FANTASIA OBSCURA: A Parody Religion, a Fake Found Film and a Future World Run By Clowns?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, we get reminded of how humble our origins can be…
…yeah, which can be a bitch…
Let’s Visit the World of the Future (1973)
Distributed by: self-distributed, but see below
Directed by: Douglass Saint Clair Smith
Okay, what do you get when you combine a comedy album, a bunch of folks goofing around with a “borrowed” camera, and a lack of a filter?
Give the prize to the young lady in the back row who cried out; “A religion!”
The film is, as the title suggests, an informational travelogue, done in the style of industrial films from the mid Twentieth Century. Which means all sorts of cloying, sappy upbeat music with all the soul of a plastic head your hairdresser has in the window of the shop, tied to a script that knows it’s trying to sell you on a bad product, but hey, a job’s a job.
And what it’s trying to sell you is how good life is in 2078, after the Earth was encased in 100 feet of concrete, where humans live in endless senseless toil. It’s a society where order is provided by the injection of nuclear beer straight into your veins five times a day and where patrols by the Bozos, clowns with cruelty streaks, take out the troublemakers, or for that matter anyone they feel like seeing die that day.
There’s a lot of details about this dystopia that’s presented in the film’s somewhat meager 43-minute run time, but that’s almost beside the point. In this instance, it’s more about presentation than product, and it’s really in how we’re told that we get a true sense of how bad this is.
By nonchalantly discussing brainwashing, soul-crushing degradation, random acts of violence and whatnot, in a way where your narrators not only accept their reality but embrace it, the true level of depravity that everyone’s fallen to is starkly felt as you watch. You cannot help but feel how wrong it’s all gotten, even as you’re asked to enjoy this “educational film” that feels like it was meant for you to first see back in the fourth grade.
Which is not to say that this film’s any good; oh LORD no, it’s not!
Could the film have been, well, better? Considering the original version was, yeah!
In fact, the end credits of the movie cites the main inspiration for the film, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus by the Firesign Theater. While the album is a radio play that suggests that this bleak universe hasn’t happened yet, we get no relief in the film, and it doesn’t care about us. Mainly because its creators were too drunk and/or stoned (more likely “and”) when they made this, which is also cited during the end credits in a long rambling monologue delivered over outtakes under the credits.
And if this had been done by someone who never decided to do another film, or even just decided that that one weekend where he swiped film equipment from Southern Methodist University to shoot some crazy crap around Dallas was “a mistake” while going on to do more mainstream stuff, it might have disappeared from memory and never been heard about by anyone.
However, this was not to be, thanks to the followers of J. R. “Bob” Dobbs…
In 1980, Smith and Steve Wilcox took on the personae of Ivan Stang and Philo Drummond, respectively, which was probably the only respectable act done during the founding of the Church of the SubGenius. From there, they developed a system of beliefs where they pretty much proclaimed…
…well, we should let Reverend Stang speak for himself:
How seriously should anyone take this? Hey, they don’t; Stang discussed doing a documentary about the origins of the Church back in 2017 (which as of this writing is still looking to be crowdsourced) to give a less colorful story than the one that appears in official writings of the Church, regarding Dobbs and X-Day. It’s an intricate story about how a time would come in the future, when humans would be forced into meaningless existences, under the oppression of… the Bozos.
In fact, the Wiki site for the Church notes that Let’s Visit the World of the Future was made in 1953, and first shown at the 1953 World’s Fair in St. Louis (an event that was proposed but never took place), meant as a warning as to what was to come to those who failed to hold onto their Slack. A more clear-headed history, however, appeared on the SubGenius Facebook page, where a more honest, humble origin is provided. Which means no, they probably were never really going to field a softball team to send to the Interfaith Inter-murals to play against the Rosicrucians…
Whether such proclaimed members of the Church such as Robert Crumb, Paul Reubens, David Byrne (whose song “Puzzling Evidence” from True Stories borrows its title from the SubGenius’ radio program of KPFA-FM) and Mark Mothersbaugh (who contributes a column to the Church’s website, “What I Know” among other acts of DEVO-tion) buys the first answer or doesn’t even care about the other, treating the whole thing as a great imaginative gag… Okay, yeah, it’s likely the second one…
The point of all this, however, is where the film leads to, much like many of the conspiracies mentioned in passing in the literature of Church of the SubGenius. This movie in many ways can be called the Dead Sea Scrolls of the SubGeniuses; there are texts and plots that deal with concepts that find their ways into the organization, the first draft from the 1970s that would get refined over the next few decades into the core belief of the only religious movement that actually pays taxes on monies collected. And while the original film had no formal distribution outlet, the Church of the SubGenius has been willing to share this, both as a stand-alone and as part of their 1992 release, Arise! The SubGenius Video.
And if you dare want to risk watching the original, it should be easy to find out there; Bob helps those who helps themselves…
NEXT TIME: When strange men accost you at burger joints to see if you want to take a trip, it may not be a good idea to accept that invitation, but we’ll watch the hell out of what happens to you if you accept, though…
