Tag: South Park

And Now a Word from Our Sponsor

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Today was the dreaded ladder day.  I have been promising to clean out the gutters on the house and adjoining buildings for quite a while.  And because there are levels and other levels and other, other levels it took hours.   And somehow that damn ladder has gotten heavier over the years.  I mean it can’t be me.  I’m as strong, skillful, handsome and intelligent as ever.  I think it may be that the Earth’s gravitational field has increased over time.  If I’m ballparking it, I’d say it’s doubled.  For that reason, I found it necessary to use “maximum effort.”  But it didn’t help that it was in the high eighties today and high humidity.  And if I’ve learned one lesson it’s that badminton birds are very effective at plugging downspouts.  From now on badminton is a forbidden sport.  Let’s see them get a basketball stuck up there!  Well, that’s enough whining.  I didn’t manage to break my neck or go into vapor lock so let’s move on.

I saw that the same company that wasn’t willing to pay $46 million dollars in losses a year for the Late Show was willing to pay $1.5 billion dollars for five more years of South Park.  That’s got to make you pause.  I remember back in the 1990s when the pilot for that show came out on-line.  It had Jesus fighting with Santa Claus.  It looked like it had been drawn by a twelve-year-old and it seemed to have about the same emotional maturity.  And now the two doofuses who created it are going to be billionaires.  Well, only in America, I guess.  And that at least makes sense.  People want to watch their product.  It makes money.  It has value.  Stephen Colbert and NPR and PBS can’t get enough people to watch their stuff to pay for making it.

I guess the lesson here is that if you’re an equal opportunity offender (and the makers of South Park are most definitely that) then that doubles your audience and adds a level of authenticity to your story.  South Park and its creators; Trey Parker and Matt Stone have insulted and mocked every single powerful figure in one or more episodes over the course of almost thirty years.  That’s all presidents, dictators, religious leaders, billionaires, geniuses, generals, movie stars, corporate bigwigs, movie studios, nations, religions, even supernatural beings from Jesus to Satan to Mohammed.  They’ve made fun of the woke and MAGA.  They offend everyone.  And they do it disgustingly.  But people will pay to watch their stuff because it’s funny.  Disgusting, but funny.

I think that tells me everything I need to know about why the current media landscape is crumbling.  The product on display is really bad and almost no one is willing to cough up the ducats to pay for it.  And I believe that is a hopeful situation.  A lot of really crappy content will go away.  And a lot of it is stuff that annoys me; MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC.  What’s left afterward will at least be profitable.  Stay tuned.

Et Tu Camera Girl?

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The woman to whom I am married, the mother of my children and the one who serves me splendiferous food every day is not a conservative.  By this I don’t imply that she is a progressive.  Far from it.  She’s a traditionalist who saw her career as raising children, grandchildren and various creatures like dogs, birds, hamsters, lizards, turtles, frogs and hermit crabs.  But she knows nothing of politics and doesn’t want to.  She also refuses to vote.  Ever.

She claims to be an Italian American peasant woman and nothing else.  And after years of trying to explain to her why the country is going to hell in a handbasket and failing to interest her in any of it, I gave up.  Other than uttering expletives about Biden and company in her presence I’ve let things be.

So, I was caught off guard today when she asked me, “What is woke?”

I was sort of dumbfounded, for a minute I was speechless.  But then I took the opportunity to capitalize on South Park’s handy-dandy formulation.  I said, “You know how recently Disney decided to remake “Snow White” with a Snow White that isn’t White?  That’s what woke is.”  I then explained what diversity, equity and inclusion means and summed it up as basically anti-white hate.  I told her the theory is that because of past injustices we can’t treat people all the same but must discriminate against white people.  And just because I love listening to it I, I played her the video of Cartman endlessly saying, “Put a chick in it and make her gay and lame.”

And afterward she said she understood.  I started to expand on how things like Drag Queen Story Hour and pediatric transgender affirming surgery were also the fruits of “woke” but at that point she had heard enough and moved on to other activities that were more pressing to her like getting the dogs out for some exercise.

So, I reflected on this strange situation.  Had the revolt against wokeness reached such a dominant place in American life that even an apolitical soul like Camera Girl had been exposed to it in her daily on-line routine which mostly revolved around basset hound and cooking videos?  I had to assume it was the case.  And now the outrage over the obvious idiocy of the policies being applied was no longer stoppable.  Powerful companies like Disney were being mocked openly and regular people were aware of the worthlessness of these policies.  Even the staunch defenders of the woke ideology have a hard time defending some of the transparently awful results.

Maybe we have finally reached the tipping point.  I thought the straw that broke the camel’s back would be the pediatric transgender clinics.  I assumed anything that dystopian and monstrous would wake up the masses and have them grab the torches and pitchforks and storm the barricades.  But if South Park and the race swapping of Jake from State Farm have to be the trigger then I say why not?  Is it any stranger than the Boston Tea Party?  Give me liberty or give me death or maybe put a chick in it and make her gay and lame.

South Park is Making Disney Lose Billions of Dollars

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Anyone who has kids or grandkids is aware that Disney has been on a jihad to “diversify” their movies and tv shows.  This entails replacing characters who in earlier stories were male or white or sexually normal with women and specifically non-white women and very specifically non-white, queer women.  This was very noticeable in the Star Wars franchise where all the heroes are now women and all the men are either lame or evil.

But that was only the beginning.  Next comes the princess movies.  Apparently the irony of a character named Snow White who isn’t white was too complex for Disney.  And diversity has become the marching orders going forward in the Marvel Comic Universe (MCU).  So the old white male heroes like Iron Man and Captain America have been either killed off or put out to pasture and a new generation has been introduced.  So we’ll be getting Black Captain America and Black Spider Man.  But the most egregious example of DEI awfulness is the female Marvel superheroes.  And now that innovation has born fruit, poisonous fruit.  Whereas previously they produced Captain Marvel, we now have “The Marvels.”  That’s blonde haired Captain Marvel joined by two diverse and empowered female heroes who battle against a female super-villain and “don’t need no men to get in their way.”

The reviews of this movie have been scathing.  Apparently when you make message fiction it’s not necessary to have a coherent plot or likeable characters or even a recognizable beginning, middle and end.  You just stop when the special effects guys run out of stuff.

Well, there is no need to complain about this movie.  Making the Marvels was its own punishment.  Based on its opening box office, the movie is already predicted to lose hundreds of millions of dollars.  And all this pandering to diversity has inspired the South Park guys, Trey Parker and Matt Stone to create an episode that mocks Disney’s endless crusade to artificially diversify their movies.  In this episode Cartman finds himself both transformed into a diverse woman and also assuming the place of Disney’s diversifier in chief; producer Kathleen Kennedy.  In this guise Cartman endlessly orders the showrunners for his movies to “put a chick in it and make it lame and gay.”  Here’s the “not safe for work version.”

And now both Kathleen Kennedy and Bob Iger of Disney have made public statements complaining about what’s going on.  Kennedy has stated that South Park is causing Disney fans to think poorly of Disney’s movies and that is causing the poor box office.  She hints that legal action is forthcoming.

Iger is a little more grounded in reality.  He admits that a portion of Disney’s audience really is consciously unhappy with what he calls Disney’s diversity, equity and inclusion program.  And he states quite openly that his solution to this situation will be to “double down” on more diversity, equity and inclusion.

You’ve got to respect his honesty.  Okay.  In the face of a string of movies and tv shows that because of the emphasis on unentertaining social messaging have bombed at the box office Disney is going to give us an even stronger dose of social messaging.  The beatings will continue until moral improves.

This is pretty great.  Disney is a corporate behemoth.  They’ve had a built in cash machine tied to the American family for generations.  And now they’re committing public suicide just to prove they can do it.  Well, how stupid do their competition have to be.  They should jump at the chance to provide these families with exactly what they used to get from Disney.  Hire some decent writers who don’t hate normal people.  Pay the special effects people to animate it and get rich.  Give them knock-offs of all the Disney and Star Wars and Marvel stuff but without “putting a chick in it and making it lame and gay.”

There. That’s not so hard to figure out, is it?