this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

Life is full of mysteries, yeah
But there are answers out there
And they won't be found
By people sitting around
Looking serious
And saying 'Isn't life mysterious?'
Let's sit here and hope
Let's call up the fucking Pope
Let's go watch Oprah
Interview Deepak Chopra

If you wanna watch telly, you should watch Scooby Doo
That show was so cool
Because every time there was a church with a ghoul
Or a ghost in a school
They looked beneath the mask and what was inside?
The fucking janitor or the dude who ran the waterslide
Because throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved
Has turned out to be
Not magic

- Tim Minchin, Storm

[–] [email protected] 53 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

And then they undermined that message that one time they made the zombies real, and probably a couple other times I don't remember.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Every movie essentially involves the supernatural to some extent.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

To be fair it started with the Scrappy Doo series. A lot of those villains were real.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Explains why the first live action movie features him so prominently

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

That and to cash in on everyone hating his guts

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Don't get me started on Kiss being aliens with transformation sequences.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 hour ago

I mean, that's just Kiss lore. I'm not kidding, there's KISS lore

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Also in the show that is pictured here

[–] [email protected] 38 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Wow, Scooby Doo must be "woke" or whatever the kids say these days

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Everything you liked as a kid seems woke and politicized when you were a tiny kid because tiny kids are too dumb to think on purpose.

I'll say, though, I was old enough to be mad at the James Gunn-written Scooby adaptations because they couldn't resist doing actual supernatural stuff and lost this angle entirely.

And then those got reappraised as not being garbage when THOSE kids grew up and a lot of the newer stuff went with that angle as well.

You being too dumb to think on purpose doesn't mean you're not learning, for better and worse. I used to think that wasn't the case when I was a kid because I was too dumb.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago

The hex girls tho

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

....the "kids" in question being Republicans.

It's fine, I also respond like this.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

Well, you'd be surprised. Going through uni I definitely got to see a lot of left-of-centre young adults get through semiotics and discouse analysis courses and have an absolute fit at the realization that a bunch of the cool stuff they liked as kids had a clear right-wing bent.

I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard before they were forced to think about it too hard. Learning! Twice!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

I still can't tell if the original response thought I was actually calling Scooby Doo woke 😭

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Interested in hearing about the right wing bent of Bttf and die hard

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I would lie if I said I wasn't baiting a little bit, but man, see? Cuts both ways.

Die Hard is extremely obvious. I mean, the whole movie is about this guy finding that his wife suddenly has a job, makes more money than he does and may be attractive to smarter, richer people, but then fate conspires to make his blue collar streetsmarts and prepper attitudes having him save the day for the foppish yuppies. The entire movie ends when they throw the eurotrash rich thief out of a building by literally unshackling Holly from the bonus gift her company job gave her, then wrapping her up in a comfort blanket and taking her home. The movie also finds time to clearly establish that all public servants are idiots except for street level cops.

Back to the Future is subtler, but also pretty straightforward. Kid thinks life with middle class parents in the 80s sucks, goes back to the 50s, which turn out to be as ideal as expected but also somehow cooler in a very 80s kind of way, teaches his dad self-assertion and comes back to the future to find he's now upper class and has a 4x4. It's a lot less hardcore, but the reagonomics are running underneath the whole thing. I'd take that it's accidental, because the same team went much more leftward in Roger Rabbit, so I think it's just that a lot of the cultural white noise of the mid-80s is baked into the assumptions. And the nostalgia is a massive driving force of conservatism anyway. BTTF is idolizing this "fifteighties" imagery the same way Grease was to suggest there is a perfect past to return to. Kind of in the way Stranger Things and a bunch of other stuff does to the 80s.

That's maybe the most fun part of breaking down BTTF. The iconic slivers of the film set in the 80s are supposed to show it being run down, realistic and disappointingly drab by comparison.

Also, Lybian terrorists stealing plutonium but being so incompetent they get tricked by Doc and defeated by Marty. That's a very time-specific one, like Rambo praising the Taliban.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Dare I ask you to go further?

What’s an extreme example of a crypto-rightwing-coded-80s-flick?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

I don't know, man, Die Hard is pretty far out there.

The Rambo and Rocky sequels are what they are as well. They are almost naive about it in a way that supports ironic appreciation, though.

Dirty Harry tracks, but that's back in the early 70s. I never went deep enough into the sequels to see if it got really bad down the line.

I've heard some stuff about Field of Dreams, but I don't think I've watched that in one sitting.

I don't know it's often the action stuff. Your Commandos and Death Wishes and so on. Does stuff like Red Dawn and Invasion USA even count as "crypto"? Those are pretty overt.

If you let me break the time frame I will say that I think The Incredibles flies over people's heads as being aggressively conservative. Forrest Gump used to, but I think people got wise to it over time. Another Zemeckis joint, too. Maybe it's Roger Rabbit that was the accident.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Don't forget any movie that includes a fleet of Chevrolet Suburbans being driven as a government vehicle!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 45 minutes ago

Oh, man, way too new for the conversation.

But I guess we can add Bad Boys 2 to the list. I mean, all of Michael Bay's oeuvre, but holy crap, Bad Boys 2. That MUST have been some form of weird Florida-lobby/CIA psyop, there is no other explanation.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Ahh Deathwish I haven’t thought about that in years but yeah it does have white flight, brown gangs, and one NYC architect-cum-vigilante savior.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Even the incredibles thinks the insurance industry is predatory. It flew over my head completely in being right wing, but I’m autistic and often miss really, really obvious subtext (though I can generally predict entire plots from the first few minutes, so it’s a weird combination). I could tell that zootopia was a heavy handed allegory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it referencing racism, for example.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

In fairness, Zootopia is... kinda muddy on that front.

The Incredibles is very overt about the whole objectivist "if everybody is special the nobody is" and how the supes are better because they were born better but the wannabe sidekick has no business trying to be one of the special people by inventing stuff. And how the government and society are regulating these people who are intrinsically better into normalcy when they should be allowed to freely express themselves.

But not the guy who isn't born into it. That's evil.

I mean, I'm pushing it, but it's not really a secret. And man, does it set people off. Not just on the Internet. There are full on thinkpieces that have been printed on paper about how he's subtly different from a true Objectivist and so his ideas that some people are exceptional and superior are fine.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, they all had a lot of time to get attached to Back to the Future and Die Hard

What's so right wing about those? Honestly, it's been a while but I don't really remember any clear examples.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Somebody else just asked, so see above.

BTTF I can get, but Die Hard flying under people's radar is always surprising.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks! Today I learned I don't really remember any details about die hard...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

Hah! It happens. That's when the shock comes.

I'll say that it's still a great movie. I love it. That's something modern culture warriors just won't acknowledge. You can engage with a piece of art or entertainment pushing politics you despise. It's fine.