WOKE SADDLES

Blazing Saddles is literally about how a DEI hire was the best choice and improved everyone's lives.
My God.
- Um, I don't think Bart was anything close to resembling a DEI hire or even affirmative action. Bart was chosen because he was seen as an almost guaranteed failure as the town would unanimously reject him for being black and decide to leave town, allowing Hedley Lamarr and his goons to scoop up Rock Ridge for pennies on the dollar for their railroad (due to the quicksand they encountered at the very beginning of the movie). They nearly did reject him in the beginning, only to start warming up to him once he showed an effective prowess at dealing with all the curveballs Lamarr threw at him (ie Mongo). They promoted the idea of Bart as a progressive choice on the surface (dare I say, a cabinet post!), but the underlying reason was to play on the citizens of Rock Ridge's racism and coerce them to leave town.
  So I'd say that maybe it was meant to be seen as an inclusive and progressive choice (in modern parlance), but the underlying reason was anything but (in the context of the movie).
  
  They promoted the idea of Bart as a progressive choice on the surface (dare I say, a cabinet post!)
  Isn't that what racists think DEI is all about?

They actually did remake Blazing Saddles. It came out in 2022. Instead of a black sheriff, it was a kids movie about a dog that wanted to be a Samurai in a town of cats in Japan. It was originally titled Blazing Samurai, but they changed the name to Paws of Fury. It was pretty mediocre. I was watching it with my kid without knowing it was a remake of blazing saddles and I was noticing a lot of similarities with the story, then I noticed Mel Brooks was voicing one of the characters and went and looked it up. It was certainly a movie.
- The Sheriff is deer?
  
  Lol, they absolutely should have made that joke. It's on paramount plus if you're one of the 8 people that have it and want to piss away 2 hours.

I always found it crazy when this would play on network television, they would not censor any instance of the N-word, but would completely remove the campfire fart scene.
- It's entirely possible that the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles is the straw that broke Hollywood's fetish for westerns.
  
  If so, Mel Brooks did the world a great service.
- Fun fact, that scene was the first audible fart joke in film, so it being censored originally makes a little sense.
- Curious, in contrast I remember when they aired A Fish Called Wanda (that was a long time ago), they censored John Cleese's response to one of Otto's inarticulate verbal insult streams:
  "How very interesting... you're a true vulgarian, aren't you?"
  ...so as to not offend... people from Bulgaria, I guess? They might confuse the V with a B, then write strongly worded letters to the head of network programming?
  
  Vulgarian sound like "vulva." It was probably that weak similarity to dirty, evil sex that got the line cut.

You really couldn't make blazing saddles today. It's a satire that while beloved belongs to its time. You couldn't make "Veneno" in the 70s, and not just because it's about a woman who became famous in the 90s. When blazing saddles came out whole categories of stories were relegated to less than savory media like pulp novels.
Also modern satire focuses on different topics because in the past 50 years a lot has changed. Even when you focus on racial issues "Get Out" is a product of a much more modern time than Blazing Saddles. And while i love Mel Brooks's movies, I'm glad that the media about anti black racism that's popular today is largely by black creators

I like the little butterfly effect details. Blazing Saddles even got a different person hired at this place.
Oh, and Godzilla is real.
- My favorite part is that Mirror Ethan is holding a different version of the same Transformer.

Dunno why someone would set some saddles on fire, but did anyone else notice, that in the alternate version everything's slightly different... ...but the moaner?

🦖

the common clay of the new west!

Why is Daria in the background?

We have arrived to the parallel universe somewhat. At least the nazi cartoonist Hans Christian Graebener have made a cartoon calling Half-Life 2 a woke garbage for Eli Vance and Alyx. A few month and we will go back the the early days of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theories, long before Carl Benjamin and Paul Joseph Watson made it more digestable for those within the atheist and/or skeptic community, to recruit gamers to the far-right. Maybe the next wokeness detectors will also talk about if the Illuminati and/or Freemasons are depicted as either a neutral or good forces as the OG ones did, just to know where this whole thing comes from.
- is that the source behind gamergate?there are quite a few right wing gamers on youtube.
  
  Gamergate was an astroturf by regular /pol/ users that was organized on a public IRC channel, but the original "wokespotting" also involved spotting triangles and hexagrams. I still remember how much I laughed at a conspiracy head claiming the David Star in the banking scene of the first Harry Potter movie was to make goyim children to accept the Jews as their financial overlords, all while said conspiracy theorists also claimed he was not an anti-semite, because "real christians love the sinner and hate the sin" and "Judaism is a religion/sin, not a nationality". Did manage to find others in similar vein, especially through the whole Lion King SFX controversy, but most of it disappeared the moment gamergate blew up.
  The thing is, neo-nazis vowed to recruit gamers early on, but for many years, had way too high standards, and called classics like Metroid or Tomb Raider "cultural Marxist garbages" for the sin of having women outside of the kitchen, not to mention games made by the far-right. Beginning in 2012, a lot of them started to have lower standards for geek media, especially gamers. I tried to warn my then fellow skeptics that they're looking in ways to make their conspiracy theories more digestable to "normies", but they wrote me off as someone trying to politicize skeptic circles, as back then a lot of skeptics and atheists tried to be politically neutral to wave off "Stalinism" accusations, and otherwise most of them thought their "hidden messages and cultural Marxism in popular culture" conspiracy theories were way too insane to save. Many of them later told me I was right and were sad to discount me as some paranoid weirdo that probably also believes nazis are living on the moon and secretly controlling everything.

I like the alternate universe better, may Godzalli bring a swift end to the world!
- He's a protector, though. Sure, he's pissed and smashes some shit because we woke him up, but if he gets pointed at a threat, he beats the piss out of it and goes back to sleep.
  For worldwide destruction, you'd want King Ghidorah.

What was this webcomic called again?
I think I remember something with clones and a wacky storyline when I stopped reading it 20 years ago.
- Shortpacked by David Willis
- the author did an alternate universe in a more grounded setting where all the characters go to collage together, its really good https://www.dumbingofage.com/2010/comic/book-1/01-move-in-day/home/