The Conspiracy of Arthur the Aardvark.

Good evening ATS, how is everyone doing today?

So, as I was getting ready to catch my bus this morning, as I do most mornings, I switched on the television. I usually watch BBC Breakfast because it has a clock in the corner and I can tell how late I am from when the regional news and weather pops up. But anyway… I had been watching the CBBC channel on Saturday before I went to work (Scooby Doo was on. I can’t deny Scooby Doo no matter HOW old I should be acting) and so my freeview decided it would put that particular channel on again this morning. So I go to press the buttons to change to BBC 1 (I lost my remote a long time ago), and then notice that the particular television programme which was n was not only a cartoon (yay!) but a cartoon I used to love when I was a kid. So I left it on.

Now, I don’t know how far Arthur (the aardvark) stretches, but they are American voices, so I suppose you yanks know about it. If not, it’s one of those sickly sweet kids cartoons which work towards encouraging kids to go to the library and read and not to it your little sister and to exercise and that the ‘school bully’ is a big softie and all this. With cartoon animals for ‘kids’. Like Arthur, who is an aardvark (although I’ve never seen one who looks like that) who is the ‘normal’ kid, and then you have Binky who is… a dog, maybe? And he’s the ‘big’ kid bully, and then Brain who… Well, I have no idea what Brain is, but he’s the ‘geek’ kid, and there’s the sporty kid and the rich kid, etc.

So, you may be wondering where I’m going with this. I’M wondering were I’m going with this. The introduction I much longer than it needs to be when I’m discussing a children’s television programme, but it’s kinda important, at least in my opinion, to get this out there before I start.

The kid who interested me most when I was a kid was the cartoon rabbit, Buster Baxster. Now, every last character in that programme is a stereotype, as I’ve already pointed out, and when you’re a small child you’re quite heavily influenced by stereotypes; hell, you are when you get older too. Now, Buster was the ‘weird’ kid, in the nicest way possible of course, because Arthur was always nice about everyone. No, Buster was a conspiracist of ATS worthy standards, and I had completely forgotten about this until I watched it back this morning. In fact, just looking for an image I found a caption saying that he is "obsessed with aliens and UFOs"

So, I’ll point out that even when I was a kid I had a solid interest in conspiracies and aliens (mainly down to my grandmother’s influence, as she was always telling me that we couldn’t be the only life out there – I know, pretty cool in the grand scheme of things), and I’ve also always been the kid on the fringe of society. Even when I was in primary school (elementary for all you yanks out there) I was one of the outcasts, I’ve learnt to live with it and it’s never really bothered me, especially now that I have ATS to broadcast silly things like this on.

But I’ve gone off the point again. This cartoon rabbit this morning believed he had seen a UFO, and there was a full 10 minute cartoon devoted to ‘the Brain’ trying to prove him wrong. In order to prove he HAD in fact seen a UFO, Buster borrowed a telescope and took pictures of planets, the ISS, and an insect’s leg in order to try and prove his point in a very ‘pictures-or-it-didn’t-happen’ way. Needless to say, the cartoon rabbit was proven wrong at every turn, and the poor thing ended up giving up on his beliefs. Until he saw a comet in the sky, and photographed it, claiming it was going to hit earth. Which caused mass panic amongst the other cartoon animals when Brain agreed. Now it was all a misunderstanding because they had set the telescope up wrong, but that isn’t the point.

My dear friends, even cartoon animals are mocking us and our beliefs. This poor rabbit was mocked and shown to be an idiot at every turn because he believed he had seen a UFO and everyone else was like, “oh no, it was a helicopter” – I mean, how many of us can relate to that? I know I can. How many of us have predicted mass extinction because of a telescopic accident? Well, okay, I haven’t done that one, but plenty of us are predicting the apocalypse on a daily basis…

No, my point is, and I’m not normally a massive conspiracist with the government ramming stuff into our heads and conditioning and disinfo, but I just think it’s interesting that one of the characters in this television show is a conspiracy based character, and he is also proved wrong constantly. I mean, for me, I always felt sorry for him and it worked in the right way, but is this just to add a bit of humour to a television programme which is targeted at 8 year olds who won’t even KNOW about UFOs and are more easily influenced into NOT believing by seeing on Arthur that there is no way on Earth that these can be from off Earth? Eh? See what I did there?

Anyway, maybe it isn’t. Maybe they just decided to add little Buster in to make up the stereotypes. I mean, maybe 8 year olds in the States do actually have an aliens-clique, but this isn’t the only episode of its kind that I’ve seen, and it just struck me as interesting now that I have time to think about it. Because Buster also ate pizza a lot, and other junk food. And you know, we all do that too right? Maybe they are watching us.

And maybe at the end of the episode, when they all turned into aliens, maybe that is real too? THEY’RE AMONGST US RIGHT NOW! INFULTRATING OUR TV AND TAKING OUR JOBS.

No, I’m joking. Of course I’m joking. I just saw it this morning and really felt the need to post a light hearted thread on the topic and see what everyone else thought, especially about the way the cartoon rabbit is treat and debunked constantly. Plus, I mean, maybe we could use it to make a list of debunking tools. Think before you post because it might be a bugs leg sorta thing. No, it’s just a very strange character to add in, and the way said character is shown and debunked and made to look a fool is very typical of what conspiracists get in the real world and I wished to share. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's good press (I mean, I love him!), and maybe it's a disinfo campaign. Who could possibly tell?

Thanks for reading if you got this far, and very well done.

I leave you with this: who could debunk this face?
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/3379b6c58367.jpg[/atsimg]

Hakuna Matata,
Aya.

reply to post by Ayana


aww!, i used to love watching Arthur every day when i got home from school! This is interesting and i've noticed this type of stuff before in other television programs. Something else that came to mind when i read this was a clip i saw on youtube featuring a different Arthur episode where you can clearly see a book in the background with the "all seeing eye" illuminati symbol . Very interesiting indeed..
thanks for the post!

Arthur is a somewhat old kid show in the States. You can actually watch all the shows on this person's youtube channel.
Arthur Youtube Channel