Posted 1/27/2007 12:48:00 PM by Douglas

Finally watched Idiocracy this week. My overall reaction to it was pretty close to the writeup on IMDB: It's not finished. The story kind of falls apart and there's enough holes from beginning to end to drive a truck through. What I found HI-Larious were the subtle details that Mike Judge picked to exemplify the overall "dumbing down" of our society. The fact that "smart" people talked "faggy", the ubiquitous advertising, and the "ghetto and valley girl" dialect that is spoken shows that it's not that big of a jump between today's dumb people and 2505's "super-dum" people.

So why did Fox Studios refuse to promote it and let it die at the box office? A theory:

On Labor Day Weekend, the slackest time of the year for movie-going, the Fox Studios dumped the most interesting American comedy of the year in 130 theatres without any advertising whatsoever. Idiocracy was written and directed by the paleoconservative Mike Judge (whom I profiled in VDARE.COM last spring). Judge is the creator of the highly successful television series King of the Hill, Beavis & and Butt-Head, and the cult classic film Office Space. So Fox killing Judge's Idiocracy made little sense on financial grounds.

Idiocracy turned out to be Borat for smart people—profanely funny, but with a much more thought-provoking message. (The DVD is being released in the post-Christmas shopping dead zone on January 9.)

Fox presumably decided to exterminate Idiocracy because its premise was explicitly based on the forbidden dysgenic theory of declining IQ.

I don't know about all that, but it's obvious they made no efforts to see that they got their money back on this one. It's safe to say this one won't achieve the cult status bestowed on Office Space (which didn't make any money 'till it went to DVD, either), but it's a solid Judge film and worth a look.