The ZRC was linked to this video on Twitter and it provoked mixed reactions. It’s basically catchy pop-culture infused nerd rap-rock and quite easy to listen to, and Zombie Ninjas are at least somewhat novel. However, in spite of these fictional Zombies from the song apparently being stealthy superpowered action heroes, they’re also very stereotypical in terms of their ‘Zombie’ nature: the Ninjas are now Undead and utterly fixated on eating brains.

Brother.

Check this out and get back to me:

What’s with the ‘brains’ thing? Why did they have to go there? We’ve talked about the hateful and prejudiced stereotype that all Zombies devour or want to devour piping hot human brain before on the ZRC blog many, many times. Not only is it prejudice but it’s unsupported by even the rabidly Anti-Zombie media; the overwhelming majority of Anti-Zombie books, games, comics and films do not show the Undead as having a particular preference for or focus on a brain-based diet.

George Romero hates the stereotype, because it’s not from his work. Resident Evil’s ‘Zombies’ don’t particularly care for brain. ‘Dead Rising’s Zombies don’t eat brain. ‘Marvel Zombies’ eat all flesh, human or otherwise, and even, in some series, foliage and wild plants. ‘Walking Dead’ Zombies eat flesh in general, not just grey matter. And of course, supernatural and/or ‘Voodoo’ Zombies don’t eat human flesh of any sort, even in stereotyped and flagrantly offensive early American Anti-Zombie film. ‘White Zombie’, ‘King of the Zombies’, ‘Revolt of the Zombies’, etc, all flesh-eating free. (In fact in ‘King of the Zombies’ the Zombies sit down to a home cooked meal of perfectly ordinary food,)

Instead, as we’ve tried, fruitlessly, to explain to the general public on innumerable occasions, the brain-eating stereotype originates with 1985′s ‘Return of the Living Dead’, a cult-classic film popular with horror aficionados but virtually unknown in the general population. That’s about the only thing that our Anti-Zombie culture absorbed from ‘Return’, however, which featured intelligent Undead who craved neural tissue for medical rather than gustatory reasons.

Thus when we see yet another video defaming Zombies, a diverse population of Undead citizenry, for allegedly acting according to a half-remembered stereotype from a movie made as recently as 1985, it drives the ZRC barmy.

Zombies deserve better. Zombie Ninjas deserve better.

For shame. We rate this video ‘Anti-Zombie’:

Tags: Music, Youtube Mischief, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 6:31 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.