I try to cut slack for people who earnestly try to parody or critique the flagship titles of Anti-Zombie media, your Night of the Living Deads or, in this case, your Walking Deads, what have you. But still, sometimes a parody continues to advance Anti-Zombie, even Living Supremacist views (think Shaun of the Dead) and you have to call them out: being funny isn’t the same as being right.

And so we come to this Gingerbread take on The Walking Dead, on a t-shirt.

First off, yes, it obviously helps to illustrate the essential silliness of the Zombie Apocalypse by rendering it in pastry. But still, the tableau seen here reinforces more than it subverts the essential fearmongering and dislike of the Zombie Community. We see ‘Zombie’ Gingerbread men attacking their… Living?… fellow citizens, and a symbol of Gingerbread authority using violence against them, while he slowly succumbs to the… Infection?… himself.

Can cookies die? Can they live, for that matter? Is this getting too philosophical for a t-shirt review?

In the end, this is less a social critique, a satire if you will, then simply a joking form of the Zombie Apocalypse that helps to reinforce the very stereotypes that it’s lightly mocking here. Why must, even in Gingerbread people, the advent of a few Zombie fellows lead to carnage and madness?

Why indeed.

Tags: Anti-Zombie Products

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.