Things are getting bad when Elmo’s dad is going to war eh? Well, not really. Apparently, Elmo will be used in a DVD, and handed out for free, showing how Elmo deals with its [is it a she or a he? or just an it?] father heading off to war and how things are different when he comes back. The DVD will feature real families in addition to the Elmo family, so it won’t be a full Muppet cast.
The BBC News article points out that some 500,000 children up to the age of five have at least one parent in the service. Isn’t that bad for families? You know, the whole rearing a child on your own thing, isn’t that a no-no? That whole war on Murphy Brown and all. Breaking up families, an effect of the war that isn’t seen as often, it’s a behind the scenes thing, something I’ve never had to experience [but my family did back in Korea].
I recall people [Dick Cheney, cough, cough] getting deferments for constantly knocking up their wives. Cheney got deferred five times! And was famously quoted as saying “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” in a WaPo interview. Ugh
The DVD will be in English and, gasp, Spanish! I wonder if Joey Vento [the guy from Geno’s Steaks who got into a shitload of national attention from his english-only ordering policy] will throw a shit fit over this and start hurling ‘steaks at his TV. Wait, he probably doesn’t watch public access. He’d probably rather let the families that speak Spanish suffer without the aid of a cheery Spanish language Elmo. I wonder if they have a, gasp, Spanish language version of the national anthem on there as well. Perhaps Dubya himself will make a cameo spitting some of his nifty Spanglish confusing all viewers into thinking they have the incorrect audio track playing.
One weird thing from the end of the article:
“Other kids in school will say, ‘My daddy is away killing bad guys.’ This prepares the mom or dad to prepare the kids with better things to say.”
The cynic in me immediately jumped to the conclusion that there would be some sort of propoganda spewing from Elmo’s mouth into the heads of the impressionable children with parents in service. What will those kids be told to say? “My mom/dad is helping to curb the insurgency of jihadists set to destroy our American way of life”? What “proper” things will Elmo be teaching the children to say at the playground about their parent[s]?
And if there are any The State fans out there, remember that skit where they eat Muppets? Hilarious. “I didn’t know you could eat Muppet!”