Saturday Morning Mind Control
Phillips
1991
Did you know that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a cult? Did you know that the Care Bears are about non Christian attitudes and beliefs? Brace yourselves! Saturday morning TV is full of evil and it is brainwashing your kids! The back cover details how these innocent looking cartoons have a much more evil agenda.
I will tell you that one of my favorite cartoons as a kid was Casper, the friendly ghost. I was shocked to learn that this was preparing me for a life in the occult and that my life has been a waste. Excuse me while I go and reprogram myself with episodes of Scandal.
Mary
And for everyone who wants to say, “No one would believe this baloney!” I have to say that yes, yes they will. I loved watching the Smurfs, He-Man, and Casper when I was little, but once my mom got a hold of this book and others like it, those shows were off-limits. Fortunately with the advent of Netflix and other streaming programs, I can catch up on my childhood. 🙂
So, in a nutshell, everything your kids like is evil, because we have waaaaay too much free time and spend it reading sinister motives into banal things.
Plus, even if it was all true, the book is horribly out of date. (Do Saturday morning cartoons even really still exist?)
Last Saturday was the final death blow: http://gizmodo.com/saturday-morning-cartoons-arent-dead-theyre-everywhere-1642859147
Wow, this guy must be a pleasure to talk to about anything related to popular culture. I imagine the only people who would enjoy this book would be the few hardcore religious types who share the same philosophy that you start with the premise that everything is “bad” by default and work backwards from there.
The best part is that “Phillips has studied over a thousand hours of cartoons.”
Yep, I remember Phil Phillips. Sadly his stuff did circulate at our church (along with scare tactic theologian Hal Lindsey and quite a few Chick Tracts) and I got a few lectures about The Real Ghostbusters and He-Man…although in my parents’ defense they thought I watched too much tv in general.
Seanbaby wrote up a pretty fantastic article recently about this book and a handful of others (including good ol’ Doris & Graci): http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-deranged-authors-who-wrote-same-book-over-over/ – Phillips’ reasoning behind hating Rainbow Brite might be the single most depressing thing I’ve ever read.
Sarah, thanks for the Cracked.com link — what a hoot! But their cultural illiteracy is so agonizing. As for Phil Phillips — reminds me that the censors have to read/view/listen to what they consider nasty so they will know it’s bad for the rest of us. Ergo they have all the fun.
Wow, that’s a thousand hours well spent, Phil Phillips!
I just recently got a request for a book on the occult dangers of Dungeons and Dragons. She was somewhat taken aback when I said that I had played it in the past, and it was really just storytelling with dice.
That’s actually not a bad definition of RPGs. Well, depending on the system and the players involved there is also a creative interpretation of rules. 😉
There were a bunch of books like that in the 80s and early 90s. All I know is, I need this book cover as a poster!
I really want to know why books like this even get published when I’ve heard how difficult it is and how it requires a lot of skill and talent, because I want to be a children’s author and illustrator more than anything and have written loads of stories and drew my own pictures for them and yet it’s like pulling teeth for me to get anything made into a real book.
Speaking as an author, I can say there’s a difference in cases like this. Certain publishing houses specialize in certain types of books. Oliver-Nelson is a religious book publisher, so they’d be apt to accept something like this for their particular audience. There are also obviously certain types of books – children’s books in particular – that are especially competitive for a variety of reasons. It seems the most successful at breaking into children’s books for the first time are famous actors. We can imagine why. Though I haven’t gone down that road myself, if you’re unable to get interest from a traditional publisher, the good news is there are more options than ever for self publishing. That path doesn’t have the same stigma it used to and, assuming that were still your goal, might be one path to getting noticed by a traditional publisher if you have some success with it.
This was a Christian publisher.
That link from Sarah was hysterically funny– especially the Doris Sanford section of the review.
Also, most of my stories glorify magic, fantasy creatures, talking animals, characters who celebrate Halloween and (GASP) non-Christian beliefs, such as creatures who see the Earth itself as their creator and worship nature, or believe in a Fairy Goddess. Horrors, I am going straight to the underworld! 🙂
All I can say is that as I tried to read this aloud to a friend every time I tried to scroll down I got thrown off the internet with an error message. It happened three times. Am occult number if I ever heard one.
Talk about a threat to the future of our nation, here I am, a platinum-haired little ol’ school librarian, raised in a cauldron of evil! Dare you trust your children to me? Bugs Bunny! Top Cat! Pixie and Dixie and Jinx! Underdog! Tom Terrific, Mighty Manfred and Crabby Appleton! Beany and Cecil! Rocky and Bullwinkle! And if those weren’t responsible for my ultimate corruption, our family never failed to watch Three Stooges and Little Rascals. Oh–and we all infiltrated church on Sunday.
Oh, Rocky and Bullwinkle had to be the worst of the worst — they were probably communists as well as [fill in the blank] subverters of our universal Judeo-Christian culture! LOL — what planet were these people from??
There are a number of perfectly sensible reasons to limit what your child watches, why on earth make up ridiculous ones?
I remember finding something like this at a religious relative’s house, warning parents against the dangers of Ouija boards. I was pretty little, so naturally, all I wanted to do was play with the first Ouija board I could find. If anything, these “neopagan” takes on kids’ shows is pretty interesting and kinda just makes me want to get into them again.
I’m pretty sure that Batmobile wasn’t ever used in Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Well, chances are that Batman:TAS or some other Batman cartoon series was in some Saturday Morning Cartoon lineup somewhere.
As ridiculous as this book is, the cover is epic. C’mon, you know the Ninja Turtle most like to brainwash children and establish a new cult has always been Raphael.
Oh god, those all-day Inspector Gadget marathons. What was it, “Super-Spy Saturday”? Is that right?
The original binge-watch! 🙂
What is this mysterious mind control ninja power called “kujucurry”? The only Google results (besides a few references to this very book) are on Indian cuisine.
Probably a crude attempt to transliterate something like Ku ju ku ri.
As Flanders says: ‘Keep sex and violence in the Bible, where they belong’ !
Thanks for putting up the Cracked article also-Sarah!:) Oh man was this guy nuts and people actually believed his spiel! I’ve heard many a story about kids having their toys thrown away and having to watch cartoons at a friend’s house because of this madman. I think I’m most disturbed by his reactions to the Care Bears and in the article Power Rangers and Rainbow Brite. He seemed less angry in those cases with the magic occult themes oddly and more with teaching kids about friendship, kindness, love, agency, improving oneself mentally and physically, and accepting everyone no matter what color a person is or background a person comes from. I don’t know about anyone else but if those are wrong values to teach then I don’t want to be right in the eyes of Phil Phillips and whatever messed up deity he thinks he’s serving.