Always worth pointing out:
People were skeptical of toilet water but after Not Sure et al demonstrated that it was effective, they embraced it.
We have people who were skeptical of... modern medicine. And when vaccinations were demonstrated to be effective they... shoved horse medicine up their asses and attacked medical workers.
We are so far past Idiocracy.
Yeah, at least President Camacho was open to other points of view and was willing to defer to an "expert", rather than throw a tantrum because someone didn't immediately compliment and agree with him
I mean, some people are past it... The types that deny sandy hook was real, and that want the guy with orange spray paint on his face to win.
I love that transition so much!
Also, I miss Fuddruckers. Might be one or two left, but nowhere near me anymore.
As of 2019, Fuddruckers had 49 company-operated restaurants and 107 franchises across the United States and around the world.
Number of locations | 60 (January 2024)
Uh this sounds a little low…:
On June 21, 2021, Black Titan Franchise Systems announced a deal to acquire Fuddruckers for $18.5 million.
There’s one in Concord, CA.
I genuinely hope this isn't a hot take for anyone here: Social Darwinism is a dumb and destructive ideology and Idiocracy betrays some pretty awful beliefs.
Which is weird because KOTH and Silicon Valley aren't like that.
Didn't the studio take a pretty heavy hand to it? I feel like I've heard that Mike Judge isn't a huge fan of it.
This is where Idiocracy comes from, it was pretty heavily adapted, but might account for any difference in undertones.
The original has the guy they resurrected enact a genocide on the 99% of humanity who'd been tainted by dumb genes.
And I mean I'm glad Idiocracy didn't end that way, but it's weird that the original accepts the premise of nazi eugenics, but their only issue seems to be the way it was enacted.
Ah, Idiocracy - that shining beacon of hope, where somehow the USA survives what was clearly a nation-ending process whereby nobody else around the world got dumber (e.g. in Russa or China), only us, but humans somehow gave the people in power (corporations) something valuable enough to allow to continue existence and subsistence.
Over a hundred years ago (30 years before the term "science fiction" was coined) H.G. Wells Time Machine portrayed a similar slant on the populace of the future.
The reality is that with Climate Change and automation happening as they are, even those nightmare visions seem increasingly unlikely, as the planet cannot sustain us all and robots replace the need for a worker class of humans anyway. Instead we might end up more like Half-Life where populace decrease becomes more desirable.
Travelers (2016) is an excellent TV show to watch btw - too bad we are unlikely to develop time travel to save us all.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
This is what Idiocracy is an adaptation of. So they are largely in the same camp. The marching morons is only 73 years old, but still a decent amount of time ago.
The "Golden Era" of sci-fi in the 30s - a delay from the roaring 20s perhaps? - has a lot of stuff along the general lines of "Englishman (never Englishwoman mind you), often from some minor noble heritage, through mysterious means unknown ends up in an area of savages, but through the power of their greater Intelligence, becomes stronger, faster, and outer-smartier than all of those that they outsmart b/c they are smart I tell you, so smart!"
Idiocracy - and Marching Morons I see, and Time Machine as well from 1895 - is thus very much in line with the norm, with the twist that the savage lands are the future from now; the implication being that humanity has not only "reached its peak over all those that came before", but also "peaked, then declined, so that we - here, now - are the pinnacle of all civilization that ever was or ever will be".:-P Which there is a large degree of truth to that - e.g. antibiotic resistance and the enshittification of the internet and the state of ThE eCoNoMy ThO all reveal that we now have less than we ourselves did 10-20 years ago, even if for some that refers more to potential than actual.
Not quite Butt-Fuckers level of destruction.
I don't get it
Rather than mutually assured destruction, the clock counts down to how soon the world devolves into the one represented in Idiocracy.
