Saw "Idiocracy" -- finally!

Question

If you haven't seen this gem of a movie, please do so. Now, I'm *** at myself for waiting so long.
It got a "limited" theatrical release (wasn't it something like FOUR theatres spread across the whole country? I'm guessing that a theatrical release may have been contractural), as Fox decided it should have gone striaght to DVD.
This all happened while Fox was making millions upon millions from "Borat" which would have seemed, to me at least, a perfect platform for them to promote "Idiocracy."
The premise of "Idiocracy" is simple enough: Set 500 years in the future, stupid people have continued breeding while smart people wait for the "time to be right," so the smarties unbreed themselves out of existence, to the point where an average guy (with an IQ of 100) in our time, wakes up in the future and is the world's smartest man.

Somebody I think it was somebody here posted that it was more likely a scenario we'd find 50 years form now, not 500.

One thought I had is that the movie's depiction of the Fox News Channel 500 years in the future, was more of an accurate view of the way it is today, and Rupert couldn't be happy about that.
-ADS.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]Somebody I think it was somebody here posted that it was more likely a scenario we'd find 50 years form now, not 500.[/nq]
I posted about it when I found this little gem. I think we may be the only two people here who've seen it. It's too bad, because the movie is extremely accurate in its satire. And I think it has a lot more to do with today's world than 500 years in the future.
I've added the movie to my DVD collection. I often recall bits and pieces of the movie (the guitar army; the TV show "Ow, My *****!"; the doctor; the constant and pervasive ad placement) and chuckle to myself.
jaybee

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Somebody I think it was somebody here posted that it was more likely a scenario we'd find 50 years form now, not 500.[/nq]
[nq:1]I posted about it when I found this little gem. I think we may be the only two people here ... guitar army; the TV show "Ow, My *****!"; the doctor; the constant and pervasive ad placement) and chuckle to myself.[/nq]
I saw it too wasn't blown away.

"Anybody can direct. There are only 11 good writers." ? Mel Brooks

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]I saw it too wasn't blown away.[/nq]
That's 'cuz yer a freaking robot.
jaybee

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[nq:1]I haven't heard of this movie. It sounds like a science fiction short story written circa 1957 by Cyril Kornbluth, The Marching Morons. That was hilarious. Similar premise smart people have few or no children, uneducated people have lots, so the average IQ plummets.[/nq]
I remember that short story as well.
The movie is not fatalistic, it's a very funny satire. It operates on the premise that, between freaking out and laughing, might as well laugh at it all.
It was written and directed by Mike Judge, who also did 'Office Space' (among others).
jaybee

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]You kids, get off Schlock's lawn. I'm a lot more optimistic. The **** always has and always will gain great prominence, but the the good stuff will always find an audience.[/nq]
You also have to realize that there's alway been **** - it's just that yesterday's **** didn't survive to make it to today. All we see is the good stuff that endured. Fifty years from now, when Christina Aguilera's granddaughter climbs to the top of the pop charts with the love ballad "*** me up the *** then *** all over my face", people will say that we didn't have any of that **** in our time.
jaybee

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]You kids, get off Schlock's lawn. I'm a lot more ... but the the good stuff will always find an audience.[/nq]
[nq:1]You also have to realize that there's alway been **** - it's just that yesterday's **** didn't survive to make ... then *** all over my face", people will say that we didn't have any of that **** in our time.[/nq]
Funny you should mention that. This was in today's New York Times...

July 8, 2007
MUSIC
There Once Was a Record of ...
By JODY ROSEN
IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled ³The Virtues of Raw Oysters,² written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. ³I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,² went one of the few lines suitable for newspaper quotation on a recording laced with curse words and hair-raising sexual slang.
³My wife and I just stared at each other in disbelief,² Mr. Young said, recalling that first listening session. ³We were just amazed that that kind of language ? what you think of as very naughty late-20th-century schoolyard talk ? would exist in the 1800s.² Mr. Young realized that he had stumbled on one of the earliest examples of audio indecency: a 19th-century record worthy of a parental advisory sticker.

Today it has one. ³The Virtues of Raw Oysters² is one of 43 profane monologues, skits and other spoken-word curios on ³Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s,² the newest release from Archeophone, a small label devoted to early sound recordings.

The album provides a new vantage point on sound recording history and offers some contemporary lessons as well. The zeal with which phonograph pioneers took to indecent material is a reminder that, from the Victrola to the Internet, *** peddlers have always been among the earliest and savviest adapters of new technologies.
These days there is a seemingly permanent culture war over pop profanity. Episodes like the recent controversies surrounding offensive speech by shock jocks and rappers are invariably viewed as evidence of America¹s moral decline. But ³Actionable Offenses² shows that the good old days were not all that squeaky clean: that the brash, bawdy forebears of Don Imus and Snoop Dogg flourished in an age of horseless carriages and whalebone corsets.
The past several years have seen a burst of scholarly interest in the music of the so-called acoustic era: the rags and minstrel songs, parlor ballads and opera arias, novelty tunes and vaudeville comedy ditties that companies like Edison and Columbia pressed onto wax cylinders and
78 r.p.m. discs in the years before the advent of electric recording.But until now few people were aware that the story of the record business¹s 19th-century origins was told, in part, in four-letter words.

³Actionable Offenses² features several other pieces donated to Archeophone by Mr. Young, starring the same anonymous narrator of ³The Virtues of Raw Oysters,² almost certainly a hobbyist who made the recordings at home. And it includes a dozen commercially released cylinder records, which mix coarse language and sexual farce with topical references to Grover Cleveland and the Spanish-American War. ³We have long thought of the phonograph as something that simply reproduced music,² said Patrick Feaster, a historian and co-author of the ³Actionable Offenses² liner notes. ³But early uses of the phonograph were incredibly experimental. People were trying pretty much everything, trying to figure out what they could put on these recordings to make a buck, everything from hymns and prayers at one extreme to obscenity on the other end.²
And occasionally a bit of both. ³Actionable Offenses² includes a version of ³I Sit Here Thinking, Will, of You,² a staple of 19th-century anthologies of bawdy verse that tells of a church parishioner¹s deflowering in ³Deacon Foster¹s pew.² That poem is recited by the home-recording artist, with the barely contained glee of a man who knows he¹s making mischief.
Prankster he may have been, but he performed a valuable service, leaving behind the earliest oral renditions of texts well known to folklorists. His repertory includes ³He¹ll Win in a Walk, B¹Jesus,² a scatological ballad about a day at the horse track; several dirty variations on ³Mary Had a Little Lamb²; and off-color limericks like the one that begins ³There was a young lady from Alaska.² (Let¹s just say the punch line involves John Jacob Astor.)
The recordings from Mr. Young¹s collection are charmingly rough, and not just because of a century¹s worth of accumulated crackle and hiss. They are audibly the work of an amateur experimenting with a new machine. The other dozen cylinder records on ³Actionable Offenses² are a good deal more polished. Made in professional studios and commercially released sometime at the tail end of the 19th century, the cylinders languished unheard for at least 50 years in the vaults of the Edison National Historic Site in West Orange, N.J., one of the world¹s largest repositories of early recordings.
The cylinders were packed away in a box with a handwritten tag attached: ³Not for mixed company.² Other jottings identified the performers as Cal Stewart, Russell Hunting and James White, three of the best-known turn-of-the-century recording artists, famous for their humorous monologues and ethnic dialect comedy.
The routines on ³Actionable Offenses² are striking for their similarity to the period¹s straight comedy records; they are blue burlesques of the performers¹ signature acts. Stewart earned wide fame for his character Uncle Josh Weathersby, a bumbling rube from the fictional backwater of Punkin Centre, Vt. ³Actionable Offenses² includes ³Learning a City Gal How to Milk,² in which Mr. Stewart voices the parts of two farmers marveling at a city girl¹s cow-milking prowess and speculating on her related skills in the amorous arts.
Both Hunting and White specialized in Irish dialect routines, and they can be heard on several tracks, reeling off ribaldries in exaggerated brogues. The most brazenly pornographic record on the CD is White¹s ³Dennis Reilly at Maggie Murphy¹s Home After Nine O¹Clock,² three-plus minutes of simulated intercourse, complete with comically dirty banter, cries of ecstasy and squeaking bedsprings.
Record companies were discreet about such material, issuing the cylinders pseudonymously (Hunting¹s aliases included Manly Tempest and ***** Fathand) and marketing them to saloons, amusement arcades and other gathering places with nickel-in-the-slot phonographs. But the recordings did not go unnoticed by guardians of public morality. Journalists railed against ³the abuse of a great invention.² Soon Anthony Comstock, the crusading founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, was on the trail of indecent cylinders, chasing down distributors and even performers. On June 24, 1896, one of Comstock¹s detectives came to Hunting¹s Manhattan home, posing as a fancier of naughty songs. Hunting custom-recorded two cylinders for his visitor, was promptly arrested and was sentenced to three months in prison for violating obscenity ordinances that normally governed written literature and visual images.
In 1899 a new law was enacted, promising stiff fines and lengthy prison terms specifically for purveyors of phonographic profanity. The scarcity of the recordings today is in part explained by the chilling effect of this legal crusade. ³People went to jail for making these cylinders,² said David Giovannoni, the co-producer of ³Actionable Offenses.² ³These are the artifacts that caused the law to change.²
The album¹s liner notes include a photograph of Comstock glowering above a mutton-chop mustache, the very picture of Victorian rectitude. But the CD debunks the cliché of Victorian America¹s pervasive primness. You won¹t hear a smuttier record this year than ³The Whores Union,² an extravagantly detailed menu of brothel services (³All night, with use of towel and rosewater: $5²), bellowed by Hunting in the voice of a prostitutes¹ union president.
Ribaldry may even have surfaced in that sanctum of audio science, the Edison workshop. Thomas Edison claimed that the first words he ever recorded, in 1877, were ³Mary Had a Little Lamb.² But conflicting accounts have Edison and his assistants shouting ³Mad dog² into the machine, then running it backwards to hear the phrase ³*** ****.² And others have claimed that far more colorful language flew around Edison¹s all-male laboratory and wound up on those earliest recordings. It¹s known that Edison¹s rival, Alexander Graham Bell, proposed developing a ³swearing top,² a spinning toy that would blare curse words. Beneath their funny hats and furrowed brows, it seems, our Victorian cousins had minds as dirty as ours.
But ³Actionable Offenses² offers something besides history lessons: laughs. Once you get past the records¹ shock and novelty value ? and acclimate your ears to the primitive sound ? you¹ll hear some very funny stuff. Stewart and Hunting were terrific joke tellers and raconteurs, bringing years of trial-by-fire training in vaudeville to the creation of a comedic art in a new medium. It¹s hard to resist routines like Mr. Hunting¹s ³Gimlet¹s Soliloquy,² a gonorrhea-theme riff on Hamlet¹s ³To be or not to be² speech, delivered in a mock-aristocratic British accent full of lustily rolled r¹s. The best jokes on ³Actionable Offenses² still kill.
The most haunting voice, though, belongs to that nameless amateur whose home recordings Mr. Young unearthed a decade ago. It¹s an odd experience, listening to a record that was in all likelihood made for private delectation; you feel at times that you¹re invading someone¹s privacy. Then again, maybe the guy had heard the cylinders of Stewart, or ones like them, and figured his filthy routines were as funny as the pros.
Would he really have bothered to preserve his act if he didn¹t want someone to hear it? More than 100 years after uttering the unspeakable into a phonograph horn, he has his audience: a 19th-century potty mouth, with jokes to scald 21st-century ears.

"Anybody can direct. There are only 11 good writers." ? Mel Brooks

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]You also have to realize that there's alway been **** ... we didn't have any of that **** in our time.[/nq]
[nq:1]Funny you should mention that. This was in today's New York Times... July 8, 2007 MUSIC There Once Was a Record of ... By JODY ROSEN[/nq]
[nq:1]The recordings from Mr. Young¹s collection are charmingly rough, and not just because of a century¹s worth of accumulated crackle and hiss. They are audibly the work of an amateur experimenting with a new machine.[/nq]
There are audio samples of each track on the website archeophone.com. The original recordings are very scratchy indeed, but it seems like they simply held a microphone up to the cylinder phonograph's horn and didn't make any effort to clean out the hiss and pops. I couldn't make out most of what was being said.
jaybee

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[nq:1]my nephews and nieces would rather cut off their arm than pick up a book they didn't need to read for school.[/nq]
That has always been the majority of students. Intelligent people are the minority. It used to be only the academically inclined went to college; now it's a free-for-all because, hey, you need a degree to sell shoes, especially if they're couture.
You're worried about the deterioration of art and culture? Art is the icing on the cake of life. Worry about the deterioration of the health care system and the morons has no choice but to employ.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:2]Funny you should mention that. This was in today's New ... Once Was a Record of ... By JODY ROSEN[/nq]
[nq:2]The recordings from Mr. Young¹s collection are charmingly rough, and ... the work of an amateur experimenting with a new machine.[/nq]
[nq:1]There are audio samples of each track on the website archeophone.com. The original recordings are very scratchy indeed, but it ... make any effort to clean out the hiss and pops. I couldn't make out most of what was being said.[/nq]
Sounds like a job for ClickRepair:
http://www.maths.anu.edu.au/~briand/sound/

"Anybody can direct. There are only 11 good writers." ? Mel Brooks

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[nq:1]It got a "limited" theatrical release (wasn't it something like FOUR theatres spread across the whole country? I'm guessing ... millions from "Borat" which would have seemed, to me at least, a perfect platform for them to promote "Idiocracy."[/nq]
But don't forget: the **** of the jokes in 'Idiocracy' is Fox's target audience. Half of thenm would have felt insulted, like a lot of the people leaving comments on imdb who felt cross without really knowing why.
The other half wouldn't have gotten the joke.
jaybee

Saw "Idiocracy" -- finally!

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