Blah blah Avatar, 3D sucks blue cat people DAE no cultural impact?? Can you remember any character names??
but seriously it was bold as fuck for someone like James Cameron to make something so blatantly anti-US-military at a time when literally the entirety of Hollywood was united in jerking off American imperialism. It was not the least bit subtle and that makes it all the more impressive that Cameron was able to make a pointed takedown of Iraq-era militarism on such a scale.
RLM pretty wisely keeps political topics out of their videos (unless you include their analyses of Hollywood rainbow washing), but occasionally something like this slips through and reveals that there are a lot of politically charged "non-political" things Americans are taught to believe.
RLM got pretty bad in one of the later Plinkett Star Wars reviews. Mike was pontificating about "forced diversity" without using that term exactly and his argument boiled down to something like: "This is a movie for kids, and when I was a kid, me and my friends never noticed or talked about race."
They just don't get it
The thing is, they constantly mention in their videos that they resent being dismissed as "flyover" midwesterners by coastal elites. Fine, I understand that lib stereotype of middle America isn't helping things. Yet from time to time the RLM crew does reveal they do hold some backwards or questionable views
I don't think they try to be reactionary. Politics isn't a big part of their content. They're certainly not ideologues or part of the right wing grifter media sphere, and I don't think people should go after them
But do think twice before recommending their videos. Wouldn't recommend anyone Asian watch the video where Rich, upon seeing Leo Fong, laughs and bellows out, "Why's his face so flat?" and a big "racist" label ironically pops up
The absolute worst Mike take is in last year's Picard Plinkett review, where he discusses sexuality in the context of how the show gave a female love interest to an established Star Trek character who had been previously portrayed as having exclusively hetero relationships (duh, it was the 90s) and goes full on "let's not get so open-minded we start fucking children"
Ironically I actually think Rich has come off pretty good on race and gender stuff lately despite his previous edgelord tendencies. He's visibly uncomfortable with misogyny and sexual violence and often jokingly worries whether a tape they watch is going to turn into insane right-wing propaganda
Didn't Jack and a few others end up separating a bit from RLM to be a bit more openly leftist on other platforms?
Not really. Jack, like Josh and Tim, has never been an employee at RLM- they're just friends and appear whenever they can. I do get a sense that Jack wasn't entirely happy that Previously Recorded, his video game review show/Twitch channel he hosted with Rich ended (from what I understand mostly due to Rich getting burned out on live streaming) and that he wanted to do more in the video game/content creation space (he's just a guest on RLM, they're not his shows) which is why he ended up at The Escapist. His lessened appearances as of late can probably be chalked up to coronavirus + him being busy with Escapist stuff.
He is more politically vocal on Twitter than any of the others in the RLM crew though, which is why RLM's chuddier fans regularly get mad at him for things he says about nerd culture war hot button issues.
Also, a funny sidenote regarding The Escapist and leftist content- around the time GamerGate happened, the site's old shitty management put all their eggs in what would become the alt-right basket and went full pro-GamerGate. In fact, on the Escapist forums the site's owner (who I believe went on to work for Peter Thiel or something) would tell users to read up on cultural marxism and white replacement.
The editorial staff and talents were left-leaning liberals though but the aforementioned shitty management's awful treatment of anyone that wasn't Yahtzee Croshaw had caused them to hemorrhage most of them (including Jim Sterling) so the owners decided to go mask off and hoped to capitalize on the burgeoning fascist-curious nerd market. It didn't pay off, and after a number of years circling the drain solely sustained by Zero Punctuation, the site was bought out by some of the old staff who used to work on it and they hired new talents including Jack Packard. (They also hired back Moviebob but he was let go in less than a year :michael-laugh: )
To be fair though, The Escapist is and has always been pretty much the Zero Punctuation channel- if you look at their Youtube views, ZP gets hundreds of thousands or the occasional over a million views per episode while everything else is lucky to break 10,000
I have never seen a guy on the net who was more openly self destructive than moviebob. Guy needs a thread in The dunk tank and I shall be the one to do it one of these days
Mike is mostly apolitical but sometimes it does very much slip through that he grew up in a straight up old timey racist household (seriously his parents are / were like actual white nationalists)
Flyover country is so real and whining about being treated as an empty cultural backwater when you live in an empty cultural backwater that has been utterly devastated and hollowed out by neoliberalism is extremely provincial and cringe. The Midwest sucks, and it's few bright spots just reinforce how shitty everything else there is, and if you think that's somehow unfair you're pathetic.
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This was shortly after the Avatar review so it's also a decade ago, but I remember an early Half in the Bag where Mike and Jay make fun of George Lucas for talking about how hard it was for him to get Red Tails, a WWII movie starring black people, made. They essentially called him a liar covering for his movie sucking, pointing to movies like Blade existing and accused him of sowing racial tension or something
I remember that, it's like every five years we get a "black guy movie" and that convinces everyone that there isn't racial discrimination in Hollywood. That said, Red Tails really sucked.
Oh, it definitely did. It's just annoying that they sometimes cannot hold two ideas in their heads simultaneously, like "Red Tails sucks" and "Hollywood doesn't want to greenlight movies starring black actors"
or "Sony is milking the angry chud reaction to Ghostbusters 2016" and "There are actually a lot of chuds disproportionately mad about this shitty movie"