I’m glad it struggled to stay afloat and finally shut down long ago but at the same time it’s honestly too bad that CAPalertwasn’t concurrent with tumblr. Where were all you guys back when this site was a bottomless well of meme-ready absurdity?!
They lasted just long enough to “review” Bee Movie and tell us why God hates it though.
My biggest question might just be why “you fool” is in of itself an offense unto the lord
CAPalert was actually the first time I ever learned this but the term “fool” originally meant “hellbound” or “godless” and the bible explicitly states that calling someone else a fool, i.e. accusing them of being a damned sinner, is a terrible sin against God specifically because only God is allowed to judge that.
And yeah the irony of a fundamentalist harping on that is pretty self evident.
avatar-dacia
What is this, I don’t even. Also: way to make it clear that “politically correct” is pretty much a meaningless term; it can apparently mean either “not being bigoted is Insincere and Bad” or “blatantly transphobic.”
That was actually status quo when I was a kid. “Cross dressing” jokes were still seen as TOO POSITIVE by mainstream America and considered a part of that evil “pro-gay” agenda.
You have to realize, some people believe wholeheartedly and very, very literally that even the slightest deviation from traditional gender norms is a calculated attempt by the devil himself to destroy the fabric of all morality, end the world, and send as many humans to the eternal fires of hell as he possibly can, and this was VASTLY more mainstream of an attitude even just 15-20 years ago.
If kids laugh at a silly cartoon man wearing a dress, they reasoned, then kids might accidentally think a man wearing a dress isn’t the end of the world as we know it!
They even caught on to the fact that kids commonly find villains to be cool and fun, so even explicitly evil characters with a dash of gay-coding were part of Satan’s gay seduction scheme. He gets their guard down with a snarky villain who kinda looks effeminate, butters them up with those hilarious cross-dressing jokes, and then, POOF! YOUR KIDS ARE GAY AND GOING TO HELL!
I really cannot emphasize enough how hard I am not exaggerating and how normalized these attitudes were only half my lifetime ago.
nonbinary-fusion
I’m having a really hard time with a scoring system that thinks “Joe Dirt” is more wholesome than The Labyrinth…
But does Joe Dirt have….
Okay I didn’t think I’d be talking so much about CAPalert in 2018 or that I ever hate-read it enough to become such an expert but a few people have asked why, say, Rocky Horror has a surprisingly “better” rating or why the Simpsons manages to have a worse rating than South Park.
Basically, these guys stuck very strictly to an analysis model they believed was “truly objective” and this is how it worked:
Every movie began with 100 points in six different categories. These are “Wanton Violence/Crime, Impudence/Hate, Sexual Immorality, Drugs/Alcohol, Offensive to God, and Murder/Suicide.”
Yes, it spells out W I S D O M.
As the CAP minister (and it was usually the same guy) watched the film, he would detract a single point from the appropriate category for every swear word, every death, every gay character and so on.
The Simpsons scores worse than South Park because while South Park lost 100 points in violence, impudence, sex, and offense to god, the Simpsons lost a bunch of points in those categories AND a bunch of points in the drugs/alcohol category.
They also had no means of accounting for “negative” points, so one movie might have 100 swear words and another movie might have 1000, but they’d both be scored exactly the same. All that mattered was those first 100 points.
Rocky Horror, meanwhile, lost all of its points for “sexual immorality” but it didn’t have very many drug references and relatively little violence, so by CAP standards, it’s not so bad at all!
They were so, so proud of this scoring model and constantly drummed it up as an “objective” rating system superior to the MPAA but their results only consistently highlighted its sheer futility and senselessness.
