How Abusing Outcasts Saved Christmas - A Cynic's Take on "Rudolph"

Long ago, in the early days of television, animation and cartoons, certain things we now consider "taboo" or "inappropriate" were much less critically analyzed. In the good old days of cartoons, we had shows about a cat and mouse actively attempting to brutally murder each other with shotguns, fire axes and 100 ton weights. We laughed at a bald hunter's obvious speech impediment as he hunted and shot at woodland creatures, and throughout it all, mysterious OSHA-devoid company "ACME" continually ripped off consumers with untested and potentially dangerous products presumably plucked from the rejected surplus bins on the factory floor.

In today's cartoons, we've replaced the weaponry and wanton violence with nonsensical, unfunny plots aimed more at hypnotizing or possibly brainwashing viewers, and persistently bad art styles that look like brain vomit from particularly bad acid trip. The homicidal cats and smart-ass rabbits of my childhood have been replaced with such characters as a potentially homosexual talking sponge and his obviously mentally retarded starfish life-partner. But that's a topic for another blog post. The cartoon I want to talk about today is the old Christmas classic stop-animation style "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

Watching this old movie has been a Christmas tradition in my parents' house since we were little, and that style of animation was still relevant. Every year that I watch it, however, it seems to be just a little bit... darker, I guess.

The movie technically begins with a rambling introduction from a talking snowman character who turns out to be largely unimportant to the rest of the film, but really begins in a little cave where Rudolph has just been born. Donner and his otherwise nameless baby mama, I guess, have just discovered that their child's nose is something akin to the siren light from a 1950's police car, complete with flashing red light action. They're so appalled by this bizarre deformity that they completely disregard the fact that while they're oggling it, Rudolph says "mama" and "papa" presumably for the first time. As they discuss the difficulty of overlooking something so horrendous, Santa Claus walks in to see the baby. His reaction essentially amounts to "You'd better hope he outgrows that, because I don't accept freaks on my reindeer team." Then he sings a little song and leaves, and Donner decides to take action. He slaps some mud over Rudolph's nose so he'll be a "normal little buck just like everyone else." Once the mud is covering Rudolph's nose and he can bear to look at his son again, he pulls him in for some affection. "Come here, son. Now that your god-awful facial deformity is covered, I can love you again."

Meanwhile, over in Santa's workshop, we're introduced to Herbie the elf. Herbie the elf doesn't like to make toys, and evidently, this is a crime in elf culture. In fact, when he reveals this fact to his slave driv- eh, overseer, the other elves around him sneer evilly at him and chant that he should be ashamed of himself for wanting to be different. Don't believe me? Look it up, the whole movie's on YouTube. Instead, he explains, he wants to be a dentist. For this, he's mocked by his peers and his overseer person and forced to work through his break (which, considering that the elves are pretty much slave laborers, I don't imagine they get many of) all for wanting to do something different.

So let's recap. So far, we've established that if you are different, you will be mocked by your peers, can be fired from your job, deserve no respect from your parents, and Santa Claus hates you. And we aren't even ten minutes into the film yet.

Fast forwarding again (approximately twenty seconds, because it doesn't take long to find more blatant discrimination and hate in this movie) and we find Donner forcing a nose cap thing on Rudolph. Rudolph doesn't like it and complains that it isn't comfortable (and presumably forces him to breathe through his mouth, which is really attractive), and Donner basically tells him to shut the hell up and wear it because unless his horrendous malformed nose is disguised, he won't be able to have self-respect, and Santa will continue to hate him. Meanwhile, the elf choir performs an original song and dance routine for an impatient Santa Claus who spends the entire duration of the recital facepalming and slouching impatiently in his chair. When it's finally over, he dismisses the whole affair with a mumbled "Well, it needs work," before rushing out the door, presumably to go piss on someone else's hopes and dreams. The elf overlord, however, takes this as an opportunity to inform the elves that they were all terrible, and then storms off to find Herbie so he can inform him of exactly how useless he is, and how he'll never fit in. Probably because elves in this world have something against fabulous hair.

Back at the Rudolph-focused side of the plot, Coach Comet shows up to teach the little reindeer how to fly. With some adorable encouragement from his new friend Clarice, Rudolph manages to out-fly all the other reindeer, and right in front of Santa. Seems like a pretty nice turn for this story, right? Well, we can't have that now, can we? In a celebratory bit of horseplay, Rudolph's new friend Fireball knocks his nose-cover off his face. Immediately, Rudolph becomes the reindeer equivalent of Quasimodo, and scares his only friend away. To make matters worse, the other reindeer start mocking him calling him names. But Santa's right there. Surely he'll intervene and save the poor underdog, right? Actually, he tells Rudolph's father that he should be ashamed for bringing such an abomination into this world, and not having the decency to smother it before it inflicted itself on the rest of reindeer kind. Santa storms off, and Comet blows his whistle to restore order and send the little deer back to practice. Except Rudolph, who he sends home. But not before announcing to the rest of the group, and I quote, "From now on, gang, we won't let Rudolph join in any reindeer games, right?" To put this in perspective, that's like if the weird kid in school pissed his pants in Gym class, and the coach decided to make an example of him by hanging him from his ankle with the climbing rope and instructing the rest of the class to beat him like a whiffle bat piñata. And then the principal comes in and calls him a fag before leaving him to his fate. Oh, and Santa Claus hates him.

I don't really feel the need to go through the entire movie because you've probably got the point by now, so I'll skip to the triumphant return of Rudolph to Christmas Town. The narrator gives a brief little bit about how maybe people shouldn't have been so hard on the misfits. Herbie gets to open a dentist office, and Santa promises to help out the Isle of Misfit Toys (another lengthy adventure in life lessons about how you'll be rejected and abandoned for being different). It isn't because they feel bad about it, though. It's because the "misfits" have proven themselves to be useful in some kind of way, so they're tolerated now. This includes Rudolph, who's only allowed to join the reindeer team because his glimmering nose cancer will allow Santa to navigate a storm.

Hooray! The freaks found a way to be useful, Santa learned to abuse Rudolph's deformity instead of mocking him for it, and everybody lived happily ever after. Except that until this point, the movie has clearly been setting itself up for the part where everyone learns a lesson. Except nobody ever does. While Rudolph and his melancholy band of misfits find their proverbial bells to ring (that's another hunchback of Notre Dame reference, folks) the movie COMPLETELY FORGETS TO CONDEMN the fact that everyone's been abusing these people the ENTIRE MOVIE. Sure, they find a place to fit in and some half-assed apologies are given, but nowhere does it punish or condemn the behavior from earlier in the film.

So there you have it, folks. The lessons taught by the old Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer film are that if you're born a freak, or possibly a homosexual elf with fabulous hair, your miserable existence will be spent getting kicked in the teeth by life, people will mock you, your parents should be ashamed and Santa Claus will hate you, but it's okay in the end. Because somebody will find a way to abuse your deformities for their own personal gain.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

-The Sarcastic Soul-

Technology is Not My Strong Point - Space Edition

With the end of the semester, I've finally begun to have time to pull the blog back into my spectrum. I pulled up my post list today to start writing a new entry, and I happened across this half-finished one from about mid-semester when my life was starting to get really stressful. After reading through it, I decided it was too good to waste, so I'm just going to finish it. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you something that should have been posted months ago.

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A few weeks ago, I had to take both of my computers and my external hard drive to the PC repair shop to have them wiped. Everything. Every last nanobyte of data had to be destroyed. Why? A virus that's been plaguing me for over a year now. It all started around the time I accepted a folder of infected PDF files from a friend of mine who shall remain nameless. His antivirus wasn't totally worthless, and actually managed to quietly locate and quarantine the little nightmare. My computer, on the other hand, was equipped with Norton. Let me take a moment now to illustrate exactly how well-protected your computer is with Norton Antivirus.

Picture a shield. Not a kite or heater shield, but a big square Roman-style tower shield. You can stand behind this thing and not be seen from the other side. Seems like great protection, right? Okay. Now, replace the steel and hardened wood with a square frame made of pine, and a sheet of paper. Now soak that paper in water. Now put termites in the wood frame. Now burn it a little bit. Now punch out about five big gaping holes in the wet paper. Now slap on a big sign in all capital letters that says "PLEASE SHOOT ME." Now write that message in Comic Sans font. Now march this creation of yours, alone, against a standing battalion of over 500 angry men armed with illegally modified machine guns. And maybe an artillery battery.

Congratulations, you've experienced Norton Antivirus. As you may have imagined, it was fairly ineffective. So my computer caught the virus. And it infected everything. And then I transferred some files to my other computer. And it caught the virus. Then I paid a large amount of money to have my computer upgraded with a brand new hard drive. And then I restored some files from my external hard drive. Which were also infected. So my new hard drive became infected. And the nasty thing about the virus was that it installed itself onto the hard drive, so you could have the computer swept and cleaned of all the bugs as many times as you wanted to, because that sucker was still coming back.

So now I have an empty external drive and two very empty computers. And absolutely none of the data I had before. I lost countless amounts of short fiction, class assignments, papers, projects, images, music and other important stuff. And I needed to distract myself from that. So I bought a new game to play. Now, it's been a really long time since I've done a blog post almost exclusively over a video game. Last time that happened, my blog was still a Tumblr page and it was over Star Wars: The Old Republic. But you know what? I'm doing it again. Because this game is hilariously torturous enough that it deserves its own blog post.

The game I bought is a new independent game called "Faster Than Light." It's a game with simple graphics reminiscent of the Gameboy Advance style. You take control of a spaceship and crew, all of which you get to name yourself, and take off across the galaxy as you fly from space beacon to beacon in an attempt to escape the evil rebel fleet pursuing you. It's essentially the opposite of the plot in the opening scenes of Star Wars Episode 4. The entire goal of the game is to pilot your ship successfully through seven dangerous sectors of space to reach the 8th sector, and defeat the Rebel flagship in epic space combat. So, excited to get started, I set the game to Normal mode and started up.

Thus began the adventures of The Space Dingo and her faithful crew: Tech Specialist Luke, in charge of shields and repairing damaged ship systems; Weapon Specialist Ben, in charge of exploding things and beating the piss out of boarding parties; And last but not least, Captain Hayden, in charge of piloting and navigation. Never before had the fate of a galactic Federation rested in the hands of such a rag-tag band of incompetent laser fodder. But they had high hopes anyway.

So I started the game off with a shiny new ship and a full-health crew. Then I moved two spaces forward. There, I encountered a ship who hailed me and informed me that he was selling slaves. I had the option to either buy one for an obscenely large amount of money (which I didn't have), ignore him and move on, or fight him. The noble crew of The Space Dingo doesn't deal with slavers, so we attacked. Two minutes later, my shield system had been destroyed, my oxygen had been knocked out and my medical bay was on fire. We did manage to beat the slave ship into submission, and they gave me a slave for free and ran away. That was the positive side. The negative side was that my Tech Specialist was nearly dead, and infernos make terrible medical bays. "That's alright," I thought, "I'll just open an airlock and suffocate the fire." That would have worked better had I not forgotten that my Oxygen systems were still offline and poor Luke was doing his best to repair them as he bled out. As you may have guessed, venting the remaining oxygen in the ship was a poor choice.

Oddly enough, it wasn't the suffocation that killed Luke, he survived that well enough. He died when the oxygen system room burst into flames because the fire had traveled there from the med bay. We held a little vigil for him (when the flames finally went out), and he was then replaced with the free slave we were handed. It wasn't quite the same, but at least we had our shields back. And from there, we carried on. For about three spaces. And then we encountered an automated combat drone with a cloaking device that promptly destroyed the rest of the ship. Back in the hangar menu, I decided it was probably best to switch the difficulty to easy mode. Actually, that's a bit of a misnomer, in this game's case. I've found that there's nothing remotely easy about easy mode. In easy mode, you're going to die horribly. On normal mode, you're  going to die horribly, only sooner. Still, undaunted by my initial failure, The Space Dingo 2 began its doomed voyage into the stars.

About the time I launched The Space Dingo 10, I began to accept the fact that I might not be very good at this game. I had also begun to notice a particular parallel with my crew and their D&D player counterparts. And what that means is that Luke always died first. Naming an NPC Luke is like handing him a red shirt with a particularly offensive phrase written on the back in every alien language. It was never a glorious death, either. At one point, my ship had recovered a drifting escape pod, which I opened hoping to get a new crew member. Instead, an enraged space mantis creature popped out and sliced Luke in half before proceeding to attack the rest of my crew. In another playthrough, Luke was part of a boarding party who I'd beamed over to attack the enemy crew. What I didn't realize was that all members of the party had to be in the same room before I could beam them back over, and I didn't pick his room. The enemy ship took advantage of this miscalculation by destroying my crew transporter with a missile, leaving Luke to run circles around the enemy ship trying to avoid getting shot. He was successful enough at evading the enemy crew, however he wasn't so successful at not being on the ship when the fires breaking out in all the rooms destroyed enough systems to cause fatal damage to the ship. It exploded with Luke still on board.

The other trend I began to notice was that not naming my crew members after my friends made me far less attached to them, and therefore easier to lose without wanting to restart the game. This, however, did not improve my gameplay. I still died every single time. Captain Picard would be ashamed of me, but he died in a previous playthrough. As did Captains Kirk, Morgan, Solo, Planet, Crunch, Falcon, Hook and Obvious. Virtual space pirates are ruthless.

It took me literally three weeks to beat this game. Three weeks of near-daily attempts. It doesn't seem like a long time to beat a game, but then you have to remember that this game consists of just 8 sectors, and a typical play-through from start to finish lasts only an hour or so (assuming you make it to the 8th sector without dying.)

Of all the lessons I've learned from playing FTL, the clearest one is this: If ever there comes a time when space is populated by cruisers and ships manned by small Enterprise-esque crews... I definitely shouldn't be captaining one.

-The Sarcastic Soul-