Sunday, February 11, 2007

LBJ Apocalypse

Animation historian Michael Barrier has posted a link to a short film by Disney animator Ward Kimball. He says:

Back in 1969 at the Disney studio, when I first interviewed Ward Kimball, he showed me the two-and-a-half-minute film he'd made the previous year, called Escalation, an anti-Vietnam war, anti-LBJ cartoon that makes scatological use of Lyndon Johnson's nose. Now, almost forty years later and almost five years after Ward's death—and at a depressingly similar time in our country's political life—that cartoon has shown up on YouTube, courtesy of the Kimball family and Frank Thomas's son Ted.


Here's the link. I'm told that WAAGNFNP wannabe Dick Cheney is addicted to this film, alternating between giggle fits and the urge to blast someone in the face with a shotgun.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

According to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund database there were 2414 American military casualties in May of 1968, the month that GW Bush and his gentleman's C's graduated from Yale. By my count 16 of the 30 soldiers listed on the first page were not old enough to legally drink or vote in most states.

Captcha: bqimkedx

Anonymous said...

great find.... the GNF's are so perfect for our current state of freakish readiness: Iran and nukes???? Hell, no one has to change the iconography, Bush looks like LBJ to some extent, and although only one of them is actually from Texas, they both will have presidential libraries there.

Oaktown Girl said...

Wow. Amazing find, Bill.

The Constructivist said...

Bill, thanks. I'm reading Bruce Cumings's Parallax Visions as part of my prepping for my talk in less than two weeks. Hoping the Middle East is not going to be a U.S. battleground for as long as East and Southeast Asia was....

The Constructivist said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Speaking of earlier GNF times,
a site with a great overview of popular/apocalyptic culture items from the Cold War Era is Conelrad: All Things Atomic | The Golden Age of Homeland Secuirty. Worth a look at, I would add it to the blogroll, but the computer I have over here in Oz seems to choke on blogger2 signon.

The Constructivist said...

Great link--I, too, am getting error messages when I try to add it and sites like An Eternal Thought in the Mind of Godzilla and Media Commons to the MH links.