"Boss Baby": "Rugrats" Meets "Dilbert"

 I've been seeing ads for a Boss Baby tv series on Nickelodeon for a long time, maybe years, and I always think "A paeon to capitalist excess!  Disgusting!"  But then this photo icon appeared.

Tell me that doesn't look like two boy babies about to kiss.

Could there possibly be gay representation in a tv series about babies?  

So I turned on the first "new episode," which turned out to be in Season 4.

Four years of this already!

Scene 1:  The Boss Baby  is sending out several teams to do some sort of spy work in the supermarket; they substitute baby magazines for general interest magazines,; they get a dirty diaper disposed of; an operative plays the "peek-a-boo" game with random passersby.  Sometimes they are stymied by adult conventions: they can't use a telephone, since they don't know numbers, and when a passerby plays the "got your nose" game, the operative believes that his nose has actually been stolen.

What is this all for?  How does this make money for Boss Baby's corporation?

Scene 2: The Big Boss invites Boss Baby to lunch in the executive dining room (where they are fed by a French waiter who says "Monsieur, here comes l'avion").  We get an explanation: the corporation is sellng "baby love," trying to get adults to love babies more than other people and things.  Boss Baby wants to control the entire love market: "They can like whatever they want, but when it comes to that bone-deep love, they should only be thinking of one thing: babies."

Hopefully you don't mean making more babies. 

The Big Boss says that Boss Baby is doing everything right, except running a well-organized office.  He disapproves of the "renters": puppies with their own puppy-love business.

Scene 3: Back at the office, Boss Baby explains to his hanger-on older brother, Tim, that he can't just evict the puppies: they have an iron-clad contract and good puppy lawyers.  He has to get creative.

But there's no time: he is scheduled to appear at Tim's Do-Good Trooper Safety Showcase. 

Scene 4: Boss Baby delegates the puppy problem to his employees, and heads for the safety showcase. 

It's older kids on a stage, talking ad infinitum about safety (what to do if you step in poison ivy, drink poison, catch fire, and so on), with the parents in the audience, Boss Baby acting like a real non-sentient baby on his father's lap.  Everyone gets bored and falls asleep.

Scene 5: The family drives home, but Tim "wanted to walk home with Petrovsky."  A buddy-bond homoromance?

Cut to the two walking home, complementing each other's performance.  

Suddenly a tree crashes onto a parked car, and they rush to the rescue of Frankie, the baby inside.  Why was she in the car alone?  She was on a mission, trying to install a baby love air freshener. 

The adults arrive and praise the boys as heroes, whch angers Frankie: "you swoop in and steal all the love for yourselves!"  Now boy-love is competing with baby-love (maybe "boy love" isn't the best term for it.)

Scene 6: Back at work. (How do the babies get away from supervising adults long enough to go to work?).  The employees explain that they tried to get rid of the puppies by raising the rent so they couldn't afford to stay there, but the puppies just sublet out their space to a third company, "preeks" (pre-kindergarten kids).

Boss Baby is inundated by work, but Tim calls and invites him to the ceremony where he and Petrovsky will be lauded for saving the baby (right now?  not in a few days?).

He quickly comes up with a solution to the puppy-and-preak problem: open office floor plan, no privacy, so they will drive each other crazy and leave).

Scene 7: At the ceremony, the boys start their interminable safety scenario bit, while the adults all groan.  

Boss Baby runs into Frankie,  who reveals her revenge plan: she has applied lard to the floor, so when the adults try to stand, they will slip and fall, and blame the boys; thus the love will revert back to babies.

Boss Baby wants to save his brother from humiliation, so he calls the head puppy and offers to let his company stay, if they all come to the museum in 15 seconds (seems impossible, but then, this office might not be in our world).

The adults try to stand, slip and fall, and start to blame the boys.  Then the puppies arrive, and the adults blame them, assuming that they were eating chicken and left grease on the floor.  Love for puppies goes down, love for boys remains the same.  No win for babies, but family has to come before business.  The end. 

Beefcake: No.  Some of the adults are cute, in a computer-animated way.

Heterosexism: No one expresses any heterosexual interest.

Gay Characters: Buddy-bonding subtext between Tim and Petrovsky but only for a few seconds, not even enough for a subplot.  We never see the black-haired baby that Boss Bay is almost kissing in the icon.

The grown-up Tim, who narrates the original movie (there was a movie?),  has a wife and daughter, so we may assume heterosexual identity.   The grown-up Boss Baby, now named Ted, does not, so maybe we can assume gay identity.  Some reddits ask "Is Boss Baby GAY?"  

My Verdict: The babies-as-businesspeople  jokes are clever, but there is not enough satire of the corporate world -- everyone seems perfectly nice.  And the premise is inconsistent.  Maybe in other episodes we find out exactly how the adult world-baby world interacts. 

Update:  The black-haired baby is a rival.  It's hard to distingiush between romantic interest and threat.  

See also: Boss Baby: Back in the Crib.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-63) was about a teenager (Dwayne Hickman of Love That Bob) so immensely girl-crazy that in the first season he announced it in every episode: "I'm Dobie Gillis, and I like girls.  What am I saying?  I love girls!  Beautiful, gorgeous, soft, round, creamy girls!"

Other people in Dobie's world are peculiarly low on straightness, however.  His proto-hippie buddy Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver, right, later of Gilligan's Island) shrinks away from the word "girl" as timidly as the word "work," both symbols of heterosexist destiny.

He expressed heterosexual interest only a few times, and usually in the first season.  In "The Gigolo," he is sought after for dates because his lack of heterosexual interest makes him safe.

Scripts sometimes "explain" this lack of interest as shyness, but in his autobiography, Bob Denver insists that Maynard "isn't afraid of girls; he just wants to pursue his own life."

Tomboy Zelda Gilroy (Sheila Kuehl) has a crush on Dobie, but withdraws in horror when he pretends to acquiesce; maybe she is using the crush to avoid any realistic attachments to boys (in 1994, Sheila Kuehl became the first open lesbian elected to the California state legislature).

Even the foppish Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty) seems uninterested in girls for their own sake, merely using them as tools to one-up Dobie.  After the first season, Warren Beatty left the series, replaced by the gay-coded cousin Chatsworth (Steve Franken), a mother-obsessed milquetoast who doesn't even bother with the pretense of liking girls.  Instead, he openly competes with Maynard for Dobie's affection.

Even the intensity of Dobie's attraction to girls is open to dispute.  The "I love girls" speech was dropped after the first season, and most episodes were about groups of friends rather than crushes and dates.

In one episode, Dobie is even suspected of being gay.  He dates a girl who belongs to a family of trapeze artists (Francis X. Bushman, Jud Beaumont, Tip McClure), who wander around the house in togas, discussing the benefits of "the Greek way," an obvious double entendre.

  To demonstrate their enthusiasm for Dobie, they mob him, rip his clothes off, and give him a toga of his own.  Dobie's Dad arrives, mistakes the togas for dresses, and concludes that Dobie has "gone funny" in a household of drag queens.

Dwayne Hickman went on to star in the buddy-bonding Cat Ballou, with Michael Callan.

"Yo, Adolescente": Do All Gay Stories End with Coffins?

 

Yo, Adolescente  (Memories of a Teenager) is advertised on Netflix as a LGBTQ movie.  So why  is the trailer a nonstop description of the boy's girlfriend's eyes?

"She has the most wonderful, amazing, fascinating eyes that I've ever seen.  I can't describe them.  When she looks at you, it's like nothing else in the universe matters.  All you want is tor her to smile at you forever."

Does that sound like a gay kid? Bisexual, maybe.  

Scene 1: A rock concert in Argentina: "Life is hard, I won't lie."   Cut to Nico, coming home to discover that four of his friends died in a fire at that concert.  Or just one.  It's not clear.

He goes up to his room and looks through his memorabilia.  Lots of depressing statements: "I feel empty inside."

Cut to a party. Nico tells a boy "Nice t-shirt," and the boy responds: "The word teenager has nothing to do with suffering."

Is this magic realism?  I have no idea whether this is real life, or in Nico's mind.

Now Nico is named Zabo. He tells us: "I met Pol two years ago.  He was the same age then as I am now." 

Geeze, kid, just say "He was two years older than me."

They hang out, go to concerts, do outdoor things, hug.  Then Pol killed himself.

One friend kills himself, another dies in a fire.  This kid can't cut a break.

Cut to graffiti coming out of Nico//Zabo's head as he writes a blog; "What is a teenager?"

A swirling mass of darkness and despair?

"We're raw urgency in the flesh.  We don't think  about the future.  At least not the future of a house, a car, a dog, a wife.  I'd rather kill myself than have such a future."

I felt the same way growing up with the heterosexist trajectory of house, job, wife, kids being pushed at me day after day.

"Alone, alone, alone!  Somewhere, someone must be going through the same as me."

Scene 2:  Ok, his parents call him Nico, but he prefers Zabo.  He lives in a gray, lifeless suburb of Buenos Aires called Parque Chambuco, and he's in his fourth year of high school (junior year in America), studying construction, which is dreadful.  He doesn't make friends easily because he's "rustic," but he has a group of homies: Luco, Camila, Checho, and Tomas (who is two years older).

Everyone is concilaitory about the sucide of Zabo's friend Pol, but he shrugs it off.  

Ok, they all assume that Zabo is gay, but he doesn't think so.

Maria arrives.  We get the five-minute description of her eyes.

The boy is obviously in love with he -- deeply passionately, Girl of His Dreams, Spend Your Life Kissing the Ground She Walks On in love.  He's obviously straight.  Straight people can have best friends, you know.

Scene 3: Nico is playing video games with his friend Fran (wait -- how many friends does this "loner" have?)..  He wants to have sex with Maria, but he is unfortunately stuck in the friend zone.  Fran dosn't believe that she really exists -- no girl could be so perfect.  So Nico offers to throw a party, and invite them both.

I'm sick of this.  I fast forward.

I come to this.

And this.

And this.

And Pol's suicide note.  "Am I in love with you?  I was afraid to tell you."

And the last scene.  

Did Nico feel guilty because Pol killed himself due to unrequited love?  Or did he feel guilty because he never told Pol that he was in love with him?  Or because his girlfriend got pregnant?  Or...

Do all gay stories have to end with coffins?

The Naked Ape: Johnny Crawford's First Nude Scene

Other than Burt Reynolds posing on a bear skin rug for Cosmo, this is probably the most famous nude photo ever: a frontal of Johnny Crawford, a Boomer icon for his teen idol songs and his role as the squeaky-clean, innocent kid on The Rifleman, no longer squeaky-clean or innocent, letting it all hang out for the swinging 1970s.  It was used to advertise The Naked Ape (1973). 

But no one has actually seen the movie, unless you went to the theater on the three days in August 1973 when it was playing.

The book The Naked Ape (1967), by Desmond Morris, attributes our behavior today to the evolutionary advantages of our caveman ancestors.  Women are attracted to big muscles, for instance, because they were better for fighting off saber-toothed tigers, thereby enhancing survival.  Men are attracted to big breasts because they can nourish infants better, thereby enhancing offspring survival.

Wait...not every woman likes big muscles, and not every man likes big breasts.  Sometimes it's the other way around.  Physical attractiveness is primarily a matter of cultural norms.

Anthropologists thought it was ridiculous, but the back-to-nature set grabbed copies as fast as they could be printed, creating the first anthropological bestseller since Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.  

But how do you make a movie out of an anthropological text?

Not very easily, apparently.

It seems to be about two college student (Johnny Crawford, Victoria Principal), who get all horny with each other and hang out naked, while a psychiatrist (John Hillerman) explains their behavior as cave-people grunting.  There are trippy animated sequences.  Robert Ito of Quincey plays a samurai.  Davis Olivieri of The New People is in there somewhere.  Since it was produced by Hugh Heffner of Playboy, I doubt that there is any gay content.

In spite of the word "naked" in the title, The Naked Ape came and went instantly.  Writer/director Donald Driver never wrote or directed any movie ever again.  It received no play on tv, hardly any on cable tv, it's not on youtube or Netflix, and there's no DVD available. It's hard to even find a plot synopsis.

Maybe it's for the best.  After seeing the nude frontal of Johnny Crawford so often for so many years, what movie could live up to the expectation?

You can see the uncensored photo on Tales of West Hollywood.

Eleven Minutes to Homophobia in "Adventures in Public School"

Amazon Prime added a movie, Adventures in Public School, to the "We think you'll like it" list.  I'll give you 100 to 1 odds that the adventure is about Winning the Girl, so I'll hate it. 

Just for a lark, let's plug it in to see how long it takes for the heterosexism to begin.

One minute: Teenage Liam (Daniel Doheny) is being home-schooled by his mother, because he is too smart, sophisticated, and sensitive to be bruised by the bullies and misunderstood by the morons in public school.  

Sensitive?  Code for "gay." Maybe this movie won't be so heterosexist after all.

Five minutes. Mom is giving Liam the whole school experience, including sports and a prom, where of course she is his date.  

Geez, just have sex with him already.

This is disgusting, but it's "Mom wants to have sex with her son" offensiveness, not heterosexist "The Girl of His Dreams" offensiveness, so it doesn't count. .  

Six minutes: Lame...um, sorry, Liam... wants to be a "real boy" -- and get away from his Smother for a few hours, so he insists on going to public school.  Mom escorts him, giving him fretting helicopter-mom advice about how to survive.  "They will misunderstand you.  They will call you names.  They will accuse you of cheating.  But just remember, you are superior to them.  You are perfect in every way."

So that's why you're not screwing him.  It would be inappropriate to have sex with God.

Will this be a movie about how clinging mothers and absent fathers turn boys gay?

Eight minutes: No.  Suddenly Lame sees Her across the crowded hallway.  He is frozen in place.  His jaw drops. It is the Damascus Road experience.  He has seen God and lived.

Have you ever in your life responded that way to the sight of an attractive person?  But I guess She is not a person, she's so wonderful that she will be the God of a god.

Suddenly Lame understands the meaning of life, the reason he was put on this earth.  He knows that he will spend his life joyfully, eagerly doing the only thing worth doing, the only thing that matters: basking in the glory of The Girl. 

There it is!  The heterosexist erasure of same-sex desire.  

But I don't get to the "Turn this nonsense off" button soon enough. 

Ten minutes: Lame is a taking a test. There happens to be a homophobic slur etched into his desk.

Eleven minutes: The proctor accuses him of "spreading vicious rumors" about him and the gym teacher, Toby.  "Yes, I have been with a man, and yes, it was Toby, but I'm not a dirty cocksucker."

So just anal, huh?

Eleven minutes to the homophobia.

Sandy Ricks in Trouble

It's been over 50 years since Sandy and Bud Ricks appeared on the Boys with their Shirts Off Show, aka Flipper (1964-67).

It was about two boys and their dad living in the Florida Everglades.  In each episode, one or both would get into a jam, and their pet dolphin Flipper would rush to their aid.  Sort of like an aquatic version of Lassie.

Except neither of the boys owned a shirt

Dad was shirtless sometimes, too.

And the show was in color, giving you clear, bright, beautifully detailed views of muscular chests and taunt biceps.  Especially when they were tied up, and straining at the ropes.

I never saw Flipper during its first run -- it was on Sunday night, when we were in church.  But millions of Baby Boomer kids watched, enthralled by the endless teenage beefcake, getting their first glimmers of same-sex desire.

And they remember.

My childhood favorite was Bud (Tommy Norden), with his impossibly buffed physique, but most Boomer kids seem to have favored the lithe, slim Sandy (Luke Halpin).

Today you can go to an online archive where a fan has digitized thousands of screencaps and pictures of Luke Halpin, and there's plenty of fan art.

On deviantart.com, aard4447 envisions a meeting between Sandy and Robin the Boy Wonder of Batman (1966-68).

Bondageincomics draws Sandy bound and gagged, being kidnapped, and left to drown.  If only Flipper were here!

Korak225 gives us another Sandy Ricks kidnapping scene.

And Sandy being untied by his brother Bud.

Or maybe tied.  Bud was always jealous of Sandy's teen idol status, after all.

All drawings copyrighted by their respective owners.

See also: Flipper Toys