I'll always find it hilarious that Taika Watiti deliberately didn't do any research into Hitler's life and history before playing him because he felt that he didn't deserve to be played accurately.
Additional fun fact. A lot of Maori served with distinction in WWII. Which horrified a lot of Nazis, who thought allowing "savages" onto the battlefields of Europe was a war crime. So a Polynesian Jew playing a camp Hitler is something that would outrage Nazis.
I love juvenalia-for me, that would be late 70s to early 80s sci-fi fantasy that would be found in Heavy Metal magazine. It’s validating to know that the only thing separating me from fascist sociopathy is self-awareness and a healthy sense of irony...
It's okay for your fave to be problematic. I just worry when people rage out when you point this out, rather than just nodding and saying, "Yeah, there's some not okay stuff here."
And also the realization that the stuff we like can shift and adapt. After all... it's all make-believe, yeah? So why not cast off the cumbersome shackles of a slavish devotion to a "Glorious Past" that never existed? It's how progress is made. In order to change the world... one must first imagine a better one. Otto Lielenthal, Glider-King Of Prussia, and the Wright Brothers never would have gotten off the ground had Icarus never flown too close to the sun.
Yeah this was one of your better episodes, I really thought you nailed it here. That part with the butterfly in Jojo Rabbit, still really gets to me The Iron Dream would make for an awesome metatextual movie
@@jordanloux3883 Yeah that'll be cool like a more insidious version of Garth Marenghi's Dark Place. I was thinking playing it like a more Galaxy Quest approach.
It's something of a slog, TBH. Bob wasn't kidding about it being deliberately badly written. Still, there's a fascination to it, like a really grisly automobile accident.
The rest of Spinrad's stuff is pretty good too. Check out Bug Jack Barron and (maybe harder to find) The Men In The Jungle (dedicated to none other than Harlan Ellison, "the Dangerous Vision that got away").
Apparently the Karl May angle kept going well into the war. Hitler was pushing his books onto people in the German military as fine examples of military tactics. They were not, but nobody was going to tell Hitler that. There's an early episode of the exceptional podcast Behind The Bastards that covers this wonderfully.
8:13 Figured it'd be good to transplant this from the original video, but no future commenters: Bob isn't saying hating Thundercats makes you a Nazi. He's just making a joke about ludicrous overreactions to juvenile media.
Which of course have also been made elsewhere... "Final Crisis" gave us Superboy Prime, an AU teenage version of Superman who was ready to destroy all of reality because it had gotten too full of anguish and despair... anguish and despair he was all too happy to joyfully inflict on his enemies while simultaneously blaming them for "stooping to their level." "LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!" Superboy Prime would scream, as he RIPPED AN OPPONENT'S ARM CLEAN OFF. As Linkara would later observe several times in "Atop The Fourth Wall," Superboy Prime is an embodiment of fanboy-entitlement- always looking back at a rose-colored past that never really existed, and throwing a destructive temper-tantrum when he didn't get his way.
Basically, anything that pits good and evil against each other in some way has the potential to inspire bigotry, even if the story itself is neither pulp nor bigoted. The Lord of the Rings is a great work of literature, but it can also inspire Nazis qhen they see themselfes as Aragorn and the group they hate as the Orcs. And don't forget the mental gymnastics some Star Wars fans perform by seeing themselfes as the Rebels while admiering the Empire at the same time.
Fun fact about Karl May, the Author Hitler really, really liked, he once tried to convince people that the stories he wrote were true and that he was the protagonist, Old Shatterhand. (He had never even been to America, where the books take place)
The commonplace dismissal encapsulated in Godwin's law - that any equating of something to Nazis/Hitler is a singularity that rational discussion cannot recover from - probably blocks or dissuades a lot of thoughtful analysis. I admire Bob for not only sidestepping it, but coming up with a fresh take combining historical and contemporary elements.
@@jordanloux3883 I'm not sure I subscribe to that law in the first place. It seems like a way to dismiss any criticism of fascist ideology, since Nazis are the most convenient example of it to hand. It seems to me perhaps Godwin just didn't know how to answer the argument "the anti-nazis are the real nazis." Which admittedly is intentionally too insane to argue with rationally. Until you remember that Goebbels himself worked out the simple trick of accusing the other side of that which you are guilty. Another schoolyard bully strategy.
@@jasonblalock4429 my favorite version of that movie is Falling Down because Dfense has a really emotion "wait a minute...Im the bad guy." Moment and it's so good.
Spot on. BTW, I read maybe 20% of that Norman Spinrad book back in the1970’s, and gave up because it was just too obvious where it was going. Wish I had stayed on for the appendices. One thing I think you left off: The Lord if the Swastika (the book-within-a-book in The Iron Dream) was also a sendup of JRR Tolkien, which scared a young me because it made me notice some of the… problematic aspects of The Lord of theRings.
Exactly what I came to the comments to say. I think we need to be looking out for anyone following in their footsteps who are also Warhammer 40K nerds who will only play as the space marines. And only listen to death metal.
In fairness, Boris has been a mainstream figure in British conservatism for several decades, who has avowedly pinned himself to the centre-right, libertarian, socially liberal wing of the Tories since he rose to prominence in the 90s. Boris is not a staunch ethnonationalist, but a follower of the English (i.e., not Scottish, Welsh nor Northern Irish) sensibility as of right now. Unfortunately, that has become stridently nationalist. In any case, comparing him to Trump forgets the first rule of British international relations: don't piss in the Atlantic Ocean. Regardless of the PM, it is the PM's job to pally up with the US President. Just to be clear, I voted to remain. But keep some perspective.
@@troppmann From the sound of recent events, Johnson is pissing all over everywhere that isn't Westminister. Kind of got a feeling that one's going to have some blowback.
If the Reich were a bunch of pulp adventure nerds, what's that make the Proud Boys? What's their aesthetical hyper-fixation? Vikings? The Civil War? Tacticool?
All that and more. Probably also the Spartans, which has gained cache in neo-Nazi circles over the last twenty years or so. The reason for that is kind of funny: they finally realized that all those lands where their pet Norse mythology was born had the least use for their ideology.
I have and it's everything you say. In the same vein is Deathrace 2000, which I swear to God accurately foresaw the REAL 2000s just through insightful extrapolation of trends going in the mid-1970s.
I'm also reminded of the Jovians in Martian Successor Nadesico- initially presented as alien invaders, it turns out they're actually a lost colony of humans who based their entire society around a 70s-style super robot anime.
I remember renting Max on DVD back when Blockbuster was still a thing! 😅 But I misremembered it starring Kevin Spacey so I was afraid to rewatch it, luckily it was John Cusack!
One of my favorite Big Picture episodes. Now I want to read "The Iron Dream" to see how bad the book-within-the-book really is, and why Hitler decided to emigrate after WWI rather than stay in Germany.
One of the "how bad it is" parts about it is that most of "Lord of the Swastika" follows the history of the Nazi Party to a T with some name changes, but "everything always goes right". It gets quite boring after a while. And it very much that kind of Mary Sue writing as well, in that if something does go wrong with Ferric and his merry band, it's always so easy to turn it around into an advantage to propel them on forward with barely any impact.
@@jakarnilson The book-within-the-book ends with Jagger and his knights (who ride motorcycles instead of horses, because Hitler thought motorcycles were cool) nuking the entire planet and rendering it inhospitable to life... but that's okay, because the mutants and subhumans are dead now and The Lords Of The Swastika have rocketships and cloning-vats, so now it's time to conquer the galaxy and repopulate the human race without any need for those pesky women that don't show up in the novel anyway except for the "pleasure-sluts" that service the villains of the piece! Basically it's Warhammer 40K fifteen years before it was a gleam in Games Workshop's eye, ending with The God-Emperor Of Mankind(Jagger) and his Primarchs (The Sons Of The Swastika and their clone-children) kicking off The Great Crusade.
@@thetribunaloftheimaginatio5247 The problem (or more likely, the point Spinrad wanted to make) is that all these things are overcome so easily and interspersed between the politics segments. Or course, they ARE political segments as well, but are more covered up in the garb of pulp SF.
@@jakarnilson Actually, the main political segments are in the Framing Device of the actual novel... even in a world where Adolf Hitler became a crappy sci-fi writer instead of a dictator, the blueprints of his evil are all present and accounted for, waiting for any ol' nabob lacking a firm grip on reality to pick them up like rifles in an abandoned warzone. And just like the rifles in that analogy, the coda (the imaginary literary-critic's essay as described in the episode) describes Hitler's book being picked up by a growing cadre of angry young men who cosplay as Ferric Jagger and his Sons Of The Swastika... which is starting to worry people for good reason. It's fascism cropping up in a world that never experienced it for real, and they have no idea what kind of hell they're in for. As evidenced by the author of the essay basically shrugging his shoulders and going "Eh, what's everyone gettin' their knickers in a twist over? It's just a bunch of sci-fi geeks indulging in masculine power-fantasy! What horrors were ever wrought by weirdos playing let's-pretend?" Luckily, we live in a world where we DO know what horrors can be wrought by a bunch of angry mythology-geeks playing "Knights Of The Round" make-believe.
Having a characteristic that is in no way decided by you is literally the easiest way to fabricate pride. Where you were born, your race, your gender, those are the most common ways simple people make pride where there is none. These simple people then get duped by manipulators telling them they are completely right in just telling themselves they are good based on these dumb ideas, but you’d be even more good if you also blindly agreed with all this other stuff! Like when someone starts by appealing to nationalism before transitioning into “you don’t actually deserve to derive pride from nationalism unless you also agree with everything I say because now I decide what nationalism really is”
Weirdly enough this video reminded me of Fanhunters, a Spaniard comicbook from the 90's. The comic is a mess (and the original artwork is awful even for "comicstrip on a fanzine" standards), but the story of the villain's rise to power was a lot more grounded I realized when I read it ten years ago: he was member of a right-wing advocacy group against geek culture that included Christian "moral crusaders" and "the MCU is the dead of cinema"-style pseudo-intellectuals. He was secretly neither of those but a geek gatekeeper so when they conquered Europe he betrayed the group and became the Pope of a new theocracy. His first words: "Phillip K. Dick is God, all the other fandoms are heresy an will be eliminated" I don't know why my mind went there, and the comic isn't really political satire (its protagonist are all parodies of comicbook characters except for a hairy gun-nut called "Ridly Scott" and at the end is more about an interdimentional invasion) but is like, Nazis always assisted to ComiCon, they just didn't tell us what they are because we didn't ask
The main difference being that Hitler was (and I hate saying anything good about the guy, but) substantially more intelligent, or at least better-read, than Trump. Hell, that may have been the thing that kept Trump from tipping over into full on evil overlord territory. He was too stupid and petty-minded to ever look past his own ego and personal vendettas to become *really* ambitious.
@@jasonblalock4429 considering Lord Dampnut is very nearly functionally illiterate, something that is quite obvious any time he has to read a prepared speech, it's not MUCH of a complement to Hitler to say he's better read. 😉
Also, his original Eternal Champion novel, which deconstructs the "Chosen One" narrative of high fantasy to expose unthinking racism implicit within such a tale.
@@jordanloux3883 just how something so juvenile that not a lot of people took notice some how become part of bigger narrative and made it political sense for the mass
@@LuisPJ Seems to have died down in more recent times, though. None of that is to say that they've gone away. I also wonder on the more toxic DCEU faithful and the Snyder cult (not people who just like the films, let me stress, but the unbalanced trolls who think nothing of death threats).
@@sephirothsadvent That implies a coordination and level of thought this crowd only WISHED it had. More likely, they saw an effective template, stole it and repurposed it.
This reminds me of something: Daryl Davis is as black musician/author that often visited KKK rallies (look him up, he's awesome) and he described some of their rituals. It involved lighting effegies and chanting about their grand purpose. Their administrative hierachy includes titles like "Wizards" and "Dragons". Some commenters joked that aside from all the racism and hatred it seems like a bunch of boys having fun larping. I sense a connection there.
There's a documentary that come out called White Right: Meeting the Enemy, all about a muslim woman who speaks with far right people, and in most cases these people are so lonely that one person being nice and talking to them is enough for them to change their ways. Hell, in a lot of cases the host is likely the first Muslim any of these people have ever met.
This overabundance of nerd culture will soon be destroyed. The jocks will rise again to restore the balance, like a purging wildfire when a forest becomes overgrown.
I'm sure that's what the jocks tell themselves. I'm equally sure that they'll be joining the nerds on the same funeral pyre, as they too are products of an obsolete culture that has little to no bearing or meaning on the current culture.
My favorite movie Nazis? The Nazis in Indiana Jones. Yeah this movie does have the Nazis discover ancient and powerful relics, but unlike so many movies using Nazis this movie never portrays the Nazis as Nazi propaganda would. These aren't the highly organized and efficient Nazis of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda movies, no the Nazis in Indiana Jones mainly exist around to be dunced on. They are disorganized idiots who are shown to constantly fail, and they aren't cool in any way. And many of the main villains in Indiana Jones try do distance themselves from Nazis, only for them to be punished as much as the Nazis because Nazi colaborators are still assholes that allowed the evils of fascism to thrive. But here is the best part. The Nazis would have found the arc regardless of whether or not Indiana Jones was involved, and they still would have opened the arc and got themselves killed. Because what else can you expect from these losers? Even when they find a highly valuable and powerful artifact they still manage to get themselves killed. Nazis of the real world are nowhere near as organized, efficient or genious as their propagandas portray them (and alot of movie portrayals of Nazis does borrow from propagandas). They were morons to put it lightly. They were tricked by blow up balloon tanks, they were tricked by the allies planting fake orders into the pockets of a dead soldier, they built massive tanks that collapsed under their own weight, they didn't prepare for winter in Russia of all places, more people died making the v2 rocket than the rocket ever killed in war etc. Which does make it perfect that Indiana Jones movies portray them as self destructive morons who would have lost with or without Indiana Jones's involvement.
While the Nazis adopted the Skull Hat badge it wasn't taken from comic books Hitlers arse. It was copied from several military units in the Germany Army. Specifically the Brunswick Deathshead Hussar. It was more an attempt to imitate German history from only a couple of centuries and from German Nobility. There is a UA-cam video from Mark Felton were he talks about slot of Nazi Iconography such as the Deathshead, SS rune and Swastika.
This movie really is about geeks. Replace hitler with whatever dumb thing they idolize. Luke skywalker is a good choice. And you have the classic “grow the heck up” story arc.
Bob... nazis were efficient in war, if they were not, they would be crushed within a year without even being able to leave their borders... instead they challenged 3 out of 4 current great powers and managed to fight that way for years...
Fun Fact: Noah Taylor would later play Hitler again in the AMC adaptation of Garth Ennis' comic Preacher where he has a fight with Jesus.
If there was ever a single sentence to so completely and successful recommend a show to someone, it's this sentence 😂
Bonus fun fact. Noah Taylor lives in Brighton and drinks in my mates local. He's by all accounts a very nice chap.
I saw the clips from Max here and immediately did a facepalm for how much I unknowingly missed that connection in Preacher.
I'll always find it hilarious that Taika Watiti deliberately didn't do any research into Hitler's life and history before playing him because he felt that he didn't deserve to be played accurately.
Plus he's playing Hitler as imagined by JoJo, so it makes sense that his characterization is nothing like the real guy.
Additional fun fact. A lot of Maori served with distinction in WWII. Which horrified a lot of Nazis, who thought allowing "savages" onto the battlefields of Europe was a war crime. So a Polynesian Jew playing a camp Hitler is something that would outrage Nazis.
@@jacobvardy that is genuinely awesome.
@@jacobvardy Yeah, every bully thinks he's hot shit until he runs into somebody who can fight back.
"You gonna get to know your character or something?"
"This fucker? Why?!"
I love juvenalia-for me, that would be late 70s to early 80s sci-fi fantasy that would be found in Heavy Metal magazine. It’s validating to know that the only thing separating me from fascist sociopathy is self-awareness and a healthy sense of irony...
That an the lack of an overwhelming victim complex.
@@jordanloux3883 that’s where the self awareness and sense of irony come in, lol
It's okay for your fave to be problematic. I just worry when people rage out when you point this out, rather than just nodding and saying, "Yeah, there's some not okay stuff here."
And also the realization that the stuff we like can shift and adapt. After all... it's all make-believe, yeah? So why not cast off the cumbersome shackles of a slavish devotion to a "Glorious Past" that never existed?
It's how progress is made. In order to change the world... one must first imagine a better one. Otto Lielenthal, Glider-King Of Prussia, and the Wright Brothers never would have gotten off the ground had Icarus never flown too close to the sun.
This episode was and is still excellent, but that title promised Mel Brooks, we need more Mel Brooks!
(entitled joke aside, great video, Bob!)
I agree with Matthias Johnson
Jojo Rabbit and Blackkklansman would make a great double feature.
True
Never made the connection but you're right.
Yeah this was one of your better episodes, I really thought you nailed it here.
That part with the butterfly in Jojo Rabbit, still really gets to me
The Iron Dream would make for an awesome metatextual movie
I'd love to see The Iron Dream as a faux-documentary about the making of an Iron Dream adaptation and Hitler as a writer.
@@jordanloux3883 Yeah that'll be cool like a more insidious version of Garth Marenghi's Dark Place.
I was thinking playing it like a more Galaxy Quest approach.
God I love when Bob does these little Eye opening videos :) They convey over a thousand words and a Thousand feelings all at once :)
The funniest part is he has been describing SJWs and Antifa but will not admit it.
@@trip9845 keep telling yourself that.
@@trip9845 i kinda' wondered about that. i mean, what *anti* fascist wears a *mask?* :3
Did you read the news today?
They say the danger's gone away
But I can see the fires still alight
They're burning into the night
This is the world we live in.
Tell me why this is the Land of Confusion...!
This ep gets more chilling every time I see it.
Still need to buy a copy of The Iron Dream.
This and Bob's two-parter on propaganda are probably my favourite Big Picture episodes
Ouch, Bob, Ouch.
Also, Jojo Rabbit was brilliant.
Brilliant and painful. My wife and I loved it, but I don't know that either of us will ever be able to watch it again.
One of my favorite episodes that I find myself revisiting every so often
Ok. Now I need to read The Iron Dream!
It's something of a slog, TBH. Bob wasn't kidding about it being deliberately badly written. Still, there's a fascination to it, like a really grisly automobile accident.
The rest of Spinrad's stuff is pretty good too. Check out Bug Jack Barron and (maybe harder to find) The Men In The Jungle (dedicated to none other than Harlan Ellison, "the Dangerous Vision that got away").
Apparently the Karl May angle kept going well into the war. Hitler was pushing his books onto people in the German military as fine examples of military tactics. They were not, but nobody was going to tell Hitler that.
There's an early episode of the exceptional podcast Behind The Bastards that covers this wonderfully.
No surprise...do recall that this is the same guy who made a point of replacing the Bible with copies of Mein Kempf by decree.
8:13 Figured it'd be good to transplant this from the original video, but no future commenters: Bob isn't saying hating Thundercats makes you a Nazi. He's just making a joke about ludicrous overreactions to juvenile media.
That sense of entitlement can escalate horribly if left unchecked.
Which of course have also been made elsewhere... "Final Crisis" gave us Superboy Prime, an AU teenage version of Superman who was ready to destroy all of reality because it had gotten too full of anguish and despair... anguish and despair he was all too happy to joyfully inflict on his enemies while simultaneously blaming them for "stooping to their level." "LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!" Superboy Prime would scream, as he RIPPED AN OPPONENT'S ARM CLEAN OFF.
As Linkara would later observe several times in "Atop The Fourth Wall," Superboy Prime is an embodiment of fanboy-entitlement- always looking back at a rose-colored past that never really existed, and throwing a destructive temper-tantrum when he didn't get his way.
Wait a minute the KKK are also obessesd with weird fantasy lore stuff like Knights, Wizards, Dragons etc.
Nerd culture is abit sus
Basically, anything that pits good and evil against each other in some way has the potential to inspire bigotry, even if the story itself is neither pulp nor bigoted.
The Lord of the Rings is a great work of literature, but it can also inspire Nazis qhen they see themselfes as Aragorn and the group they hate as the Orcs.
And don't forget the mental gymnastics some Star Wars fans perform by seeing themselfes as the Rebels while admiering the Empire at the same time.
Nah, nerd culture is fine. Those are just asshole fans.
Fun fact about Karl May, the Author Hitler really, really liked, he once tried to convince people that the stories he wrote were true and that he was the protagonist, Old Shatterhand. (He had never even been to America, where the books take place)
The commonplace dismissal encapsulated in Godwin's law - that any equating of something to Nazis/Hitler is a singularity that rational discussion cannot recover from - probably blocks or dissuades a lot of thoughtful analysis. I admire Bob for not only sidestepping it, but coming up with a fresh take combining historical and contemporary elements.
Yeah, Godwin made an amendment to his law: It doesn't count if you're actually talking about Nazis.
@@jordanloux3883 I'm not sure I subscribe to that law in the first place. It seems like a way to dismiss any criticism of fascist ideology, since Nazis are the most convenient example of it to hand. It seems to me perhaps Godwin just didn't know how to answer the argument "the anti-nazis are the real nazis." Which admittedly is intentionally too insane to argue with rationally. Until you remember that Goebbels himself worked out the simple trick of accusing the other side of that which you are guilty. Another schoolyard bully strategy.
This is an actual "Classic"
Hard cut at 11:05 to Fight Club. Nice one, Bob.
It really bugs me how many people never seemed to realize that Tyler Durden was a baddie.
@@jasonblalock4429 my favorite version of that movie is Falling Down because Dfense has a really emotion "wait a minute...Im the bad guy." Moment and it's so good.
Glad this is back, one of my favorite the Big Picture episodes!
This is my third "thank you for saying this" so far.
Spot on. BTW, I read maybe 20% of that Norman Spinrad book back in the1970’s, and gave up because it was just too obvious where it was going. Wish I had stayed on for the appendices. One thing I think you left off: The Lord if the Swastika (the book-within-a-book in The Iron Dream) was also a sendup of JRR Tolkien, which scared a young me because it made me notice some of the… problematic aspects of The Lord of theRings.
So the Culture Warrior Network aka Fandom Menace. Don't be shook, Bobby, said it straight.
Oh yeah, amazing how straight a line you can draw, isn't it?
@@johnathonhaney8291 I don't agree with Bob on MANY things but he pulled some cards here.
@@JangoGod Got my own disagreements with Mr. Chipman but when he's right, he's hitting the bullseye.
algorithmic punch!
(Well you certainly came out swinging with this one Bob. Good work.)
Haven't even watched yet, just love that the title is from a line in a song from "The Producers"
This is one of my favorite videos of yours. Thanks so much for re-uploading it
So on the nose, it perforated the head.
Fantastic video, never heard of the Iron dream before and I think this is such an important topic to address at this time 👍
Amusing to see the dislikes racking up from a long hidden Antarctic base.
And the far side of the Moon.
Hitler was just the worst kind of D&D Player.
Or the fanboy manbaby with the worst possible career arc.
I can't read the word "kurgan" without thinking of the bad guy from The Highlander.
Wow, can’t believe I missed this one when it originally came out. This was a good one!
Does the early views of Hitler remind anyone else of trump and boris? Two right wing leaders who also weren't taken seriously for similar reasons.
Exactly what I came to the comments to say. I think we need to be looking out for anyone following in their footsteps who are also Warhammer 40K nerds who will only play as the space marines. And only listen to death metal.
In fairness, Boris has been a mainstream figure in British conservatism for several decades, who has avowedly pinned himself to the centre-right, libertarian, socially liberal wing of the Tories since he rose to prominence in the 90s. Boris is not a staunch ethnonationalist, but a follower of the English (i.e., not Scottish, Welsh nor Northern Irish) sensibility as of right now. Unfortunately, that has become stridently nationalist. In any case, comparing him to Trump forgets the first rule of British international relations: don't piss in the Atlantic Ocean. Regardless of the PM, it is the PM's job to pally up with the US President.
Just to be clear, I voted to remain. But keep some perspective.
@@troppmann From the sound of recent events, Johnson is pissing all over everywhere that isn't Westminister. Kind of got a feeling that one's going to have some blowback.
kinda think that's the whole point, here.
@@stevegoodson9022 Exactly! Who in their right minds would play Space Marines when the Orks exist?
This is one of the best Big Picture episodes
Holy crap, Bob taking no prisoners this week
Thank goodness this isn't a problem we're facing in modern American culture.
Right? Hahaha, imagine
Required viewing for certain types, this should be.
Thumb's up for the title alone.
Every time I see that video, the reveal of the “Iron Swastika” title always makes my eyes widen.
11:24 jfc how many times were we warned about this?
If the Reich were a bunch of pulp adventure nerds, what's that make the Proud Boys? What's their aesthetical hyper-fixation? Vikings? The Civil War? Tacticool?
All that and more. Probably also the Spartans, which has gained cache in neo-Nazi circles over the last twenty years or so. The reason for that is kind of funny: they finally realized that all those lands where their pet Norse mythology was born had the least use for their ideology.
ua-cam.com/video/pZMWQDvZQZs/v-deo.html
I still think Roman Griffin Davis would make an interesting Kid Loki.
Was waiting for a cut to Charlottesville,(sp?)
Norman Spinrad was always one or three steps ahead.
Check out Bug Jack Barron for a book on modern media written in the 60's.
I have and it's everything you say. In the same vein is Deathrace 2000, which I swear to God accurately foresaw the REAL 2000s just through insightful extrapolation of trends going in the mid-1970s.
Damn, head banging on point , 2016- January 6, 2021. Well done.
I still think this is one of the best videos you've done
So that's TWO John Cusack movies with puppet fucking...
I believe Saddam Hussein had some art in his palace that would normally be featured on the side of someone’s van
He had a Rowena painting in his cheesy little secret peit de terre, I believe. Rowena was mortified to hear about it.
Glad to see this one back up. :)
I'm also reminded of the Jovians in Martian Successor Nadesico- initially presented as alien invaders, it turns out they're actually a lost colony of humans who based their entire society around a 70s-style super robot anime.
Great episode as usual. And for the second time
9:34 Sounds like The Turner Diaries.
I remember renting Max on DVD back when Blockbuster was still a thing! 😅 But I misremembered it starring Kevin Spacey so I was afraid to rewatch it, luckily it was John Cusack!
Damm I had forgotten how poignant this video was. Uff. Some of your best writing Bob. Good job.
This is a masterpiece.
The funniest part is he has been describing SJWs and Antifa but will not admit it.
@@trip9845 I think you've commented this half a dozen times and it only gets funnier and sadder the more you do it. Kinda like Q.
I was looking for this one
One of my favorite Big Picture episodes. Now I want to read "The Iron Dream" to see how bad the book-within-the-book really is, and why Hitler decided to emigrate after WWI rather than stay in Germany.
One of the "how bad it is" parts about it is that most of "Lord of the Swastika" follows the history of the Nazi Party to a T with some name changes, but "everything always goes right". It gets quite boring after a while. And it very much that kind of Mary Sue writing as well, in that if something does go wrong with Ferric and his merry band, it's always so easy to turn it around into an advantage to propel them on forward with barely any impact.
@@jakarnilson The book-within-the-book ends with Jagger and his knights (who ride motorcycles instead of horses, because Hitler thought motorcycles were cool) nuking the entire planet and rendering it inhospitable to life... but that's okay, because the mutants and subhumans are dead now and The Lords Of The Swastika have rocketships and cloning-vats, so now it's time to conquer the galaxy and repopulate the human race without any need for those pesky women that don't show up in the novel anyway except for the "pleasure-sluts" that service the villains of the piece!
Basically it's Warhammer 40K fifteen years before it was a gleam in Games Workshop's eye, ending with The God-Emperor Of Mankind(Jagger) and his Primarchs (The Sons Of The Swastika and their clone-children) kicking off The Great Crusade.
@@thetribunaloftheimaginatio5247 The problem (or more likely, the point Spinrad wanted to make) is that all these things are overcome so easily and interspersed between the politics segments. Or course, they ARE political segments as well, but are more covered up in the garb of pulp SF.
@@jakarnilson Actually, the main political segments are in the Framing Device of the actual novel... even in a world where Adolf Hitler became a crappy sci-fi writer instead of a dictator, the blueprints of his evil are all present and accounted for, waiting for any ol' nabob lacking a firm grip on reality to pick them up like rifles in an abandoned warzone. And just like the rifles in that analogy, the coda (the imaginary literary-critic's essay as described in the episode) describes Hitler's book being picked up by a growing cadre of angry young men who cosplay as Ferric Jagger and his Sons Of The Swastika... which is starting to worry people for good reason. It's fascism cropping up in a world that never experienced it for real, and they have no idea what kind of hell they're in for. As evidenced by the author of the essay basically shrugging his shoulders and going "Eh, what's everyone gettin' their knickers in a twist over? It's just a bunch of sci-fi geeks indulging in masculine power-fantasy! What horrors were ever wrought by weirdos playing let's-pretend?"
Luckily, we live in a world where we DO know what horrors can be wrought by a bunch of angry mythology-geeks playing "Knights Of The Round" make-believe.
It’s still great.
Might be your Magnum Opus, in truth.
Fun Fact: Noah Taylor reprised his role as Adolf HItler in the tv series Preacher.
You KNOW it would've been more applicable to put Culture Warrior Network channel symbols on the screen.
Nobody wants to talk about the 501s.
Well done, Bob.
Satire at its finest
This was beautifully subversive in a way many may miss and otherwise just brilliant.
I really enjoyed this movie.
Having a characteristic that is in no way decided by you is literally the easiest way to fabricate pride. Where you were born, your race, your gender, those are the most common ways simple people make pride where there is none. These simple people then get duped by manipulators telling them they are completely right in just telling themselves they are good based on these dumb ideas, but you’d be even more good if you also blindly agreed with all this other stuff!
Like when someone starts by appealing to nationalism before transitioning into “you don’t actually deserve to derive pride from nationalism unless you also agree with everything I say because now I decide what nationalism really is”
Wow! That was some mic drop, Bob.
Great apisode.
WE GOIN MEL BROOKS?
I'm still sad I missed this one at the cheap theaters, it sounds like a good watch but I'm much too lazy to try to find it on streaming haha.
Weirdly enough this video reminded me of Fanhunters, a Spaniard comicbook from the 90's. The comic is a mess (and the original artwork is awful even for "comicstrip on a fanzine" standards), but the story of the villain's rise to power was a lot more grounded I realized when I read it ten years ago: he was member of a right-wing advocacy group against geek culture that included Christian "moral crusaders" and "the MCU is the dead of cinema"-style pseudo-intellectuals. He was secretly neither of those but a geek gatekeeper so when they conquered Europe he betrayed the group and became the Pope of a new theocracy. His first words: "Phillip K. Dick is God, all the other fandoms are heresy an will be eliminated"
I don't know why my mind went there, and the comic isn't really political satire (its protagonist are all parodies of comicbook characters except for a hairy gun-nut called "Ridly Scott" and at the end is more about an interdimentional invasion) but is like, Nazis always assisted to ComiCon, they just didn't tell us what they are because we didn't ask
Excellent as ever.
Cool video!
Nazi was silly, dont do it again.
What a fantastic video
The more Bob talks about Adolf, the more he sound alike Donald. Funny, that.
Trump is what you get when you order your Hitler from Wish.
The main difference being that Hitler was (and I hate saying anything good about the guy, but) substantially more intelligent, or at least better-read, than Trump. Hell, that may have been the thing that kept Trump from tipping over into full on evil overlord territory. He was too stupid and petty-minded to ever look past his own ego and personal vendettas to become *really* ambitious.
@@jasonblalock4429 considering Lord Dampnut is very nearly functionally illiterate, something that is quite obvious any time he has to read a prepared speech, it's not MUCH of a complement to Hitler to say he's better read. 😉
still one of the best big pictures ever just saying....
Say, whatever happened to that Big Picture episode about Louis C.K.? I liked that episode.
He should cover the history stuff he skipped over in another video.
It's on the list 👍
@@moviebobcentral Yes please! :-)
@@moviebobcentral How long is this list now Bob because I can only assume that shit is looooong.
Another read with reading and mentioning : Starship Stormtroopers by Michael Moorcock
Also, his original Eternal Champion novel, which deconstructs the "Chosen One" narrative of high fantasy to expose unthinking racism implicit within such a tale.
Sooooo nailed it on this one.
Wow
6:15, I kind of wonder if history repeat itself with the whole "Gamergate"
Wait, that's still going on?
@@jordanloux3883 just how something so juvenile that not a lot of people took notice some how become part of bigger narrative and made it political sense for the mass
@@LuisPJ Seems to have died down in more recent times, though. None of that is to say that they've gone away. I also wonder on the more toxic DCEU faithful and the Snyder cult (not people who just like the films, let me stress, but the unbalanced trolls who think nothing of death threats).
@@johnathonhaney8291 I was reading somewhere that gamergate was basically a dry run for Q. It uses the exact same tactics and rhetoric
@@sephirothsadvent That implies a coordination and level of thought this crowd only WISHED it had. More likely, they saw an effective template, stole it and repurposed it.
This reminds me of something:
Daryl Davis is as black musician/author that often visited KKK rallies (look him up, he's awesome) and he described some of their rituals. It involved lighting effegies and chanting about their grand purpose. Their administrative hierachy includes titles like "Wizards" and "Dragons". Some commenters joked that aside from all the racism and hatred it seems like a bunch of boys having fun larping.
I sense a connection there.
There's a documentary that come out called White Right: Meeting the Enemy, all about a muslim woman who speaks with far right people, and in most cases these people are so lonely that one person being nice and talking to them is enough for them to change their ways. Hell, in a lot of cases the host is likely the first Muslim any of these people have ever met.
This overabundance of nerd culture will soon be destroyed. The jocks will rise again to restore the balance, like a purging wildfire when a forest becomes overgrown.
I'm sure that's what the jocks tell themselves. I'm equally sure that they'll be joining the nerds on the same funeral pyre, as they too are products of an obsolete culture that has little to no bearing or meaning on the current culture.
You think Kanye likes this movie...
All of this also applies to fans of Ayn Rand.
I realize it's his style, but sometimes bob just talks too fast.
Or maybe I'm just really tired. All the time.
11:18 : Well, I think Disney and the Great Mouse are seeing MANY dollar signs now, thanks to this little bit of Copyright Infringement ^_^
Go read the Richard Evans trilogy and then try infantilizing the Nazis.
My favorite movie Nazis? The Nazis in Indiana Jones. Yeah this movie does have the Nazis discover ancient and powerful relics, but unlike so many movies using Nazis this movie never portrays the Nazis as Nazi propaganda would.
These aren't the highly organized and efficient Nazis of Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda movies, no the Nazis in Indiana Jones mainly exist around to be dunced on. They are disorganized idiots who are shown to constantly fail, and they aren't cool in any way.
And many of the main villains in Indiana Jones try do distance themselves from Nazis, only for them to be punished as much as the Nazis because Nazi colaborators are still assholes that allowed the evils of fascism to thrive. But here is the best part.
The Nazis would have found the arc regardless of whether or not Indiana Jones was involved, and they still would have opened the arc and got themselves killed. Because what else can you expect from these losers? Even when they find a highly valuable and powerful artifact they still manage to get themselves killed.
Nazis of the real world are nowhere near as organized, efficient or genious as their propagandas portray them (and alot of movie portrayals of Nazis does borrow from propagandas). They were morons to put it lightly. They were tricked by blow up balloon tanks, they were tricked by the allies planting fake orders into the pockets of a dead soldier, they built massive tanks that collapsed under their own weight, they didn't prepare for winter in Russia of all places, more people died making the v2 rocket than the rocket ever killed in war etc. Which does make it perfect that Indiana Jones movies portray them as self destructive morons who would have lost with or without Indiana Jones's involvement.
That's not SCARY AT ALL!
Ooooooo Bob wants to start a fight!
No, just finish one.
While the Nazis adopted the Skull Hat badge it wasn't taken from comic books Hitlers arse. It was copied from several military units in the Germany Army. Specifically the Brunswick Deathshead Hussar. It was more an attempt to imitate German history from only a couple of centuries and from German Nobility.
There is a UA-cam video from Mark Felton were he talks about slot of Nazi Iconography such as the Deathshead, SS rune and Swastika.
So Mark was discussing additional made up nonsense like Armanen runes then?
This movie really is about geeks. Replace hitler with whatever dumb thing they idolize. Luke skywalker is a good choice. And you have the classic “grow the heck up” story arc.
First?
Good video, I guess. Politics never take a weekend off.
... why you talking so fast?
Bob... nazis were efficient in war, if they were not, they would be crushed within a year without even being able to leave their borders... instead they challenged 3 out of 4 current great powers and managed to fight that way for years...
So you're saying they were terrible at war