Counter-Currents
Adult Cartoons Are a Disaster for Western Civilization,
Part 1
Travis LeBlanc
2,898 words
Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)
I have seen the “normalization” of a great many things in my lifetime — almost all of them for the worse.
One of the most conspicuous of these is the normalization of profanity. There was a time when people used to take “fuck” and “shit” almost as seriously as they take the n-word now. Sure, people swore when I was kid, but there was all sorts of etiquette surrounding it. You didn’t swear in public, in front of your parents, or around an authority figure. And the most low-class thing a man could do was swear in front of a woman. Swearing was “man talk,” and you didn’t do it front of women. Girls did not swear, ever. I think the last of the old-school chivalry broke down when women swearing became normalized in the 1990s. It was like a social contract was broken. Once women no longer felt the need to pretend to be princesses, men no longer felt the obligation to pretend to be princes.
Over the course of my life I’ve also seen the normalization of divorce and unwed pregnancy, two things that would have been surefire subjects of gossip in my youth which are barely even noticed nowadays. Everyone at my school knew which kids had divorced parents, because they stood out. And I’ve also seen the idea of the stay-at-home dad — which was so unusual at the time that it was the subject of a 1983 comedy film called Mr. Mom, with Michael Keaton — go from being preposterous to becoming commonplace.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
These are just the things I saw normalized in the twentieth century, mind you. In the twenty-first, I’ve seen porn, LGBT issues, and all other manner of deviancy become commonplace.
But one of the most subtly destructive normalizations I’ve seen, and one that does not get nearly the attention it deserves, is that of adults watching cartoons. The idea of a cartoon that could be enjoyed by adults started out as a joke, but now that joke has gotten completely out of hand to the point that we now have a society where there are adults who do nothing but watch cartoons. The fact that there are adult men who collect action figures and cream their shorts over the latest superhero CGI shitfest can be blamed largely on the destruction of the social taboo against adults watching cartoons in the 1990s. “Adult cartoons” has been a disaster for civilization.
It’s easy to scapegoat the Japanese cartoons and say, “Rick and Morty is fine. It’s that anime shit that’s the problem. It’s too cutesy-wootsy, adolescent, and overly sexualized.” Others might take the opposite position: “Anime is fine. At least it’s not as Jewed up as that American Adult Swim crap.” They are both wrong. The problem is all cartoons. It all has to go. If we are to survive as a civilization, we have got to stop watching cartoons.
Let’s now climb into the time machine and take a look at how we arrived here.
Once upon a time, it was understood by all and sundry that cartoons were for children
I fully expect to get some “Um, well, actually . . .” responses to this assertion.
Yes, The Flintstones aired on primetime TV. Yes, cinemas used to show Warner Brothers cartoons before the features. But when those shows went into syndicated reruns, they were played during the children’s viewing hours that were sandwiched in between the latest Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Many Disney animated movies were critically acclaimed by serious people, but at that time it was understood that Disney movies were supposed to be something that you would watch with your children. It would have been weird for an adult to go see Pete’s Dragon without a kid in tow.
There were some exceptions to the rule even before 1990. There were some animated movies that were specifically marketed for grown-ups and that are worth examining, because you will see that they were exceptions that proved the rule.
Ralph Bakshi
As with most social problems, if you follow the chain of causation back far enough, you will find the hand of the Jew at work. The current plague of adults watching cartoons is no exception. In this case, the Jew in questions is director Ralph Bakshi, who pioneered the concept of “adult cartoons” with a series of animated feature films in the 1970s and ‘80s, starting with 1973’s Fritz the Cat, which became an underground sensation.
Bakshi was born in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1938 to a Krymchak Jewish family. Krymchak Jews are a microscopic — there are only 1,500 of them in the world — Jewish ethnicity whose origins are shrouded in mystery. Some people think they are the real descendants of the Khazar Jews.
Bakshi’s family moved to Brooklyn in 1939, and then in 1947, his family moved to a majority-black neighborhood in Washington, DC. Of his childhood, Bakshi said:
All my friends were black, everyone we did business with was black, the school across the street was black. It was segregated, so everything was black. I went to see black movies; black girls sat on my lap. I went to black parties. I was another black kid on the block. No problem!
This is highly relevant, as even for a Jew, Bakshi’s negrophilia runs deep, and is a theme in his early “urban” work.
Bakshi got his first animation job with Terrytoons in 1956, where he worked on Deputy Dog and developed a superhero parody show called The Mighty Heroes before leaving to start his own company, Bakshi Productions. During the 1960s Bakshi Productions made animations for commercials, the Canadian superhero cartoon Rocket Robin Hood, and most prestigious of all, the Spider-Man cartoon series. While he had success in children’s programming, Bakshi’s dream was to evolve animation beyond being something just for kids and to make animation for adults.
Bakshi thought he had his opportunity in 1967, when he was hired by Paramount to be the head of their animation department. Bakshi brought in a dream team of writers and artists and drew up plans for four short animated films, one of which was a hippie-themed cartoon called Marvin Digs that “was going to have curse words and sex scenes, and a lot more than that.” Alas, Paramount shut down the department the following year before Bakshi got to see his vision through.
Bakshi then had a vision for an urban-themed, street-smart animated movie about life in the inner city. The story he came up with was Heavy Traffic, but he could not find anyone to fund it. He set about coming up with another adult cartoon to pitch to investors.
Fritz the Cat was based on characters created by the eccentric comics artist Robert Crumb, a counter-culture icon of the hippie era who was the subject of an acclaimed 1995 documentary. The film follows the eponymous anthropomorphic cat as he meanders around 1960s New York and encounters various counter-culture archetypes: stoners, college radicals, anti-social revolutionaries.
Whatever one may think of Fritz the Cat, it is a cartoon for adults. I know because I watched it as a teenager and hated it. I was under the impression that it was some kind of porno. It was famously rated X, and certainly the promotional materials played up the sex angle. What I did not expect was how boring the movie was. There is indeed sex and nudity, but it is overstated and not terribly erotic unless you are a furry (all the characters are anthropomorphic animals). I was expecting porn, and what I got was a rambling, super-political critique of 1960s hippie Leftism.
I watched Fritz the Cat again recently, and now that I’m older and know more about 1960s sociopolitical trends and can understand the commie babble, I got more out of it. That’s not to say it’s a good movie, but it is an interesting time capsule. As degenerate as it is, if there is a message in it at all, it is anti-Leftist. After deciding to become a revolutionary, Fritz joins a real terrorist group and comes to reject radicalism:
You’re full of shit! All you care about is a reason to hurt, to destroy, to blow up. You don’t know what a real revolution is. None of you sons of bitches do.
Ralph Bakshi wasn’t merely an animator who happened to be Jewish. He was a hardcore Zionist, and his Jewishness was central to his work. Bakshi said that his 1977 fantasy film Wizards was an allegory “about the creation of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, about the Jews looking for a homeland, and about the fact that fascism was on the rise again.” In 1981 Bakshi released the animated rock musical American Pop, about a family of Jewish immigrants and their struggles across four generations to break into the music business.
Indeed, after Robert Crumb disavowed Fritz the Cat as a bastardization of his work, Bakshi subtly accused him of anti-Semitism.:
That’s why Crumb hates the picture, because I slipped a couple of things in there that he despises, like the rabbis — the pure Jewish stuff. Fritz can’t hold that kind of commentary. Winston is “just a typical Jewish broad from Brooklyn.” . . . [The strip] was cute and well-done, but there was nothing that had that much depth.
Bakshi did Jew up Crumb’s work quite a bit. There are not one, not two, but three scenes showing people urinating. He also inserted several Jewish characters into the story, and gave Fritz’s girlfriend, known only as Winston in the comic strip, the surname of Shwartz. With the exception of his fantasy movies such as Lord of the Rings and Fire and Ice, Jewish characters are prominent in all of Bakshi’s films, as is his persistent negrophilia.
Robert Crumb objected to Fritz the Cat for a variety of reasons. For one, the film is critical of hippie Leftism — and Crumb is a hippy Leftist: “They put words into [Fritz’s] mouth that I never would have had him say.” Crumb also felt the film was
really a reflection of Ralph Bakshi’s confusion, you know. There’s something real repressed about it. In a way, it’s more twisted than my stuff. It’s really twisted in some kind of weird, unfunny way. . . . I didn’t like that sex attitude in it very much. It’s like real repressed horniness; he’s kind of letting it out compulsively.
Fritz the Cat was a hit on the arthouse movie circuit, and since its release it has made $90 million on a $700,000 budget. In addition to spawning one forgettable sequel, it also inspired a low-budget and even lower-brow ripoff, Down and Dirty Duck, which featured voice acting and music by members of Frank Zappa’s backing band. Think Fritz the Cat meets 200 Motels, and that’s Dirty Duck.
Bakshi would follow up this success with more politically and sexually-charged “adult cartoons”: Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and Hey Good Lookin’, which followed the Fritz the Cat formula of combining lots of sex, nudity, profanity, and negrophilia with Jewy political commentary about inner-city life.
![Coonskin (1975) - HD Trailer [1080p]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rqTLJJpB89k/maxresdefault.jpg)
1981 saw the release of what this author considers to be the granddaddy of all the classic “adult cartoons”: Heavy Metal. Heavy Metal was based on the French anthology comic series Métal hurlant (Howling Metal) created by Jean Giraud, better known to Americans for his work with Marvel under the name Mœbius. It was republished in the United States by National Lampoon as Heavy Metal.
I would like to apologize to my readers that I am not capable of speaking objectively about this movie. Even though this article is a denunciation of adult cartoons, I have to NAXALT Heavy Metal. It has everything: fantasy, sci-fi, horror, comedy, hot chicks, cool cars, rockin’ tunes. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I love this movie. It’s Jewish and degenerate, but you’re still going to have to tear it from my cold, dead hands.
While the screenplay was written by the Jewish writing team of Dan Goldberg and Len Blum, best known for their collaborations with Ivan Reitman (Stripes, Meatballs), Heavy Metal makes no attempt at political commentary, and isn’t weighed down by a lot of outdated counter-cultural baggage such as Bakshi’s cartoons, never mind his unapologetic Zionism. It drew its influence from science fiction and fantasy subcultures, as well the contemporaneous Dungeons & Dragons fad. It’s pure guilty pleasure. The downside is that by being apolitical and more action-oriented, Heavy Metal is more similar to a children’s cartoon than Bakshi’s “adult cartoons.”
Almost as famous as the movie itself was Heavy Metal’s legendary soundtrack, which featured some of the hottest bands of the day from across the musical spectrum. It had a resurgent Black Sabbath with their new singer, Ronnie James Dio, for the metalheads, as well as Devo for the new wavers, a pre-Van Halen Sammy Hagar, and pop rockers Cheap Trick. The soundtrack featured several previously unreleased songs, including the lead song “Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride)” by Don Felder, who was the guitarist for The Eagles. (No, not that guy. That’s Joe Walsh. No, not that guy either. That’s Glenn Frey. The other Eagles guitarist.) The soundtrack reached #12 on the United States album charts and sold over a million copies.
The “adult cartoons” craze came crashing to a halt in 1983 with the Canadian production Rock & Rule. It was about a fictional rock band, and the soundtrack included all-original songs performed by Cheap Trick and Earth, Wind & Fire. The singers were Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Debbie Harry of Blondie. Rock & Rule was somewhere halfway between Bakshi’s American Pop and Heavy Metal. it was a rock musical as well as very action-oriented in the same spirit as Heavy Metal, as the band has to save the world through the power of rock ‘n’ roll.
A refreshingly all-gentile production, Rock & Rule’s animation was fairly sophisticated for its time. The studio that had picked up the distribution rights, however — namely MGM — gave it only a limited release, and in the end it earned a paltry $30,379 from an $8,000,000 budget.
Now, let’s pause for a moment
Having reviewed what was called an “adult cartoon” prior to 1990, you will notice that the movies I talked about have two things in common. Let’s look at them in turn.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Part Four of the Trilogy here.
First, why is it wrong for an adult to watch cartoons? Because cartoons are for children. The R rating (or X, or no rating at all) that the “adult cartoons” received was proof that they were absolutely not for children. In fact, a child couldn’t see them even if he wanted to, as the theater wouldn’t have let him in. Old-school “adult cartoons” always had tons of sex, blue humor, drug use, and graphic violence. Indeed, sometimes they tried a little too hard to emphasize just how not for children they were.
Second, the movies look as if they were made for the purpose of being watched while high. A lot of psychedelic imagery and scenes featuring pointless surrealism seems to serve no purpose other than to look cool to someone who is high on drugs. This was a key element of the old-school “adult cartoons.” After all, if you merely wanted to see a movie with a lot of sex, blue humor, drug use, and graphic violence, you didn’t have to watch cartoon, as there were plenty of live-action movies which were already offering that. That’s where the fact they are “cool to watch while high” comes in. This is also why there was so much emphasis on the music in these films, since people who are high like to listen to music.
Such movies are rather a lost art. 2009’s Enter the Void was the last one. But back in the 1960s and ‘70s, if a rock band released a theatrical movie, they made it with the understanding that a large percentage of the audience was going to be high on some kind of drug. Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, The Monkees’ Head (an underappreciated masterpiece of the genre), and The Who’s Tommy are all quite clearly not made for sober people.
A parallel phenomenon to the normalization of adults watching cartoons is the normalization of adults being interested in superheroes. During the making of the 1978 Superman, they paid Marlon Brando $3.75 million and 12% of the profits to get him to appear for only a few minutes, only to give the movie credibility with adults. At the time, most adults would have been too embarrassed to see a superhero movie unless they were accompanying a child. The same was true of the 1989 Batman movie, where they had to cast an actor of Jack Nicholson’s caliber so that adults would not think it was only a children’s movie.
In short, old-school “adult cartoons” used to be about sex), drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Not this shit:
Next, we will fast forward to December of 1989, when two things happened within a week of each other, casting Western Civilization out of the Garden of Eden and sending us down the road to Perdition. On December 17, the first episode of The Simpsons aired on the then-fledgling network FOX. Then, on December 25, there was the North American debut of Akira, which introduced “anime” to the American masses in a big way.
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40 comments
What about Belladonna of Sadness or, say, Princess Mononoke?
Also pretty sure you’re gonna make Buttercup mad.
I disagree. Taboos on adult cartoon watching are a silly case of hide bound thinking. Japanese seem to be immune to this. Like with any medium, the estimation of a piece is particular to itself. Some, ahem, animation is good and some is crap, just like I question the intelligence of adults who watch slapstick, I would question the intellect of an adult who watches looney toons. I think some of the only good tv writing is in animated series like Rick and morty and especially adventure time these days. Notice also for some reason they seem immune to the woke choke racial politics. That’s how we’re gonna beat ‘em, through the cartoons!
I’ll concur with that. Although there’s a tremendously broad body of work consisting of kiddie toons, there’s nothing inherently juvenile about animation. It’s just another medium, and its uses can be good, bad, or indifferent. As for good ones, Murdoch Murdoch certainly has its moments. Then there’s this old classic:
https://odysee.com/VID_20200630_173911_462:b
If I could get the gumption to learn the right software, I could be producing my own films on a nonexistent budget. An animated version of The Camp of the Saints would have a lot of potential, for one thing.
I for one would love to see an animated Camp Of The Saints, just to see someone’s interpretation of the mutant child on the boat. After reading it, I actually searched around the web to see if there was a sketch or anything out there.
My first thought is to make him cyclopean, which is a real though very rare condition. The book doesn’t say that’s what he looks like, though. So on second thought, maybe he’d be somewhere between Eraserhead’s baby and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Hmm… any recommendations on software that I could use to bring it to life?
Shoestring budget animation only works if it’s comedic. Any hint at self-importance will make the sloppy execution stand out. I doubt any of the Murdoch-Murdoch more serious pieces could really be effective out of context and for a general audience.
Are you guys both “on team”?
Excellent article. I can’t wait to read the conclusion, even if you’re decimating a few guilty pleasures of mine. I would also love to hear your take on adults and video games. About the time I was almost out of high school I totally lost interest beyond Galaga or Pac-Man at the sandwich shop while most of my friends were getting hooked on first person shooter games and Grand Theft Auto. Most of them still play this stuff and it’s kind of sad seeing a forty year old father of three devoting most of his free time to chasing around bad guys in a fantasy land.
Fun fact about the movie Head. Supposedly, it was named Head so that if it was successful and a sequel was possible they could advertise it with the tagline “From the people who gave you Head.”
I think people spend too much time playing video games but historically, I don’t think they were ever seen as something exclusively “for children”. Console games, yes. Atari and NES marketed to children but Arcades in my youth were always dominated by teenagers and young adults because they had jobs and disposable income whereas children had to ask their parents for money to play them. Old school DOS games on PC were always marketed to an older crowds. Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a big hit in the 1980s.
There are two watershed moments in a white man’s life on which hinge his own and society’s well-being:
1. Whether he will embrace or shun his racial tribe, and
2. Whether he will cease making every decision based on how much it stimulates his wiener.
* * *
Looking forward to Part 2! 🙂
I remember watching Bakshi’s animated LOTR as a kid and loving it. In fact, it inspired me to read the trilogy when I got a little older. For some reason, I had no idea he did Heavy Metal, which I also loved.
I don’t know if I really agree that animation in and of itself is objectionable, but I do know I really despise the irony bro cartoons that became popular in the 90s and then “evolved” in the 21st century (South Park, Family Guy, Rick & Morty, American Dad, etc.) Same frickin joke, over and over again with that “gee aren’t we so clever?” wink and nod to the audience. Vomit.
Ralph Bakshi didn’t do Heavy Metal. The director’s name escapes me but Ivan Reitman produced it out of Canada.
You’re right, I misread the article. There was a quick transition from Bakshi to Heavy Metal, and my brain didn’t hit pause.
Bashki did a similar movie called American Pop:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082009/?ref_=nm_flmg_t_24_dr
I saw it in the theaters when it came out. Didn’t think much of it. Or his earlier LoTR animations which I also saw in the theater.
If you like that lotr animated feature, you will notice that the rankin bass productions of the hobbit and return of the king are meant to complete that lotr. They fill in the prelude and ending, which were excluded from it. I personally prefer the rankin bass which use an Arthur rackham artistic interpretation, and have good songs imho, but some people dislike their kiddie tone. But when watched together, they are supposed to give you the complete epic. I like this much better than the live action movies. You will note that the live action movies pirate a lot of their directing from the animated features!
There has been a general dumbing down of many segments of entertainment, though its not as if anyone will look back at Bonanza or Gunsmoke as historic art. Comic books and graphic novels seem to be the male equivalent of the lite young-adult novel targeted to girls… though adult men and women are bigger consumers of these than many think.
Liberals get a kick out of defacing anything that could be construed a “sacred cow”. Innocent cartoons become rated X, the crucifix was dunked into “Piss Christ”, country music got a shaft of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road”. Long before the current gender craze, David Bowie, Brian Eno and the NY Dolls were cross dressing. The young generations never want to be accused to just copying old people.. their spin… this time its for real.
I used to roll my eyes at anime (and still do for most of it). But the films of Miyazaki and contemporaries (and dare I say even the occasional Pixar opus) have their charms. When you have kids you can appreciate something that works on multiple levels and have some appeal to adults.
Sure. Our own Trevor Lynch favorably reviewed The Incredibles (and I also liked it). I’m not sure I buy the “cartoons bad” argument, but I agree insofar as it correlates with the dumbing down of culture and the endless flogging of worn-out franchises and genres.
Once upon a time, it was understood by all and sundry that cartoons were for children
I fully expect to get some “Um, well, actually . . .” responses to this assertion.
Okay, well here’s mine. This article has got me thinking about this issue and it sparked a memory. When my older brothers were in college, every now and again I would go hang out with them on campus. I remember that every Friday afternoon after lunch they would have a showing of Warner Bros cartoons and/or The Three Stooges in one of the side rooms next to the cafeteria. This would have been, oh, 1979 or 1980, somewhere around there. I can’t tell you if there were a lot of kids my age in there, but I can tell you most of the people watching were college students. Maybe they just had a bunch of immature folks there, I dunno. But that leads to another question: are the Three Stooges any less juvenile simply because they are live action as opposed to animated? And yes, I know they are all jews.
Great essay Greg. Can’t wait for part two. As far as Bob Crumb goes, didn’t he marry a Jew twice? He has some Jew broad fetish . He’s certainly a person one can take one look at and realize there’s something a wee bit off.
so far I couldn’t agree more.
Out of curiosity, why do you address Greg? Is Travis LeBlanc another of Greg’s pen names? If so, I wonder if Trevor Lynch would agree with Travis…
I swear, I’m one of the few people in the Dissident Right that uses their real name and I get accused of being everyone but me. Yes, I realize that my name sounds fake. A white nationalist whose last name means “the white”? Yeah, I get it. But I assure you that I am me.
I’m terribly sorry. I thought the author was Trevor Lynch. I didn’t look closely enough. Anyway, great read. I look forward to part two.
You’re not the only one. I always get Travis LeBlanc and Trevor Lynch confused, as well.
If I think about swear words and what’s really “wrong” with kids saying them, it doesn’t seem to be the literal meanings of the words, since there are other words that kids can use to express the same concepts. It’s not the sounds of the words. So what is it? As best I can tell, it’s simply that those words mark a person as an adult, or perhaps as a person who has lost their innocence or beauty in some sense.
Why does that offend us? Is it because children are laying claim to unearned adult privileges and thereby bucking tradition and their rightful place in the social hierarchy? Is it because we don’t want to see children lose their innocence prematurely?
I shy away from saying such words myself, at least in their more vulgar forms, but why? I think it’s because they seem to be most frequently used by the most distasteful people – not that every foul-mouth is nasty or that every polite speaker is a good person, but there’s a correlation – and I don’t want to be like the ugly ones. So do we just not want to see our children acting in a way that correlates with ugliness of character?
I dunno. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cartoons either, but perhaps the dynamic is similar.
One of the reasons it was enforced so strictly is because swearing reflected poorly on the parents. Kids swearing was a proxy for the quality of their parenting.
If a kid swears it means a) that’s how their parents talk at home (and it was low class to swear in front of your kids) or b) or that their parents were asleep at the wheel and not paying attention to what their kids were doing. Before the internet, parents had a lot more control over what children saw.
Also, if you are a kid, the rule is you don’t swear. If a kid couldn’t follow that rule, what other rules were they willing to break? Are they willing to cheat on their test? Are they willing to steal? So people used it as a proxy in that regard. There was a high overlap between kids who swear and misbehaving in other ways.
Was perfectly rational? I’ll leave that to the philosophers. Was it socially valuable? Yes.
ZOG did not just throw child drag queens at us out of the blue one day. There was a multi-decade process leading up to that and breaking down of the taboo of using profanity was a crucial part of that process.
So here’s a two-fer: when my kids were little Sponge Bob kept them entertained in the mornings and I confess, me too sometimes. One of the best episodes was when Sponge Bob and his moron friend, Patrick, discover swearing. They call the bad words, “sentence enhancers”, I think. It was pretty funny.
My son actually would yell “beep” when he wanted to curse because all the shows we watched beeped out the bad words, especially Ice Road Truckers.
I watched SpongeBob until I was in 7th grade. I remember being in woodworking class 20 years ago and the guys sitting next to me said that SpongeBob was actually gay. I couldn’t believe it. I never watched it again.
“Whatever one may think of Fritz the Cat, it is a cartoon for adults. I know because I watched it as a teenager and hated it.”
You and me both. Just reading this piece gave me a flashback of the depression I felt after seeing it. I was expecting a facetious celebration of the counterculture; instead the movie came over more like a nightmarish cautionary tale. But then, I’ve never been into cartoons since I was traumatised as a kid by the death of Bambi’s mother.
The use of CGI to create “virtual actors” is a current cause of concern to the denizens of Hollywood. Maybe “cartoons” are the inevitable future of cinema.
The cartoons of my childhood were….Beanie & Cecil, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear, Jonnie Quest, Flintstones (prime time…!), Jetsons, Milton the Monster Show, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Jot, Davey & Goliath, Walt Disney Presents (once a month on Sunday Nights), et.al.! Society was different in those long ago days, but who would still laugh at comedy shows such as Red Skeleton, Hazel, and be spell bound by “The Outer Limits” & “The Twilight Zone”? Although, F-Troop and Get Smart still takes us back to a simpler time, and thanks to the “chosenites”, they totally destroyed the old family ethic
Our biggest mistake that the West ever made, was to adopt the Christian religion, and it’s too bad that the Emperor Julian (last pagan roman emperor), didn’t live a while longer, as his aim was to abolish that superstitious Asiatic religion and go back to our Roman/Greek Hellenic religious roots….nature worship and respect for physical laws…
@Mike Bennett : Should *Le songe de l’empereur* (*The Emperor’s dream*) by André Fraigneau exist in English, you might appreciate this book (a simulated autobiography). Jerphagnon’s *Julien, dit l’Apostat* (*Julian, said to be the Apostate*) is excellent too (a historical biography).
Chamfort wrote it in one sentence : “M. de…, qui voyait la source de la dégradation de l’espèce humaine dans l’établissement de la secte nazaréenne et de la féodalité, disait que, pour valoir quelque chose, il fallait se débaptiser et se défranciser et redevenir Grec et Romain par l’âme.” (“M. de…, who saw the source of the degradation of the human species in the establishment of the Nazarene sect and of feudalism, used to say that, in order to be worthwhile, one had to dechristen oneself and to defrancize oneself and become again a Greek and a Roman by the soul.”)
Thanks for the good article. I agree that animated films are degenerate for the most part. I’d love to see a Heavy Metal movie. I haven’t seen this movie yet.
I consider “Heavy Metal” the best animated movie ever made. You don’t have to be a fan of heavy metal music to like it. Although it does have an excellent soundtrack which includes Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult. A favorite cartoon from my childhood was “Thunder The Barbarian”. In a way, I’m surprised it was on Saturday mornings. It was set in post apocalyptic future that didn’t always portray humanity and civilization in a positive light.
More please!
Things that make me go hmmmm:
“Bakshi was born in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1938 to a Krymchak Jewish family. … Bakshi’s family moved to Brooklyn in 1939, and then in 1947, his family moved to a majority-black neighborhood in Washington, DC. ”
So a Jewish family leaves Palestine for Brooklyn, then a black neighborhood in DC? I’m reminded of what someone said about the Alice Cooper band: the only rock group that moved TO Detroit to become famous.
Speaking of Detroit and “normalizing”, one example I’ve noticed is the obsession with sports. Growing up in Detroit, in the 60s, I recall that the only people who were obsessed with sports were, well, retards. Literally. They’d be on the bus wearing ball caps and perhaps nylon team jackets and you knew they were “special.” Sure, people went to Tiger or Lions games, listened to Ernie Harwell announce the games on the radio on Saturday afternoons, but people weren’t obsessed with sports. The idea of a “sports bar” was unknown (though there was the Lindell AC near Tiger stadium, where actual players hung out), people didn’t plan their weeks around “the game,” stores didn’t sell special shoes and outfits (we made do with “gym shoes”), people didn’t have “man caves” filled with “memorabilia” (another similarity to comics) etc. And of course, there were not dozens of TV channels devoted to sports. There was game broadcast on Saturday and that was it.
I may be wrong, and this was just my own twisted perspective. If correct, however, it does suggest a White Nationalist angle on Americans becoming entranced by black and brown people playing children’s games, on teams owned by Jews.
Once upon a time people railed against the motion picture as a symbol of absolute cultural depravity. Still, life went on. Whether cartoons really do represent the end of civilization remains to be seen….
I went to see Heavy Metal in the theater when it came out in 1981. I found it revolting in the same way that I do Anime. Cartoonish sex and violence and an overall culture of perpetual adolescence. The masturbatory nerd was voiced by John Candy. And the “Heavy Metal” soundtrack wasn’t even very good. (Btw, Black Sabbath is one of my favorite bands of all time.)
On the other hand, I always liked the Simpsons about a dysfunctional family that really wasn’t quite as dysfunctional as suspected. That one came out on the Fox network in late 1989 and was an animated spinoff of a best-forgotten sketch comedy called the Tracey Ullman Show. The first Simpsons shorts were intermission filler or something like that.
In those days the Fox TV network where I lived didn’t have a “Fox viewing position” to get the reception because there was no Fox transmitter in the area. If you wanted to watch something on Fox, you had to have a cable TV subscription. There was a lot of buzz then about the edgy Fox show Married With Children, for example, but I was never too impressed with it.
A Gen-X colleague at the TV station where I worked was going to be out of town and asked me if I could record this new Fox cartoon called the Simpsons on videotape from the NBC TV station’s satellite dish. I did and found it pretty funny and clever, with a lovable Dad who was a bumbling nuclear power technician. What’s not to like?
Of course, the Simpsons “jumped the shark” a looong time ago, and I don’t watch it very often ─ maybe the Halloween special. But depending on the writing, it still has some charm and is usually pretty funny.
Occasionally, the Simpsons will drop some philosophical or historical reference that will far exceed the range of juvenile hearing and “dogwhistle” to more mature ears. This is part of the appeal for multiple generations after over 750 episodes so far.
I’m not a prude and would caution against too much puritanism, but I agree that normalized swearing and the Negrification of the English language in the past few decades has not been a positive trend.
It used to be that film production had to toss in a few fleeting F-bombs to get an R rating that would make the film be taken seriously by adult audiences. At the same time, the category PG-13 had to be created to make a niche between R-rated and PG-rated content after filmmakers like Spielberg had a festival throwing pre-war Nazis into airplane propellers and stuff like that in the name of adolescent adventure archaeology.
There was also big trouble with the X-rating itself. In 1972, our family went to a reshowing at a mall cineplex of the G-rated movie Swiss Family Robinson (Disney, 1960). But everybody at the theater was jammed up waiting instead for Marlon Brando’s X-rated Last Tango in Paris.
Years later I watched the Brando film on cable wondering what the rage was all about. Why was it originally X-rated? Something to do with a scene that is usually partially cut about a stick of butter.
I later wondered why it was that so many of the rated-R’s at the video rental shop (remember those?) were actually pretty much straight out porn. The new category NC-17 doesn’t really help much either, as nobody at the show-house checks IDs for age anyway.
I’d say that the motion picture rating system usually works pretty well in gauging what you are going to get, in spite of many Lesbian filmmakers wondering why Democrat machine politicians like Jack Valenti got to be the final arbiter of family-friendly fare.
Ever since TV broadcasting became common shortly after WWII, both producers and media consumers have been mightily worried about what filth might be piped into the family living room.
The American color analog television technical standard was finalized in 1953, and American home TV ownership exploded in the 1950s. By 1965, when the three TV networks took the plunge and finally decided to use Color broadcasting as their default, a big console Color TV set was almost affordable for a normal American family ─ and within another decade, the price was no longer a consideration at all.
Contrary to popular belief, it was not the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) who were raised with a Boob Tube in every pocket. Yeah, we watched TV but it was only three or four channels that all signed off at night and mostly showed reruns. Movies at the theaters would come out on TV fairly soon, and usually be made safe for living room consumption.
When Bobby Kennedy was shot in 1968 after winning the California Democrat Primary, I was furious that literally nothing else was on TV for an insufferable length of time.
In early 1983, I watched the M*A*S*H finale, a TV show which had “jumped the shark” many years before and was finally being euthanized. Our college apartment was crowded with strange campus people since we had a big console Color TV set that I had rebuilt from junk. With over 100 million viewers watching, this final episode held the record for the most TV viewers until 2010.
Crowded in front of the TV set, some unknown girl had her head on my shoulder sobbing at the end ─ and I forgot to get her name and phone number. (Or maybe I dodged a bullet. Who would not be somewhat embarrassed about tears shed in their youth over the fictional 4077th leaving Korea?)
In 1984, when HBO started scrambling their satellite downlink feeds, the big deal was getting “uncut” movies. Unbowdlerized media did have some appeal ─ but if they are throwing in minority monkeyshines and F-bombs just to be edgy, then I am not sure of the creative merit. When people started fast-forwarding through the boring parts of video tapes, I began to think that maybe they really were watching too much TV.
Before long the rage became “Reality” TV, which is cheap to produce because you don’t have to pay for writers or talent. And I suppose animation and AI can fit into that category as well.
Media, like anything else, is only as good as its creators ─ and you do get what you pay for.
🙂
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The famous ‘butter as lube’ sodomy scene from Last Tango In Paris is indeed tame by modern standards. It’s an art film about a torrid anonymous sexual affair Marlon Brando pursues to cope with the death of his wife. Even if the Gato Barbieri soundtrack is atrocious, the film seems to find new connections and controversies with new generations. In the 70s-80s it was cherished by liberals for its candor and sexual frankness, Pauline Kale gushed over it. Conservatives denounced it as obscene. It might have been William F. Buckley who called it Pornography dressed as art.
In 2016 there was a role reversal amidst the Me Too frenzy. The infamous butter scene was cause celebre of feminists, a simple matter of rape rather than something along the BDSM spectrum. When the film was made in 1972 there wasn’t a 5 page consent checklist for each sex scene. In 1972, nineteen year old Last Tango actress Maria Schnieder said she slept with 120 men and women, used cocaine and heroin, and praised director Bernardo Bertolucci, “Everybody was digging what he was doing”. In 2016 after a disappointing career, Schnieder was on a tear that she “felt raped” by the simulated sex scene because Bertolucci and Brando improvised some of it without telling her. The press all piled on and even lefty film critic David Edelstein got fired for cracking a butter joke on Facebook. I wonder how many of these folks even saw the film, because they magically seemed to overlook the ending, in which Schnieder shoots Brando dead, then starts rehearsing her story for the police, that he was some anonymous man who tried to rape her. The press also made no peep about her role in Diary of French Whore, and her abuse at the hands of pimp. Hopefully this trend is receding after the ‘peak’ of Jeanne Dielman being voted greatest film of all time by Time Out, in which a prostitute stabs her client to death as poetic justice for all the drudgery she suffers.
Schnieder never had a star turn as significant as Last Tango, so she tried to blame her career letdowns on it, saying it ruined her life… Apparently her disappointing career was solely the blame of Brando and Bertolucci, not on drug addictions, mental health fits and walking out on movies after production started. Amazing the career of ‘Dame’ Helen Mirren turned out differently, having had quite a few tawdry sex and nudity scenes tucked in her garter belt.
Clarification, in 2016 Schneider had already been dead a few years but the press was resurrecting her grievances against Bertolucci and Brando. While many will call it a rape scene, Schneider and Brando continue their overtly consensual affair about another half of the film. Brando eventually breaks it off, then later encounters Schneider and wants to rekindle it, this time disclosing his identity and biography, seemingly looking for a ‘real’ relationship, though Schneider now doesn’t want it. The meaning of this turn of events is probably the most interesting part of the film and you will get different answers if you ask a ‘male gaze-obsessed’ feminist or ‘red-pilled’ man. In any case, Last Tango proffers more to think about than Fritz The Cat, both X-rated flicks from 1972. But I’ll the Studio Ghibli cosmos over the Marvel Universe.
Our culture and society has been debased. Crudity, moronic humor and crassness are the norm in cartoons and TV shows. Throw in an over the top preoccupation with sex while you’re at it.
Not surprisingly, most of the public sees nothing wrong with this.
I understand the theme of this article, but it’s rather limited. I have not sworn in nearly 2 years (though I do give myself a dispensation on two words some may consider profanity: one starts with N and the other means cigarette). It is difficult at first to shut off an outlet to vent, but it does increase you creativity in speaking and your intolerance to vulgarity in others. I think profanity can still be used as literary exclamations because there is a time and place for all words..
What I disagree with is the cartoon thing. I don’t watch cartoons anymore or television, but I reserve the right to again someday. Cartoons are an art like anything else. Why cede territory to the enemy like we have with so many other things? Before I went through all my VHS tapes and sold them to some white guy with nostalgia (only white men have this), I binged on a ton of cartoons I grew up with. Many 90s kids will agree with me that the shows we watched on Nickelodeon did not talk down to us. I learned so much from those days. I could watch these cartoons again all these decades later and not feel ridiculous. I keep saying I will, but I never get around to it.
Did you make an effort to stop swearing? I keep trying to stop, but traffic gets me every time.
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