m pretty warped. But rather than talk about that, I want you to now consider two cartoon scenarios no one has ever seen.
1. Popeye is nearly beaten to death by Bluto. He pulls out his spinach, then looks at it and says to himself, “Why bother, it may not work this time, and I’ll just have to keep facing these situations again and again. Better to get it over with than try to spit in the wind.”
2. Eighth Man has managed to smoke one of his energy renewing cigarettes and escaped from a death trap a moment before the thing would have killed him. As he flies into the air, he says to himself, “I was sure lucky to get out of that. Those guys are crazy! I gotta get out of here before they try to do something else to me.”
You may replace the heroes in these scenarios and their respective strength-givers, with any of the variety of cartoon and comic strip beings who similarly possess their stash in case of trouble (sidebar: did you know marijuana was nicknamed spinach in the early 1930’s?): Underdog and his energy pill, Roger Ramjet and his proton pill, Sinbad Jr. and his belt, the Mighty Thor and his stick, the Mighty Hercules and his ring, etc.
Now, there is one other thing all these cartoons share other than a popeye and a spinach. They’re all to varying degrees extremely violent. Sometimes the violence is silly, as in Roger Ramjet, but sometimes it can be pretty explicit and genuinely scary as in Eighth Man and Popeye.
Many of these cartoons have disappeared from syndication, or if revived, the heroes are now peaceful souls who resolve their differences without conflict. Well, all except Eighth Man.
Eighth Man After—the anime revival from the late 1990’s--has our friend Tobor going into fits of psychopathic rage because of psychological/technical problems adapting to being in a robot body. Nonetheless, you will only see such cartoons on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, a show where these toons, verboten by PC from the children’s hour, can be indulged in, in their Johnny Quest violence and Betty Boop sexuality until you get your boopadoop taken away.
Children have always played rough with each other—especially siblings. For some reason people in the late 1960’s became convinced that violent cartoons evoked increased levels of violence in the little darlin’s. Like someone in Stalin’s Russia, one night a cartoon would disappear and never be seen again, permanently imprisoned in some far off anime archipelago.
Other cartoons would stay, but have mysterious continuity gaps, or abruptly early endings. I remember a cartoon, I think it’s by Bob Clampett, where a flea ends up carrying off Elmer Fudd and his dog to eat them. Elmer’s cat sees this and says, “Now I’ve seen everything!” He then chooses to take his own nine lives, pulling out a revolver and shooting himself in the head nine times to end the cartoon.
When I saw it recently, the cat says, “Now I’ve seen everything,” immediately followed by That’s All Folks against WB cartoon title backdrop.
Now, I saw the original ending, and never have I once considered shooting myself in the head nine times, nor do I know of any cat who’s considered it. What makes me different than today’s brats—er—sweethearts? Why was I allowed to be brainwashed while they weren’t? What did we ever do to convince anyone we even had been brainwashed by these cartoons?!
I hope you don’t mind if I generalize (but if you do, it’s my essay, so tough), today’s youth is unusually fatalistic or concerned with themselves before anyone else. A teen superhero of today might indeed take the involuntary suicide route Popeye took in imaginary scenario #1. Or he may feel prompted to skeedaddle, he’s not going to take on any prehistoric monster that came from outer space, sent by the Martians to destroy the human race. The FBI is helpless, it’s 20 stories tall. What do we do? Who do we call?
Well, not me, buddy, it ain’t my concern. I never go to that city anyway. Of course, Popeye and Eighth Man might try to resolve their differences in a peaceful manner with Bluto and Dr. Spectra. Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me cartoon, ack ack ack ack ack!
There was a reason why Popeye was transmographied—a little by Elzie Segar, a lot by Dave Fleischer—into the hero who eats the spinach and saves the day.
If I had to characterize the Great Depression, I’d say it was like the last three years of my life multiplied by 100,000,000. Even the upper middle class teetered on the brink of destitution.
FDR’s answer was fireside chats, but Segar’s and Fleischer’s was to create a feisty little guy who never gives up, stands his ground and fights, and always wins.
Some thirty years later, we and the Japanese were both trying to figure out how we could be symbiotic business partners when just twenty years earlier we’d been lethal enemies.
We’d not forgotten Pearl Harbor, no. Nor should it be. But if I had to say which of two events—the attack on Pearl Harbor and the dropping on atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—left the greater mass psychological scar, I’d say it was the A-Bomb.
I don’t want to go into whether the A-Bomb was evil overkill on our part or what was deserved in retribution for Japan’s attack on China and the Pacific. I do know the previously unknown effects of exposure to radiation made the A-Bomb’s impact last into the next generation and its many babies born with birth defects.
I also know that regardless of the situation, you must not give in, stand up, and go on. As long as we’ve opened the vaults of my movie memories, there was a Japanese film shown on American Public TV which was about a teacher and the class she taught, soon separated because of a prank of one of the children that backfired. The film followed what happened to teacher and class.
It had the soap opera volume of tragedies—it seemed no one in the class did not die or have some horrible sickness or injury. But regardless of whether it looked too melodramatic when seen through American eyes, the last scene was universally meaningful. It showed the teacher, now a middle-aged woman, still peddling down a rural road on her bicycle to teach at the next school she went to.
You do not give up. You face your tragedies. And you go on.
Eighth Man saw the significance of such symbolism, too More apparent in the original Japanese-language version of the 1960’s version was the fact that it was pretty clear the country that supplied so many of the villains Tobor fought was America—us.
That’s a shocker. Or is it?
Was the issue where the villains were from or whether the hero would not give up, would revive, not run but fight, and win against bad guys? Was it something the Japanese needed to see as much as Americans needed to see it in Popeye in 1933?
Those questions were irrelevant to me then. They made no sense to a child of eight watching cartoons on TV. All I knew was Popeye and Eighth Man were fighting bad guys.
But I could understand that the two imaginary cartoon scenarios where Popeye and Eighth Man simply shrugged at an amoral world would never happen. Never.
It didn’t matter what was done to them—brutal exposures to forces more than enough to kill someone—they didn’t give up. They still had faith in their respective talisman, as well as themselves, they stood their ground and fought ferociously even when it seemed even with the spinach or cigarettes they could still lose. That sense of will, of unshakable belief in one’s self, was really the thing that made them win.
Yes, these cartoons warped my fragile little mind. They deluded me into believing I was the captain of my fate, I was the master of my soul.
Some day, when the victim can no longer count on heroes for rescue, the victim must become the hero himself. That’s what I learned from those awful cartoons, and that’s not what our “heroes of tomorrow” are learning from current animators and their castrated politically correct cartoons.
No, I haven’t seen it all yet. And you know Andy in my comic book is going to win.
Copyright 2006, Michael Berest. All rights reserved.