Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends
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culture, it must be perfect already. Furthermore, Bloo does not understand that
the elements of a blockbuster movie, for example, often depend upon their
original context to make any sense at all. In the episode “Challenge of the
Superfriends,” which will be analyzed in detail, Bloo emulates the behavior of
superheroes he sees in comic books and movies, but ends up letting the villain
escape. Bloo does not understand why this creates as a problem, as he did it in
“a very super way.” Another storyline finds Bloo attempting to make Mac
“cool” by employing every surface transformation he can think of He
encourages Mac to use the mannerisms of boy band members and spout
catchphrases from commercials. Bloo’s advice proves disastrous, as he removes
these behaviors from their contexts without altering them. While Bloo
wholeheartedly endorses anything slickly packaged and marketed, the show uses
him to point out the ridiculousness of being too caught up in glossy exteriors.
Children today face an all-out assault from a “glutted market for adolescent
obsessions” (Wright 284), and Bloo falls victim to the latest trends nearly every
time. Bloo’s tendency to mimic popular culture as a means of attempting to
either connect with others, or prove just how “cool” he is, allows Foster's Home
to delve into the relationship between Americans and their popular culture.
The episode “One False Movie” finds Bloo hijacking Mac’s film
project for his elementary class. Mac films various residents of Foster’s Home
for Imaginary Friends, giving each one the chance to say a few words to the
camera. Bloo declares the project “boring,” and convinces Mac to let him “fix”
it. When Mac plays the movie for his class, he finds to his horror that Bloo
superimposes fart sounds over the initial soundtrack, thus depicting everyone as
suffering from extreme flatulence. Much to Mac’s surprise, his teacher and
classmates find the film delightfully funny, and his principal enters Mac in a
regional filmmaking contest as a result. Bloo once again commandeers the
creation of Mac’s movie, this time reaching far beyond the oft-used attempt at
humor derived from someone passing gas. Bloo names his creation T-Rexatron
Alien Wolfhound III, A Prequel in Time: The Unrelenting. The quality of Bloo’s
movie becomes obvious just from its title. Indeed, a robotic tyrannosaurus rex, a
werewolf, and time travel all make appearances at various points in the movie,
but the result is completely incomprehensible, a mishmash of images stolen
from various blockbuster films and cobbled together without rhyme or reason.
Bloo’s movie also incorporates elements of the Lethal Weapon movies, the
spaghetti western, pirates, and the iconic scene of Elliot flying against the
silhouette of the moon from E.T., again with no reason other than that Bloo
believes that if one popular culture reference is good, dozens certainly will result
in a superior movie. Bloo even provides the voice-over for the movie, which
sounds like a collection of the quick catchphrases used to capture the audience’s
attention in movie previews. In fact, such lines as “In a world where chaos
reigns like cats and dogs” and “A retired cop must settle one last score” could
almost have come from the previews for any large-budget feature of recent
years.