So for no reason whatever, I started thinking about the TV movie "New Kids on the Planet" from the Nickelodeon TV show Cousin Skeeter. Now Cousin Skeeter is an entertaining show about a teen and his cousin who's a puppet, but is treated just like everyone else. Skeeter gets into crazy situations that would be brutal to a human, but since he's a puppet it's funny. Well in this movie, the cast gets rocketed to this far distant planet. Now I don't remember much about this TV movie, except for that everything was free. The food, free. The clothes, free. The other things, free. The one puppet girl thought "something isn't right," but Skeeter and the other 2 were loving it with Skeeter eating everything and the 2 humans "buying" everything they could. It turns out that it was all a ploy to get them to get replaced by clones or something, and the mayor guy was evil and got thrown into an abyss of nothingness, but that's the general thing. Oh, and a tug-nut is like 5000 miles, but I want to talk about the free society thing.

Now I can't help but think this is some kind of commentary on communism. I honestly can't, English class has ruined entertainment. But anyway, it's a bustling, happy planet, not much different than Earth, where they eat Pizza and Burgers just like humans, and have cool space fashion. Aside from the diverse aliens, it's just like Earth, except everything is free. As a kid I had trouble grasping "why people would work if there's no money." Now that I look back on it, that society was a communist utopia; everything is free, but things still get done. Yes, even as an 8 year old, I understood free market capitalism and thought communism didn't make sense; or socialism, I'm not sure what the appropriate term is for the situation of this TV movie planet I'm trying to remember 12 years later and I'm not fluent in the differences between every economic system, so I'll just call it communism for the rest of the blog.

Anyway, it's a nice planet run by evil people who want to replace you with clones. I can't help but feel that there's a strong political message here. History or propaganda, there is the story of the communist utopia where everyone does their fair share and gets whatever they need, only to find out that the utopia is a desolate wasteland where nothing gets done and evil dictators in control and forcibly silence any opposition they receive. At the end during the climax, the single elevator that links the outside world to the underground city is broken, or overburdened when the main characters need it most and the underground city is in disarray. This may be a commentary on communism sounding like a good idea but in reality it falls apart and is lead by evil people.

Also, the evil mayor presents himself as this nice guy but he ends up being evil, and is controlled by some bug woman thing. This might be a commentary on real life politics and how a charismatic leader may seem all fine and dandy, but he's actually evil and is a sock puppet for an eviler entity.

OK, I can't handle this anymore. I doubt that the writers were ACTUALLY making a political statement on the true nature of communism. The whole "everything's free" was probably just a plot device to make everyone think the planet is great even though it's evil. The elevator thing was probably just to add more conflict and tension. The seems nice but is really evil leader thing was just meant to be a character trope. However, my English teachers taught me that there's deeper meaning in everything, and this seems more logical than some of the crap we read and analyzed. Well this has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.