2,897 words

Part 1 of 2

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.

These are just the 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.

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.

Fritz the Cat (1972) – Theatrical Trailer

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.

Fritz the Cat Crow

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.

American Pop Trailer 1981

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.

Dirty Duck Caca Scene (1974)

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]

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.

Heavy Metal (1981) – Trailer HD 1080p

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.”

Heavy Metal (1981) – Captain Sternn & Hanover Fiste

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.

Take a Ride – Don Felder, Heavy Metal Soundtrack.avi

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.

Rock & Rule (1983) Trailer HD

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.

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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