Recent searches
Search options
That kitchen lady SOTU GOP response redubbed in a dalek voice.
Somebody please do this.
Stars Wars and Doctor Who both feature villains transparently based on Nazis, and I’m coming around to the idea that Doctor Who had the more socially useful model: Imperial officers / stormtroopers come off as evil but maybe kind of badass, whereas Daleks more accurately portray fascists as stupid and cheap and just gratingly skin-crawlingly annoying.
The idea that something as obnoxious and ridiculous as a Dalek can also be dangerous and utterly evil is…a useful lesson.
Realizing as I wrote the previous post:
Doctor Who is remarkable, unusual among its peers, for its 60 years of near-total non-interest in machismo and militarism. Though the show is often violent, the violence is usually something the baddies do, and always miserable and unfortunate — a failure of some kind, something to mourn. It’s a show where the only things that are ever •badass• are intelligence, courage, and kindness.
Re the ridiculousness of the Daleks:
I’m not sure people realize how much the press, especially British and American, mocked Hitler throughout the 20s and even 30s as being idiotic, pathetic, comical — too silly to take seriously. (Look at P. G. Woodehouse’s Roderick Spode…in a 1938 novel!)
I’m not a historian, and won’t make a judgement about how much the world regarded the Nazis with fear vs mocking vs attraction, but surely these are all ingredients.