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0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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0:00:10
Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 109 and I am one of your co-hosts, Ben Radford, and with me is…

Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward, as always. How you doing?

0:00:35
BR: Good, good, good. Now, you and I were chatting earlier and I thought I heard another voice. It was really weird. I don’t know if I’m just hearing voices or do you…

0:00:57
CW: Do we have a ghost in the studio?

0:01:00
BR: It’s either that or it might… Is it possible that we have a special guest on this time?

0:01:05
CW: Spirit, rap once if you’re there.

0:01:09
BR: Did you hear that?

0:01:10
CW: Oh my God!

0:01:12
I think it’s Erik Kristopher Myers.

0:01:16
EM: That means no, it’s not Erik Kristopher Myers.

CW: It’s oh, but you sound just like Erik Kristopher Myers.

0:01:22
BR: He’s doing the Fox Sisters thing. That’s awesome.

0:01:24
EM: It’s Erik Kristopher Myers.

0:01:28
CW: All right.

0:01:29
EM: This is there’s a distinction here.

CW: We weren’t pronouncing your syllables correctly. Mr. Myers.

0:01:34
EM: If you can hear it, then you can share my injections and my nightly medicines.

BR: Fair enough then. So today on the show we will be talking about subversion in children’s shows and entertainment.

0:01:48
CW: One of my favorite topics.

EM: Very much.

0:01:52
CW: We each looked into a few aspects of things aimed at children, mostly entertainment type things. I did some dives into Disney content which is a bunch of different rabbit holes. And Ben looked into a couple of cartoon sources as well. And Erik, you’ve got some D&D information to bring us, right?

EM: Absolutely. Dungeons and Dragons.

0:02:12
CW: Cool. Kind of going through this, I kind of found three different categories going on. There was the actual, like admitted, found, verified, subversive content that was either put in as a joke or as some sort of sabotage. And then there’s suspected subversive content that you kind of have to strain your imagination, perhaps a bit of pareidolia going on. And then there’s flat-out hoaxes that never happened, but people sometimes try to convince other people that this piece of their childhood really was tainted with something subversive that they just never noticed.

BR: Tainted or enriched?

0:02:47
CW: A good question, Mr. Radford. Ben, have you had, you’ve had a busy week.

0:02:51
BR: Has anything hit your radar that you’re skeptical of this week?

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0:02:52
BR: Yes, I wanted to briefly call back to an earlier story that we think we briefly touched on before. As regular listeners of the show know, I think it’s important to do follow-ups. So often, there’s a news story and it’s big news and it’s an outrage or whatever else, a big concern, and then with the 24-hour news cycle, it’s gone, right? These stories just fade away with no real resolution, no real answers. And I recently came across a news report that was following up on some mysterious deaths in the Dominican Republic. You guys remember those cases?

0:03:42
CW: Oh yeah. I remember some tourists, something in the drinks or some kind of strange way that tourists were finding themselves.

0:03:51
BR: Yes. Yes. Mysterious stuff. And for those who remember, this happened earlier in 2019. I think it was around, there was actually a handful of cases, well, more than a handful, but of separate incidences, I think ranging from about March to May or June. And in one particular case, the concern was about tourists in the DR, in the Dominican Republic. And the news, the follow-up is that the FBI looked into the deaths of three people and they determined they were not in fact caused by poison alcohol. So basically what happened was that in the DR, there were three incidents. There was Nathaniel Holmes, Cynthia Day, and another person in their 50s and 60s who all died in the Dominican Republic at tourist resorts. It was weird, mysterious, maybe. It was certainly thought to be. Immediately, of course, conspiracies circled. Were they being drugged and maybe trying to be robbed and they were given too much or what happened. And one of the main theories was that they were the victim of poisoned alcohol.

0:04:57
CW: Yeah, that’s what I’d heard.

0:04:59
BR: And so to be clear, that is a viable theory. It is known that unfortunately that is a thing. Tainted alcohol is a problem in tourist areas, including the Caribbean and elsewhere around the world where unethical tourist resorts will substitute cheap alcohol, selling cheap alcohol for top shelf liquor. And of course, after you’ve had three or four, you’re a drunk tourist and you’re not going to tell the difference. So this is a real thing. The problem is that sometimes they will mix in other types of alcohol. In some cases, it can actually kill you. The Dominican Republic, which is of course concerned about its tourism, as you would expect, the DR Tourist Board was not happy with all the media attention on it. They looked into it and they said that they didn’t see any pattern, there was no real connection between the deaths. And because several of them were U.S. citizens, the FBI was asked to investigate. Anyway, so the follow-up is the release of the toxicology report and I have a quick statement here. This is from the State Department said, The results of the additional extensive toxicology testing completed to date have been consistent with the findings of local authorities. Our condolences and sympathy go out to the families. Methanol poisoning from tainted alcohol was ruled out by the FBI in these cases during the toxicology screenings. So as I mentioned, this is a real problem and particularly in India. In fact, when I was doing a little bit of poking around, I found that earlier this year, 150 people died in Northeast India because of alcohol poisoning and and hundreds were sick. And so this is a common problem and sometimes people will intentionally drink tainted alcohol. I mean, they won’t do it knowing it’s going to hurt them, but they buy cheap alcohol for this home brewed in someone’s toilet because it’s cheap and inexpensive and thrifty because cheap and inexpensive aren’t synonyms. Anyway, it looks like the evidence so far is that most likely it simply ran the coincidence. And I remember Mick West, who we had on the show a while back, did an excellent analysis at his website, metabunk.com, just explaining that this apparent string of mysterious deaths is actually right about random chance. Yeah, so it’s just, now to be clear, there were other incidents, for example, there was one in, there was a case in, there were several cases in Costa Rica, I think there was one or two in Mexico as well. So this is only one of several cases, but this is one of the higher profile ones. And as it turns out, if anything, the number of tourist deaths in the DR are actually down from recent years.

0:07:47
CW: Oh, OK. So this is like the Bermuda Triangle, just involving people drinking alcohol and stuff rather than ships sailing through a certain part of the country.

0:07:57
BR: Right. So, you know, there were…

0:07:59
CW: There’s a lot of tourists.

0:08:00
BR: Some are going to drop dead. It’s the same thing on cruise ships. You have cruise ships have thousands of people on board. Many of the people who are cruising are elderly. They’re retirees and they have health problems. So it’s not at all unusual to have there be a medical emergency on a cruise ship. In fact, I haven’t looked into this and it’d be hard to get data on this because the cruise ships are not going to be interested in publicizing how many people are dropping dead on their cruises, but I would bet you that if you did analysis, you would find that the average cruise ship has probably had numerous people die on that ship every year.

0:08:38
CW: I’ve heard many of the larger ones have morgues. I mean I’ve never seen the morgue, but I’ve heard that exists.

0:08:41
BR: So again, if all you’re told is you don’t want to go on that ship, do you realize that eight people died on that ship last year? Well, yeah, but they had 30,000 people. So what do you, it looks so far like the so-called mysterious deaths in the DR and probably elsewhere are most likely just due to statistical chance.

0:09:06
EM: So if I were to go to the Dominican Republic, it would be safe to drink. That’s what you’re saying.

BR: I, yes.

CW: No more dangerous than usual.

EM: Just let me clarify, if he said no, I wouldn’t have swayed my behavior in the Dominican Republic. I’m just looking for personal clarification.

BR: Well, here’s what I think we should do. I think that at some point soon, we should organize the first annual Squaring the Strange vacation getaway. And we could do it in the DR or Jamaica or Haiti, somewhere else, we could maybe do an investigation somewhere. And we can invite all our friends and listeners and we’ll just do some investigations and we will test this theory that drinking heavily is not gonna be a problem.

0:09:54
CW: I’m willing to investigate that one drink at a time.

0:09:57
EM: Actually, I think it’d be really cool if you get a PA, somebody that you can just run around to all of these different locations and buy tequila from five places and rum from five places and then essentially do a tasting test and see which one does or does not kill you.

BR: I think Kenny Biddle would be all over that.

EM: Kenny? Kenny, let’s do this.

CW: We just need a couple dozen hundred thousand more patrons and we can start flying to the Caribbean every week.

BR: You heard her folks, patreon.com backslash squaring the strange.

EM: Pay for our liver failure.

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0:10:47
CW: So we’re back with Erik Kristopher Myers, a filmmaker extraordinaire. You’ve had great success with your previous films. You’ve won several awards and been listed in all sorts of indie film wrap ups and notable horror films of the year for Butterfly Kisses. And you’re are you working on anything new you can tell us about?

EM: I’m writing a new script. I’m kind of writing several new scripts and just seeing which one I like the most. It’s kind of I mean, you make one of these these scripts into a film and you’re living with it for a couple years of your life. So you’ve really got to be in love with what you’re working on. And I’m just sort of weighing my options right now.

0:11:22
CW: Survival of the fittest, that makes sense.

0:11:23
EM: Yeah, and then getting the opportunity to come and hang out with friends like you, doing things like this.

0:11:27
BR: Very cool, we appreciate your taking the time out to check in with us.

0:11:32
EM: Totally, always.

0:11:33
CW: Okay, well, let’s get right into subversive things in children’s entertainment. This topic has always kind of enthralled me because there’s a little of so many things. There’s stranger danger. There’s urban legends going on like, oh, did you hear there’s a frame in such and such movie that you can pause right on and there’s like a naked person there. There’s a subliminal messaging, supposedly. There’s a whole lot of different skeptical topics that kind of intertwine to create the notion of subversive elements in children’s entertainment.

0:12:07
EM: And it’s also really cool that if you think about it, it’s a lot of urban legends on the playground.

0:12:13
CW: Yeah.

0:12:14
EM: Which is different from what we sort of look at in terms of crime, you know, true crime stories or what have you that have been passed through the oral tradition. These are stories that, you know, were born and propagated on schoolyards, which makes them so extra cool.

CW: And very, very, very much present in our generation because we kind of came of age as video players started populating people’s houses.

0:12:40
BR: Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, we are sort of the target generation for these things, right? Because, you know, just with the explosion of children’s entertainment in the 70s and 80s, there’s just more content than ever before. And of course, some of that content will be potentially subversive, shall I say. We’re talking about both real and imagined and sometimes a mix of both subversive elements. And just to sort of set the stage, I mean, keep in mind that there’s always been parents and moral guardians that have been worried about the hidden influences about what kids read or see, right? Sort of like the time-honored tradition of hand-wringing and, you know, what kids today are doing. This goes back decades. You can look at the concerns about the damaging effects of comic books or video games and TV shows and music. And of course, you know, previously we touched on the satanic panic. But oftentimes, it’s a fear that they’re or more often other people’s children, frankly, they’re not smart enough to tell reality from fiction. And that’s one thing that I find fascinating about a lot of these stories and sort of parental warnings is they’re often perpetuated by people who are saying, look at this thing, you know, this is subversive, this is dangerous, this is going to – this is a hidden message that’s going to have your kids smoking the devil’s weed and maybe cocaine and degeneracy and white slavery and just this long cascading laundry list of social ills. And it’s usually framed from this sort of – this stance of how, well, I’m smart enough to recognize this, right? It’s like, well, I figured this out, he said, sort of smoking a pipe. But I’m worried about the kids today, not necessarily my kids because my kids are smart, but your kids, right? So there’s this sort of arrogance that’s often involved in this. And again, the concern warnings that other people’s kids aren’t going to be able to tell reality from fiction. They’ll watch Beavis and Butthead and start a fire in a house or something.

EM: One of the things that I find really interesting is it defies generation. Whether we’re talking about Frederick Wortham attacking comic books in the 1950s or the turmoil in the toy box book from the 1980s, what you’re looking at is adults, seemingly rational, intelligent adults, who are looking at toys and animated television shows and movies and They are drawing more ludicrous meaning from the subtext what they consider subtext than anything the children would ever come up with.

0:15:29
CW: A funny thing about the examples. I was looking at is many of them are simply Oh, if you look close enough these shapes come together in a certain way and, oh my goodness, it looks like part of the human body. And if your child is going to be completely corrupted by seeing something that kind of looks like part of the human anatomy, then, well, I guess you can’t let your child ever get undressed in front of the mirror. You can’t take your child to any of the museums that have classical Roman sculptures in them. There’s a number of things your kids will not be able to do if seeing naked human forms will ruin them for life.

EM: Well, it’s also a question of was something like the alleged penis on the cover of The Little Mermaid, and I don’t want to jump into a bunch of examples because I know you’ll be getting into it, but was it something that was accidental? Was it something that was meant to be part of that image and like a museum, we need to be able to respect what we’re looking at because it is part of the artistic expression or is it something that animators were trying to hide within the image? And that’s where it becomes a little bit of a slippery slope.

0:16:39
CW: Yes, and you never know, sometimes you’ll get an explanation, but people won’t necessarily believe that explanation. In the case you’re talking about, the Little Mermaid penis castle. It’s a VHS cover and the background image of the, you know, kind of golden, corally sort of castle. There is a spire in the middle of it that does look very much like a circumcised male member, just kind of in there with all the other coral spires, which also look kind of like male members, just a little bit mutated.

BR: Don’t  large buildings in general kind of look phallic just sort of in general.

CW:  I mean or was this literally has kind of the tip of it and the mushroom kind of shape and…

0:17:21
EM: And besides if you’re saying that all the spires look like phalluses, this is the alpha spire.

CW: Well in that case the artist who did it was a background artist who was a contractor He was not a Disney artist and he’s been questioned about it and all the various articles I found claim that he said no, no I did not do this on purpose. I was doing this job at 4am, I was really rushed, it didn’t look like a penis to me at the time and I got it out the door and I didn’t think anything of it and I believe Disney did recall that cover and changed the background castle a bit.

0:17:55
EM: Oh yes they did because it was a quest to try to find which of your friend’s sister had the actual VHS with the penis on the cover or the recalled version.

CW: That leads into another kind of conspiracy thinking thing is how many of these are put? in and then explode on the rumor mongering sphere merely so that some things become collectors items.

BR: Sort of intentional. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, you know, what I find really interesting about it is the inherent ambiguity, right? If you’re in a museum and you’re looking at a Roman sculpture of a nude, it’s clear what it is. That’s the context. You’re seeing a piece of art. If it’s just something that’s kind of ambiguous, you know, if you look closely, this could look like a breast or a penis or whatever else. That’s where you get into this, you know, you get into psychology, right? You get into confirmation bias. You get into, it sort of reminds me of the big hubbub over subliminal messages. There was a famous book in 1974, Subliminal Seduction by Wilson Brian Key. He’s the one that famously showed a photograph of a glass of ice and said, do you see the hidden messages in this ice? If you look closely, this could be a breast. You’re like, wow, dude, you know, again, that’s part and parcel of the fears, right? You see the same thing, for example, with fundamentalist Christian parents who are concerned about Halloween. They say, okay, well, yes, it’s snow white or their kids’ costumes or whatever else, but to them, it has a double meaning. And so they’re not literally concerned that if their little 10 year old girl puts on witches costume that she’s gonna turn into a witch. The parents are often concerned that it’s symbolic and that that will open the door to her exploring the occult and Satanism and all these sorts of things.

0:19:52
CW: Well yeah everything is a slippery slope.

EM: Yeah and it’s really hard to be able to look at some of these parents and dismiss them outright when you can then not deny the fact that we have examples of subliminal images that made it into of all things the most reliable children’s entertainment of all time, Disney films. When you actually do have a naked woman standing in a window in the background of the rescuers, you know, you kind of can’t fault the parents who want to, you know, give everything the squint test.

0:20:26
CW: That leads right into my laundry list. I’ve compiled a nice little laundry list. The Rescuers is actually kind of the patient zero. It’s one of the most well-known instances of something subversive being in a children’s movie. Now, Snopes actually has a write-up on this one. They rate it as true. Rescuers was originally released in 1977. And that original film, the original cells, do have two frames where a topless woman is visible in the distant background. It’s kind of like a window that they fly by as the two mice are flying on the back of Orville, the albatross, they go by very quickly, and the human eye cannot pick it out. It’s a 30 frames per second playback, and so literally it’s up there for like one tenth of a second and it goes by one to the other side, from the right to the left of the screen and it’s super fast. However, if you look at that specific frame, it’s not even a cartoon naked woman, it’s like a real photograph of a naked woman, kind of topless torso, you can’t even make out nipples, it’s very low resolution, but it’s there. This is not an urban legend.

BR: Lamest porn ever.

CW: Yes, very lame porn. Oh my gosh. Yeah. So this became sort of folklore in the Disney company. The animators knew about it. The story is it was not done by a Disney animator. They had sent the cells out to a post-production company and that that company took photos of the cells and transferred it to a negative to make the movie. And that’s where it happened. Some yokel at the production company decided to play a little prank and he put those two naked images in there. In movie theaters, this was never noticed. This was never something that people, you know, came out of the movie theater saying, wow, I feel like my child has been exposed to a naked woman. Nobody noticed.

0:22:19
BR: And it was literally something, correct me if I’m wrong, Erik, but it was literally something that that someone could not notice.

0:22:25
EM: No, you could not. And then VHS happened.

0:22:28
CW: Well, yes. And in the original 1992 video release of the Rescuers, the offending image was painted over. So it was not in the original one. But in the later release for 1999 for the Master Collection, or maybe it was the masterbatory collection, somebody lost track of the folklore. And they went back to the master negative of the original film and they spot cleaned it here and there but nobody went by frame by frame. So it ended up in the VHS released in 1999 now guess how many complaints they got about it? That is the answer they got zero complaints. Nobody noticed, nobody complained, but of course everybody found out about it because Disney recalled the VHS film. They apologized, they weren’t real specific, but they said an inappropriate image is in there, we need to recall it. So three days after they were released, they recalled 3.4 million copies of the video. And this is the first time Disney has ever done anything like this. And it led to something kind of like the Streisand effect, since nobody really knew about it before. Disney made this recall announcement and everybody knew about it and of course collectors held on to them, I’m sure. So Disney was trying to be proactive and maintain their family-friendly brand, but of course we had quite a few people suggesting that they were just creating the controversy to boost sales of an otherwise kind of, you know, lackluster video.

EM: But they were also responding accordingly to what had happened with the Little Mermaid, which they were not expecting to be a thing, and other items that are bound to appear here on your list. I mean, they were probably jumping the gun excessively, but there was a precedent.

CW: Yeah, and this, of course, bolstered a lot of the theories that were already circulating about Disney regularly and purposely hiding obscene images in their films. So in 1997, just two years earlier, the Southern Baptist Convention had passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Disney and describing, you know, these immoral hijinks that the company regularly did.

0:24:45
BR: Immoral hijinks, I tell you!

0:24:46
CW: Yes, that’s a direct quote immoral hijinks.

0:24:52
BR:  I could just picture something you know like just just you’re just getting apoplectic over immoral hijinks

0:24:58
EM: Yes, so I’m just gonna use that to rationalize and explain my behavior moving forward Yeah, immoral hijinks with Erik Kristopher Myers. Now due to this little brouhaha Disney pledged to review every frame of every animated film before each future video release.

0:25:17
BR: And whose job was that? Whose job was it to go frame by frame?

0:25:22
CW: I think everybody’s. It kind of called all, it asked all the employees to call out any potential pranks that might be out there. Though it says there are no others it knows about. However, there are quite a few that did end up in there. Like you’ve heard about the Lion King one, right?

0:25:37
EM: Oh yeah.

BR: So now, is that the one? This doesn’t rise to the level of immoral hijinks, right? This is more like immoral shenanigans. I’m trying to just gauge what the scale is.

0:25:47
CW: I wouldn’t even call it immoral, unless you find something subversive about special effects.

EM: It was a joke for themselves that they never expected anyone to be able to interpret. And of course, everyone interpreted it incorrectly.

0:26:04
CW: Yes, there was a scene where Simba kind of flaps himself down on some flowers and some dust and, you know, and the flower petals and the dust float up in the air. And for one frame, it looks like it’s well, the animators intended it to spell S.F. as in Frank X for special effects. And that’s kind of kind of their little calling card, like, ha ha, we snuck that in, we’re the special effects team. And of course, people saw it as S-E-X. And much hand-wringing ensued. And then there’s an audio pareidolia one, similarly, where in, have you heard of the Aladdin audio pareidolia one?

0:26:45
EM: Oh yes.

BR: I have not. How have I been out of the loop on these things? Tell me, tell me.

0:26:49
CW: Well, apparently, Ben, you’re not a teenager that wants to take their clothes off.

EM: And good teenagers take off their clothes.

CW: Yes. There’s a scene in Aladdin where Aladdin has, you know, gone up to the rooftop and met with Jasmine and her very large tiger companion. And he’s getting nervous and trying to shoo the tiger away. And what he’s actually saying is, Good Kitty, Take Off and Go, but if you listen to it, and I’ve listened to it a number of times, if you’re primed to hear something else, man, it really does sound like it. He sounds like he’s saying under his breath, good teenagers take off their clothes.

EM: And I still am baffled why it is that I cannot watch Aladdin and not get through it fully clothed. I just I always end up sitting there naked alone and everyone’s left the room.

0:27:43
BR: It’s it’s awkward once again, you know, another another another Christmas ruined at the Myers household.

CW: Yeah, you know, I was drawing caricatures just the other night at a at a holiday party with plenty of families, lots of young kids. And that song by what’s his name? You know, it’s getting hot in here. So take off all your clothes. He literally commands people to take off all their clothes multiple times in the chorus of that of that song and you know everybody around me stayed clothed.

0:28:08
BR: I find that shocking. Maybe maybe the problem is that it wasn’t subliminal. Maybe the problem is that if to get in there and to control to do the mind control. As you know, you have to be subliminal. You have to be so you don’t register it consciously. At that point, they’re just zombies. This is this is well known.

0:28:20
EM: In the words of Kirk Cameron, you have to circumvent the intellect. Oh, OK.

0:28:32
CW: There’s a lot of other pareidolia inspired ones, like if you look at the the image of Simba or actually, I don’t know if it’s Mufasa or Simba. It’s it’s the lion kind of in the background, kind of fiery clouds, his nose and muzzle on the Lion King movie poster. If you kind of strain, if you kind of take a marker and like trace over the lines, you could see it as a woman’s backside with her butt cheeks kind of hanging out of a thong.

EM: Oh, you absolutely can.

CW: I don’t know. It seemed like a stretch to me.

EM: It looks like a stretch to me, but nonetheless, that’s clearly what it is.

CW: But there’s apparently also hidden vagina in a couple of the movies. Hercules and Roger Rabbit are well known for having a glimpse of vagina. And my God, it is absolutely not a glimpse of vagina. It’s just… in animation you can’t just throw like one frame of like a different color like underpants in there. It wouldn’t look quite right if the person is spinning around. But in Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit gets thrown out of a car when they crash into something and she kind of spins around and she’s got that dress cut up to there. And there’s one scene where you just kind of can sort of see up her legs, which go all the way up. And there’s no underwear, but there’s also no labia. You’re not seeing a vagina. You’re just seeing flesh color.

EM:Now, in fact, she has one leg sort of obscuring anything that might be seen regardless.

CW: Yes, and same with Meg. There’s some there’s some rumors that, oh, you can see Meg’s vagina in Hercules during one of the dance numbers. And what it is, it’s just animators rendering very long legged women. And if you’re going to define a vagina as just a flesh-colored thing with some kind of delineation. Well, then, I mean, if you have your legs all the way together and you pull your dress up over your knees, and yeah, the flesh between your two thighs, you could call that a vagina if you want to, but it’s not. And what it is, is the dress is up and the legs are long and, oh, they’re seeing flesh with a line, and they freak out and think it’s a vagina. Now there’s a whole bunch of hidden penises, not just the little mermaid castle And again in hercules, there’s a centaur when he gets hit with something on his head, you know the the old cartoon You know, you’ve seen it happen a million times to yosemite sam you get a big bump forming on your head.

BR:  Really? Really?

0:31:07
CW: Well this centaur this centaur also had like kind of lumpy forehead flesh where his two eyebrows were. So people are saying it’s a blue penis grows out of his forehead when he gets hit.

0:31:27
EM: And at least the bishop in The Little Mermaid has the good taste to cover his erection during the marriage ceremony.

0:31:33
CW: I was just going to get to that one. It’s like you know all this dirty material ahead of time, Erik. Did you study?

0:31:39
EM: I’ve been in the classroom of life and it’s been filled with working in comic stores and talking about these very things all through the 90s.

CW: Yeah. Now, the bishop, I think this is just bad character design. The bishop who is marrying Prince Eric to evil sea witch Ursula in disguise, he’s sitting there, you know, going through his motions and it does look like he’s got a little boner popping out of his papal robes there and that’s supposedly his knee but, no… bad design. It does not look much like a knee.

EM:  So I feel like his gigantic hat sort of just underlines what’s going on there in his nethers.

0:32:17
CW: The giant hats not a phallic symbol, but that little pokey bit, you know, right out of his robe there. That’s absolutely and and then another one you’ll find online constantly is Minnie’s dress from a European publication. It’s just a still image and she’s wearing this blue dress with kind of a poofy sleeve on it and the sleeve kind of looks a little bit like a the head of a penis and Mickey’s kind of gripping her. So it looks like he’s gripping a giant blue penis. And yeah, it’s a bit of a stretch but it did make it onto the subreddit mildly penis.

EM: And with good reason.

BR:  You know what we’re talking about here is of course if you’re if you’re psychologically primed to look for hidden messages or dirty things you’re gonna find them even if they’re not there in other words people with dirty minds will see dirty things which is obviously the case with you too.

CW:  I believe we’re being maligned here Erik.

EM: And I’m relishing every moment of it.

0:33:15
BR: And of course, it’s all in how you interpret it, right? I mean, there was there’s the famous line, you were a little hard on the beaver last night. Oh, yeah. Which which is actually that that line was actually in Revenge of the Nerds, the 1984 classic comedy. The actual line from Leave it to Beaver is arguably as salacious, but a little toned down. It’s don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on the beaver? So it leaves out the last night implying when ward was hard on the beaver, right? So or or of course the the the modern version of that is that’s what she said.

0:33:48
CW: Yeah, you could that’s what she said is a great line for turning something ambiguous into something really dirty.

BR: That’s what she said. No, that doesn’t work then.

CW: I never thought of that No, it doesn’t work there I’m sure we’ll find a few other opportunities.

0:34:03
BR: Well, of course, Mickey wasn’t the only subversive mouse out there. I’m of course referring to Mighty Mouse.

CW: Oh, here I come to save the day.

BR: And of course, there are many incarnations of Mighty Mouse. The one that I’m referring to aired on Halloween 1987 and the show was The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse as Ralph Bakshi.

0:34:25
CW: And John Cresfalucci, right?

0:34:26
BR: Yes. Yes, and it was a the successor to the much less successful the old adventures of mighty mouse which for some reason the kids didn’t really take to the old worn-out adventures. They for some reason they thought the new adventures would bring the kids in and sure enough it did the this happened this happened around in 87 88 and and there’s an episode titled The Littlest Tramp. And no, no, not Tramp as in, you know, trashy woman. That’s not where we’re going. Get your mind out of the gutter. But there was a scene in which Mighty Mouse smells flowers. He sniffs this and then this sort of like this puff goes up in the air, and then he has this sort of euphoric reaction. Sure enough, someone complained. The complaint was, I’ll just read you a brief quote from the New York Times. This is July 26, 1988 by Craig Wolf, titled, Mighty Mouse Flying High on Flowers. The gossip began after Mighty Mouse was seen by a family in Kentucky sniffing petals from a flower when the episode was broadcast last December. This would be 87. The family interpreted his action as cocaine sniffing and phoned the American Family Association in Tupelo, Mississippi. It started as a campaign to have that scene deleted. Quote, we can’t have the implication that it’s okay to use drugs, said Alan Wildman, its associate director. They call it crushed petals, but it looks like a powdery substance to me. All right, dude. So we see this all the time. Again, this is 88. In today’s world, it would be the outrage of the week, right? It’d be, did you see this? Look at this on Facebook. Look at this, Mighty Mouse is encouraging kids to do cocaine. And of course, the one million concerned moms, all 16 of them would sign a petition, send them off, and it’d be a big thing. In this case, it got a little bit of traction because it was produced by Ralph Bakshi.

EM: Exactly.

0:36:30
BR: And Ralph Bakshi, for those who don’t know, Erik knows, he created the X-rated animated series Fritz the Cat, which was the number one animated series. It was not for kids and it wasn’t marketed to kids. But it was raunchy. I can’t, you can’t paper that over. That’s, that absolutely was. And so because of, because it was produced by Bakshi, it was this sort of guilt by association. Well, look at this. Clearly this is, this is Mighty Mouse sniffing cocaine because the producer is notorious degenerate Ralph Bakshi.

EM: Well he also was somebody who took great pleasure in being subversive. So, I mean, it’s, you know, you’re kind of setting yourself up for that when you’re like, I’m the guy who directed Coonskin and I’ve never gotten the respect in Hollywood as an animator that I feel I should have. And so I’m just going to keep needling and planting all of these, you know, counterculture ideas into everything I work on. And then you give them Mighty Mouse and this is what happens.

0:37:36
BR: So this turned into what we would often call a nothing burger. But nonetheless, we can’t have outraged citizens complaining about something. So Bakshi eventually agreed to cut three and a half seconds from that episode. And that scene, or that tiny bit of the scene, didn’t appear later on.

0:37:57
CW: Well, and then he went on to do Cool World and got to put as much cartoon sex as he wanted into it.

0:38:02
EM: Actually, he didn’t get to put as much cartoon sex in it as he wanted to.

CW: Oh!

EM: But it was, I mean, what’s out there right now, the released version is pretty raunchy, but his original idea was much ickier. But I mean, you know, when Ralph Bakshi is claiming ignorance of something like this, it’s hard to know whether to take him seriously or not, but I’d be more inclined to say, you know, it probably was a nothing burger if Ralph Bakshi wasn’t trying to take credit for it.

0:38:41
BR: Yeah, I certainly don’t think that Bakshi was intending to stir up controversy for his own benefit. And in fact, from my reading of the incident, it caused far more of a headache for him than anything else. But Erik, you’ve done a lot more in some of the cartoons. What’s what did you dig up?

0:38:58
EM: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily call it a cartoon, but I am a big fan of a television series that you may or may not have heard of called the Teletubbies.

CW: Oh yeah there’s some animation in there it’s a it’s just on their bellies and in the sun.

BR: I vaguely recall that was that the one wasn’t there like a like a weird anthropomorphic sun and there was like three or four of them with weird colors this was kind of after my time as you can and they all they all spoke in some strange language.

EM: When I was a child I was watching the electric company like all the other you know young hipsters of that era and then as a college student I had graduated to the Teletubbies.

BR: And step up was was Nick for Kids a little too taxing for you?

EM: No, this show, it was on from 97 to 2001 and there have been various resuscitations of it, but those four seasons or what have you that were produced by the BBC or by a company called Ragdoll Productions, they just cycled and played at all hours of the day and I found myself between classes or whatnot becoming progressively hypnotized by this show. And so it’s this British preschool kids TV series and it features four pillow-shaped creatures known as the Teletubbies and they are named after the television screens that are growing out of their stomachs and…

BR:  This sounds horrific.

EM:  And the TV Like antenna that is growing out of each one of their heads.

BR:  That’s fucked up, man. I I mean I vaguely recall this but in you describing it it just sounds terrifying.

EM: Well buckle up because this is primo 2 a.m. with you know a domino’s pizza kind of TV show.

0:41:18
CW: Man, British subversion is the best kind of subversion.

EM: Oh, it’s wonderful and you’ve got these, I mean it’s kind of like if you made the prisoner for preschoolers. And you’ve got these four tubbies, right, and they are living in this pastoral land, not unlike the shire of Middle Earth. And they’re all living in this big communal dome, and the landscape is populated by pet robots, magic windmills that summon them to take turns displaying educational short films on their tummy TVs. And the whole time, all the proceedings are watched over by a Gerber baby who either lives in or is the sun.

0:42:11
BR: And someone thought this was a good idea?

0:42:13
EM: Oh, it’s a brilliant idea. And the fact that no one speaks any English, it’s all this baby talk. It’s like the first 20 minutes of the Star Wars holiday special where you’re just in the Chewbacca family’s domestic dealings, you know, where Grandpa Itchy’s pissed off and just trying to, you know, watch his holograph porn and little Lumpy’s stirring up all this trouble while Mala’s trying to make the Bantha bisque or whatever the hell she’s doing. It’s like that. And it’s all based around one idea per episode with the Teletubbies. It’s either they find a magic door that’s floating and repeat over and over again the act of each one approaching this door and going through it after closely inspecting it. Or they dance in this episode. Like nothing happens. And yet so much of the nothing happens that it just opens itself wide to deeper analysis. It’s like it’s begging for it. So you’ve got these four tubbies, right? You’ve got Tinky Winky, then you’ve got Dipsy, who was also male and he was green, had a basketball, and a straight erect antenna.

0:43:49
BR: Okay I’m probably gonna regret asking this but how are the genders differentiated?

EM: Oh I’m getting there.

BR: Okay I don’t want to ahead of the story.

EM: There’s Lala who’s a female and she is yellow and has two antennae, and then finally Po, the shortest of the four, red and female. So these four Teletubbies live in this dome, like I said, and they eat Tubby Toast, they play with their sentient vacuum cleaner, Nunu, and they speak almost no English, as I said, but rather it’s baby talk with cadence. And again, each episode, it’s just repetitious behavior, repetitious behavior. But while you’re watching it, you start seeing things. So like most people, I heard Jerry Falwell’s argument in 1999 that Tinky Winky, the tall purple one that I said, was clearly homosexual. And this was an attempt on the part of the show runners to foster wicked behavior by indoctrinating and desensitizing young viewers.

BR: Oh, the gay agenda thing of course.

EM: The gay agenda thing.

BR: We all know how successful that’s been.

CW: And thus a gay icon was born.

EM: Exactly, and because this argument was not unique to Falwell, he lifted it from a theorist named Andy Medhurst, and two years prior to Falwell making his big stink, Medhurst had said that Tinky Winky, his purple skin, and his triangular phallic appendage all represented gay pride.

BR: So this Medhurst, other than having a lot of time on his hands, what was his qualifications?

EM: That he wrote think pieces like this.

0:45:37
BR: Oh, okay. All right.

0:45:39
EM: And you also, I mean, you got to keep in mind the era in which this is happening. This is the same period that Ellen DeGeneres was making waves for coming out. And you know, you already had certain parts of the country worked up and then Falwell spreads this to his legion of followers. But I’ve, I watched this show very closely and on closer inspection, there is room for this argument. And it’s due to Tinky Winky’s exaggerated and somewhat effeminate pantomime body language. And notably, each of the tubbies has their own accessory. So Dipsy, the one that I said was green and a male, he has a basketball. That’s what a boy plays with. LaLa, who is a female, I forget what she had, but then you had Po, the other female, who had a scooter because she was kind of a tomboy. But Tinky Winky, the purple one with the triangle, his accessory was a red purse and he kind of pranced around with it. And during the course of numerous episodes, you’ve got Lala and Po, the other two girls, attempting to steal the purse away. You’ve even got Dipsy, the other boy, at one point looking like he was actually going to do bodily harm to Tinky Winky, trying to take this purse away. And there’s, you know, Foist Po’s scooter on him and he’s refusing and with this very sashaying sort of run is fleeing the other tubbies as they’re chasing him all around and the baby in the sun is watching and laughing. It’s beautiful. This is like, this is like, this is poetry.

BR: This is so like, like bizarre, zardoz, weird, wow.

EM: It totally is and you know I found watching it that the argument was only bolstered by the fact that if you look at the other three they have sort of characteristics that put them in a very easy to digest for toddlers sort of example of representation you know Dipsy the green male he’s got a basketball but also his face around which you know there’s the green fur, his face is the only one of the four that is dark brown. And when he dances, as do all the Tubbies, but when he dances, he has these sort of hip-hop inflections in what he does. You’ve got Lala, the girl who’s yellow, and her voice and her gait seem to be in imitation of Asian dialect and movement. She has these little short vowels. Po, the red tubby, she apparently, according to the creators, is meant to be Asian, but she doesn’t come off so much as the yellow one does. It’s just in the way that her behavior is. But there’s room to make these interpretations. And as you start watching it, it’s sort of like when you have a pet and when you first get that pet you’re like, oh it’s a dog, it’s brown, it barks. But as you get to know that pet you start seeing the personality and seeing the facial expressions, what they’re thinking behind their eyes, their body language, all these things with the Teletubbies start leaping out. And the thing is that that interpretation of Tinky Winky being homosexual. I don’t find it to be much of a stretch, actually.

0:49:18
CW: Wow.

0:49:19
BR: Interesting.

0:49:20
CW: Okay.

0:49:21
BR: Let me ask you this. I’m probably going to regret asking this, but were there actors inside suits or were they CGI or what was that?

0:49:30
EM: Oh, they were actors inside of suits. They were probably poorly paid actors inside of these very hot, stinky outfits, being forced to dance in a row.

0:49:43
BR: Dance, monkey, dance! By this smiling Gerber baby son. That just, the whole thing just sounds dystopian and horrific.

0:49:51
EM: It is.

CW: Now, were there, were their voices different at all? Because I caught brief glimpses of the show, and I remember all of them having these high-pitched chipmunk-y sort of voices that had no gender inflection that I could tell.

EM: Well, they do. And the thing is that the girls have higher-pitched voices, and the other boy, Dipsy, the only thing they say in English is their names, and their names aren’t even English, really. But, you know, Dipsy, the boy, is like, you know, when he’s called to call out his name, he’s like, you know, Dipsy! And, but when T-

BR: You’re sure he doesn’t say dip***

EM: He might it’s always a little but Tinky Winky and this is the weird part his voice this is the weird part we’re now getting to the weird part go ahead all right okay when I say weird let me qualify that and say this is the incongruous with the theory part Tinky Winky it’s the way he talks he’s a And he sounds nothing like what sort of a gay panic stereotype would, or even somebody trying to say, we’re going to sneak into the fabric of this television show, certain messages that it’s okay to be gay. There’s nothing there in the way that this character speaks that reinforces that notion. He sounded like Gomer Pyle.

CW: Well, wait a second. Wasn’t the guy who played Gomer Pyle gay?

0:51:18
BR: Jim Neighbors was gay, yes. So it all comes full circle.

0:51:22
CW: Oh, this is very meta.

0:51:25
EM: I think we need to devote an entire episode to just this moment of realization.

0:51:30
CW: I think we’ve just cracked it. They based him on Gomer Pyle. That was like a triple hidden message there.

0:51:36
EM: And now I need to break out all of my VHS copies that I bought from Walmart decades ago and watch them again with this in mind.

0:51:43
BR: Better you than me.

0:51:45
CW: I would go to that watch party. Erick, I would love to sit down and watch Teletubbies episodes with you.

EM: I would love to have you. Let’s get some some beverages from the Dominican Republic. That would go well too. Yes. We’ll make a party of it.

0:51:57
BR: That is the only thing that would make that tolerable for me. It would be lots of assistance from the captain.

EM: Some night train.

0:52:05
CW: Well, Erik, your phenomenal analysis of Tinky Winky’s queerness goes right into another thing I had listed in the Disney pantheon, which I don’t consider it subversive. Just throwing that out there, the fact that gay people exist is not a subversive fact. It’s kind of a fact of life, but there are people who do find that just the mere suggestion that gay people exist in our society a subversive message. So it’s interesting there’s a lot of rumors but there’s also some concrete intentional representation especially lately and reams of writing about how Disney has represented the queer experience metaphorically or directly. If listeners want to check out some more stuff, I highly recommend there’s an Atlantic article by Akash Nicholas titled, It’s Not Just Frozen, Most Disney Movies Are Pro Gay. And there’s an author named Sean Griffin, who literally wrote the book on Disney’s gay history. And it’s titled, Tinkerbells and Evil Queens the Walt Disney Company from the inside out He goes into plenty of movies and shorts and everything from way back Starting with like Ferdinand the Bull the 1939 short version about how Ferdinand just was not the picture of Masculinity and was very effeminate and liked flowers and everything But really it’s not surprising that if you make movies as Disney does with messages like be tolerant of people who are different from you and it’s okay to be yourself. People can infer from that an argument of oh this nasty liberal agenda of I don’t know being tolerant of people who are not like you. And if that’s the gay agenda then you know then Disney’s all on board with that. So you could look at this from a lot of the different movies. Elsa has her ice powers in Frozen, which she is born with, you know, just like Lady Gaga would say you’re born this way. That caused her to be ostracized and she hides her true self. And Let It Go has been kind of received as a huge coming out anthem. In the movie Mulan, the song I Want also has a ton of references to wanting her outside to reflect her inside. There are recent Disney films that have bucked the standard Cinderella finds prince narrative. We have Merida from Brave and Elsa. Neither one of them find princes and marry. Other protagonists who do marry show a tendency to marry who you want to, not who society wants you to marry. Like even if they’re another species, like if you’re a fish person and you like a human, well go find yourself a sea witch and if she sounds like a drag queen, even better. And she can make you a brand new pair of legs and a human vagina and things will work out just fine. Ironically, critics of the so-called gay lifestyle compare gayness to bestiality and if you look at it, Disney just up and made a movie involving a love story that has a real beast.

0:55:16
EM: And more power to them.

0:55:18
CW: Yeah, and things worked out. It was fine.

0:55:20
BR: And it seemed to work okay with The Shape of Water.

0:55:23
CW: Well, that was not a Disney movie as far as I recall.

0:55:27
BR: No, but it was a well-regarded…

0:55:29
CW: Del Toro, yeah. As far as, yeah, and everything from Dumbo to Pinocchio to Rapunzel, there’s a lot of Disney movies that revolve around being a little bit different, unusual, wanting to fit in, and then realizing your uniqueness is just fine. Now, real quick, I wanted to talk about some characters that have a little subversive bit of gay in them, from the definite to the maybe. I mentioned the sea witch Ursula. She was definitely categorically based on Divine the drag queen from Baltimore and that’s according to producer and lyricist Howard Ashman. He was a gay man who spent time in Baltimore’s theater and gay scene So it’s not a big surprise that he’d be aware of John Waters and Divine And Beauty and the Beast’s LeFou at least the live-action version recently Played by Josh Gad was definitely as confirmed by Josh Gad and the director, definitely played as gay. And they tweaked a little tribute song that he sings to Gaston. And he kind of gazes as Gaston and has a little man crush on him. And it’s kind of a minor character in Frozen. But do you guys remember Oaken, the traitor?

0:56:42
EM: Yes.

0:56:42
CW: Yeah, in the first Frozen movie, he briefly waves and says, hello, family. And he’s waving to another guy with four kids. And it’s a little less definite as the writers from Frozen were questioned on it later and they didn’t really answer. They just said, well, we know what we intended, but it’s out there for public consumption and however people interpret it, they can enjoy it however they want. Disney does absolutely have a ton of gay writers, animators, directors, creative people, and some character design notes do reference things that can be interpreted as show this character to have some signs of queerness, one way or the other. Jafar in Aladdin was supposed to be theatrical and effete and have these touches, the pencil-thin mustache, etc. The lead animator was Andreas Deja, a gay man, and according to Sean Griffin, he does admit to conceiving of the character as a gay man to quote give him his theatrical quality his elegance. The genie in the animated version of Aladdin played by Robin Williams there’s an earring on his right ear there’s a few other little tells he morphs into female clothing a few times etc etc and this isn’t really Disney but did you guys pick up on the inclusion in the Dark Crystal series on Netflix?

EM: I remember only that girls only have wings.

CW: Oh, no, that was the original. I mean, the brand new series on Netflix. Have either of you seen it?

0:58:10
BR: I’ve not seen it.

0:58:11
EM: Yes, but is it something spinning from that?

0:58:14
CW: No, no. One of the main characters, the girl named Deet, she has two fathers. So her family is two dads and a little brother.

0:58:23
EM: Oh.

0:58:24
CW: Yeah, and they didn’t make a big deal of it. It was just you know, that’s her her dad and her other dad and there you know, so there is some real categorical intentional representation of gayness and queerness that Disney definitely cops to and And and has documented and then there’s rumors some without really a whole lot of merit and some kind of plausible And definitely encouraged by fans. There were some rumors that Woody from Toy Story was going to come out as bi. I don’t know how toys have sexuality, but I guess they do. Elsa is has been widely rumored to be a lesbian, and they even kind of almost take it there in this latest Frozen and Merida from Brave. As I mentioned, they’ve they’ve identified her as potentially queer or even asexual. She, you know, she she’s also young, so it’s kind of, you could take it as she’s just young and she doesn’t care about those things just yet. Now, oddly enough, with all this, like I said, documented queer representation, the kinds of things that anti-LGBTQ groups actually seem to get fired up about and call subversive are kind of ridiculous. There’s a pair of moms in the background of one scene and the million moms went crazy about that. The Daily Citizen, this I wouldn’t recommend it publication, just a few months ago published a screed titled Disney is moving from entertainment to propaganda in which the author who is Zachary Mettler started promoting homosexuality to children. And the things he names are, in 2017, a Disney sitcom called Andy Mack had the nerve to have a character that comes out as gay.

BR: Now, how is having a gay character promoting homosexuality? I’m a little fuzzy on that. How does that work?

1:00:19
CW: Like I said, they view it as a as a threat that oh gay people exist and if you let kids know the gay people exist.

1:00:30
BR: Because it’s not self-evident

1:00:33
EM: Yeah, the threat is that they are living and co-existing alongside you and your children and doing so openly and that particularly in these shows and movies They are liked and accepted by their peers. And that is not a scenario we want, do we? So let’s make noise about it. And yeah.

1:00:57
CW: So yeah, anyway, this author, Metler, went on about a number of things that he noticed that have two moms in the background of a show. It happened on Good Luck, Charlie. The Doc McStuffins cartoon had two moms in one family. And oh my God, they were voiced by actual lesbian actresses Wanda Sykes and Portia de Rossi.

1:01:18
BR: Well fortunately you can always change the channel. I assume his remote has a has up or down channel I don’t know.

EM: It’s the principal Ben, it’s the principal. Think of the children.

CW: Yes so in the fact that they point these things out like oh my god this minor character, you know shows up to the classroom and they’re being driven by their two moms that’s horrendous in the fact that they’re getting up in arms about that, but they’re missing the undercurrent of Tolerance and being okay with the quote-unquote, you know outlawed love in every other Disney movie since time began Really kind of it shows you that they don’t do a whole lot of deep thinking about these issues.

EM: That’s because it’s evil, you know Promoting evil.

BR: I think deep thinking is their forte, but I could be wrong. So Celestia you mentioned hoaxes earlier on what’s a couple examples of that?

CW: Oh, I found some really cool Disney hoaxes now people may have noticed these popping up on their on their Facebook feeds and social media because that’s kind of where they live now. But one is a Toy Story still image that shows all the toys kind of looking up in this, you know, astounded horror and there’s a shadow being cast on the toys. And you slowly realize as you look at this still that it’s the silhouette of a man and a woman. Well, you can make out the woman’s head and the man’s groin area. Something’s happening there of a sexual nature. And this is actually from a parody news site called South End News Network and it’s not a great Photoshop job, but it still has gotten around the interwebs with some people believing it. And the story appeared with a whole narrative about a woman calling in to complain that her kid had watched it 400 times and she had sued Disney before. So her kid took a break from watching porn online to watch this and was offended by well like I said that was a fake news story Claiming that this mother had done that and there’s another still image of Sully from monsters monsters incorporated bursting into booze bedroom and on the side of The closet area you see a kid’s drawing on the wall and one is labeled Mom and uncle Roger, and it’s a very you know stick figure rendering of a sex act. There’s also a still from Lion King, supposedly, showing some sandy dunes that the bird is flying over. And there’s two dark shapes on the sandy dunes that are clearly nipples. And it’s purported that this was a prank that kind of went by you really quickly. It was an Easter egg snuck in by animators? Well, okay, the truth is with these that some of them are actually Easter eggs snuck in by artists, but not Disney artists and not during the production of the film. These were simply post-factory manipulations done of screenshots that were encouraged by a contest on cracked.com back in 2013. So The winners appeared under the very misleading title, 17 R-rated Easter eggs you never noticed in Disney movies. So you just read the headline and sure, it sounds like they really showed up in your childhood films, but they are simply tributes done by fans with a bit of a sense of humor and slight perversion. And have you guys seen, this really stood out in my memory, it showed up on my feed recently. Have you seen the Mickey Mouse Swiss cheese?

1:04:54
EM: No, I don’t think I have.

1:04:57
BR: I haven’t but I can hazard a guess as to what Mickey Mouse is doing this with cheese, but go on…

1:05:02
CW: Well, it’s a conveyor belt scene and it’s a very steamboat Willie type era animation and it’s true Do he’s like, you know kind of pumping up and down and there’s a conveyor belt in front of him and there’s cheese with no holes coming toward him and he takes it and he creates some holes in the cheese by using a part of his body that you would assume he would be using here and just doot doot doot doot doot and pops it back on the conveyor belt and off it goes and Minnie is kind of spinning the the crank on the conveyor And it’s actually really well done. Snopes broke it down beautifully and credits somebody on a B3TA board named Dremble. And it was created back in March of 2011. And each character and the way that they’re moving was lifted or retraced in the same motions from other appearances in the Steamboat Willie film. So it’s not even interesting. Yeah, so they did like frame for frame representations of how they’re moving. But you’ve got Mickey and Minnie and there’s a parrot and peg leg Pete are all in this little clip. And there’s a big tongue in cheek clue on the gif. If you look in the background on the wall behind the conveyor belt, there’s a poster labeled HSEREG, meaning health and safety executive regulations. And that wasn’t a thing until the 1970s. So that obviously is way later than Steamboat Willie came out.

1:06:34
EM: That just sounds like a profound waste of cheese to me.

1:06:37
CW: That’s what she said.

1:06:41
BR: And keep in mind that, you know, what is another word for penis? Willie. So it all makes sense there.

1:06:50
CW: Now Erik, you said you looked into some a little bit more frightening aspects of subversion in children’s entertainment.

EM: Yeah, I’m going to bring the room down here. So if you’re listening to this episode in your car, going to work, you know, and you’ve been laughing along with us, and you would like to have your day continue on that positive sort of step, now is the time to shut off the sound of my voice I am here of course to talk about Dungeons and Dragons.

CW: So we’re done with the part of the show where we talk about mice either having sex with cheese?

EM: No we are here to talk about demons. We are here to talk about possession we’re here to talk about unfortunately suicide and homophobia and drug abuse and all sorts of terrible things, for which Dungeons and Dragons was really turned into a scapegoat. So first of all, have either one of you ever played Dungeons and Dragons?

1:07:50
CW: Yes.

1:07:51
BR: Oh yes. I spent many, many months and years in high school and a little bit after that playing D&D.

1:07:59
EM: It sounds like Ben is the big cheese here when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons. Why don’t you tell the listeners what the game is?

1:08:12
BR: The game is basically a role-playing game in which it usually has two or more, usually much better with more than two, but I’ve played games with two people. One is the Dungeon Master and the other one is one of the players, and the Dungeon Master creates a scenario involving sometimes dragons, for example, and sometimes dungeons, although not necessarily. It could have castles and swamps and whatnot. And usually there’s some sort of quest, and so the Dungeon Master actually creates the game, and it’s very much a fantasy game. And so the Dungeon Master has different rooms with different treasures or traps or different monsters, and of course there are different characters. There’s the heroes, there’s paladins, there’s fighters, there’s clerics, and they all have different spells and abilities. And it’s a very ostensibly complex game, but once you get the pattern of it and get the hang of it, it goes pretty well. And the other player or players tell the, you know, speak out loud. They say, okay, we’re going to go into this, we’re going to do that. So it’s an open-ended game in that regard. And again, usually there’s some sort of quest. And typically the games can go anywhere from a couple hours to days or weeks.

1:09:22
CW: Can I have a whack at summarizing the game?

1:09:24
EM: Please.

CW: Nerds roll dice, fight imaginary monsters.

1:09:27
EM: Yes. And for those of you who still don’t have a frame of reference, I’d say, you know those who play fantasy football at work, in the break room, at lunchtime. Fantasy football is Dungeons and Dragons for people who think that they’re too cool for Dungeons and Dragons. It’s the same thing, you know, it’s like, basically you take the modern RPG or role-playing game that you would find on a console like the PlayStation or the Xbox, really in the mode of Final Fantasy VII. That was the big game that came out on the PlayStation. It sort of brought everything we’re talking about into the video game form, where you are playing a character that usually you have named, you are controlling him or her through a series of adventures, and along the way there is turn-based combat, fetch quests, level-ups, level ups, unique weaponry based on accomplishing specific objectives or what have you. It’s what we did in the days before PlayStation, where we had to sit around a table, drink Mountain Dew, eat pizza, and have a pen or a pencil and paper and dice. And the dungeon master, as Ben said, is the referee of the game slash psychologist leading us through this adventure. So the game was originally introduced by a studio or a company called Tactical Studies Rules Incorporated, most commonly abbreviated TSR. In 1974 they went through a change of ownership and Dungeons & Dragons is still around today. It’s become kind of a hipster cool thing and it’s shaken off a lot of the early negativity. But D&D has kind of had three phases, really. And the first phase is the one we’re going to talk about here in a moment. The second phase that happened probably in the later 80s and into the 90s was when D&D just became this lonely outpost for nerds on Friday and Saturday nights who couldn’t get dates or whatever and played the game, even though that wasn’t true, because trust me, I was there playing it with them. That was the perception that the public had. And now, again, it’s becoming something that’s kind of en vogue and fashionable. But when D&D first came out in 74, it was this very, very underground thing that only the nerds who went to comic book stores and before the days of chat groups and bulletin boards on the interwebs, you know, comic book stores and places like that, hobby shops, that was where all the conversation about nerd culture took place. That is where geeks found one another and started playing this game. And it became something that took on popularity on college campuses and became more and more prevalent as time went on. Now, to be very annoyingly autobiographical, my earliest impression of D&D was really sprung from two sources that were both based on a real incident that had occurred. I was at the time a Tolkien nerd, at a very young age, I’m reading the Sword of Shannara, and so obviously the Dungeons and Dragons items on display in the bookstores very clearly drew my eye. However, I saw these two very, very frightening television specials in the early to mid-eighties that achieved their objective, which was they planted the seed in my mind, as well as the minds of at least dozens of other people, that Dungeons & Dragons was actually an occult-based game. The American Reveille Podcast is a production of the week starring a young Tom Hanks. And then there was a 60 Minutes special from 1985. And both Mazes and Monsters and the 60 Minutes special were telling a true story, but presenting it differently. So while Mazes and Monsters was the fictionalized account of, you know, allegedly a real case and served more as a cautionary tale than hard news, both the movie and the 60 Minutes episode focused on alleged murders and suicides related to the game, supposedly related to the game, and the game has, you know, at this period, as a result, taken on this somewhat sinister reputation, despite that cover art I’m seeing at Walden Books featuring things I personally happen to enjoy, like wizards and hobbits and elves. Now, both Mazes of Monsters and 60 Minutes presented the unveiling truth of the terrifying, subversive nature of the game, specifically in the way that it represented, allegedly, a form of demonic possession. Players would create their character who would then become in their minds almost a sort of tulpa or thought form, if not in actuality a masquerading demon in the traditional Christian model who used that construct of the character that has been created and emotionally and mentally imbued with certain personality traits through the role-playing scenario of Dungeons and Dragons. As such, this evil force becomes an active force in its creator’s life, either taking them over or directly influencing the individual’s behavior. And as far as I can tell, these two programs, which we’ll break down right now, had the most to do with the impression that the general public had of Dungeons & Dragons, and specifically the way that it supposedly encouraged players to lose touch with reality to occasionally fatal result.

1:15:39
BR: Well, and you see the same sort of complaints in modern times with with Harry Potter, for example, the fundamentalist groups that are that are freaking out about it. I mean, they sort of as we touched on before with with Halloween and stuff and the notion that, oh, here’s this seemingly harmless Halloween game. And, oh, they’re dressing as masks. And, you know, it’s not that big a deal. But is it right? No, well, what if little Jennifer comes to believe that she really is a is a witch and you know, is casting magic powers and what if she goes online and finds grimoire spells and is trying to sacrifice things for Satan. Again, it’s gets into this whole, this whole notion that the kids can’t tell fantasy from reality. And oftentimes, of course, it’s the adults that seem to have a hard time differentiating them.

CW: Well, more so than just differentiating fantasy from reality, at least from what I remember of the Dungeons and Dragons scare and subversiveness, reminded me somewhat of some later scares I heard about with Second Life and other online games where you create a persona, you make a different version of you and you live through that character. And then, like, for instance, I, you know, Ben, you’ll have to look into this as an urban legend. I remember hearing about one kid who committed suicide because his second life character or some online forum character he created died and he had invested like two years upgrading and playing that character. And so when it died, he killed himself. Don’t know if that’s true. It’s just an urban legend I heard. But that’s the sort of like you imbue this created character, this golem, with what you want to be. You start identifying with it very strongly, and you can lose yourself psychologically into it. And that was the fear I remember permeating the whole notion of Dungeons and Dragons like, you know, you can you can totally lose yourself into it. It’s bad, you know?

EM: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, like any good urban legend and all of these stories, like the one that you just stated, they’ve circulated, they’ve made the rounds. And it’s because, you know, any of these stories is going to be a grain of truth, you know, in a shovel full of bullshit. But there is still some inciting incident there. one time that friend or that co-worker that he or she goes home at the very start of their weekend and they log in to PlayStation Live or what have you and they spend their weekend playing video games and that’s what they do. And you know that you look at something like Dungeons and Dragons where you say, okay, this isn’t just there’s an on-screen avatar character that you’re playing. You personalize this character. It’s sort of, you know, it’s the ultimate Mary Sue because you’re saying, well, I want to be me except I want to be a healer like a cleric or I want to be a bard who can sing or I want to be a thief or whatever and you name them, you dress them, you give them their skills and abilities and that’s what you do socially with your friends.

CW: Yeah, nobody ever wanted to be a bard, Erik.

EM: Well, bards were useful sometimes. I just never wanted to be one, but you know. So anyway, let’s talk first about Mazes and Monsters since Celestia was so excited about that. It’s a TV movie as stated that was based on a book that like the subsequent film was called in fact Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters. As far as I know, an author’s name is typically utilized to increase interest, and I can’t personally find any information to corroborate the notion that Jaffe’s name was a sufficient draw, but whatever. Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters was drawn from the true story of the unfortunately named James Dallas Egbert III, whom I know you have touched on in other episodes. And Egbert was a child prodigy. He was attending Michigan State University at the very young age of 16, where he majored in computer science. And in addition to this tender age and all the social pressure that goes with standing out amongst his peers in that sort of paradigm, Egbert was also allegedly dealing with other issues, including but not limited to severe depression, which may or may not have been connected to closeted homosexuality. His mother was just the sort that would make a lot of noise about something like Dungeons and Dragons or something like a Disney show, as you mentioned before, that featured a gay character as just one of the rest of us. She had a severe problem with this, and so he felt that he needed to live up to all sorts of incredible standards. Whatever the case, Egbert composed a suicide note on the 15th of August in 1979. And then he left his dormitory room and made for the university’s steam tunnels. He attempted unsuccessfully to overdose there on quaaludes. And when that didn’t work and he woke up, he went into hiding at a friend’s house the next day, which was also the opening day at Gen Con 12, a convention dedicated to games like Dungeons and Dragons. And some of the attendees there reported that they may possibly have seen him there that day.

CW: Gen Con goes back a lot farther than I thought.

EM: It sure does. And so he was possibly recognized, which led to a police search. And soon, Egbert’s family hired a private investigator named William Deere, whose later book, The Dungeon Master, is the most complete source of information on the entire case. And Mr. Deere theorized that Egbert’s disappearance was related to his involvement with the Dungeons and Dragons game. And that, of course, took off in the news media. It turns out that students at the time were reported to play live action role-playing or as we call it LARPing in the steam tunnels below the school. So of course, it was speculated that Egbert had gone there, he was injured, something happened to him or what have you. So the search goes on and it goes on for weeks during which time Egbert, sort of observing all this from the sidelines, moves to two other houses in East Lansing before catching a bus to New Orleans, and he then attempts suicide again, this time with cyanide. And when that didn’t work, Egbert contacted William Deere, revealed his location, and then died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on the 16th of August, 1980.

CW: Wow.

EM: So, interestingly, when Jaffe writes her book, her fictionalized account, Mazes and Monsters, the title of which is a play on Dungeons and Dragons to avoid copyright.

1:22:35
BR: Oh, that’s clever.

1:22:38
EM: Did you just catch that? Mazes and Monsters.

BR: Oh, the brilliance of that went right over my head.

1:22:44
CW: She really rushed it out. From the brief bit of reading I did about it, I remember she wrote it like gangbusters in like three days or something, right?

1:22:52
BR: A quickie book.

1:22:54
EM: It was definitely a quickie book, but here’s the weird part. So in Mazes and Monsters, she draws from the Egbert case, but then she takes a really sharp left-hand turn in a way that almost seems to underline how insubstantial the D&D’s harmful claims really were at the time. So her book and the TV movie, they both feature four college students who are deeply involved in an MNM campaign. And one of these kids is named JJ. And JJ is Egbert in all but name. He’s significantly younger than the rest. He’s socially awkward. He’s entered college at a young age. And he is in fact the one who suggests LARPing at the mysterious caverns just off campus.

CW: He was played by Tom Hanks. He was the one.

EM: No, no.

CW: Okay.

1:23:44
EM: That’s the twist. It’s Tom Hanks’ character, Robbie, who essentially loses himself in the game. The game serving as a distraction after the tragic death of Robbie’s brother, which results in Robbie believing that he is in fact now a a religious wanderer named Pardew who fights dragons and kills a mugger he believes to be a reptilian monster. Then he suffers a nervous breakdown atop the World Trade Center where he intended to jump and he’s finally depicted as suffering a complete and total disassociation afterward and the message is clear that D&D and indeed all forms of associated role-playing, splinter the psyche for the players. But the kid who’s based on Egbert turns out fine.

CW: Okay.

BR: I remember the outlines of that but hearing you describe it it’s far more bizarre and Byzantine than I had remembered.

EM: Oh it’s glorious. And then there was 60 Minutes and they also retold the particulars of the Egbert case but from the perspective that the game was at fault rather than the deceased’s very clear desire to escape his life, whether by way of gaming or drugs or a bullet. And the program included an interview with Patricia Pulling, who was an anti-occult campaigner from my nearby Richmond, Virginia. a one person advocacy group called Bothered Against Dungeons and Dragons. B-A-D-D.

BR: I remember that, yeah.

1:25:18
CW: That was one person?

1:25:19
BR: Oh yeah.

1:25:20
EM: One person. I mean, it’s like, it’s like on the one hand, she founded it in 1982 after her son Irving committed suicide and your heart goes out. And then on the other hand, her immediate response is to sue TSR. She files a wrongful death lawsuit against the the manufacturers of the game as well as her son’s high school principal who allowed Irving to play the game at school. Of course the case is completely thrown out in 1984 and most of her claims were you know disproven by reporters and in fact there was one named Michael A. Stackpole who did a whole study and came to the conclusion that actually role-playing gamers have lower suicide rates than non-gamers. But that did not stop polling from Founding Bad, and she began publishing information to promote her belief that D&D had encouraged suicide and rape and Satanism and incorporated an entire litany of immoral and illegal practices into this argument much the same way that Jack Chick did in that very infamous tract from the same period all about the evils of Dungeons and Dragons and you know bad never went anywhere it was just kind of a punchline and when Pulling died in 97 of cancer or one woman protest march ended there.

BR: Well you know if you were still around today, she would have a Twitter account with 10 or 12 followers. Half of them are bots, but, you know, whatever.

1:26:57
CW: Yeah. Again, I’m thinking about the Bermuda’s Triangle here, much like Ben’s story at the beginning of this long, long, long episode. Sorry, listeners. Regarding the tainted, the supposedly tainted alcohol and why tourists are dropping dead on Dominican Republic, the fact is just that some tourists will end up dying while they’re on vacation, just like some D&D players will commit suicide because you have a human population and that’s a behavior that happens sometimes.

1:27:27
EM: Yeah, and some 20-somethings will watch the Teletubbies in the middle of the night, every night.

CW: Erik, you might have been a group of one there, just like the founder of bad.

EM: Hey I had friends they were over.

BR: So Celestia do you do you have anything on one of my personal favorite cartoons Animaniacs?

1:27:47
CW: I wanted to bring up Animaniacs it’ll be a nice palate cleanser after all the Dungeons and Dragons death and destruction and doom and gloom. Animaniacs is a bright spot in my I guess not childhood I was definitely a full-on adult when it came out. And wow, do you guys have your favorite dirty moments of Animaniacs?

1:28:10
BR: I have a couple. They’re mostly sort of double entendre puns, but.

CW: That’s what they specialized in. Unlike a lot of the Disney stuff we were mentioning, the Animaniacs did have absolutely not hidden adult humor. And it kind of harkened back to some of the shows of the 60s and everything where there be an adult sensibility bit of dialogue that would go over the kid’s head, hopefully. The dirtiest joke I think that I can ever remember being in a children’s cartoon involved Dot looking for fingerprints. Do you remember that?

1:28:51
BR: I think I do. Yes. Not everybody remembers who the anime ex are.

1:28:57
CW: Well, there’s there’s Yakko, Wacko and Dot. Dot’s the cute one.

1:29:00
BR: And they’re Warner Brothers and the Warner sister.

1:29:03
CW: They’re looking for Prince, like as in like, you know, dusting for fingerprints, you know, to solve this mystery. But they don’t quite say it that way. And Dot shows up and she’s got Prince, the artist formerly known as Prince, in all of his purple glory with his fancy shoes and his little hairdo. Yeah, she’s just kind of holding him up the way that a groom would hold a bride over the threshold. And she’s like, I found Prince. And he’s like, no, no, no fingerprints. And she kind of looks at Prince and he kind of gives a smirky smile and she goes, I don’t think so. And all of us filthy minded adults were laughing our butts off and the kids hopefully did not understand that joke. And there was another scene in some medieval setting where a woman kept, of course, a beautiful, voluptuous woman, much like the nurse that always showed up, kept calling Yakko, sire, sire, sire. And he said later when we’re alone.

1:30:01
BR: I remember that.

1:30:02
EM: It sounds so juvenile compared to the Teletubbies.

1:30:05
CW: The funny thing is, this was an Emmy winning show. It didn’t really have much pushback from parents or groups or censors. Everything just kind of slid right by and teachers adopted many of the songs as learning devices.

EM: I am dealing right now as you’re talking about this with a seven-year-old who is coming home from school and out of nowhere? endlessly on loop belting out the Animaniacs theme song apparently his music teacher is teaching the kids this this cartoon that none of them have ever seen because it was so many years before they were all born, but they know every word of the song and they won’t stop singing it.

CW: It absolutely has staying power and a lot of the songs had like there was the president’s song and a lot of the songs have some sort of Educational if you you know element, but they’re also kind of you know there’s some subversive elements definitely on display they did a whole song about Lake Titicaca Which pretty much just plays on how much they like saying the name Titicaca. I mean, it was not Ren and Stimpy level. It was not Fritz the Cat or Cool World or Rick and Morty. It was not aimed at adults. It was definitely created for children, but man, the Easter eggs were very cleverly linguistically disguised for us adults.

1:31:32
BR: Well, of course, we could go on and on. We could do another couple of shows on this, everything from, you know, are Bert and Ernie a couple? You know, Scooby-Doo? Just how much of a stoner was Shaggy? Puff the Magic Dragon, if it actually was about smoking marijuana? Maybe someday we’ll circle back to a second episode on this.

1:31:55
CW: Yeah, hit our Facebook page up, listeners, and let us know what your favorite subversive or rumored to be subversive element from a kids show was and and Erik. Thank you so much for joining us.

1:32:06
EM: Are you kidding me? This is my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it as always.

1:32:11
CW: We’re gonna go ahead and end it there guys because we’ve already gone on far too long with all of our favorite elements from juicy television moments of our youth.

BR: Yeah, I’m gonna I’m gonna I’m actually gonna go Google some of the images that you guys talked about because I haven’t seen them so I’ll need to be alone for a while.

1:32:27
EM: It’s cool, I’ll be sending you videos the entire time.

1:32:30
CW: Yes, I think I’ve got that screenshot of Jessica Rabbit I could send it your way.

BR: Awesome.

CW: All right, take care everybody. Bye-bye.

1:32:37
See ya.

1:32:37
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1:33:04
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1:33:33
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