\nThunderbirds and Johnny Quest and SeaLab 2020 all that stuff ‘00s Adult Swim were parodying were totally a fantasy of the WWII-Korea US military as childhood family, weren’t they
fuck, so was Star Trek.
(which means TAS:SeaLab 2020::TNG:SeaQuest DSV, doesn’t it?)
This reminds me of something I think about often but should say at length:
People know that the twist of Stepford Wives is the women are being replaced with robots.
They miss the significance of one further twist, which is that the Men\u2019s Association, despite its historic mansion headquarters, was only established after WWII
That its founders aren\u2019t members of leading local families, they\u2019re masters of the new postwar fields like public relations, the robotics directly invoke Disney animatronics and the famous \u201cImagineers\u201d
The whole point of the story is that the midcentury \u201chappy homemaker\u201d suburban patriarchy ISN\u2019T a continuation of age-old small town-tradition, it was deliberately created postwar by men drawing on the cameraderie, scientific and organizational expertise that came out of WWII
Like, the single most important fact about mid-20th century American society was that every adult man had the experience of working together in a designated role in the total war mobilization, winning, and seeing their quality of life increase radically as a result
That\u2019s big business leadership going from the hereditary owners\u2019 hands to a executive class modeled on the officer class arranged in organizations and following procedures directly lifted from military staff
That\u2019s all the cameraderie, all the operation as collectives, both the \u201cman in the grey flannel suit\u201d and non-revolutionary labor unions
That\u2019s why the Korean War had to be swept under the rug as fitting awkwardly with the narrative and a story of astronaut-heroes puffed up instead
That\u2019s why the Vietnam War fucked every part of American society up so much, the invincible military the entire country was modeled on was confronted with a challenge it couldn\u2019t conquer
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