can I offer you any more Kool-Aid? oh, I see you're already topped up

ECHO...
ECHO...
echo...
echo

you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself, i guess. the toll for reading this post is having to look at Madame Blavatsky here on the right.

i've been sitting on this one for a week now, because i couldn't be sure. but it finally came to me what the animation looked like. that seemed to be the key to me, stylistically. it didn't say "Russian" to me, and I threw out the live-action portions of the video as irrelevant to my point. whatever it was at the time. but i got it.

the animation is straight out of Fleischer Studios. you may remember them from the classic Superman cartoons.

that's what didn't sit right with me. it was supposed to be "Russian," but all the animated bits screamed "American." LS was the only one who got close to this, but i think you're basically all drinking the Kool-Aid. he said it was bullshit because it was bullshit the Russians wanted us to buy. he was nearly there. it's bullshit WE wanted US to buy.

stop and think about the provenance of this video for a second. EC says he got it at a garage sale in south Florida. if you look at that wikipedia link, you'll see that Fleischer Studios had their own animation outpost in Miami in the 1940s, at the same time this video was dated and that GFK confirmed in his post. now unless you're crazy enough to think that there was a secret Russian enclave working at Fleischer in Miami in the 1940s, this has definitely got to be ours.

the thing that makes me stop and doubt a little about WHO had this vid was EC saying that it had an old stamp on it that said "SA [something]." that could mean a lot of things. maybe it's "standard animatic" or something to do with animation. but it just as easily could mean School of the Americas.

the SOA (SA) was founded in 1946 in Georgia, so it would make sense that they'd use training or propaganda vids from a close source. Miami is a short train ride. plus, you've got all the Cuban population in Miami. we were training junior dictators and insurgents from south Florida before Castro. you better believe we were roping them in to work for SOA, just as training. after all, we liked Batista's thugs, and those thugs knew how to keep a population down.

so remember the spore thing I talked about? the quick explanation is that this is a biochem war training manual. we're showing the worst-case scenario to our latin Americans to show them how to get their gas masks on when we "cropdust" the commie latin Americans. why else all the fucking gas masks?

the other quick explanation is this was domestic propaganda and counter-information meant to scare the shit out of anti-war reps in congress. stop and think about the security the US felt in 1948 or whenever this video literally claims to be from. you've got the US riding high on being the only country with The Bomb. but at the same time, you have China falling apart to the communists. you've got people in State who don't like Chiang and think Mao is the answer. how do you take apart those people in State? HUAC and McCarthy are one answer. the other is, show them something that takes the a-bomb out of the question

you guys point to the Russian animation vids as propaganda from "them", and maybe they are. but saying this film is the same thing as that is just assuming too. what if we were inspired by their propaganda, like the reanimation of animals thing? "hey, that's scary. let's make it scarier. to LAUNCH the appropriations budget for the Military Industrial Complex into the STRATOSPHERE."

BOTH explanations come back to the same thing. maybe we were training SOA counterinsurgents with the vid. maybe we were scaring congressmen. both direct back at America to make us promote the M.I.C. we have to make it bigger. it needs to have its control.

LS talks about cloud seeding. who wanted to weaponize that? the M.I.C.! they took a thing that helps civilians and wanted to make floods and monsoons. THEY have been researching chemical seeding from the start. do you really think they stopped at RAIN? you really think it was just the Russians that tested shit in the sky, just because of a video? WE made that video. those jets are so fucking generic to begin with. it starts with cloud seeding, it ends with crowd control.

i love the Russian propaganda as much as you all, but you're so focused on seeing THEM behind the scariest options that you don't see US. behind the things we document. the things we proved we'd do. you don't assume that this video is just us making us bigger, for us, for no reason, again.

edit: if nobody's gonna comment, I'm just disabling it. also adding the "you guys are lazy shits" tag, because you guys are lazy shits.

hello? where the fuck is everyone?

seriously? we found this film, went on with some amazing conjectures about it, and now- no one has talked about it again for a week? did we hit a dead end? i have an idea, why don't we hit up a site to translate cyrillic into english and put what words the film did have into babelfish or any plethora of free online translators...

no?

ok, i'll go first: споры is "Spores."

so maybe that balloon is filled with anthrax? eh?

Blogger Error (Again)

Hi, guys. It looks like the Blogger code error that happened to LS before happened to me this time. What I posted yesterday was eaten up, and I know Max couldn't add any content anywhere. I don't know if I have the heart to rewrite my post, but I left a brief comment on LS's most recent post just so he'd have a reply after his apology. I've written to the Help Center, but their solution seems to be, "Delete whatever creates a problem." It's an easy fix, but that's like setting your house on fire because the roof leaks.

The Devil's Advocate

No, for once I'm NOT talking about the FINEST movie Keanu Reeves ever made. I want to toy around a little bit with what you "gentlemen" have posted so far.

First up, thanks again for filming and uploading these, EC. Second, thanks again for writing up some smart speculation about what these films could mean, G.

Third, I think you're both wrong.

If there's any one thing we've FAILED to learn as a country from the Cold War, it's that an idea of a threat can be as powerful as the the threat itself.

If we'd had an ounce of sense on September 12, we'd have said, "Ok, a bunch of useless whackjobs did this, and whoopie for them, they just killed off a third of their own manpower. They're a sad and lonely bunch of crazies who have to hide from society because of how much everyone else in the world thinks they're fucking dogshit. They punched us. It hurt. Who gives a fuck? We're bigger and badder than that, and we're going to rebuild, and they can go fuck themselves."

Instead, we fueled the idea. We made them supermen. We made them a thousand times more powerful in our nightmares than they ever could be in reality. A handful of totally twisted broken people with a severe inability to fucking DEAL WITH IT ("it" being the rest of the fucking world) became a monster in every shadow. We closed our eyes and saw them there too. When they probably weren't enough people to storm and wipe out half the fans of a southern high school football game.

The thing is, we ALWAYS do this, and we're ALWAYS wrong. Think back on Kim Philby and Team B and HUAC and McCarthy. We've got the worst track record on this shit. Every time we figure out that we were wrong, we say, "Well, we're never going to overreact like THAT again!" And then the next crisis comes along, and we go all, "WAAAUUUUUUUGGGGGH FFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!" and freak the fuck out and act like a bunch of totally unforgivable pantswetting spazzes.

What's worse is, I think you guys are doing it again here. When, if anybody SHOULD know much better, it's you guys.


So what...?

Okay, first of all, let's accept that everything GFK said about the date of this video is true. Well, what's that tell you?

Look at the time period. The Soviets weren't stupid. They could see what was going on in America. Fuck, getting a subscription to the New York Times wasn't hard. They watched as we reported on our own paranoia. HUAC was a sitting committee starting in '45. Every time the communists made a gain in Europe, we flipped the fuck out. Meanwhile, look at it from their perspective:

1. They need nukes and don't have them.
2. They know even if they crack the nuclear code and start making nukes, we're way ahead of them.
3. But we'll believe anything we read, see, or hear, so...
4. What the fuck's it matter?

Instead of racing to close the distance between us on nukes, why not say, "Fuck it"?

I know what you're going to say: "Fuck it! Yes! That's your answer. That's your answer for everything! Tattoo it on your forehead! Your revolution is over, Mr. Lebowski! The bums lost!"

Seriously, though, follow me here. If we were so credulous we'd just buy ANYTHING, that meant they didn't have to sell anything real. Just invent something that would make us shit our pants. Sure, we had nukes, but all they had to do was claim they could seed the sky with something that would set the world on fire. Who needs nukes when they have that? BOOM, right there, it doesn't matter if there's a gap in nukes, because nukes are on equal footing with SKY FIRE.

It's not even that implausible when you consider 1946 is when cloud seeding was invented. We'd already just figured out that we could control the weather by dropping shit into clouds, so why couldn't the Soviets control the apocalypse by doing the same? Hell, WE tried to weaponize cloud seeding anyway, so we were already thinking perfectly along the lines they'd need to promote a propaganda weapon. WE started chemically altering the sky itself, so who could even say that they couldn't do it with the right compounds, ones we hadn't even found yet? Hell, just stop and think of the images in the film. Why are ALL their troops wearing gas masks? What is this stuff coming out of the plane? What could the Piemaker be making?




CHEMICALS. Or so we'd be totally willing to believe because we almost NEED to believe shit like this.

We set OURSELVES up. All they'd need was a punchline. One filmstrip leaked to the west later, and suddenly there's "proof" how they're going to fight American nuclear armament. A little push here with a cartoon and some Higgins motherfucker, and we'd shit our pants for them and create our own fears.

Stalemate.

Jigsaw Post #3

EC, God help me, what you posted was disturbing and, to steal from Scotty's word vault, awesome as hell. I don't know whether to feel elated or unsettled. I know what my stomach feels like: it feels like about half a bottle of the Jamey. And it feels like the other half should be coming soon. I wish you'd gotten that video out before I'd got tossed out of my head, but I can't stop watching it. I really doubt I'll be able to contribute all that much, but it's just amazing to me. Where did you say you got this again? Promise me you'll remember better and tell us more.

Okay, okay, we should look at some of the frames of this, because the individual pictures reveal probably more than the video as a whole, insofar as the choices the director made are animated ones (at least partially) where he could pick out the themes of violence he wanted to evoke, irespective of consequence.


This is an amazingly menacing image, because you've got the rat behind bars. I can't tell if this is immediately a capitalist metaphor, the predatory animal that eats and steals from others. It would seem to be the well that any good Soviet video would go to. This thing creates nothing and yet prospers due to exploitation and theft from the creative and generative class. Better that he be locked up. What happens to him is anyone's guess. I can't tell what's killing him, but his stabbing/strangulation seems almost lusciously vindictive and bloodthirsty.



Given how much the "Higgins" (cf. Scotty's post) character is lecturing or directly narrating at the camera, this substance seems to be a critical element (but is it an element?—the notation suggests it is not) in the dramaturgy. But not knowing what it is obviously means that we can't really say anything informed without venturing into putting on airs or, if you like, Asshole Territory.

If you remember, our earlier inclination was to say this was an anti-nuclear film — as if to say, "Here are your horrors. You would not want them yourself. But what could they do to us?" Perhaps it was the USSR drafting a westerner ("Higgins") to warn us about the dangers of our overreaching militarily and damaging the balance of power or the planet itself. But given how threatening or frightening the rest of this clip becomes, I don't feel comfortable anymore with this being cautionary. It could be an aggressive warning. I don't know what the substance is, but my first guess is that it's highly radioactive particulate matter. Something that shows the west that their weapons have direct harm.

Can you weaponize exposed soils? If teh Soviets had access to low-density soils exposed to an atomic blast, maybe they might offer them up as condemnation (in this video) of western action, or maybe they might offer them up as a threat. Remember that balloon from the earlier clip? Perhaps they could be saying, "If you poison our soils, we will drop your poison on you."


I could not get a clear screenshot of any of this, but there is a sustained sequence involving burning bodies and fires within a city. My guess is that it shows the horrors of a deliberate strike and the breakdown in social order. But I don't know if this is a passive or active statement. Food for thought.



This is another complete puzzle. This plane flies, and after it we see stalled boats and driftwood, which seems to signify the arresting of conflict. I don't know if this is a propagandizing gesture or a descriptive one. Is what's within this plane a metaphor? Is it an actual, named weapon? Is the word an acronym or a representation of something else?




This shot is a very poor one, but I'm having trouble getting my fingers to hit the keys at the same time I'd like. What I was trying to get is the people going by in gas masks. Again, I don't know what that signifies. My quick guess would be "Fallout Protection." Going off my earlier guesses, if this animation sequence is immediately post-war, that means that the Soviet Union did not then possess nuclear capabilities. They didn't get those until the Cambridge Five brought them the necessary scientific shortcuts in the later 1940s. If my dating suppositions are accurate, then it would make this video the product of an era of total and extreme paranaoia. It would make sense that they'd broadcast to the world both nuclear horrors and how those horrors could be turned back on the aggressor: how the seeds he'd planted with his bombs could taint the soil and grow into death and malignance for himself as well, how ripe the death could be for everyone who tilled that murderous field. How crappy poetry he could write if he were drunk. Sorry for writing all dramatic like this. Gross.


Here's where the warning stops being implicit and starts getting explicit. But I don't think this amounts to any such thing as a declaration of war. Although, I'm not naive. It just as well could be. However, as I've said, the dating of the video seems to be from a very praranoid time, so you can see this violence as retributive. If there is an atomic age that the USSR isn't part of, you can see them conceptualizing nuclear violence as something that beats back and bloodies its user just as hard and just as well. I don't know. I feel like I'm almost arguing against myself and better judgment at this point.



And here's where I'm starting to freak the fuck out looking at it. Because you can see the spread of this "CNOPbl" element cast across the North American continent and rise up into this Death's Head. Obviously, it's easy to incorporate this in my earlier thesis: this is the Soviet fright manifesting as a cautionary tale for the Americans. "Use this," it says, "and the death you bring is death across your own territory too. It doesn't get localized. Nuclear terror is global. Even for the user." On the other hand, there's something not at all "friendly warning" about skulls skipping across a continent and getting huge until they blot out the screen.

I feel like I started out wanting to believe one thing about this film and now almost want to believe the exact opposite. My problem is that I still think the dating of the film is on-target. If that's the case, it just makes it more confusing and difficult to deal with. If this is a pre-nuclear Soviet film, the threats it makes are all threats WE created. If it's post-nuclear (and I don't think it is), then the threats are clear. And it's an aggressive and confident document from early in their nuclear career. If it's not nuclear and not passive, it's just a bizarre anomaly that's hard to reconcile.

I have to quit now because I'm just drunk enough to be starting to write really crappy prose-poetry, tilling that field of sounding really sappy. And I need the rest of that Jamey.

Thanks again, EC.

Also, Boston College sucks completely and couldn't even come close to the spread. Assholes.

(I'll add links in the morning.)

(Hell, who am I kidding? I'll add links in the afternoon.)

(Links added — 12/7 8:09 p.m.)

finally got more footage up

(not just talking about the footage in my pants)

okay guys, i have had a HELL of a saturday...all according to the gf's evil plans to steal all my weekends from me forever...and i am uploading this thing and sprinting for a bar

i wish this sucker answered more questions than it makes me ask...but it sucks that it doesnt. that film is really looking bad. there are bits that seem like theyre gonna break off at any second, so i tried to film a bit that looked like it was going to be pretty good...there were a lot of false starts in there. i figured you didnt want to hear me yelling at shit breaking or watch clips that were 11 seconds long. this is the best stretch

theres a lot of that Higgins guy again

we open with the spruce moose, then a lake i think...

about 25 secs in theres a FUCKING COOL scene with a rat

CNOPBLI! its what plants crave...a ton of people on fire...BAPNN -- you get it from planes

some dude gets OWNED with a flagpole in the FACE after getting seriously fucked up by someone

get this though...its a SOVIET flag...and the flag dude has a GAS MASK

after that the CNOPBLI spreads across america like death...VERY creepy

i hope this is enough for you guys to sink your teeth into because getting any kind of long clips off this reel is going to be hard...its just falling apart depending on where we are on it, and i cant sit and refeed it forever to try to get it going again. tell me you guys can get stuff out of this much because im not sure how much more i can get out of the reel without fucking up something really cool that we might not get to see again...also, i do you think im off base not taking this in somewhere? do you have a guess if its valuable??

Jigsaw Post #2: I think it's teddible you are not taking me vetty seriously

Now that we got the less critical analysis out of the way, it's time to look at this a little seriously. You know, use the brain device thing to do brainwork. I said I'd actually THINK about this stuff, and I will keep my word. Word is bond. Straight up. You feel me? Also, big ups to Biggie. Love you, dawg.

Something Max said in the comments on Post #1 got me thinking. He asked,

have you considered whether this could be anti-nuke propaganda? if the dates are as right as you think they are, then that would put the film in a period where the russians didn't have nukes, so this might be their attack on them to discourage other nations from using them or condoning them.

He raises some good points. Combined with G.'s comment that, "Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment," I spent a while thinking about this guy before I made my other post.

Here's what I think the problem is: he looks too bourgeois.

Look at that picture. Three-piece suit. Desk blotter. Pen set. Nicely wood-paneled room. Maybe some sort of exotic bird in a cage next to him.

The entire thing sets off alarm bells with me that this guy is not an engineer, and he's not a proletarian. He seems un-Soviet.

If you think about most of the videos we wind up looking at, you usually see some dude in a jumpsuit or a white coat. Something that really brings out the SCIENCE+WORKERS! element of the Soviet Union. Either that or you get some jowly commissar with a bad haircut and bags under his eyes. By comparison, this guy looks like he lives in some nice digs. He almost seems like a banker. Maybe even a British banker. Like any second he's going to get a teacup and saucer and say "oooh, lovely!" and then say

Oh, by the way, I can't believe I forgot about this; I really would lose my head if it weren't attached to my neck! I'm so bloody forgetful. But, the thing is, and this is really quite a tedious point to make, chaps, but the thing is there's this new bomb that can obliterate life on earth. Cheerio! Toodle pip!

THAT'S what makes me think Max might be onto something here. What better way to send a message to democratic governments than with someone FROM there? He can talk to us because he looks like us. If you think about it in those terms, he looks more like a professor than a banker, so maybe he can tell us about the GRAVE THREAT of nuclear weapons.

You know who he really reminds me of? The English guy from the reanimation of animals video that EC linked way back in this post. You know, this dude:

I'm too lazy to go back and read when they did that video, but I remember he was a British scientist who got discredited because people thought that the USSR was using him as a mouthpiece to front for propaganda. The thing was, a lot of the stuff he was talking about WAS real, but it just seemed a little fishy that here was this guy who was just perfectly willing to shill for Soviet science. Maybe it's a loose connection, but if years before or years later or whenever it happened the Soviets were willing to go looking for a westerner to talk to a western audience, maybe that's an idea they would have had before or gone back to after. Does that make sense?

I'm not saying I have any real reason to go with this idea, but this is just what I came up with. Like GFK, something about this guy was just bothering me in my gut, and I couldn't tell what it was. This explanation quiets my gut down, and it would make sense given the dates this is probably from.


EDIT:
Somethings's gone really wrong with blogger all of a sudden. Arrrrggghghghghghghg fuck blogger!

My first post from today - which was AWESOME - for some reason is totally fucking up our blog's main page and making it not load. I figured out it was that post, but I don't want to delete it because maybe someone at blogger can fix it.

We can get around it for now though by making every post its OWN PAGE. I know it's sort of a headache to have to click if you want to go back and read GFK's post or something, but it's better than not being able to see it at all.

Scrimshaw Post #1: Mutual ASSured Destruction, Prying Open the Truth and Cracking The Code

NOTE: I rewrote this late last night when the kid woke me up. It's sort of like the post Blogger - FUCK BLOGGER - deleted. I had a shell of it in a Word doc but had to rewrite a bunch anyway. Whatever. If you guy's think it's dumb to have it follow the serious post I technically wrote after writing this, go ahead and backdate it. I don't care.
- LS, 12/6/08


GFK has done a wonderful job of breaking this film EC found wide open and probing inside, but anyone who thinks that's where all this ends is fooling himself. After plunging off an intellectual waterfall, skiing slopes of meandering thought and snaking dynamically through the subterranean text waiting to be mined, indeed, it's time to admit: we walk from here.

What my man G. cannot tell you is critical and vital to understanding this video, and what he can't tell you is very simple. Who the fuck is El Baldo of the Professor Institute of Knowing Things?


Thankfully, I can, b/c I hold advanced degrees in Awesomeness, a Bachelors in Being Rad and a minor in Doing It With Ladies. The man in the picture is none other than Galactic Rear Admiral Chester F. Buttocks, and he's not even a man at all b/c he is 10 million times older than the Earth itself, if you're one of those people who believes in the literal word of bible (which he wrote, to troll everybody).

Over five billion years ago, after losing an apocalyptic battle of fission thumb-war with Superman - who's actually a massive DICK - the Admiral was exiled as punishment. Superman dispatched him to the outer boundaries of the new galaxy that had come into existence after the Admiral had punched him so hard in the stomach that his anus dilated like it was trying to say "Whuh-oooooooooo-OOOOOOOwwwwww" and Superman literally sharted out the new creation - much of which never changed form at all and later became Texas.

After failing to wrest control of the oblong brown prisoner transport vessel he was locked in, the admiral instead fled via escape pod after overwhelming the security forces controlled by Aquaman - proving once again that Aquaman isn't worth a tenth shit-all of FUCK outside of the water. Also, the escape pod looked a lot like like a bomb being carried by a balloon. The bomb was later worshipped as a godhead in part of a cargo cult in the year Andre 3000.


Superman's forces opted not to fire on the escape pod even after it was jettisoned, b/c sensors indicated no life forms were aboard. This is because the Admiral had changed physical form to that of an ambient gas to evade detection - like one of the angry gods of a foreign world in Star Trek. Or a vampire. Later, some of Superman's stormtroopers examining the landing area on the ground would find clues that were inconclusive.

"Look, sir! Admirals!" said one to his supervisor, while holding up a navy cap with gold-thread "scrambled eggs" on the brim.

"You're a goddam idiot," said the other. "That's just a fucking hat."

Superman's forces combed the earth, trying to track down the escaped Admiral, flying crisscrossing search patterns in airplanes that looked remarkably like Spruce Gooses. Each craft was capable of carrying 200 passengers from New York's Idlewild Airport to the Belgian Congo in 17 minutes, but almost all of them crashed due to crewmen knocking over their own jars of urine on the instrument panels and causing the craft to plummet and then augur hundreds of feet into the ground - which, if you weren't dead, you could look to the left side of the aircraft and see out the window. But you were, so fuck you.


Special note: Wonder Woman coulda totally helped out with the search party, but she didn't. Why? Because Wonder Woman is a stone bitch. The other reason is because her plane's all invisible or whatever, you can look up in the sky when she's passing over and notice what a fat fucking ass she's got now that she's all old and shit. Girl's ass so big, they call the strap of her thong the International Ain't Gettin No Date Line. Seriously, Superman told her she had to stop flying in front of the sun b/c her assclipses were scaring the shit out of all the Maya. Bitch fat, that's all I'm sayin.

Anyway, Superman eventually gave up and fucked off b/c he wanted to investigate whether somewhere in the galaxy there was a Planet of Impressionable Gay Boys Who Looked Tense and Could Use a Massage. The Admiral was left to wander the entirety of the earth in solitude for billions of years. After one billion, he settled on a static visage of himself as some kind of grayhaired suit-wearing version of Higgins from "Magnum, P.I." Either that or one of those dads from the 80s tv shows about white dudes adopting young telegenic black kids. I don't know which one. I don't have a degree in Looking Up This Gay Bullshit. You know what I do have, though? I have a doctorate in Eat Me, Look It Up Your Damn Self.

For a while, he wrote a series of totally incredible romance novels and, ashamed that they weren't his best effort, buried them for millions of years in a ditch in England, where they were eventually found and published under the name Barbara Cartland. After people were invented, he'd randomly leap into their bodies and try to help them with the aid of an invisible cigar-smoking former child actor. But the Admiral could never leap home and died. He died 1,478 times actually, regenerating every single time. Why? Stick-to-it-iveness. Also, heart.

Sometimes he'd pretend to be a god just to see if he could get a couple million people to kill a couple other million people over invisible bullshit. He would never have done this if he could have gotten drunk while watching television. Once, he got so bored waiting for Philo Farnsworth to show up and invent TV that he just invented it anyway, but it turned out it was useless b/c nothing was on. He thought about inventing Lucille Ball to have something to watch, but he knew with a flash of incredible perception and prescience that Lucille Ball would be an annoying overrated harpy that no one born after 1970 would ever sincerely like but would profess was a genius anyway b/c that's what a bunch of assholes always said.

Then he decided to invent the hot ladies from "Bewitched" and "I Dream of Jeannie," and they spent ten straight years having totally hot unnatural sex. Why unnatural? Because one was a witch, the other a genie, and the other a billion-year-old goddammed immortal gas being vampire god who shart-punched superman. That's just how they do. They'll do whatever the fuck they want. I don't slap the dick out of your mouth and tell you how to do your job, so you just listen to the goddam story and stop being all snippy about why this and why that. Bitch.

Sometime in the 1940s, after spending years carving a mile-wide glacial frieze of a veiny and erect uncircumcised penis to impress Jodie Foster, the United States' atomic tests roused the Admiral from his languor. Fearing the vengeance and return of his SuperNemesis, the Admiral captured the world's leaders and imprisoned them in back braces intended to prevent scoliosis and made them watch a color broadcast of his warning to the globe.


In it, he showed off the totally badass desk he'd stolen from an old person who smelled like powder and death and on it displayed the special white mask he wore to protect himself from the haunted vapors that could be projected out of his ass. The mask rested on a canopic jar. It contained the brain, nose and ilium of Austrian empress Maria Theresa. For luck. The Admiral demanded the world cease all nuclear research and production or else be leveled by his stunning flatulence.

Undeterred, American general Carl "Tooey" Spazz ignored the threat and made more nukes. The Admiral made a face like Magnum had forgotten to let Robin Masters' dogs out. That was it. Fuck you if you thought he was just going to stick around and wait for that George-Lucas-hair-having twink bitch Superman to tie him to some half-cylinder justice dome and cram a fat man suppository up his little boy and blow him up forever. Fuck that.


Both sides in the Cold War thought they could dress everyone up in gas masks like a Wilfred Owen poem on acid and ride out the coming apocalypse in trenches, but they were wrong. the Admiral "called down the thunder" and "dropped the bomb."


It was over. The blast killed Superman. This is what happened to his face:


The Admiral was fine b/c he was dressed like a ghost. Only Americans survived b/c they led the world in being fatties and cutting ones. The rest of the world is just an illusion maintained by the Admiral to give them busy work.


Later the admiral returned to his self-imposed exile, fleeing to his White Castle of Fear in the Colorado mountains in a vintage WWII T-34 tank that he'd generated by re-arranging matter around him with the power of his mind. There he lives in seclusion and sleeps in a speedboat with a dog that can mix drinks and use a toilet.

Jigsaw Post #1

I couldn't think of a good post title, so I just went with the name of the puzzles that annoyed the bejesus out of me as a child. Since we're basically trying to piece together just what the hell EC found, it seems appropriate.

First up, I don't have a Russian dictionary/Cyrillic type pack installed on this computer, so can anyone translate this? The same goes for the text that opens the film. I have a feeling both could be of enormous help.

I have an overall impression of the film, but I want to get there after making note of a few things.


DETAILS:
1. This looks to be fairly standard WWII-era tank; the profile looks pretty much like a T-34, so going off the other cues/clues from the film, let's just assume it's that.



2. This scene shows a soldier running down a trench. Also, all the soldiers seem to be wearing gas masks. While there was significant entrenchment in Stalingrad and the siege of Leningrad, these images really seem like throwbacks to WWI — especially since they're combined. On their own, they don't signify much, but together they seem like artistic choices deliberately meant to evoke a memory of Great War-style warfare.



3. That said, while the first two pictures ground us in WWI and the early years of WWII at the latest, this image establishes that this video can't pre-date 1945.



4. The presence of the balloon, though, makes me reluctant to date this much later. And this is a significant reach on my part, so feel free to call me on it. The thing looks like it's delivering a bomb payload, but why? Balloons are incredibly unreliable, and the bomb could wind up anywhere. No country is going to go to the balloon (pardon the totally inappropriate metaphor) well if they have access to supersonic jets; the value you get out of a balloon is so much less than a jet delivery of a bomb. So that makes me want to date this no earlier than 1945 but no later than 1948 — 1949 at the latest.



5. This actually looks like a souped-up B-29 or an end-of-war prototype for a super-fortress style bomber. Actually, what it really reminds me of is the Spruce Goose, only with four fewer engines. The important distinction here is that it's very reminiscent of American bomber designs. That's actually helpful, because it only helps further anchor this film in the immediate post-war period. If you'll recall, both Lend-Lease and our open allied partnership with the USSR from 1941-1945 saw American arms shipped to the Soviet Union en masse. There was no shortage of Douglas and Lockheed aircraft in the Soviet Air Force and Army support, so it would make sense for Russian artists to go with what they knew. What they knew was a lot of American designs. It would make sense to date this video in a period before the two Air Forces significantly diverged.



6. I literally have no idea what this guy is doing, but I've been watching a lot of Pushing Daisies lately, so every time I watched this video (which was about a round ten, trying to figure it out), I thought, "Meanwhile, The Piemaker...." So that's who this guy is: The Piemaker.


SUMMARY:
As I've said, I don't see any reason to date this later than 1949 at the very latest, and because of the balloon technology and absence of jets, I really want to date this film to 1945-6. Remember the old adage: generals always fight the last war. Consumed with the desire to correct the mistakes they made last time, they make mistakes by ignoring the new details of this time. Artists make the same mistakes. They always have difficulty envisioning the next conflict (the few who don't are the real geniuses), and because of that they tend to describe what they just saw. The presence of WWI-era gas masks and trenches and WWII-era tanks and propeller planes date this as the product of the Second World War or its immediate aftermath. The presence of an atomic mushroom cloud gives us a hard date of 1945 at the earliest.


SPECULATION:
I have no idea what this video is for, just yet. Anything I say would be wildly off-base and just what I want to hear. Right now, though, the only supposition I feel comfortable with is that this is either:

a. A recap of WWII, in instructional form, maybe meant for the civilian populace's education/entertainment.

b. An immediate post-war video meant to show the Soviet Union's continued mobilization for war and readiness for national defense.

Of course, a lot of that speculation hinges on what this guy is here for:

Right now, I don't know. Something about him doesn't sit right with me at the moment.

Either way, that's my speech. What do you guys think?

pink floyd goes to war all fucked up in russia

ok, so heres the motherbitch...i cant believe it took me this long to get it up (all up in your blog).

i dont even know what to tell you about this. its like watching The Wall high as shit, only its not The Wall, and ive never seen it before, and its actually kind of fucking scary if youre in an empty office with the projector going clickclackclickclack over and over alone



i KNOW what you guys are going to bitch about though, so let me get this off my chest RIGHT NOW. i threaded the film in the projector and started going and realized id left my camera downstairs with the gf.

so i have NO idea how far into the strip we came in

i was running around downstairs trying to find her...i found her on the back porch, but she said shed left the camera in her bigass purse by the couch...so i had to find that. that was a HUGE help considering her purse is BIGGER THAN GOD...i spent another minute just throwing away wads of tampons and an old EXTRA CELL PHONE before i got the camera that i guess she managed to cram at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE BAG. i got it and went upstairs and fired it up and started recording

trouble is, this film is OLD. i got about a minute recorded before it broke...do NOT get on my case for this. i had no idea...i thought i had the camera with me at the time...and i really didnt sweat missing a few seconds because i thought theyd be all credits

fire away...its late and i need sleeeeeeeep

UPDATE: i added 2 stills i snapped with my point and shoot....the embedded video quality blows...

happy thanksgiving, this is fucked up

not sure i had the best holiday, hope your guys' was better

its nice to see family and get together with them, but this one was a mother...kids, dogs, parents everywhere. i dont know all the little kids names, and i dont know all the dogs names, so i couldnt tell who was yelling at who. i think there might have been a dog and a kid with the same name, because otherwise there was a dog with shitty table manners or a kid who wouldnt get off a rug

i tried setting up the projector in an office and getting a quiet 5 minutes but FUCK THAT, that wasnt happening...the door kept flying open and whiting out the movie, and i had to chase 2 or 3 cousins out every time i turned around. plus you could hear these kids screaming and bashing shit over the sound of the PROJECTOR. andy was a trooper and tried to quiet everybody down for a quick 5...no luck

i tried conning andy into letting me have the projector and going home with it, but he said the fam that was staying with him wanted to watch old reels together and shit...so it had to stay with him. it meant i had to stick around until all the kids were put down for the night and everyone else left...which meant i was stuck hanging around during CLEAN UP, meaning i had to help scrub about a billion dishes and wipe up the kids table and sweep their area and all that bullshit. i mean, i didn't HAVE to...but if youre gonna be there and asking for a favor, you cant sit around just reading a magazine waiting for everyone else to stop working so you can goof off...unless youre my gf. tyvm for all the help, lazy broad

i FINALLY got to shoot the film upstairs waaay late, and believe me when i tell you this shit is FUCKED UP. i dont know if its some kind of goof or serious propaganda or what, but it looks cool as shit, really wanna upload it.......

except i left my firewire cable at work

i got home and realized i cant upload from my camera, so ive been sitting on this vid since thurs night just waiting to get to work and show you guys this shit. its AMAZING. i googled a bunch of stuff and jumped around youtube and couldnt find anything like it, so i hope this is something new

as a matter of fact, i got SO excited, i got to work and realized i left my camera AT HOME

fuck fuck shittity fuck shit fuck rihkerwghp98h3jgksdbnkdshgu34hdskjbsdkfbjlsoipwg

so this shit doesnt happen to me again only in reverse, i already crammed the firewire cable in my bag and took my bag out to my car, so even if i forget EVERYTHING ELSE, at least ill be going home with it. hopefully ill upload it tonight. you guys are going to love this