Boomtown

This short by Bill Plympton was included on the PLIMPTOONS DVD. This 60 minute set of early Bill Plympton shorts is a must-see for animation freaks, but since it's not his latest stuff, such wonderful shorts as GUIDE DOG and PARKING aren't included. Most of the shorts are "fall on the floor laughing" funny and only a crabby old curmudgeon couldn't enjoy these films! This film is one of Plympton's earlier films and you can see that he still hasn't hit his stride or developed his signature style. Though it is well made, it lacks the lovely drawings we'd usually expect from one of his cartoons. Plus, while it makes a good point about the military-industrial complex, it comes off as preachy and a tad overly-idealistic.

The film is a short narrated by "the Android Sisters"--two cool robots who talk and sing in synchronization much like Huey, Dewey and Louie. They sing about how great defense spending is and how much we hate the Russians and it seems that Plympton and the writer of the short, Jules Feiffer are trying to send us a message that this sort of thinking is evil. Despite not agreeing with the message since it overly simplified the struggle between the two super-powers, it was very well made and you really can't hate the film since it's so clever and engaging.

This reminded me of the late '60s when we Left Wing college students would hear all this anti-military propaganda, and just eat it up.

"Defense" was a bad, bad word, so "defense spending" - the topic of this six-minute piece - is bad, too. Apparently, it was still bad to my old Liberal friends when Bill Plympton did this tongue-in-cheek diatribe against Ronald Reagan's administration, which was spending more on defense than his predecessor.

Of course, we know how things turned out in that regard three/four years later.....the opposite of what our foresighted cartoonist was implying here, but, hey, it always sounds like a good message.