You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News Read online

  5. PENNY FROM INSPECTOR GADGET

  Legal guardian

  Inspector Gadget, the cyborg that would have resulted if RoboCop’s accident had also made him retarded.

  Where are the parents?

  In the world of classic cartoons, roughly 80 percent of all children are orphans. This is important because it teaches young viewers that someday their parents will mysteriously disappear from their lives for no reason and never be mentioned again. Penny was Gadget’s “niece,” but she looks nothing like him and shares none of his baffling incompetence.

  The horror

  Most episodes open with Gadget warning Penny that the mission he’s about to go on is too dangerous for her (always after he’s disposed of a clearly labeled explosive by carelessly tossing it in his employer’s face). While these warnings might seem responsible to an outsider, Penny knows better. She has to go. If she doesn’t save his ass from whatever malfunctioning machinery happens to spring out of it next, it’s back to the orphanage.

  When Gadget actually invites his niece to come along and match wits with a global terrorist (he does this multiple times), it’s probably the most responsible thing he could do. At least she doesn’t have to figure out a way to pay for airfare and travel to strange lands unaccompanied by a grown-up.

  The gritty reboot of your childhood cartoons, starring a malnourished Dakota Fanning, Howard the Duck, and a real, terrified chipmunk.

  Not that her uncle is an adult in any real sense of the word. Penny probably had to start childproofing their house as soon as she could walk. But he looks like one to outsiders, and for a twelve-year-old girl constantly traveling to foreign countries by herself, kidnappers and perverts must be a constant concern.

  The missions are no picnic. It turns out there’s a reason that real detectives don’t bring their kids along to investigate global terrorists. Penny is kidnapped dozens of times, and on one occasion has to be rescued from a machine designed to crush her to death. By her dog.

  In fact, when you look at everything she goes through to continue living with her defective robot guardian, it becomes pretty clear what a goddamned horror show cartoon orphanages must be. Which is bad news for …

  4. HUEY, DEWEY, AND LOUIE

  Legal guardian

  First their uncle, Donald Duck, then when Donald joins the navy, their great-uncle Scrooge McDuck. Apparently when you’re a duck, even if you’re from the same family, your last name reflects whatever crude ethnic stereotype you represent.

  Where are the parents?

  According to volume 1, number 1, of Walt Disney’s Comics, the boys “hospitalized their father when a prank involving firecrackers went wrong.” Historically speaking, in cartoons explosions are about as effective as laws requiring the wearing of pants. So this was either one massive bitch of an explosion, or the biological parents are just using it as an excuse to get away from their indistinguishable kids. Given the fact that the parents have never sought contact with them again, we’re leaning toward the latter.

  The horror

  After being abandoned, they are left in the care of Uncle Donald, who’s known for having anger-management problems. He in turn hands them off to a moneyed, distant relative four times their age who is generally thought to be an asshole by everyone in his community. So they are abandoned twice over before they even hit puberty.

  The sheer size of Scrooge’s fortune, coupled with the lack of anyone their own age to socialize with, pretty much guarantees that Huey, Dewey, and Louie will grow up to become Duckberg’s version of the Gotti children, a fate that anyone outside of the hair-gel industry can agree is worse than death itself.

  3. THE TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES

  Legal guardian

  Master Splinter, if giant rats who live illegally in the sewers can indeed be considered “legal” anything.

  Where are the parents?

  Once normal turtles, the boys were transmogrified into hideous abominations after marinating in radioactive sludge, which means their parents are most likely still just normal turtles, eating wilted lettuce, scrabbling against glass walls, and humping one another for the amusement of YouTube viewers.

  The horror

  The real villain here is Master Splinter. OK, also Shredder. But Splinter was once a disgraced human ninja, who immigrated to New York City and immediately took up residence in the sewers rather than trying to find housing. Once the turtles arrived and he was changed into a rat, he decided the best course of action was to teach his newly adopted sons to be a noble—if hilariously in-your-face—ninja fighting squad.

  Let’s go over that again the way the people from Child Protective Services would put it: Known soldier of fortune Hamato Yoshi fled to the United States, likely to avoid arrest for one of his many murders. He evaded immigration authorities by living in the sewers, where he raised four young men from infancy. Throughout their upbringing, he kept them largely confined to the sewer system, fed them a steady diet of junk food, and brainwashed them into forming a code-named terrorist gang willing to enact violence on his behalf.

  How Donatello ever learned to “do machines” in this environment remains a mystery.

  2. KIT CLOUDKICKER FROM TALESPIN

  Legal guardian

  Rebecca Cunningham, owner of the Higher for Hire air-delivery business and most attractive bear on television outside of Zach Galifianakis.

  Where are the parents?

  Yep, another orphan. According to the show, Kit was raised by air pirates before meeting Baloo, the jocular drunk who encourages him to get towed behind airplanes while standing on a sheet of metal. If air pirates are anything like their waterborne brethren, Kit’s backstory implies (a) that his parents were murdered in front of him and (b) that he’s been routinely sexually assaulted (the sky, she is a lonely place).

  The horror

  At first blush, Kit seems to have a shot at recovering from his deep emotional scars. He’s been adopted into a nice family, headed by an educated, no-nonsense woman; just the type of sexy bear lady a young tough needs to set some boundaries and turn his life around.

  Unfortunately, he spends most of his time endangering his life with Baloo the flying DUI.

  Also he lives in a town with only one way in or out: a tiny crack in a cliff face constantly being patrolled by the same murderous air pirates that slaughtered his parents. We have to imagine it’s tough to mature into anything resembling a normal adult when your childhood is one long flashback to your parents being murdered and the filthy pirate sex that robbed you of your innocence.

  1. ALVIN, SIMON, AND THEODORE

  Legal guardian

  David Seville, a jingle-writing lifelong bachelor in his thirties, who for some reason lives in a four-bedroom house by himself.

  Where are the parents?

  The show gives no hints, but assuming they’re also talking chipmunks logic dictates that they’re either squashed flat on the interstate somewhere or still in the woods wondering who the hell kidnapped their beloved children.

  The horror

  Dave illegally cares for three children (not his) and forces them to learn complicated song-and-dance numbers for his own profit. When they fail to perform to his impossible standards, he yells, “Alvin!” at them and makes them start over.

  He’s the ultimate weirdo stage dad.

  Dave’s been drinking again.

  Naturally, the chipmunks are kept pantless, forced to clothe themselves in modified burlap sacks. The fact that Alvin, Simon, and Theodore never attempt to escape suggests that the entire show is an exercise in Stockholm syndrome, and the mere existence of the Chipettes implies an organized ring of abusive slave-parents exploiting their children for the good of the vast and powerful novelty-song industry. At least the Powerpuff Girls got superpowers.

  FIVE CONSPIRACIES THAT NEARLY BROUGHT DOWN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

  CONSPIRACY theorists rank alongside Scientologists and urine-soaked hobos as people you should generally not believe: 9/
11 was not an inside job, vitamins don’t cure everything, and that dog cannot read your thoughts. That said, it’s not as if the concept of conspiracy is a purely fictional thing. In fact, there are five little-known conspiracies that manynon-urine-soaked individuals believe nearly brought down the United States of America.

  5. THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION

  Remember when John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan? Imagine how weird it would have been if he actually succeeded and if, instead of being some crazy bastard who’d seen Taxi Driver too many times, he’d been Robert De Niro. That’s the WTF scenario Americans woke up to the morning after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, one of the most famous and respected actors in the country.

  The plot behind the assassination is also far stranger than your textbooks might have let on. They probably told you Booth was just a murderous lunatic with unknown motivations, rather than part of a far-reaching plan to overthrow the entire U.S. government that came terrifyingly close to succeeding.

  Back then, the government was a much less stable system. If modern politics is a game of Jenga in which careful maneuvering is needed to alter even the smallest piece of legislation, then old-timey politics was also like a game of Jenga, except that it wasn’t against the rules to just uppercut the whole damn stack off the table and declare yourself winner for life.

  Unhappy with the outcome of the Civil War, Booth hatched a simple plot: He and his coconspirators would murder the president, vice president, general-in-chief, and secretary of state simultaneously, toppling the U.S. government so the South could rise again. And if they’d pulled it off, no safeguards were yet in place to protect the sanctity of the administration. Historian Jay Winik is of the opinion that even a simultaneous assassination of the president and vice president would have done the trick. Luckily for the United States, murderers aren’t that reliable: most of the assassins chickened out, except Booth and Lewis Powell, who went to Secretary of State William Seward’s home and overdosed on stab crazy, perforating Seward, the Union general guarding him, his nurse, his children, a messenger, and probably any pets that Seward had. However, the joke was ultimately on Powell: Seward survived despite dozens of stab wounds because, as Teddy Roosevelt would later prove, politicians were mostly carved from wood back then, and nothing short of a forest fire could put one down.

  4. THE BURR CONSPIRACY

  Aaron Burr is what is known in the political realm as a “total bastard.” In 1800, he narrowly lost the presidential race to Thomas Jefferson, which he blamed on his political rival Alexander Hamilton and not the aforementioned bastard issue. Due to the somewhat bizarre rules of the era’s politics—more Thunderdome than Primary Colors—coming in second made him the vice president, a position in which he served admirably right up until 1804, when he was informed that Jefferson was essentially firing him for his second term. Burr responded by running for governor of New York, losing, blaming Alexander Hamilton again, and then murdering him in public.

  Some might consider going from being the nation’s third vice president to unemployed murderer a bad year. Instead, Burr decided to embrace the supervillain role he was so clearly born to play. After murdering Hamilton, he set his sights high and began a decade-long plot with the endgame of—ready?—becoming king of the western United States. He began buying up most of Texas from the Spanish government and hiring a modest army of well-armed “farmers” to work it for him. When America went to war with Spain over the western territories, he planned to use his army to seize territory for himself. If you’re thinking Burr was just a lunatic with delusions of grandeur, you should know that he had the commander in chief of the region’s army and a young Andrew “Craps Thunder and Pisses Murder” Jackson on his side. If the Spanish had gotten off their lazy asses to start the Spanish-American War thirty years earlier, Texas very well could have ended up as a monarchy with Burr its first king.

  He was eventually arrested for conspiracy, but, despite the best efforts of Thomas Jefferson, he was never convicted. That’s not altogether surprising since he also got off for Hamilton’s murder despite having shot him in a public duel witnessed by some of Hamilton’s best friends. We weren’t kidding around about the bastard thing.

  3. MR. BUCHANAN’S ADMINISTRATION

  If you think the power-crazed Burr was the highest a conspiracy ever got in the U.S. government, we’d like to introduce you to President Buchanan, who took office with one noble and lofty goal in mind: to deal with the slavery problem once and for all. It’s just too bad his way of “dealing with it” was to legalize it nationwide.

  Buchanan first tried to accomplish this by meddling in the landmark Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which in 1857 set a precedent that all persons of African descent were to be regarded as nonhumans and therefore property. With part A of Operation Worst Goddamn President Ever accomplished, Buchanan moved on to aiding the South in its quest for secession.

  That’s right, the president encouraged secession. While Confederate skirmishes raged on unchecked in the state of Kansas, Buchanan claimed that it was well beyond his ability to interfere in matters of secession—despite the fact that he’d just finished doing it to the Mormons in Utah. Due to his stalling, the Confederate army was able to arm itself with the stolen weaponry that made the Civil War possible. Hey, but at least he kept the Mormons from taking over Utah, right?

  2. OPERATION SNOW WHITE

  Sometime during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided its religion wasn’t getting the respect it deserved. Instead of converting to a slightly less silly set of beliefs, it did what any reasonable alien-god-fearing American would: declared a covert war on the U.S. government.

  The goal was basically to destroy every single sensitive document that made the religion look bad, in hopes that it would help in their prolonged war to become an officially recognized (as in tax-exempt) religion. The incredible scope of the plot came to light when two men were arrested trying to enter the U.S. Courthouse in Washington with fake IRS credentials. One of the men was sent to jail where he refused to talk, while the other, Michael J. Meisner, gave a fake name and disappeared.

  According to Time, a year later Meisner “turned himself in, identified himself … and said he had just escaped from two months of ‘house arrest’ by cult members.” He went on to describe how the church had planted employees in the IRS and Justice Department “for the express purpose of stealing documents concerning investigations of Scientology.” He also said they’d broken into the IRS and planted a bug in a conference room, and stolen mind-boggling amounts of sensitive information. After humoring what they must have assumed was just a crazier-than-average Scientologist, the FBI obtained search warrants, just in case, and conducted a raid on Scientology offices that confirmed every word of Meisner’s account.

  Scientology’s crack commandos had wiretapped and burglarized various agencies and stolen hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. In the end, 136 organizations, agencies, and foreign embassies were infiltrated. According to the Phoenix New Times, Operation Snow White was the largest infiltration of the U.S. government in history. Ever. Of the many thousand hostile governments and criminal organizations that have wanted to get their hands on sensitive U.S. intelligence, the people who actually managed to pull it off also believe that Battlefield Earth is a documentary.

  It’s impossible to say if the church was able to use information pilfered from the IRS toward its intended goal. But it’s certainly strange that it didn’t seem to hurt: In 1993 the IRS, the very organization it had freaking wiretapped less than fifteen years before, gave the Church of Scientology exactly what it was after, granting it recognition as an official religion. Toppling the U.S. government may not have been the stated goal, but of all the conspiracies on this list, Scientologists probably walked away from the ordeal with the most reason to believe that, should it ever become necessary, Washington, D.C., was as easy to take down as Grenada.

  1. THE BUSINESS PLO
T

  Notice how not-fascist America is right now? It’s nice, right? Well, just a few decades ago there was a plan to end this whole democracy thing, and some pretty heavy players were involved.

  In 1933, a group of wealthy businessmen, which allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, and the Du Pont family, and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps major general Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And, yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one U.S. president and was grandfather to another.

  What went wrong? Well, as they say, never trust a man named Smedley to run your hostile military coup. Smedley was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently, none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932.

  Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none were brought up on criminal charges, presumably because the defendants were each independently wealthy enough to hire the Supreme Court as their legal representation. Still, the House’s McCormack-Dickstein Committee deemed the general’s testimony credible, before it was promptly swept under the rug of history (a gorgeous oriental number the people involved in the conspiracy paid for).

  The lesson here? No matter how wealthy you are, you don’t do business with guys named Smedley and you never piss off a man named Dickstein.

  FOUR TICKING TIME BOMBS IN NATURE MORE TERRIFYING (AND LIKELY) THAN THE ONES IN DISASTER MOVIES