"The Unlisted": Come for the Australian-Indian Culture, Stay for the Gay Subtexts

In The Unlisted, twelve-year old twins Kal (the cool one) and Dru (the smart one, signified by his glasses) are...

Did I say twelve?  They are played by sixteen-year old Vrund and Ved Rao, who could easily be mistaken for college students, and look decidedly out of place in a school full of 12-year olds.

If you can get past the jarring age discrepancy, the setting in the Australian-Indian community is interesting.  In the first episode, everyone is in a flurry to prepare for Divali.  I liked the scene where the jar of ghee breaks, so they have to run from store to store, but everyone is sold out, except for one shop which won't sell to Kal because he doesn't speak Hindi: "You can't pick and choose your culture."

In the second episode, a mean girl is spying on them,so they invite her into the family store and disgust her with Indian snacks like chili banana chips and nimboo pickles.

In the third episode, it's Multicultural Day, so Grandma introduces the school to the Indian sport of kabbadi.

Why not just make it a sitcom about clashing values of modern and traditional Australian-Indians? But instead we have dystopian sci-fi:

A corporation called The Infinity Group is providing free dental exams to all students, but Dru  is afraid of dentists, so he talks Kal into taking his place.  Tim (Otis Dhanji), whose parents refused to permit the checkup, goes missing.

Later everyone who got a "checkup" freezes in place.  They are being controlled by dental implants!  Plus they are super-strong and fast.

 Dru must pretend that he is being controlled, and get Kal to take his place for the athletic tests, while the boys try to unravel the sinister plot.

Eventually they find allies in their aunt, a doctor who got a job with the initiative without realizing what it was about, and Jiao  (Zachary Wan), whose implant never worked.

And four refugees who knew too much and are now on the run:  three girls and Jacob (Nya Cofie, right), although Gemma (Jean Hinchliffe) is so androgynous that I thought the character was meant to be nonbinary.

Originality of the plot: C-.  It's been done before.  See:  The Tripods.

Beefcake: D.  Most of the actors are too young to be of interest.

Gay characters: A.  The twins have a built-in gay subtext, two of the refugee girls are in a romantic relationship, an adult ally says she was "queer before there was a word for it," and lack of expressed heterosexual interest abounds.

Fade out kiss: C.  Dru states that he and Chloe are "just friends," but Grandma goes on and on about which girl thinks the boys are handsome and wants to date them.

Australian-Indian culture: A+.

Daybreak: Saving the Non-Gender Specific Person in Distress

I was definitely planning to skip the new Netflix drama Daybreak, about teenagers surviving the apocalypse while the adults are all zapped. Riot Girls, The Last Kids on Earth, Nowhere Boys....I've seen it all before.

More importantly, the promo is all about Josh (Colin Ford) trying to reconnect with the Girl of His Dreams. What does that even mean? It's heterosexist brainwashing.  How about a new mantra: so many girls, so little time, how can I choose?

Plus Colin Ford has nice abs, but attended a evangelical Christian school, has starred in heartwarming productions, and "has never been accused as a gay."

So I was noping my way out of there when I read that his sidekick in the show is gay.

It wouldn't hurt to take a look.

Episode #1:  A narrating Josh, aka Ferris Bueller, thinks that the post-apocalypse is awesome.  Sure, everyone over 18 (and, one assumes, under 10) melted into goo  or turned into trudging "ghoulies," roving gangs are kidnapping kids to "turn into hummus," and Sam, the Girl of His Dreams, has vanished, but you can get all the fast cars and glitzy gear you want.  It evens out.

Josh hears a girl screaming as Golf-Team cannibals prepare to eat her, and rushes to the rescue.  "Let the girl go," he says, "and I'll leave you to whatever circle jerk you have planned for tonight."

"That's tomorrow night," the gang leader, Terry (Chester Rushing, left), tells him, pointing out that gender norms don't exist anymore, so gay sex is no longer shameful.

Not to worry,they still throw around homophobic slurs.  Gay sex is still shameful.

So Josh rescues the foul-mouthed 10-year old Angelica. Then they encounter Wesley (Austin Crute), a gay black bully (I've never seen those three words together before) turned Asian-wisdom spouting street samurai. 

After battling the Mad Max-style Turbo Jock, the trio heads to the  mall, where reputedly Sam is being held captive by the evil Baron Triumph.  No Sam, and the evil baron turns out to be Eli (Gregory Kashyan), a former poor kid now holed up in the mall.  The only other resident is The Witch,  aka Mrs. Crumble, a deranged, semi-zombified former biology teacher.

Kind of derivative, with boring flashbacks, and why did Josh rush to rescue a girl, when a moment before he just watched while a boy was dragged to his death.

Right -- the Girl.

I'll just sample some other episodes.

They turn the mall into a free zone, for kids who didn't belong to a clique before the apocalypse, and try to live as normally as possible.  They even hold a "welcome to being alive" prom, with a gender-neutral ruler instead of a king and queen.

Although ostensibly the "good guy" leader whom everyone loves, Josh is rather jerk-like.  When a new Asian refugee is admitted to the sanctuary, he tells her that he's the new ICE, and she has to vote for him in the upcoming election or he'll have her deported.

Not approp, dude.


There's a lot about power struggles in the Turbo Jock tribe.

Wesley turns out to be dating one of the jocks, Turbo Bro Jock (Cody Kearsley, Moose on Riverdale), who is partially melted and cannot speak.

Principal Burris (Matthew Broderick), who somehow survived being melted, wants to finish "cleansing" the world by setting off a bomb.

Fade out kiss?  Well, Wesley and Turbo Jock Bro get one, but not Sam and Josh.  She rejects him in the end.  Turns out that she never needed rescuing, and she never wanted to be his girlfriend; all of this  dreamy romance-stuff was in his head.

Who'd have thought, Josh as unreliable narrator?  How postmodern!  I might have to go back and watch this after all.

See also:Cody Kearsley: Metis actor with two gay roles, Moose Mason and a post-Apocalyptic zombie. Plus Cody and another Metis guy n*de

The Top 6 Beefcake Stars of "Power Rangers Beast Morphers"

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers premiered on the Fox Kids Network in August 1993, when I was living in West Hollywood and a big fan of some of the classic kids' shows like Tiny Toon Adventures, Rugrats, Doug, and Rocko's Modern Life.  So I watched.  For about 10 seconds.

Teenagers from a contemporary American high school get assignments from a....a nightmarish disembodied head with bulbous lips floating in a vat of opaque jelly.  They turn into costumed superheroes -- action sequences actually borrowed from an earlier Japanese series -- and the superheroes in turn merge into mechanical creations.  They fight a number of ridiculous monsters sent to destroy the world by the over-the-top Rita Repulsa.

Ridiculous premise, disturbing, disgusting images -- sorry, I can't get over the horror of the opaque-jelly vat guy.  Click.

Who knew that kids would like it?  That there would be years of spin-offs and sequels?

The latest, Power Ranger Beef Morphers, which has just premiered on Nickelodeon, is about...um....

I am copying the premise directly from wikipedia.  I can't understand a word of it:

Set sometime in the future, a secret agency in the city of Coral Harbor known as Grid Battleforce combines a newly-discovered substance called "Morph-X" with animal DNA to create a new team of Power Rangers known as the Beast Morphers. The Beast Morpher Rangers must defend the Morphin Grid from Evox, an evil sentient computer virus that creates evil avatar clones of original Beast Morphers candidates Blaze and Roxy, who have been rendered comatose as a result. When the three of them are transported to the Cyber Dimension, Evox, Cybervillain Blaze, and Cybervillain Roxy gain its de facto ruler Scrozzle as an ally as he helps them in their plan to return Evox to Earth

Holy cow.  I just want to know if there are any cute guys in the cast.

1. Rorie D. Travis stars as Devon Daniels.  I couldn't find any beefcake photos, but this one of him and a buddy is evocative.  I wonder if he's gay.

2. Jasmeet Baduwalla,aka Jazz, as the Blue Power Ranger (top photo).  At least he has some abs.

3. Abraham Rodriguez as Nate Silva.  Cute, but I could use some biceps.

4. Colby Strong as Blaze, the one who is comatose while his cybervillain double tries to take over Scrozzle or something.  Cute, but haven't any of these guys heard of a Nautilus machine?

5.  Cosme Flores as Ben Burke.  It's nice to see plus-sized actors being cast in action-adventure roles, but I'm still holding out for someone who can bench press his body weight.

6.  Reid McGowan as Steel.  Finally, some muscles!

Now,  is a shirtless shot too much to ask for?

How Queer is "Carmen Sandiego"?

Millions of millennials grew up with Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego  (1991-1995), a game show based on a video game where contestants answered geography questions in order to track down the elusive super-thief (diversity alert: Carmen was middle-aged, female, and I assume Latina).

A powerful woman who thumbs her nose at the system and doesn't have any male admirers.  A lesbian girls' dream!

No other gay content in the show itself, but host Greg Lee is apparently gay.  Seen here with his date, actor Gregory Michael of Dante's Cove,, at the 2007 Outfest.  The top photo is Gregory in action.

Anyway, Carmen won lots of Peabody awards and spun off into Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego (1996-1998), hosted by Kevin Shinick.

And Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego? (1994-99), an animated series which pits the superthief (voiced by Broadway legend Rita Moreno) and her V.I.L.E. organization against 14-year old detective Zack (Scott Menville) and his older sister Ivy of the A.C.M.E. Agency.  It also starts to redeem Carmen, making her an anti-hero who uses her thieving skills to help  Zack fight cadres of real baddies.

Now Netflix has released Carmen Sandiego (2019), an animated series with Carmen completely rehabilitated, a "modern day Robin Hood."  Trained to be a V.I.L.E. agent, she decided to devote her life to something other than evil, and went rogue.  Now she works behind the scenes, pursued by both A.C.M.E. and V.I.L.E., to solve crimes and thwart thefts of Vermeer paintings in Amsterdam, the Magna Carta in Mumbai, smart fabric in Greece, and rare gems in Japan, with the ultimate goal of taking down the entire V.I.L.E. enterprise.

Her scoobies include:
1. Teenage computer hacker Player (Finn Wolfhard).

2. Redheaded doofus Zack (Michael Hawley)
3. His sister Ivy, who looks nonbinary.
4. Shadosan, the Japanese sensei who adopted and taught Carmen.

Their main antagonists are A.C.M.E. agent Chase Devineaux (Rafael Petardi) and V.I.L.E. agent Graham (Michael Goldsmith), whom Carmen dates briefly.  Otherwise I don't see any hetero-romance plotlines, which is remarkable.  Not a lot of gay subtext, either, but with children's tv, I'll take what I can get.