Quarantine Control #163: A Zero-Sum Bonkers Idiocracy
A particular running theme in 2023, among the many it will inevitably have, involves writers fighting for their survival. Those who work on movies and shows in Hollywood as part of the Writers Guild of America are striking to fight studios worth billions for sustainable pay, which has gone on for nearly two-and-a-half weeks now with little sign of ending soon. The looming opposition is AI and the corporations more than willing to use it, which seeks to replace entertainment writers and those beyond them, a very real threat as shown just this week through the words of Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti and the desires of Shonen Jump Plus. It’s tough to tell who will win out, but you shouldn’t need to guess where writers everywhere, including for blogs like this one, stand.
Geoffrey Barnes
Lupin Zero (2022)
Source: HIDIVE
Episodes: 6
I’ve been watching Lupin the 3rd anime for a while, and have been catching up with the many — and I mean many — works that I’ve missed now that most of the series, movies, and specials are available on streaming services. But it was during a watch of the earliest content made in the 1970s that some rudimentary thoughts ran through my head. It’s established during the first anime’s start that Lupin, Daisuke Jigen, and Fujiko Mine had known each other for a while, and that Inspector Zenigata was familiar with them, while Goemon Ishikawa XIII joins the group later. But I’d love to see the story in which they all first met. This is where Lupin Zero comes in, a short direct-to-streaming series that focuses on Lupin as a high school kid in his earliest days, in stories mostly inspired by those from a saga in the old Monkey Punch manga series.
Lupin Zero takes place in the 1960s, and focuses on the titular character’s time as a young kid learning the ways of a thief. He’s not as clever as his older self and is far more of a wisecracker, but remains identifiable through his drive to become a skilled in the ways of thievery to live up to his name, and his ability to care for other people despite his outward attitude. He befriends Jigen during this time, who’s around a similar age in high school and is already a skilled sharpshooter. The six-episode format leaves little room for episodic adventures, and largely focuses on Lupin’s attempts to live up to his father Lupin the 2nd and grandfather Arsène Lupin, and his infatuation with a mysterious pink-haired woman he’s fallen for named Yoko.
The production team at TMS Entertainment may not have had much time to tell the story compared to the longer Lupin shows, but the small-scale tale is one of the best they’ve featured in the franchise in recent memory. The best Lupin works are skilled at balancing comedy and serious content, and Zero presents an equal helping of both. The series includes solid pacing and writing, with enough time to ensure that nearly every character gets a worthwhile amount of screentime. Lupin family housekeeper Shinobu is the only one who loses out here. It’s also a solid opportunity to feature Lupin’s direct family in significant roles for the first time outside flashbacks of questionable canonicity. The series serves as further proof that the creative team behind Lupin the 3rd: Part 5 is the best for this particular job.
The creative team did an excellent job making the series look and feel like an anime close enough to one from the era. It includes enough aesthetic and audio elements to resemble a tale set before Lupin the 3rd: Part 1. The animation, it should be noted, is much better than any anime from the 1960s, and it’s presented in a widescreen format. It resembles the kind of 1960s anime that exists in the minds of people who remember them but haven’t watched one in ages, with a comparatively subdued color palette, old school-style character designs, and a classic soundtrack. It’s a sight to behold, and I’d love it if the style was utilized in more anime.
It’s a pity that the series is so short at a mere six episodes, even though the story is so fittingly small scale and tightly knit that it wasn’t longer or shorter than it needed to be to get its story and character development across. A part of me also missed seeing Fujiko, Zenigata, and Goemon, even though it wouldn’t have made much sense to have them around too prominently in this period. The series ends up showing how integral they are to making Lupin’s adventures so fun to watch. But it didn’t need them.
Lupin Zero is one of the better installments in the franchise, and I’m sincerely hoping they’ll do more with the circa-1960s setting in the near future. There’s plenty of room for more character and setting development around the characters during this time, despite this series’ direct story wrapping up by the end. There’s also room for Fujiko and Zenigata, at least, to be introduced, and a future series would provide opportunity to elaborate on what happened to characters who were in Lupin’s life during this time, outside Jigen. This series garnered more praise than the fine-though-unpolished Lupin the 3rd: Part 6, so perhaps TMS will consider a longer follow-up, if rendering this old-school animation style isn’t too difficult to utilize for a longer series format.
Angela Moseley
Idiocracy (2006)
Source: Amazon Prime rental
Episodes: 1 movie
During the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing the quip “Idiocracy is a documentary.” This usually came as a response to the election of Donald Trump as President. Even Wisecrack released an interesting video examining and critiquing parts of Mike Judge’s 2006 movie. Others have pushed back stating that Idiocracy is NOT a documentary. It was difficult for me to make a judgment call about this movie considering I’ve only heard about it. I decided to finally watch this 17-year-old movie. Honestly, it is something I can appreciate now versus if I had seen it during its release.
I’m largely indifferent to Mike Judge’s work. I find parts of Beavis and Butt-Head funny, and King of the Hill is very hit or miss. That said, Judge has the same kind of insight as The Simpsons showrunners. He can see where current trends are going, take them to the most ridiculous conclusion that’s not entirely implausible, and parts of society unironically adopts those trends. Predicting these trends are less prophecy and more perception. There are clearly parts of Idiocracy where Judge was extremely perceptive with his social commentary and parody. Overall, I enjoyed the movie and found it to be a fun kind of dumb.
In the early 2000s, a top secret military program is created. Cryogenically frozen elite soldiers that can be stored and woken up in the distant future should America need them. The technology is experimental, so rather than test it on elite soldiers first, average members of the military are chosen. In this case, Corporal Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) who is extremely average at everything and has no family that will miss him is picked for a year long deep sleep. Joining him is a sex worker named Rita (Maya Rudolph), as the military couldn’t find a similarly average woman among their ranks who wouldn’t be missed for a year. Once the two are in deep sleep, scandal hits the head of the program and for incredibly stupid reasons, the site holding the sleep capsules is bulldozed to make way for a Fuddruckers.
500 years pass and the capsules holding Joe and Rita end up at the top of a massive garbage mountain. An avalanche causes the trash to spill and their capsules end up in a nearby city. Now free, Joe realizes that hundreds of years have passed since he was frozen and the world has changed for the worst. Average intelligence has plummeted, most people are barely functioning idiots, corporate interests run rampant, and the environment has been devastated. He tries to make sense of the world, while Rita (who’s been separated from him), finds it easy to use her street smarts to survive.
Not quite realizing how dumb everyone has become, Joe tries to get help at the hospital, and he’s quickly discovered not to have a barcode tattoo. He runs away, but is quickly captured, is given an IQ test, and is tattooed with the name “Not Sure.” He’s sent to jail for not paying his hospital bill, escapes, and tries to find a time machine with the help of Frito (Dax Shepard), his useless public defender. Ultimately, he’s captured again and brought to President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho (Terry Crews) after it’s discovered his IQ test reveals he’s the smartest man in the world. Joe is given a week to solve the nation’s problems otherwise, he’ll be sent back to jail.
Idiocracy’s premise that dumb people reproduce faster than smart people thus causing the decline of America, reeks of eugenics– though thankfully it’s just parody. Unfortunately, I feel way too many people who consider themselves exceptionally intelligent may miss the parody and take the movie’s word as personal gospel. Much like Rick and Morty fans take Rick’s brand of nihilism as call to action, and completely miss the criticism of this type of thinking. That said, I don’t have much else to say on this part of the movie.
Where Idiocracy really shines is the nature of capitalism and dystopia. Even in the early aughts Judge already saw how intrusive advertising could be, corporate interest trumping the common good, and how easily people were willing cede their ability to critically think for convenience. It’s not a mistake that people wear barcodes much like commodities in the dystopian future they inhabit. It’s no mistake that everything is permeated by multiple sponsorships, down to the clothes people wear and up to the government itself.
People are the products and every facet of their lives are commoditized. Large TVs are filled with ads and the actual programming takes up very little screen real estate. Hospitals are run like fast food chains, and slot machines are available to give people too poor to afford healthcare a chance at winning free care. All drinking water has been replaced by Brawndo (a Gatorade-like drink) because it “mutilates thirst.” Additionally, the stuff has replaced water for crops because it has “got what plants crave.” Not that anyone could say otherwise, as Brawndo and other corporate entities ended up outright buying much of the government to push their own agendas. As the world became stupider, everyone took corporate interests as absolute truth, even over their own interests.
Mind you, if any parts of this parody sounds disturbingly familiar remember this movie was released in 2006. Years before social media and rampant sponsorship became a common part of most people’s lives, before smartphones hit the market, and before Citizens United was ruled on by the Supreme Court. Corporate lobbying is stronger than ever, while regular citizens go unnoticed by their governments. Companies are happy to give consumers free products in exchange for all their data and the chance to endlessly place advertising in front of their eyeballs. Given all this, I can see why so many people feel that Idiocracy was prophecy versus social commentary.
Even you’re like me and haven’t seen Idiocracy in the 17 years since it was released, give it a try. Come for the dumb comedy on the surface, stay for the fascinating social commentary just under the surface.
Joseph Daniels
Back at the beginning of the Year of the Rabbit, Disney celebrated many of their iconic rabbits, but I noticed one of them was left off entirely, so it was possible they didn’t think of him as iconic. Indeed, he was a bit of a bit part in the series he did feature in, and the series itself has been largely forgotten, and with good reason…
Bonkers (1993)
Source: Disney+
Episodes: 65
Rabbits?: Fall-Apart Rabbit (supporting cast), March Hare (cameo appearances)
Despite how much it would’ve made sense, especially given the premise of the show and how other elements of the Disney Afternoon got their start (like how a series based on The Rescuers eventually became Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers), Bonkers didn’t actually begin life as a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? TV series. It has the same energy and much of the same premise, with a toon and a human teaming up to solve various capers that involve toons, but it’s not related. Unlike the movie, Bonkers is entirely animated, including the human characters.
The series takes place in Hollywood, and in fact, someone swipes both the H and D in the Hollywood sign in one episode, so Bojack Horseman wasn’t the first to pull off that gag, but the letters are returned by the end of the episode, so as far as I can tell, only Bojack had the balls to commit to it on more of a long term basis. Bonkers begins as a Hollywood star, quite full of himself, until he’s fired due to studio shenanigans. Then his friends start to disappear and through a series of wild events, he finds himself playing at being a cop alongside real cop Lucky Piquel, and eventually the pair bust the criminal responsible, a toon known as The Collector. However, it turns out that The Collector is a human in disguise, and his motivations are mostly unknown other than he wants to collect Bonkers and his friends, and he sees himself as a toon.
The “he has five fingers!” reveal felt iconic at the time, but has mostly gone forgotten since then. It also didn’t make for a satisfying closure to the narrative, for The Collector to be a random human since he didn’t show up earlier as his normal human self, and honestly? If the pilot episode had been attempted today, what they should’ve done with The Collector was have him be the television executive that fired Bonkers and his friends. Why would he fire Bonkers, only to start kidnapping his friends and eventually Bonkers himself? Easy: he’d be pulling an HBO Max situation where he doesn’t want to make any more Bonkers cartoons and also doesn’t want Bonkers to be available for anyone else, either. It would feel more narratively satisfying than having him be a random human we’ve never seen before and never see again.
But then again, this is also the cop show way, to make the villain a character we don’t always meet until the finale. The pilot episode of Numb3rs obscured the villain until the final scene of the show, they didn’t even give him a fake out appearance earlier in the episode to clear him of initial suspicion, like how cop shows sometimes do. Notorious serial killer Natalie Davis, known as The Miniature Killer, is only seen at the very end of her story arc in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, but is it really a successful fake-out if you didn’t even hire the actress until the episode where she’s revealed?
Bonkers is probably the first series that doesn’t quite live up to the quality of earlier shows in the Disney Afternoon, and is what happens when a studio is desperate to keep the hits coming. They’d had a new hit every year up to that point, and Bonkers was going to be the next big hit, but production problems had begun to affect their shows. The original premise had Bonkers being the partner of Officer Miranda Wright for a full 65 episode series, but many of the episodes came back looking like garbage. Instead of fixing them, new episodes were ordered which featured Lucky Piquel as Bonkers’ partner, and an episode was written to bridge the gap between the Lucky and Miranda episodes. This is likely why the pilot episode features Miranda as a secretary in a non-speaking role.
Incidentally, Gargoyles also had issues with some of their episodes looking like garbage thanks to the animation studio they outsourced their production to. Unlike Bonkers, Gargoyles was always meant to have a strong sense of continuity, so they couldn’t just scrap the episodes and write more and air what they had. They had to put the series into reruns after less than ten episodes had aired and get the rest of the first season redone. I do wonder what might’ve happened if they’d done the same with Bonkers, but I guess we’ll never know.
I don’t feel like a lot of the jokes and gags on the show landed, but that’s mainly because I rewatched some of the episodes thirty years after their initial airing. I was ten years old when the series first aired, and my standards were a lot lower back then. I’m hesitating to consider how bad some of the other shows in the Disney Afternoon are going to seem to me, now that it’s been decades since I last watched them. Gargoyles, of course, stood the test of time, but not every show does. And even back then, I knew that both The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa and The Shnookums & Meat Funny Cartoon Show were terrible and that even Aladdin and Hercules showed how creatively bankrupt they were becoming. The last Disney Afternoon show I genuinely liked was The Mighty Ducks, and I don’t know if I want to try watching any of it now.
The fact that Disney didn’t acknowledge Fall-Apart Rabbit earlier this year is definitely not surprising, since people tend to skip over everything between Goof Troop and Gargoyles when talking about good Disney Afternoon shows, and honestly? I don’t blame them. Considering the quality of Gargoyles, it felt like they were indeed the next series after Goof Troop to air, and then everything started sucking from there, but things were clearly beginning to deteriorate as early as 1993. At least Disney was able to keep their movie renaissance going until the end of the 1990s, but even their movie division was beginning to deteriorate, considering the decade is also when their obsession with direct to video sequels began, with 1994’s The Return of Jafar. The Disney of today is even more obsessed with money, and sadly, we have our parents to blame for buying into Disney’s 90s garbage. And us, too, for having watched a lot of it.
This Week’s Short Film
Load Aim Burn, Episode 1: Canvas’s Edge (2023)
Even in this make-pretend post-COVID time, there are still far too many crises to discuss in the news every week. But that’s simply how life on Earth is. See you all next week, Same Quarantine Control time, Same Quarantine Control channel.
(That’s corny, yes, but it had to be done at least once. You have to understand.)
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
