difquin

"Casper og Mandrilaftalen" ( - roughly translated into "Casper and the Mandril Agreement") broke new ground when it was broadcast during 1999. Never before had TV satire been so lowbudget, so rough around the edges or so primitive. The writers of the show once described it as "Children's TV for adults" - which gives a good offset for understanding what this thing really is. Some might claim that it is just poor quality humour, others, myself included, think that this show might be the closest we can get to actual surrealistic or dadaistic TV. Most lines, albeit written in a script, seem to come from random impulses and some make no sense at all. But in all the meaninglessness the hilarious element involuntarily arises. The Python crew realised this back in the 70's and with Casper og Mandrilaftalen, the genre was renewed. Maybe that's why John Cleese stopped by in the second season of the show, as both a 'Gunrack of Love' repairman and a Kite enthusiast...

This documentary covers a whole lot of ground. It deals with every historical and contemporary aspect of hemp usage and cultivation (mainly in the U.S.), which turns out to be a lot. From describing the production of a fibre much more durable and economic than wood, the documentary discusses hemps multilateral uses as e.g. food products, as a non-polluting fuel and as a pharmaceutical product with much less griveous sideeffects than chemical pharmaceutical products. The film also investigates why America went from a country which produced vast quantities of the non-narcotic industrial hemp, to the complete ban on hemp production in 1938. This story in particular is interesting, and it points out that the large oilbased industries actually had a key role in the aforementioned ban. Food for thought! The conclusion of the documentary could be that hemp may prove to be a valid alternative to both oil and wood in the future.