Ordinarily I’d be mildly excited about “Alien: Earth,” Noah “Fargo” Hawley’s take on Ridley Scott’s extraterrestrial horror franchise come home to roost.
But don’t we have enough real monsters down here already?
A handful of corporations battling over the remains of a dying planet? Check. Gazillionaire techlords acting on their every whim without let or hindrance? Roger that. The nice robot is your friend? Oh, hell, yeah.
Same goes for “Wednesday,” Tim Burton’s vision of the spooky daughter from “The Addams Family.” Steve Buscemi joins the cast this season as an educator with a whole Edgar Allen Poe thing going on. And while I love me some Tim Burton, Steve Buscemi, E.A. Poe and Charles Addams, not necessarily in that order, well … see paragraph no. 2 above.
Our real-life spooks are hellbent on robbing me of my sweet girlish laughter, is what. The sonsabitches will do that to us, if we let them. I’ve had to add some old Dan O’Neill comics to my bathroom library to remind me ’twas ever thus.
Corporate swine, gazillionaire techlords, and the politicians who serve them deserve all the mockery we can muster and then some. Just ask O’Neill, who went to war with Walt Disney Productions Back in the Day®. Disney proved a remarkably humorless and implacable foe, for an outfit that made bank on the antics of a cartoon rodent and his pals, but O’Neill kept on slugging, a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.
He lost, of course. But it wasn’t a knockout; the judges had to turn themselves inside out to declare Disney the champeen. And even in victory the Mouse was left coughing up a couple mil’ in legal-fee corpuscles.
Forty-five years later, thanks to the Innertubes, parody, satire — and yes, outright mockery — can spread a whole lot further and faster than a handful of underground comic books, if we’re not all too busy clutching our pearls on our fainting couches. Follow the lead of Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, and “South Park.” Hit ’em where it hurts with the ol’ one-two — the hee and the haw.
I don’t think Dan will be sprawled on his couch watching “Alien: Earth,” if only because it’s streaming on FX/Hulu, which is owned by — wait for it — Disney.
Between you and me, I hope O’Neill and the other surviving Air Pirates are busy working up a fresh parody of our modern monsters. Are you ready for Mickey Xenomorph? Game over, man … game over!
Mad Blog Media 
Parody and satire can travel fast, but so can lies, distortions, fake news, etc. Sigh.
Ayuh. It’s profoundly depressing when you have to look twice, mebbe three-four times at something that might be legit before muttering, “I dunno, man … it looks fake to me.”
Digital fentanyl is more destructive than any street drug. And, the billionaire brats profiting from it make the Sackler family look like poseurs.
But, to the point. If an alien from space is picking oranges in California are they illegal? How about Texas?
I have a feeling the space aliens will be a tad harder to deport than the poor folks who harvest the crop for Big Agribidness.
Under the heading of “did it really?” I see that a man who threw a sandwich from Subway at a CBP agent in DC was charged with a felony. I mean, how does the Onion stay ahead of this shit? The agents actually bestirred themselves to run ten feet to catch him, and Judge Jeannine made the decision to do it. This just smacks of a charge getting laughed out of court. I will confess I saw it on WaPo’s site, and verified it on the NYT site. So even through the filters of corporate media it made it out. I guess if he had missed it would have been simple assault, but OMG he hit the agent in the chest. I guess the bread must have been stale and hard, for the agent to have even noticed.
Mayo on the battle-rattle? By George (Patton), we can’t have that! Put ’im in the Sammich Slammer, where Officer Big Mac can beat him on the kidneys with a Hot Apple Pie.
What a girly man. Now spraying him with bear spray and throwing a fire extinguisher at him would have been a real assault.
The NYT plays it with a straight face:
Assault With a Nourishing Weapon. Is that on the books somewhere?
Well, I’m not sure that one would “stick.” “Nourishing?” From Subway? Assumes facts not in evidence, your honor.
Objection sustained…jury will disregard the statement.
Perhaps the cbp agent was a vegan and the judge took extra-mayonous circumstances into account.
Maybe he was just being a ham for his fellow federales.
That man is a gyro.
Matt Gaetz got clobbered with a smoothie so maybe there is a food as protest movement happening.
Time to revive the Fish-Slapping Dance? I’d like to see a few public nuisances treated to the Big Fish as swung by John Cleese.
I’m also occasionally a sucker for the comments in the WaPo stories. My fave: “The officer was treated at the Mayo Clinic. It seems the bread had been toasted.”
Ho, ho. Good one. Alas, I croaked my sub to the WaPo because Jeff Bozos and his simp minions are such douches. Shitting on Ann Telnaes was the last straw. Dog knows The New York Times is far from perfect, but at least I don’t have to think about Dick Missile and his cyborg fuck-puppet while I’m scanning the headlines.