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Buzzfeed reports:
Early in the 2016 primary race, comedy screenwriter Etan Cohen began to notice some similarities between the Republican candidate, mendacious former reality star Donald Trump, and Cohen’s 2006 movie Idiocracy, which features fictional wrestling champ-turned-president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews). Ever since, those similarities have only grown, leading to Cohen and Mike Judge, who wrote and also directed Idiocracy, now working on a series of anti-Trump ads with Crews reprising his role.
The 2006 satire shows a semi-distant future in which the world has been overrun by dummies and, as a result, is falling apart. At first, the parallels to the real primary race were “just a general lizard brain kind of thing: The presidency is all about entertainment value,” Cohen, who also directed and wrote the 2015 comedy Get Hard and co-wrote the 2008 hit comedy Tropic Thunder, told BuzzFeed News over the phone. “Then it started to get, as the year went on, weirdly specific. People pointing out things like, ‘Oh, Camacho was a wrestler and Trump was a wrestler.’ … It’s like, the more things go on, the more it actually seems to be kind of merging in a very specific, eerie way.”…
Throughout the process, Cohen and Judge have struggled to satirize Trump because he is already so outrageous. “If you’re making Idiocracy 2, and you’re trying to write whoever’s the heir to Camacho, if you put in Trump, it would be too silly to be in a movie,” Cohen explained.
But they worked through it — Cohen felt a call to action, saying these ads are very important to him. “This is what satire is for … to be able to hold up a mirror and say, ‘This is crazy,’” he said. “Idiocracy was like that, but this all of a sudden felt like a very immediate need for the true meaning of satire and what it can actually do.”…
“The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room,” Cohen continued, noting that he would “definitely” vote for Camacho over Trump. “Also, not a racist.”
I’m actually kinda looking forward to those ads. Will Baby Donald bitch about the totally inaccurate, very biased, very unfair comparisons? Or will he embrace it as another form of celebrity endorsement?
Open Thread: It’s Official – Donald Trump Brings the <em>Idiocracy</em>Post + Comments (268)