This will be another reason for the traitors to piss and moan.
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Superman? Political?
I wanted to see if I could find this as a poster, but it only comes in 11" x 10" 😕
Looks like the original was a 12x18 book cover in 1949:
https://www.dc.com/blog/2017/08/25/superman-a-classic-message-restored
You might be able to take the 11x10 version and get it sized up at a print shop!
Reminds me of this video made by the department of war after WW2. Americans today should watch these videos
There is a vast, deep ocean of things Americans should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch. We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.
I am utterly baffled how we all grew up watching the same damn shit and took such vastly different messages from it. Were there kids booing every time the turtles beat Shredder? Were there kids getting pissed at Mr Rogers for saying everyone should respect each other?
I first noticed this a few years back when I started to see “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” on bumper stickers. Sure it seemed like a joke at the time but I was confused that so many people thought this was a statement worth putting on their vehicle. I mean, pretty early on in the OT, Darth Vader uses the Death Star to murder an entire planet so surely no one was serious, right?
Whoooo boy have I learned a lot about my neighbors’ values since then.
Let us remember that the entire "The Donald" meme subreddit was entirely satirical when it was made back in the early days of his first campaign. It was people posting memes of Trump as the Emperor from the fascist human empire in Warhammer 40k. (Which is also an entire related topic on its own)
What happened pretty fast is people who didn't get it was satire started coming in absolutely LOVING the worship of the golden clown and started posting unironic memes of Trump riding tanks and carrying eagles and shit. They eventually drove out the people who were there for laughs and it became one of the largest subreddits and a huge chunk of his online support came from that subreddit before it was eventually banned for all the reasons you would expect.
I think we have vastly overestimated people's capability to discern media, we have vastly overestimated our population's capability to rationalize and reason things out. We have a massive segment of the population that has cognitive dissonance baked-in to their very being.
Seriously, I had a whole ass mental breakdown when I started realizing just how bad it is. Most people are on autopilot and just react to stimuli. No brain use. They're fucking CLAMS.
When I found out about the 501st Legion, I was absolutely baffled. George Lucas dressed the bad guys to look like Nazis, and now fans were dressing up as the bad guys because they love the movies so much? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Then Captain America came out and people started dressing as Hydra agents, and I was like, "Oh, they're just straight-up okay with Nazis. Got it."
I had the impression the 501st was a different beast from "The Empire Did Nothing Wrong" types. I thought the point of them being stormtroopers was so everyone else had someone to heroically oppose? Their charity events seem to focus on things like kids shooting them with dart guns.
I'm not saying they haven't been co-opted since I learned about them several years ago; but last I knew, they were happy playing bad guys to let other people be good guys.
I mean, cartoons from when I was a kid were problematic in different ways.
G.I. Joe taught me that the U.S. Military were the good guys and 'Cobra' were the bad guys. While I'm sure Cobra was probably bad, I'm not so sure about the first part. Also, guns are less dangerous than pepper spray and never lethal. On the other hand it also taught me that no matter how hard the GI's fought against the bad guys, they would never stop them for long or truly defeat them, so I guess that it wasn't wholly inaccurate.
Ducktales taught me that miserly Billionaires that hoarded vast amounts of wealth were lovable good guys actually.
I'm not even going to get into what Thundercats taught me.
I see this take all the time, I have a friend who always has to say "copaganda!" when I mention Zootopia (speaking of what Thundercats did to us) but I disagree with the whole impulsive need to call out "problematic" things in these iconic programs. They were problematic mostly in terms of being toy commercials, and the money we fed into toy companies for kids at the time probably contributed to a large portion of the algorithms that are doing far more damage to society than the very abstracted "message" that you can possibly be a lovable billionaire (if you're a duck.)
All that said, yes it's hard to watch now as adults, but I am not going to preach about it or even bring it up. It's cherished memories.
There's no faster way to get people to abandon everything you will ever have to say than by shitting on their cherished memories. We have to start learning to simplify our fights if we're ever taking society back from the orcs. I am serious here. I'm really tired of losing because we can't figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.
Well I was half joking, but it seems to me like you are promoting a pretty big double standard here. You start off by saying "We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy." So you are clearly criticizing something you find fault with (aka problematic) about modern cartoons (I'm not sure what, I don't really watch cartoons anymore) but turn around and say I shouldn't criticize "Problematic" things in "iconic" programs. Then you turn around once more and criticize them your own self in that they were glorified toy commercials, which is a good point. Things can be problematic in more than one way.
I agree that we should teach kids right from wrong (who are the good guys and who are the bad guys), but if you then portray the U.S. Military as 'The good guys' I have a problem with that. I bet a lot of kids who grew up idolizing the Joes ended up joining the military themselves, only to be forced to help overthrow democratically elected leaders in Central and South America, or protecting the U.S.'s ability to buy oil or opium products for cheap by murdering brown folks in the middle east. In my view, the U.S. Military haven't unambiguously been "the good guys" since 1945, and even then the way that war ended was problematic as hell, and I'm not joking about that.
It's irrelevant that Scrooge is a Duck, the message that some billionaires aren't the scum of the Earth is a dangerous message to put out to impressionable young minds- no matter how cutesy you make it look. Look at how many of us who grew up in that era now idolize Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
Yes, I understand that people have cherished memories of some of these shows (just like young people today will someday look back fondly on the shows you feel comfortable criticizing), but being able to look back at the past with the nostalgia Goggles off, and be honest about the things that shaped our values is a part of maturing and growing as people. If the only defense you have of such programs is that they are 'cherished memories'- that seems weak af tbh.
And btw, you friend is absolutely right. Zootopia is 100% copaganda. Just like 1000 other TV programs and movies in our culture. The fact that portraying cops as unambiguous 'good guys' is far and away the norm, but even the mildest of critiques such as Zootopia being copoganda sticks out as silly to you is the reason why it's important to call stuff like this out when we see it.
People need to hear and wake up to reality. Coddling reactionary fragile egos isn't going to accomplish that. Unflinchingly evaluating where we are and how we got here is the only way to do that- even if it makes people slightly uncomfortable for a moment.