Some fascinating details on the ‘Walking Dead’ DVD box set now available, which the ZRC will be buying as soon as I can arrange a suitable container to prevent the concentrated evil from these monstrous DVDs from seeping into our living environment. Maybe a fire safe that’s been consecrated? How did they bind Samael in the Hellboy movie? Ah yes, the tears of a thousand angels. It’d be tricky to get that many tears..

Ahem. Anyway, on to the details at hand, and the fawning way the Mainstream Press gobbles up the behind the scenes information on making Living Supremacist propaganda:

The Walking Dead was a surprise hit last fall, pulling in 5.3 million viewers for its first episode and more than six million for the series finale. The DVD and Blu-ray, out this week, includes all six episodes; a half-hour making-of; and various short features including a peek behind the scenes at the making of “bicycle girl” (a grisly, legless zombie).

There’s also a look at “zombie school,” the quick course taken by all the undead extras to ensure consistent behaviour. Because it would never do to have shambling, Romero-style zombies mixing it up with freaky, fast-moving 28 Days Later types.

Such attention to detail is what makes the series so watchable from the get-go. For instance, Grimes finds a horse and decides it’s a better ride than his cruiser, which leads to the shot of a lone horseman riding a deserted highway into Atlanta, past outbound lanes choked with abandoned cars. (Although if civilization ever came to an end, wouldn’t people fleeing cities use both sides of the road? Still, an impressive image.)

Oh, the number of problems with the logic of ‘The Walking Dead’ doesn’t stop there. I mean, here you have yet another Zombie Apocalypse where someone wakes up in a hospital despite being comatose for weeks and is fit and spry enough to jump around and fend for themselves immediately. What’s up with that?

Then of course there’s the fact that, somehow, when a protagonist is asleep at the start of a Zombie Apocalypse, despite being surrounded by heat-seeking and allegedly carnivorous ‘Zombies’, they never get bothered. Is this meant to resemble an old-school Role Playing Game, where nothing in the world happens when the party is asleep?

Hey, maybe that’s how you ride out a ‘Zombie Apocalypse’. You just need to find an inn, pay 50 gil, and you can sleep until the danger has passed. Simple, right?

But logic issues aside, look at this process a bit. In an attempt to maintain internal consistency the demagogues behind ‘The Walking Dead’ establish a crash-course in carefully crafted stereotyping, so that their actors, or rather, their stooges, maintain a consistent public face for their hate campaign.

Isn’t the fact that their scenario requires such careful and elaborate scripting a sign, a remarkable one at that, of how unrealistic it is? If the ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ was in fact a relevant and imminent threat you’d think it wouldn’t require special acting classes.

Still, they soldier on, preparing another season (at least) of their despicable and unconscionable media assault on the Differently Animated, and with a sycophantic press corps devouring every morsel of gossip about all things Walking Dead, they won’t have any trouble finding their audience once again.

Tags: Journamalism, Mainstream Media, Robert Kirkman, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, March 14th, 2011 at 2:56 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.