Hey - miss a day on Newgrounds (like I did) and you get your post buried way back at the end of the discussion thread.
Actually, Olay Clock's rendition of the Radiohead song, "Creep", which came out the same month Tom asked everyone to write their congressman protesting the upcoming "Consumer Broadband and Television Act", was the single Flash movie that inspired me to write the letter I did (mailed to the honorable Rick Santorum, March 24 - his office sent me back a form thank you).
Why did I like Olay's "Creep"? I don't know. Made me happy, I guess. I still don't know what Olay is - I think it's a type of flour, but I'm probably wrong. Anyhow, you had this thing that looks like a bag of flour fall in love with one of the girls from PBS's "Magic Schoolbus"---then he gets dumped (she's already in love with Bacon Burger Clock, although his bacon is missing, for some reason).
It seemed impossible in that letter I wrote to convey a rationale for why people ought to be able to swipe copyrighted images and stick them in Flash cartoons.
The argument I presented to Hon. Rick Santorum (and which you are welcome consider, for what little good it does) is as follows:
"When I was a teen, back in 80's, and I came home from school, I needed something to get my mind off my troubles. You couldn’t be calling friends like I had, seeing as how they had as much homework as I did—plus, they had their own family obligations. So I’d put down my books, pull up a chair and turn on the old television. Now, some of the stuff I saw on that television was pure crap. Strippers on Donahue shaking their butts. For my time, I preferred cartoons. Old school cartoons—Tom & Jerry from the 40's, Woody Woodpecker and Porky Pig. That, and Japanese Animation was alright. Robotech. Maybe even Voltron, although that was a little too cheeseball.
"Well, there was some crappy animation back then, too. He Man and The Masters of the Universe. They weren’t masters of anything except marketing, and they didn’t even do THAT well. Smurfs. Care Bears. My Pretty Pony. If my father had any guns in the house, I would have shot the TV dead for My Pretty Pony.
"OK.
"We had a lot of crappy animation back in the 80's.
"And what were you going to say about it?
"Nothing. You couldn’t write a letter to a studio because you were just a kid—nobody would listen to you. That left the TV all one-sided: they presented their material, you watched. Period. No discussion.
"Along comes the internet.
"Nowadays, if you’re a kid, and you feel the bigwig production houses are pumping nothing but garbage, you can do something active about it. You can parody their nonsense. You can make your own Flash cartoons which are a 100 times funnier than Pokeman or some other fluff to pop out of a south Pacific animation factory. You can stand up to the big boys and let them know what you really think of Barney."
That's me quoting from my own letter. I sort-of knew it wouldn't work when I sent it to his office. Instead, I should have sent it to my hometown newspaper's Op/Ed column (the Baltimore Sun has a fairly large readership---way over 100,000). Well, I didn't send it to the Sun, and I think Santorum's secretary gave it all of 2 minutes of her time.
Still, it's very difficult to argue the case for humor & parody. But maybe it's socially needful to argue for it - somehow. It seems the people lack the most humor are the ones capable of the greatest level of cynicism - they're the ones who are bankrolling laboratories that produce military grade anthrax (remember that guy in "Dr. Strangelove" -that guy who was always talking about "precious bodily fluids" - he's the sort of guy I have in mind).
I say these things, knowing well and good a lot of people on this site get off on the concept of "anarchy", almost as though social chaos is some sort of performance art project. There's a humorless in that, too - a shortsightedness that does not necessarily answer existing problems. If you engineer a Reign of Terror, expect to go to the guillotine, yourself. I just pity the people you take with you.
