Marching on
The premise of the forthcoming film, Idiocracy:
Private Joe Bowers, the definition of “average American”, is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program, set 1,000 years in the future. He discovers a society so incredibly dumbed-down that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.
I wonder if the creators have even heard of The Marching Morons.
In that story, published in 1951, about a man of that age who finds himself centuries in the future, Kornbluth describes the roadside advertising:
Another animated job, in two panels, the familiar “Before and After.” The first said, “Just Any Cigar?” and was illustrated with a two-person domestic tragedy of a wife holding her nose while her coarse and red-faced husband puffed a slimy-looking rope. The second panel glowed, “or a Vuelta Abajo?” and was illustrated with—
Barlow blushed and looked at his feet until they had passed the sign.
There’s a stretch of freeway in south Los Angeles with a series of immense video billboards, intrusive and distracting, often featuring scantily clad women at any given time.
We’re getting there, Cyril. We’re getting there.
"I wonder if the creators have even heard of The Marching Morons."
More often than not non-major movie producers, and sometimes disreputable wannabe script writers, run across old stories, and figure, hey, it's just some old pulp story -- that's the equivalent of public domain, so I can use that idea without credit or payment. Or they may have run across an old radio serial version, or one of the lesser-known sf tv anthologies of the Fifties versions. Or maybe even an old comics adaption. And sometimes there's just word of mouth.
And, of course, sometimes ideas are just independently thought of again. But rip-offs are hardly uncommon.
"The Marching Morons" was, as you undoubtedly know, a sequel to "The Little Black Bag," incidentally. I seem to recall that Strascynski did a radio adaptation for NPR a few years ago (never heard it; just recall hearing about it). I have the vague idea there was a radio or tv adaptation of one during the Fifties, as well, but amn't bothering to look into it, and could be wrong. Certainly both stories have been anthologized a jillion times.
Posted by Gary Farber![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mememachinego.com/nav-commenters.gif)
on
June 30 2006 05:39
There was a TV version of "The Little Black Bag." I think it was from the old "Twilight Zone."
The recent Wayans comedy about a midget disguised as a baby seems to have been a straight ripoff of a 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon, Baby Buggy Bunny.
A scene in the ad (all I've seen) even seemed to be staged with the exact same shot as the cartoon used.
Posted by Kip_W![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mememachinego.com/nav-commenters.gif)
on
August 25 2006 10:25