A Special Planet Blue News Report

To make a major motion picture, you require resources of a massive scale.  A mindboggling effort must go in.  Not only do you need to get the approval of the fickle studio, you need to cast actors, hire somebody to cast those actors, get a director, get a screenplay writer, get sound people, get special effects people, get set designers, editors, caterers, drivers, assistants, music makers, camera operators, medical staff, and millions of dollars of sophisticated equipment.  You need to find shooting locations, get approval to use those locations, and organize the logistics of an army of crew members to put the entire thing to together at said locations.  That's just to make the finished movie.  Then you have to get the approval of the same studio to release the movie, find a distribution company, create a massive advertising campaign, get the approval of movie theatres worldwide to show your picture, hire artists to make billboards, DVD covers, and McDonalds toys, and then hire editors to make television commercials.  A movie can never be a simple whim of a single man, or even just a handful of people.  Thousands of people must sacrifice millions of hours to make any film, no matter how deranged, come into being.  They all must give their consent to the project, and raise no objections.

So how in all of God's great Earth did so many people allow a movie like "Marmaduke" to be made?  How did they, being completely normal human beings of reasonable morals, not only just remain silent while this abomination was being made, but actively took a part in bringing forth this plague upon humanity?  I know the economy is bad, but just how far is a person willing to go to just make a quick buck?  Is our race truly capable of such awful acts for so worthless a reason?

Don't you fear.  I haven't seen this movie, but my heart goes out to those who have - those tormented souls who were punished far too cruelly for their simple crime of buying a film ticket.  Right now our hospitals are filled to the brink, as millions of Americans have been left empty husks; their minds broken by the wretchedness of this awful movie.  The President has declared a national emergency, and all branches of government are working at their full potential to save just a tiny fraction of the afflicted.  But their efforts will most likely be in vain.  Millions have died, and millions more will perish as well.  Our entire country seems to be in flames.  And for what?  A dog movie?  How long must we go on, allowing horrible movies to be made like this?  When will the madness end?  Look at all that's happened, and is happening right now.  This is our collective punishment, as a culture, for allowing "Marmaduke" to be made.

I'm going to be reporting every bit of news I find on the growing crisis.  Right now, as you read this, I'm sure you're frightened in your homes, huddling with loved ones.  Every major news outlet has been shut down.  The news is erratic and baseless rumors abound.  But here at Planet Blue, we are pledged to do all we can to keep America informed as it faces what may be its darkest hour.

Though already too many are blaming the studio for "Marmaduke" and the lives its destroyed, you cannot fully accuse the studio.  They did not truly understand what they had unleashed.  All they thought they were creating was a harmless dog movie for the kiddies whose Moms read them the comic strip in the newspaper.  It seems like just a simple cash-in; a mindless little movie the critics would hate, but would make a quick buck.  However, the problem was that nobody bothered to actually read a single panel of the strip.  How could they have known that they were dealing with the Devil itself?  I'm sure they imagined at worst it had to be a "Family Circus", maybe even a "Heathcliff".  The worst these strips have even done was cause a few scattered cases of upset stomaches and headaches in the weak and infirmed.  But there's no way they could have read a square of "Marmaduke".

You see, "Marmaduke" is not merely a bad comic strip.  A bad comic strip would have produced a simply unenjoyable movie that swiftly would have been forgotten forever.  But "Marmaduke" was more than simply terrible artwork, unfunny humor, and the same bad joke repeated endlessly.  It was a comic strip that was not just unfunny, but the opposite of funny.  Brave experts, sacrificing their minds and bodies to read just a single panel in the name of science, have noted that "Marmaduke"'s humor is so bad that it appears that the authors (if there are even human authors) do not understand the human emotion of humor on any level.  Even the emotion that is supposedly the comic's point, the love for a dog, is completely alien to this comic.  Instead the dog tortures its owners, devours children, and destroys the lives of everybody he comes in contact with.  How this comic came to be in the first place is a mystery, and its continued running after fifty years of maiming and killing every single one of its readers is a scandal for newspapers everywhere.  " Marmaduke" doesn't just make all comic strips look bad, it makes the entire passage of human artistic expression look terrible.

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I'm receiving some news now.  Riots have broken out in hospitals across the country.  It is unknown just who is causing the unrest, or what their reasons are.  I will report more on this once more information is at hand.  For now I will continue to summarize the events that led to this disaster.
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No author or artist or any other member of the "Marmaduke" creative team has even been located.  There is some debate whether the comic even has an author, or is perhaps simply generated out of thin air by some malevolent supernatural force.  All actors involved with the film project have completely disappeared, their whereabouts unknown.  Expect Fergie, her body was discovered earlier this morning in a dumpster in Newark, New Jersey, with no explanation for how it arrived there.  The corpse had no skin, and her eyes and mouth were sewn shut.  The worst is feared for the other actors and crew members.

Research into the comic strip's evil powers have found that no human being can withstand looking at a panel for more than five minutes - they will immediately succumb to either immediate death or if they're lucky, a persistent vegetative state.  At only thirty seconds of reading most of the subjects have been left mentally and physically impaired for the rest of their lives. Most are stricken blind, others are made deaf.  Even so, no subjects who have read "Marmaduke" have ever lived more than a single year.  Either they succumb to their injuries and die, or the mental anguish becomes so great that they commit suicide.

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The riots have begun to spread, it is reported.  Unrest has spread across the entire country.  Detroit is on fire... even more than usual.  The reports, though confused, all agree that the main body of the population of the rioters were the infirmed filmgoers.  Just hours ago they were dying and comatose and now they have awakened, and are attacking every person they see, like animals.  Some reports even say that they're... they're eating brains.

Let us continue, despite this horrible news.  There is still so much to say.  Perhaps this news report will be the very last voice still working on the Internet, which slowly darkens bit after bit.  Sites are going down left and right.  The chaos outside is beyond worlds.  Soon nobody will know what is truly going on, or what has happened here today.  I will work as hard as possible to continue as long as I can.
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"Marmaduke" was shown in thousands of theatres across the country.  Nobody could have ever guessed just how terrible the results would have been.  It was only allowed to continue playing for just four hours, before every copy of the film was burned.  Even so, the damage was done.  Packed theatres filled with patrons and their children were covered in blood, and some of the victims even had enough strength to still be screaming.  No doctor or scientist has yet been able to uncover the cause or nature of the disease.  It is said that the victims have quite simply been infected with the emotion rage in its full awful purity.  There has yet to be a count as to how many have been afflicted.  We may never truly know the human costs of this catastrophe.

[banging noises, inhuman moans and shrieks]

My God.  They're at my door!  Could the disaster have spread so far so quickly?  (Then again I do live within just a few blocks of a hospital, that might explain some of it.)  I must barricade the door.  Who could ever have guessed that "Marmaduke" would have destroyed all human civilization?

[sounds of fighting, more zombie noises, glass shatters]

Somebody... please...

[sounds of flesh being torn, somewhere in the back a Marmaduke zombie cries out:  "BRAAAAAAAINNNSSS"]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

[static, then silence]

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Bonus Thoughts:  To be a bit more serious for just a moment, "Marmaduke" is without a doubt the single worst comic strip today.  I was, and still am, a huge fan of "Calvin & Hobbes", even though I read the first strip almost three years after the creator, Bill Watterson, retired it.  I cannot recommend the collections highly enough.  Anyway, much of Watterson's problems with working in the field of newspaper comics is that there is so little space and so many restrictions and standards that no creative voice can possibly be heard.  The possibilities of the medium are completely wasted, both in the visual artwork and the storyline/character ideas.  So instead most strips find just a handful of jokes that are rerun constantly.  "Calvin & Hobbes" was especially brilliant in that it had about fifty jokes to repeat.  My point is that "Marmaduke" the movie is something of an impressive double-whammy for me:  on the one hand it represents the sickening zombification of family-friendly filmmaking these days, and it also is an adaptation of the very worst of newspaper comic strips.   "Marmaduke" is a strip without jokes, none of them are funny, or ever have been funny.  It has nothing to say but to recreate the experience of dogownership, but even then it does it in the most empty and insignificant way possibly. "Marmaduke:  The Movie" gathers together the worst portions of two mediums and magnificently celebrates the emotional bankruptcy of both.

Also I thought that Planet Blue needed a zombie invasion.  "Marmaduke:  The Movie" was just enough of offense to me - even without watching it (which I'll never do) - that it was clearly the perfect opportunity.

"Marmaduke" is something of a running joke in my family.  We have pondered for years how the strip has managed to stay running despite absolutely nothing to offer to anyone.  Lately I've come to savagely parody its unbelievable stupidity by sarcastically explaining the strip's daily beyond idiotic joke.  "You see today's Marmaduke is funny today because Marmaduke is trying to play cards, even though dogs don't usually play cards.  And he's cheating!  HA.  HA.  HA."  I actually thought this joke might even make a good addition to my blog.  Then I discovered, to my horror, that somebody had already been doing this on the Internet, and had been doing it for years (see link above).  After reading what are essentially his memoirs, I'm kinda glad he thought of it first.

Mr. Marmaduke Satire Guy, whereever you are, I salute you.