So I saw Wall-E the other day. It’s a great film with an anti-consumerism message that it wears proudly on its sleeve. In the movie, a mammoth corporation named Buy N’ Large is the only visible corporate force in the marketplace. And when I say visible, I mean the behemoth size of Wal-Mart supercenters combined with the collective advertising ubiquity of Coke, McDonald’s, and yes, Disney!
The earth has been so overrun with trash that humans have abandoned the planet and the lone inhabitants are a little trash-compactor bot named Wall-E and his robotic cockroach friend. It’s amazing how a Johnny-5 lookalike can be imbued with such stark human emotion while computer animators are still failing miserably at getting it right with CGI people. But I digress…
Two things jumped out immediately on my trip to see the movie. First, I went to the El Capitan theater in Los Angeles for the first time. For those who don’t live here or have never been, the El Capitan is owned by Disney and is their own version of Grauman’s Chinese (it’s right across the street, in fact). Old-school theater, massive pipe organ that some guy plays before each movie starts, only one screen, etc.
Apparently one of the draws is the little show that the theater puts on beforehand. They have this trippy little silkscreen show that ends with a lit up version of LA. I thought that was it and I was pretty satisfied, until the horror of what unfolded next dawned on me.