"The Walking Dead: The World Beyond": Five Disappointments and One Genocide

 

I was looking forward to the new Walking Dead spinoff, The World Beyond.  It reputedly had a big time jump from the original two series, so some rebuilding would be evident, with new societies rather than just ragtag groups of survivors holed up in soon-to-be-destroyed baseball stadiums and theme parks. Plus it promised some answers to the big questions, like what was Jadis (Anne)'s doing, living in a garbage-labyrinth, dividing people into A and B and sneaking them away on helicopters?

First disappointment:No Time Jump. Only 10 years have passed since the zombie apocalypse began.  This is the same time as the last season of The Walking Dead.

Second disappointment: No New Society.  Well, there is a new society, on the grounds of Nebraska State University.  9,000 people, high school and college classes, zombie-proof doors, Memorial Day celebrations. 

But no evidence of sustainability.  No one is growing crops or tending animals.  What do they all eat?  Besides, it is soon-to-be-destroyed.

Third disappointment:  No answers.  Well, we do find out that the helicopters belong to the ominous-sounding Civic Republic Military, which has a secret "you don't need to know" base and rules/administers the colonies of Nebraska State, Omaha, and Portland.

Portland, Oregon?  On the other side of the continent?  Are there no other survivor settlements in the whole U.S.?  Come on, there are four near Alexandria in The Walking Dead.

Occasionally Elizabeth (still no last names) drops in for  "We love you, Fearless Leader" homage, but she is not really a leader at all.  She can't reveal anything about the CRM, or she will be "fired" (more likely zombified).  

Fourth disappointment: Bizarre coincidences.  Teenage sisters Iris and Hope were only six years old when "the sky fell" (an airplane crahed, and all of the occupants got zombified and tried to eat them).  They both feel guilty over that night, one (I don't remember which) was separated from their mother; the other watched mom being shot by a pregnant lady, and then shot the pregnant lady.  As a result, Iris has become an over-achiever, and Hope a juvenile delinquent.

Their father has been taken/volunteered to work for the CRM, which means they cannot contact him.  But he is sending secret messages anyway, even though if anyone found out, he would be "fired" (probably shot out of a cannon).  When he  sends a message saying that he is in trouble, they decide to go help out.  

Fortunately, Elizabeth gives them a forbidden map with his location, even though if anyone found out, she would be "fired."  He's in upstate New York, a thousand miles away. 

And there appear to be no cars or horses, nor any patrolled trade roads between Nebraska State and Omaha, so they have to walk  through overgrown, zombie-infested suburbs.

And they have no experience with killing zombies, except some useless classroom instructioon.

Plus leaving the colony is forbidden, so they will have to sneak out.

Fifth disappointment: No beefcake

Two other teens offer to go with them:

1. Silas (Hal Cumpston), a shy, bookish, rather fey young man who dresses in a 1970s leisure suit. He's been sneaking out anyway to look for a dinosaur tooth that he lost on the night the sky fell.  His mother was pregnant, and he had been planning to give it to his baby sister.  

Pregnant...ulp...one of the sisters killed his mom!.What a coincidence!

2. Elton (Nicolas Cantu), a hulking, quiet, slow-moving boy who doesn't seem to be all there.  Maybe autistic, maybe bipolar -- just what you want on a long journey.

The minute they leave (and Silas finds his dinosaur tooth!  What a coincidence!), head security guard Felix (Nico Tortorella) rushes out in  hot pursuit, accompanied by a woman named Huck, who has a dumb name and a crazy accent. 

At least Felix is gay.  A flashback in the second episode shows him as a gay teenager being kicked out by his homophobic father just before the zombie apocalypse begins.  And, wouldn't you know it, the trip takes them right past his old house, where zombified Mom and Dad are still tromping around (what a coincidence!)

But for beefcake, I had to go with recurring characters played by Al Calderon (top photo) and Ted Sutherland (left)

Final disappointment: Genocide.

The moment they all leave, Elizabeth orders the colony destroyed and everyone killed.  They then go from house to house, looking "for her."

Heck, Liz, if you didn't want "her" to leave, why did you give the girls a map? 

Aside from the logistic impossibiity of four soldiers killing 9,000 people, even with machine guns, why destroy one of the three survivor colonies left in America, a third of its population?  Just because one of the residents knows where the CRM is, becauss you gave her a map?

It doesn't matter anyway.  I didn't come here to see genocide.

Homophobic Moment in History: Bob Hope's AIDS Joke

Bob Hope (1903-2003) was probably the most famous and beloved entertainer of the 20th century, from the 1940s Road movies with Bing Crosby (Road to Morocco, Road to Singapore) to 30 years as a radio staple to a series of tv specials in the 1950s and 1960s.

He was known for his snide, snarky one-liners -- over 500,000 through his career, contributed by an army of over 100 writers on his payroll.  Most commented on current fads, fashions, Hollywood stars, and politics.

From the 1950s:

Eisenhower admitted the budget can't be balanced and McCarthy says the communists are taking over. You don't know what to worry about these days ... whether the country will be overthrown or overdrawn."

From the 1980s:

Everything Reagan does, Gorbachev does him one better. Reagan wears the flag of his country on his lapel. Gorby wears the map of his country on his forehead.

During the 1970s and 1980s, gay activists often complained about the raw homophobia in his jokes, but Hope shrugged them off: "They're threatening to get together and hit me with their purses."

Until July 4th, 1986.

Hope was performing at a dinner to commemorate the hundredth year anniversary of the Statue of Liberty.   The aging entertainer told the audience of patriotic Liberty enthusiasts, who paid $1000 apiece to be there ($2000 today):

I just heard that the Statue of Liberty has AIDS.  No one knows if she got it from the Mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.

Ronald and Nancy Reagan laughed, but the rest of the audience sat in stunned silence, horrified by the slur against Miss Liberty's sexual habits.  The Los Angeles Times said:

Hope's "joke" was worse than obscene. It was abusive and unworthy...It is both sad and shameful that a man who many have considered a national treasure should think it would be funny to besmirch Miss Liberty on her 100th birthday.

Gay activists complained again about the raw homophobia,, and AIDS activists complained about the horrifying misinformation.  Hope didn't actually apologize, but he said:  "I've known so many people like that over the years, worked with so many.  But it's different now.  Now they fight back."

Hope continued to make homophobic jokes until 1988, when a reference to "fags" on The Tonight Show prompted GLAAD to demand an apology.  Hope agreed to participate in an PSA, which aired only on local gay tv programs:

"I was amazed to discover that many people die each year in anti-gay attacks, and thousands more are left scarred, emotionally and physically.  Bigotry has no place in this great nation, and violence has no place in this world."

He was amazed to discover that anti-gay violence exists?  Really?

Gay people are not mentioned in the 2015 biography, Hope: Entertainer of the Century.  

See also: Bing Crosby

Baby Huey and Dimwit: Bottom of the Barrel Buddy-Bonding

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, I loved Harvey Comics, in this order:

1.-2. The Ghosts, Casper and Spooky (Casper, Spooky, Ghostland, Spooktown), whose weird paranormal and science fiction adventures were full of gay subtexts.

3. Hot Stuff the Little Devil (Hot Stuff, Sizzlers, Devil Kids).  Sometimes he had paranormal and science fiction adventures, too, but more often he was stuck in crazy pun-ridden lands that made no sense.

4. Richie Rich.  Usually he was insufferable, with joke stories about how rich he was.  Who cares?  But sometimes there were fun adventure and spy stories.

5. The Girls with Halfway Interesting Adventures (Little Lotta, Little Dot).

6. The Girl with Incredibly Boring Adventures (Little Audrey).

7. Baby Huey.  Only if I was desperate.

Baby Huey was a gigantic duck toddler in a diaper and bonnet who got involved in slapstick shenanigans.  He had super-strength, like Little Lotta, but combined with basic lack of understanding of how anything worked.  The result was mayhem. He rarely if ever saved the day, although sometimes he succeeded through pure dumb luck.

He sparred with three normal-sized ducks who disapproved of him, and a fox who kept trying to eat him.  (Although the ducks were civilized and lived in cities, they were still likely to be victimized by predators.)

And he had an annoying lisping girlfriend, Matilda.  What did she see in the baby giant?  "You're so big and shtrong, Huey!"  I get it -- he was three times the size of a normal duck, so if he was proportional beneath the belt...

Who'd believe that there were 92 issues of Baby Huey (1956-1972), plus compendium titles Baby Huey Duckland (1962-66) and Baby Huey and Papa (1962-68).

As in all of the Harvey comics, there was a big change in theme and emphasis after 1966.  Baby Huey was still wearing a stupid bonnet and diaper, but he was older, able to go out on adventures by himself.

He was often accompanied by his Cousin Dimwit: an adult duck, rather cute as anthropomorphic ducks go, with a shirt that extended beyond his hands (a sign of stupidity, I suppose).

A sort of inventor, Dimwit popped in out of nowhere and announced "I want to take Cousin Huey on a trip to the Moon!"  Huey's parents would, strangely enough, permit this.

My favorite Huey/Dimwit stories:

1, They build a mechanical Frankenstein that terrorizes the town.
2. Trying to fly to Florida, they end up at the North Pole
3, They're hired by the governmnt to take top-secret pictures.
4. They use dehydrating pills to foil a criminal gang.
5. They take a wrong turn and end up kidnapped by spies.

Still humorous/slapstick, but with enough buddy bonding and nick-of-time rescues to create at least minimal gay subtexts.

Boy, I could really find it everywhere, couldn't I?

By the way, here are some people and businesses who have taken the nom de plum Baby Huey:

1. James Ramos (left), the front man for Baby Huey and the Babysitters, 1970s precursors to the hip hop style.  He weighed 350 pounds.

2. MMA fighter Tito Ortiz (top photo).  He's not fat at all.

3. Hell's Angels motorcycle club member George Wethern.

4. "Baby Huey," the host of the Saturday night show on The Bone (KSAN, 107.7 FM).  He also does the podcast "The Second Shift" with cohost Chasta.

Baby Huey is also:

1. A popular dance club and hipster hangout in Toronto

2. A moving company in Katy, Texas, and

3. A barbecue restaurant in Fremont, Nebraska.

He Walked Around the Horses

I'm a big fan of the paranormal, especially mysterious disappearances, people who suddenly and inexplicably vanish.

You and a friend are hiking in the woods.  He's a few paces ahead.  You see him go around a bend, but when you arrive, a second later, he's not there.

Your father walks out the front door of your house to go to the mailbox, a journey of 10 yards.  He is never seen again.

A man boards an airplane.  He is served by the flight attendant in flight.  When the plane lands, he is gone.

But the greatest of the "they never came back" stories happened on November 25th, 1809.  Benjamin Bathurst, a 25-year old British diplomat, was on the way to Vienna for  a meeting with Emperor Francis II.  He and his assistant, Krause, stopped for dinner at an inn in Perleberg, Germany.  When it was time to continue the journey, he walked around the horses to climb into his carriage.  Except he never made it to the carriage.

He was never seen again.

It was a journey of 10 feet.  He would have been out of Krause's sight for only a few seconds.

A few days later, his coat was discovered on a farm a mile north of Perleberg.  And his pants, in the woods near the town of Quitzow.




The gay connection:
1. Bathurst and his servant sharing a room.
2. Wherever he  went, he was naked when he arrived.

The story didn't get much press in 1809, but when it was rediscovered by Charles Fort in the 1920s, paranormal enthusiasts went wild.  It was repeated in every compendium of the unexplained.

Maybe he was abducted by aliens, or zapped into a parallel world.  Maybe he became a time traveler.  Or a vampire.

Many science fiction writers, including Poul Anderson, H. Piper Beam, Robert Heinlein, and Robert Bloch, have covered his story.

Recently debunkers have been pushing a more mundane explanation: that Bathurst was dragged back into the inn and murdered, with robbery or political assassination as the motive (it was a rough part of town, in the middle of the night).

An adaptation of H. Piper Beam's story He Walked Around the Horses appeared in February 2015, written and directed by Claude Miles, who also played Benjamin Bathurst.  Miles has also appeared in such films as Trouser Snake (aka Penis Monster), The Last Temptation of Fluffy, Cow Tippers from Outer Space, Flying Saucers over Fetishland, and Tarzan's Teenage Daughter, so I'm going to guess that this was not a serious production.