(Larry The Cable Guy)
"It's been all politically-corrected up. That's right, now in this country, I guess fairytales are offensive for the kids"
You ever get the sense that the first "Cars" movie was a bit, you know,
marxist? I mean, Lightning McQueen, he's a race car. He's living a life of stardom, luxury, privilege.
He's a beloved icon,
and all he really has to grapple with is occasionally having to bump shoulders with his dented-up,
rust-ridden fans every so often.
Fans who have those dents and that rust (to make no bones about it),
because they're poor. And then, as the film goes on and Lightning winds up stuck in a dead-end,
low-income community and made to perform menial labor as a form of judicial punishment,
he learns they aren't quite so bad after all. They may look or even act differently from Lightning,
but they're actually decent and reasonable and, most pivotally,
Lightning discovers that their social conditions come not because of any bad life choices of their own,
but because of greater societal changes they've had no real control over.
[obligatory Pixar sad song]
The highway, the arteries through which the lifeblood of the cars world flows,
cutting right over the small-town communities and leaving them with no customers,
no jobs, no opportunities, and all of this juxtaposed to Lightning McQueen himself,
a car literally built to do something that,
by contrast, his society is more than happy to lavish with money and admiration.
McQueen discovers that despite all this,
the lower-class cars are not something to be treated with disdainor even pity.
But as represented by the affable tow truck Mater,
can even take a kind of pride in their way of life. Though in real material terms,
Lightning might as well be from a different planet to these ragtag towns folk,
he realizes these social barriers between them were entirely manufactured and artificial,
a conflict formed not by any defined ideological differences, but differing social and economic classes.
So, in the end, "Cars" becomes a critique of class divide.
I feel like this is the most obvious reading you could take from "Cars",
but also, at the same time, it does make the ending, just,
incredibly depressing. Like, the conclusion at the end is basically "Yeah,
the capitalist society the cars live in means that new innovations like the highway system basically destroyed thousands of small-town communities...
But hey! This town's OK,
because one dude who benefits from this system happened to take a liking to it and single-handedly decided to stimulate their economy.
All those other communities are f*cked, and we're not going to do anything about that".
But at least we get to feel good, because one town got saved by... one guy. Really,
the only silver lining here is to remember that this is purely within the context of the fantasy world of "Cars",
and we don't have to deal with anything like that in the real world.
So anyway, "Cars 1" is about class. You all knew that. That's old news.
Did you ever notice the second "Cars" movie was eugenics propaganda?
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So, as of the end of this month, it's been about a year and a half since I brought out this video.
This video about "Sky High", Disney's fascist eugenics movie.
"Hi there, movie lovers! Fun fact: did you know that in 2005,
Disney inadvertently produced and released actual fascist eugenics propaganda?"
The video that first set off my channel and is still probably the thing most people cite when interacting with me.
Even being like...
"Oh, the Sky High eugenics video? I like that one",
or "Oh, the Sky High eugenics video? Don't you realize what an absurd ridiculous topic that is?".
Which... No, I didn't,
and hearing you point that out is... devastating to me.
What have I been up to in the year and change since that video came out? Well...
"Did you ever notice how Beverly Hills Chihuahua and 12 Years a Slave...
are basically the same movie?"
"Hello, everyone"
"That's right, they are all flaming homosexuals"
"It is but me, the YouTube leftist!"
"This is exactly what I warned you about"
"F*ck this piece of sh*t"
"Consensual vore, folks"
"Well, I know a couple of cowpoke's right perfect for us to take a gander at.
I've also officially used up all the cowboy lingo I know, so this bit is officially unsustainable.
I'm just gonna..."
"Michael Sheen 360 no-scopes President Richard Nixon in the marketplace of ideas, and it made me come"
All this to say that yes, fate has run its course,
and I have finally stumbled on another weirdly "eugenicsy" kids movie produced by the Walt Disney Corporation.
And to top it off,
it's also a good excuse to cover some things I feel I didn't do a good enough job explaining in the last video.
Also, now I don't have to do this absolutely disgusting copyright protection stuff,
because I've actually figured out how to get around Content ID.
And I can remember to export the video in the right aspect ratio this time, Jack, for fu--
And to all the naysayers who'd claim I made this video just because I'm desperate for attention and wanted to recycle popular video concepts,
I'll say I... definitely was hoping to do that in the next few weeks,
but I wasn't actually thinking about it when I watched "Cars 2". So, anyway, "Cars 2".
"Cars 2" was released in June, 2011.
Directed by John Lasseter and written by Ben Queen, who, according to his Wikipedia page,
is an American writer and producer whose son Max is a very "talentid" baseball player. So,
realizing they're basically squeezed every possible character development they could out of Lightning McQueen,
"Cars 2" abruptly switches the perspective to that of his comic relief's sidekick: Mater.
While Lightning goes off to take part in a World Grand Prix hosted by an eccentric corporate mogul,
Mater is instead roped into a secret agent conspiracy,
putting himself in mortal danger as he involves himself in a plot that may have world-shattering consequences.
Yeah, 80% of this movie is like a dated James Bond parody. It's exactly as epic as it sounds.
This is a subtle way of saying this movie is actually very dull, and I don't think you should actually watch it.
If you have watched it,
you might be surprised to hear that there even is some kind of really "out there" reading someone could take from this movie,
because, for the most part, it's an incredibly inoffensive series of cartoon hijinks.
I had to rewatch it, like,
twice to even remember what happens between the parts where it looks like Mater pisses himself onstage 20 minutes in...
and the part where mater unravels the whole conspiracy an hour later.
It's this unraveling that I'm going to hone in on today.
So it turns out the conspiracy is as follows:
Something that pops up a lot throughout the film is the current hot commodity recently announced by aforementioned corporate mogul Sir Miles Axelrod's,
"Allinol",
a so-called alternative fuel that will supposedly eliminate the need for cars to consume fossil fuels to survive.
As we later discover, it turns out this Allinol has one critical flaw,
which the criminal underbelly seems to be taking advantage of.
When hit by an electromagnetic pulse, it makes the cars fueled up with them...
...explode.
Yeah, "Cars 2" is some brutal sh*t. Things take a turn when, aided by the international police,
Mater helps infiltrate a meeting between a group of cars suspected to be taking part in this cover-up.
NORMALIZED POLICE BRUTALITY IN A CHILDREN'S FILM.
So, here's the big reveal. It turns out this technical flaw in Allinol...
isn't actually a flaw, but a feature.
Because Allinol is not actually an alternative fuel.
It's a way to even the playing field between regular functioning cars and the film's main antagonist.
Lemons.
Not those lemons. Like,
Those lemons.
Let me rewind for a second to underline something that's pretty clear if you've watched any of the "Cars" movies,
that pretty much without exception these movies are actually about people and not cars.
If you watch my video on animal allegories in fiction a couple months back,
you know what I mean by this distinction.
Essentially, if you're trying to write a work of fiction with a moral that the audience can relate to,
and you're using any kind of non-human animal or object to communicate that moral,
there comes a point where you have to decide whether you're telling a story about animals or about people.
So, if you have, say, Disney's "Robin Hood",
the story is basically just a straightforward retelling of the classic English folklore,
and the use of animals is pretty much pure aesthetic. If you have something like the popular series "Beastars"
(video plug free),
the story is very much focused around what an actual animal society would be like.
As carnivores and herbivores struggle to deal with their innate behavioral differences.
And then, caught straddling the line in the middle, there's a story like "Zootopia",
which is simultaneously a story that is plainly about racial prejudice and discrimination,
particularly in the modern US,
"-Go back to the forest, predator!
-I'm from the Savvanah!"
but also about how carnivores and herbivores struggle to deal with their innate differences.
This tension is where things can get a little thematically confused,
as it becomes hard to distinguish where the writer is using the allegory to more easily communicate a human problem,
and where the allegory exists in its own pocket universe.
So, like, if you're watching a talking dog movie
(man, I'm just killing it with these video plugs today),
for the purposes of understanding a message about friendship and relationships,
the dogs are basically people, but when they bark at cats and then go home to their owners,
they're back to just being dogs.
If we go back to the first "Cars" movie, the movie very plainly takes the "Robin Hood" route.
If you took the exact same premise, except instead of a racecar, Lightning McQueen was a racecar driver,
and instead of a tow truck, Mater was a tow truck driver, the story does not meaningfully change at all.
The whole thing about rust and dents is just neat visual shorthand for the class divide.
All of the cars can be people,
and this can still be a story about a hotshot racer learning to come to terms with his snobbish classism.
Even up to the second movie, "Cars" constantly underlines that this is the intention.
The locations are real locations. The histories of those locations did actually happen.
The highway system did devastate thousands of small-town communities.
The working title of this movie was literally "Route 66" and was made in collaboration with a route 66 historian contracted by John Lasseter.
There are even celebrity cameos using the real names of actual celebrities.
"Guido, a real Michael Schumacher Ferrari!"
"- Lewis!
- Hey, man"
"-Jeff!
-Hey!"
This is pretty much just the real world, except the people look like cars.
With everything else from history to geography to architecture being the same.
I bring all of this up, because, if we acknowledge this,
there's no way of getting around the fact that the villain of "Cars 2"...
is disabled people.
"Lemons", or, as one government agent in the film puts it,
"History's biggest loser cars",
are cars with profound manufacturing defects, affecting their safety utility and reliability.
They break down regularly,
often rely on other cars to get around and inevitably require replacement parts to continue functioning.
With companies often deciding to stop manufacturing the parts for these defective vehicles,
there are dodgy black markets through which lemons can barter for them.
If they can't find or afford them, they instead have to pay other cars to tow them around,
so they can continue with their daily lives.
Something mater gloats repeatedly about in the film.
"Lemons is a tow truck's bread and butter"
It's even heavily suggested that, among defective cars,
"lemon" is actually something of an ableist slur they're simply forced to put up with.
"...clunker, junker, beater,
wreck, rattletrap..."
"...lemon"
The movie really hammers home just how shitty it is to be a less functional car in this society.
NORMALIZED POLICE BRUTALITY IN A CHILDREN'S FILM.
Ultimately, this is the core motivation stated by the film's antagonist.
"The world turned their backs on cars like us.
They stopped manufacturing us, stopped making our parts.
The only thing they haven't stopped doing is laughing at us"
And the thing is...
at no point does the film do anything with this.
It's literally just the motivation for the bad guys. The movie pretty much outright says
"Yes, the clear parallels for disabled people are being subjugated,
mistreated and, in fact, systemically eradicated deliberately by this society.
That's why they're so evil,
look how greedy they are, willing to commit crimes and even acts of terror to...
not be systemicaly eradicated".
But this is the reality the film leaves us with,
the new Pandora's box that froze everything else about the car-human allegory of these films into chaos.
Is the "Cars" universe now suggesting that it's actually fine to build a society around rewarding the supposedly "genetically gifted",
such as Lightning, while slowly eradicating the undesirable lemons?
He is a racecar. He is literally built to race, and because of the way he was built, he is useful for that purpose.
Because of the way they're built, the lemons are seen as less useful in the society and, therefore, of lesser value.
Is this really what we've ended up with?
Because if we have,
that's eugenics, folks.
EUGENICS
If there's one thing, I wish I'd better underlined in my "Sky High" video,
It's an aspect of eugenics people often miss when discussing the subject,
the distinction between "is" and "ought" statements when talking about genetic differences.
It is neither wrong nor controversial to state that human beings have genetic differences, even along racial lines.
Although those racial lines are culturally constructed and arbitrarily drawn.
Mostly, the only point where things get particularly messy is when you start talking about IQ,
a topic flooded with bullshit racist pseudoscience for which I'm just gonna gently point at YouTuber Shaun's phenomenal rundown of the subject.
So the "is" statement would be "The human species IS genetically diverse".
Translate this to the first "Cars" movie,
and you might have something like "there ARE many different makes and models of car".
That is not a "eugenicsy" thing to say.
This is your opportunity to scroll down and laugh for the people in the comment section
who didn't actually bother watching this video and just assumed that was the point I was going to make.
The eugenics statement would be the "ought"s.
"We ought to value certain genetic groups more highly than others,
and specifically structure society around that evaluation".
This is where the Nazis come in, with their archetype of the Aryan,
though they're far from the only extremist group to engage in this. If you didn't realize the distinction there,
don't worry, renowned professor Richard Dawkins didn't either.
"Delighted that somebody here thought I was a cumdungeon"
It's actually shocking how otherwise knowledgeable people do not understand the difference between pointing out an objective truth,
such as genetic differences between people, and crafting some idea of objective values,
in terms of what genetic groups are "desirable" and "undesirable".
It could also just be deliberate obfuscation.
Not understanding the difference between an objective observation and an objective value judgment?
I feel like there's another video I could plug here--
The point is that there is no actual objective way to determine the value of one human life over another.
Ultimately, it will always come down to some personal bias or prejudice. And, as history has shown,
when pointed towards racial groups, religious groups,
sexual minorities and both neurodivergent people and people of disabilities, this inevitably leads to backwards,
pseudo-scientific and arbitrary justifications for mass genocide.
So when I made this point in my earlier video,
I feel like this wasn't something I stressed as much as I could have,
and this ultimately led to a lot of comments misunderstanding me as pointing out the fact that in this story different people have superpowers tied to their genetics,
and simply the fact that those powers are tied to genetics,
made the movie "eugenicsy". Like,
the number of people who think it's a dunk on my "My Hero Academia" counterexample to just gesture at Todoroki,
because his powers are based on his genetics,
ignoring the many times the story highlights how profoundly negatively this has affected him and the extent to which the story does not glorify it...
It's a lot! Now, to be clear, I do think these super power/eugenics concepts can be intertwined.
Eugenics propaganda comes in the inflation of value for one genetic group and the subjugation of another,
and it's hard not to see that in the extreme example of one group genetics being better than the average person,
while another can turn invisible, fly, be super strong, super fast, etc.
But the overt eugenics of that world's are not in the existence of those powers,
but in the fact that society specifically privileges those who have those powers at the expense of those who don't.
In the case of "Cars", once again, from the start,
these movies have acknowledged that different makes and models exist,
and even that some are more gifted at certain tasks than others.
What "Cars 2" introduces is the idea that the Society of "Cars" very specifically gears itself around the privileging of one group at the subjugation of another.
The fact that there is an economic system that disincentivizes support for these more vulnerable groups,
cutting off funding for replacement parts they need to survive is one obvious example,
but many smaller ones exist. It bears mentioning that the world of "Cars" is very...
...well...
car-focused, with minimal public transport options,
making it exceptionally hard for so-called "lemons" to function.
"-Hey, how far did you make it this time, Otis?
-Halfway to the county line"
"-Ooh, not bad, man!
-I know! I can't believe it either!"
Even the fact that tow trucks like Mater make a living off of helping these lemons outs is...
kind of disgusting when you think about it.
"This is your tenth tow this month,
so it's on the house"
"You're the only one that's nice to lemons like me, Mater"
They are essentially extorting these cars,
because they happen to live in a world that in no way makes adjustments to their particular conditions.
If you really want to think hard about it,
you can kind of see how capitalism, conservatism and eugenics all kind of intermingle here.
The idea is that without public support,
these groups can now become a source of revenue, and when this is observed,
the eugenics idea, that their lives are already inherently less valuable,
means that it's their own fault they're such a burden to the system.
Never mind that they had no say in how this system was structured, or, specifically,
that said system would be structured in a way that puts them particularly at a disadvantage.
It becomes their fault, their responsibility,
because the decision has already been made against their will that they are the undesirable group.
This is what Indian economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, among others,
have observed in their critiques of so-called "welfare economies".
Systems which provide superficial privileges to those with varying physical capabilities,
but do little to change the fundamental societal biases against them and their abilities.
You can make public transport free for people with impaired motor functions,
but if that public transport network just isn't there, or handicapped seats are not provided,
if the society at large continues to greatly benefit those with access to their own car,
the problem isn't really solved. To not get too ahead of myself,
the point is that "Cars 2" exists as pure ideology in this regard,
it fully accepts a world in which no real allowances are made for the group clearly being subjugated and marginalized,
and instead, concludes that this is simply a reality they should accept and come to terms,
with the only alternative being very explicit demonization. And all of this,
packaged within a film so apathetic to any of these concerns that you'd miss it being a substantial part of the plot...
without a ranty youtuber going on about it for 25 minutes.
So, Mater saves the day, gets knighted and then goes back home,
so he can continue to extort the disabled.
And that's why when someone asks you what the difference is between genetic differences and eugenics,
you can tell them
the first "Cars" movie shows genetic differences,
the second "Cars" movie...
is eugenics.
Hey, folks. Thanks for watching. I hope it was all you imagined it to be.
So, last quick announcements,
I decided to update my patreon with some Patron goals,
if you want is an extra incentive to support the channel and share it around
Right now, I'm almost 300 patrons if I can get it a 500
I'm gonna do an hour-long Space Jam video and if I can get it to a thousand, I'm doing one for kangaroo jack
Please consider supporting at five dollars or more also gets you on the credits scrolling by now
You can also consider backing over on coffee for one-time donations today
I'd like to give a special thanks to Atticus Cassidy a wreck isn't anger a Thomas Kalin Stein
cantabile a Connor D Cal rah
George Soros
India mal - Asst no more world's snowy and tore in the exile with an extra special
Thanks to Charlotte's Alan and leftist tech supports. I'd also like to give a final
Thank you to nor DPN for sponsoring this video
Once again, check out the link down in the description for 70% off of a free air plan
Other than that, I'll see you all next time as always. Thanks for watching
Love you all and stay safe
Delighted that somebody here thought I was a-- (Laughs)
Sorry, I will try-- I will try again... (Laughs)
