“Idiocracy” has come up in several conversations I’ve had about the rise of Donald Trump (or maybe I should say, “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”). It turns out that while it wasn’t quite a perfect foretelling of where the country is today, it’s certainly a useful fictional example that continues to draw real-world comparisons of what is possible.
As Etan Cohen, the writer behind the 2006 scathing satire that’s now a cult comedy hit said, in jest, on his Twitter page earlier this year, “I never expected #idiocracy to become a documentary so soon.”
The tweet was of course retweet thousands of times, leading Cohen to reach out to the director of the film, Mike Judge, to discuss revisiting the film, but crafting anti-Trump campaign ads inspired by it.
“We just thought it would take much, much longer to get to this point,” Cohen told Buzzfeed yesterday. “Obviously, when writing the movie, we knew that that was true about TV and movies and pop culture. But it was a crazy joke to think that it could be extrapolated to politics. It seems to be happening really rapidly.”
And with that, the duo (Judge and Cohen) are reteaming to produce a series of anti-Trump campaign ads that will star the film’s president as played by Terry Crews – President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, a former porn star and champion wrestler.
No previews of the anti-Trump ads with Crews are available yet. Judge and Cohen first have to get permission from 20th Century Fox (the studio who own rights to the film) to create their bite-sized “sequels” with Crews reprising his role.
“The most dangerous contrast to Trump is that Camacho actually realizes he needs advice from other people, and knows that he’s not the smartest guy in the room,” Cohen also said, adding that he’d vote for Camacho over Trump.
So now we wait for Fox’s approval, which may not come – especially if any of the top-level executives at the studio are Trump supporters. But if there’s money to be made from this somehow, anything is possible.
A website has apparently been set up at http://www.trumpcamacho.com.
Here’s a reminder:
