A commenter on the ZRC blog left a link to this little Youtube ‘gem’:

As you can see, we’re dealing with two separate media products here: a webseries being titled ‘Songbook for the Civilized Zombie’, apparently about a ‘redeemed’ Zombie who has been coerced/brainwashed into eradicating other Undead individuals, and the song within the first episode, ‘The Zombie Song’, which is quite a bit older (and available here from Bandcamp).

Neither is remotely Zombie Friendly.

As for ‘Songbook’, we’ve seen this concept before, the Uncle Zom, Undead Manchurian Candidate/’Good Zombie’ who turns on his or her fellow Zombies in the service of an eliminationist Living society. Bub the Zombie from ‘Day of the Dead’ is probably a major inspiration for this sort of plot, except that Bub comes off a lot better than his modern day counterparts. After all, Bub has emotions, loyalty, and forms friendships with Living individuals, or at least with the mad scientist working with him in the doomsday bunker.

There was a comic book series ‘Toe Tags’, apparently written by George Romero himself, which had an Uncle Zom protagonist; I actually bought a few issues back before founding the ZRC, but never got into it. Seemed kind of silly, what with a Zombie riding an elephant to massacre other Zombies. Silly or insane, take your pick. Regardless of the origin, it’s not an uncommon element, though obviously a tragic one. If Zombies can be heroic, and we at the ZRC definitely feel that they can, that heroism shouldn’t have to derive from hurting other Zombies. It’s so divisive!

‘The Zombie Song’, meanwhile, is another ‘humorous’ musical piece mocking the Undead and spreading harsh stereotypes about their incessant need to devour Living people. We’ve covered such songs numerous times here on the blog, there’s not much new to comment on here (although, being fair, this one was first recorded a decade ago so technically it was here first).

Both pieces of the larger whole, however, are ugly and prejudiced. Both qualify as Living Supremacist.

Tags: Music, Youtube Mischief, ZRC Reviews

This entry was posted by John Sears on Thursday, December 22nd, 2011 at 8:05 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.