With Universal's colorful animated tale The Lorax, "the President's liberal friends in Hollywood [are] targeting a younger demographic using animated movies to sell their agenda to children," claimed an outraged Lou Dobbs this week on Fox Business Network. Animated movies! A liberal agenda! HOW DARE THEY. What's to blame for allowing this "insidious nonsense" into the vulnerable minds of our nation's youth? Bad parenting, of course. As conservative radio host Matt Patrick bellowed from the commentator pit, "We are creating Occu-toddlers!"
In the classic Seuss story -- adapted into a 3-D animated adventure that hits screens next week -- a magical creature called The Lorax attempts to intervene as an industrialist, driven by greed, ravages an entire ecosystem. This would seem to make The Lorax even more "dangerous" than previous Fox News target The Muppets, which took as its villain a much broader and clearly unlikeable capitalist; The Lorax is designed to show viewers how much they potentially have in common with the unwitting forest-killer The Once-ler, which is why it's so powerful to begin with.
My favorite part of this insanity is when Patrick advocates intentional littering in movie theaters as a means of protest against the Obama-led agenda espoused by The Lorax (and the Studio Ghibli animated pic The Secret World of Arriety, which could lead youngsters down the slippery slope of sharing things). Throwing popcorn buckets on the ground would fly in the face of everything Dr. Seuss's anti-deforestation, pro-environment tale stands for, but it would also make you look ridiculous in front of your own children. I think the Lorax's face above says it all.
Bring on the Occu-toddlers!
The Lorax hits theaters on March 2.
[Media Matters via The Film Stage]