Of course I was spoiled growing up. We didn’t just have The Muppet Show (and Fraggle Rock!) on TV- we knew the name of the man who brought the Muppets to life; Jim Henson. We even knew that the man who voiced “Miss Piggy”, Frank Oz, guest-starred in one of the biggest sequels of all time, as a little green alien called “Yoda”.
Oh, and that sequel? We all knew whose baby it was. George Lucas. His film-school buddy Steven Spielberg was the mastermind behind E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, and the classic-styled anthology show Amazing Stories. (Just to name a few.)
Our older siblings knew the names of the men who created H.R. Pufnstuf, and many other puppety oddballs of television: Sid and Marty Krofft. “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” was a long-running cartoon show based on the early life of comedian Bill Cosby. Cosby also appeared on myriad kids’ shows, espousing the virtues of honesty, forthrightness, and racial equality, oftentimes with a magic pen called “Doobee”.
I guess you can see what I’m getting at here. In corporate 2020, the individual creator is not an asset, but a liability.
Would you like evidence? Watch literally anything Bill Cosby has ever appeared in, without prejudice. Try to watch as yourself from 30 years ago. It’s impossible. You’d have an easier time threading a needle with a welding torch.
Every single independent creator in the world right now suffers because of human garbage like Harvey Weinstein and fallen idols like Bill Cosby. Any person with a story to tell is a liability to a production studio. If you’re like me, and you’ve dreamed your whole life about creating a successful intellectual property, you should probably forget about it and go into insurance.
Look at The Simpsons. Remember how you used to see Matt Groening’s signature on every piece of Simpsons artwork? Then it came out that Groening flew on Jeffery Epstein’s “Lolita Express” private plane, and a young prostitute charged with massaging Matt’s feet became sick at the sight of his disgusting fungus-ridden toenails.
All of the sudden the creator isn’t a lauded independent artist, they’re a liability. They’re a threat to their own billion-dollar (global) brand. Thanks to Groening’s extracurricular associations, his own name is now a black mark.
(By the way- it’s pronounced GRAY-ning, like “complaining”. That’s how long I was a fan.)
Imagine idolizing Matt Groening as a cartoonist, for your entire life. Imagine coming to the realization that there is nowhere to go. Not even down; nowhere. No syndication, no sitcom deal, nothing. Not even Seth McFarlane gives a fuck about cartoons anymore. Why would he? They only made him the richest writer in television history.
Look at how Quentin Tarantino is feted by the mainstream media, since those photos of him sucking a child’s foot on the “Lolita Express” emerged. Every movie he makes is an indisputable paragon of cinematic genius, no matter how derivative or idiotic that movie might be. No one notices that he’s a kept boy, re-inflating the lost prestige of Hollywood’s fallen. He is all that keeps Miramax from sinking like it deserves. So guys like Harvey Weinstein keep him “sweet”, even in secret. QT understands that without Weinstein he’s nothing, plus he’s a perv himself, so he needs Weinstein’s remaining cachet to keep him out of court and the tabloids. And Harvey Weinstein needs Tarantino because he’s the one thing that keeps him looking like a proper producer, and not the rapist that he is.
Remember when it was just about movies?
I don’t. I can’t.
A corporation is infallible. A person is not. So when a person’s work becomes part of a corporation, that person is like an unlicensed nuclear reactor. No big company wants to risk their reputation on a flawed human who will inevitably rape or murder or drug someone to fuck their face.
Even though ideas and intellectual properties come from one place and one place only: flawed humans.
The only creation of Walt Disney (and it wasn’t even his) that anyone knows nowadays is Mickey Mouse. Not because Mickey was such a hilarious character, or because his cartoon legacy has endured for almost a century. It’s due to the aggressive branding of Mickey’s image on baby clothes sold at Wal-Mart.
You can watch hundreds of cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, dating back to the 1930’s, and laugh your ass off. This is thanks to men like Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson, Friz Freleng, and Michael Maltese. They cared about making people laugh, and about outdoing the competition. Their company overseer specifically told them not to make a cartoon about bullfights, because “bullfights aren’t funny”. Guess what they immediately set about making?
Depending on which home video release you watch, Beavis & Butt-Head is clearly the creation of one Mike Judge. Judge had to fight to get his signature underneath his famed spawn, like Groening’s. On the rare and wonderful occasions that Judge makes movies, how does the studio place his name on the posters?
No company wants to deal with a “loose cannon” creator. I hate to tell you, I may not agree with it, but I understand.
Martin Scorsese recently made a new movie with Joe Pesci, probably my favorite actor, turning in a knockout performance. It also features Robert De Niro, whom I suppose took a break from thirty years of dogshit scripts and four years of ranting about Trump to actually act again. Good for him. I for one would sooner sit on a curling iron than pay to see that muttering cocksucker on a screen ever again. I even avoided Joker because he was in it.
So there you go. I will never pay to see Robert De Niro in anything ever again, thanks to his attitude, and the fact that he will inevitably be outed as a sexual pest or predator in the next few years. The only people who go psychotically anti-Trump are either rapists or were raped themselves and are astronomically traumatized, and for whom the mere suggestion of someone like Trump being a rapist triggers an hysterical yet understandable reaction. Guys like De Niro think we’re all stupid. Fuck him. He’s made more money than I’d see in ten lifetimes. I resent the fact that I’ve praised him in the past. I don’t know him, he ain’t putting chicken on my table, he can eat my fat ass.
Phil Spector shot a woman in the face and killed her. “Ke$ha” was raped by her producer. I am more than happy to hurl the baby out with the bathwater. The popular music industry is apparently a bacchanal of murderers and sexual abusers. Literally anyone who wins a Grammy I presume is complicit in some horrific sex cult or pedophile ring. You want to call every man who works on a computer an “incel”? Fine. Everyone in the music industry is a pedophile rapist. They fuck kids. Prove me wrong. Case by case, until we get to everybody from the past ten years. Because I’m done with all this bullshit. I’m done with it.
Every white blogger is a “white supremacist”, right? Fine. Miley Cyrus and Bernie Sanders believe “abortion is healthcare”, which is great for the elites because it means more stem cells and baby parts farmed from abortion centers in all-black areas. White women will act like the slightest criticism of abortion is a physical assault, while in the time it takes them to tweet about it, a thousand black fetuses are excised and pureed like goose liver and shipped to eager recipients. Kate Beckinsale uses macerated Korean baby foreskins as a beauty treatment. But hey- at least those babies lived, amirite?
I can’t even watch Taxi Driver or King of Comedy anymore; that’s how sick Robert De Niro makes me. All the money and clout in the world doesn’t mean jack shit; these mendicants STILL have to lecture us on how to live our lives, while they themselves behave abhorrently. And then we pay them for it? FUCK YOU.
Remember Felicity Huffman from Sports Night? She got caught buying her daughter’s way into an Ivy League school; so did Aunt Becky from Full House. Seinfeld, a legendary show named for its star comedian, can’t be discussed in polite company without mentioning Kramer’s argot of racist epithets at the Comedy Store. Smallville, a popular show about Superman’s teenage years, starred Alison Mack, a real “girl next door” type who happens to be a high-ranking acolyte of Keith Rainere’s NXIVM sex cult.
Say sayonara to the baby everyone, because I’m punting this fucker clear out of the tub.
The individual in entertainment is dead. You killed it. You killed it with every compromised TV show you watched, every mainstream pop music album you bought, every second of your life you gave away to these animals. You buried Jim Henson, after you killed him, and then you kicked sand over anything he ever built. You slit my throat when you subscribed to “Disney+”, and then you laughed while I bled out and died.
You.
Odds are within ten years’ time I’ll be gone. Aside from my own desires, there is no reason to continue doing this. It’ll never lead to anything bigger. There will likely never be a Bands I Useta Like animated series, or a Ceaseless Fables of Beyonding movie. There are no rebel animation studios willing to take a chance on me. The world I knew ten years ago isn’t even history; it’s forgotten. People are paid to erase it. Some even do it for free.
If that sounds fatalistic to you, maybe you should have done something about it when you had the chance. Maybe you should have fought a little harder for the individual and not eagerly promoted corporate product. Maybe you should have listened a little better when guys told you that things were wrong, instead of doubling down on a lunatic diversity agenda that works for no one and actively discourages merit. Maybe you should have been a little harder on companies like Disney, and the shills they wield. Maybe you should have been more suspicious of them when they started selling a lifestyle. A costume. A uniform.
Maybe you should have been a better individual, because it’s too late now. Not only is Jim Henson dead, he could not conceivably exist in our present timeline. That’s why we have Elon Musk and his homely Space Truck. Everyone just assumes the windows won’t break until someone breaks them. That’s your entrepeneur of the 2020’s right there; marginally competent and in way over their head, touting a product that appears to be designed by people who resented doing so. That’s the kind of thing people celebrate now. A controllable buffoon.
Begging your pardon, but that’s not good enough. But what can I say, I was spoiled growing up.
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