Disney's latest movie Zootopia has something for everyone! Cute talking animals, a positive message
of social acceptance, crack cocaine! Truly a movie for the whole family. MatPat Awesome Intro** *Music Hello Internet! Welcome to Film Theory.
The show that makes it slightly less creepy that I'm sitting solo in a movie
theater, watching a Disney movie, surrounded by screaming children. But
seriously, I love Disney movies. In a time where the world is so full of fear, hate,
and Youtube rage comments, it's nice to visit a bright colorful fantasy world where
things are simpler... happier... Ahh who am I kidding? Disney movies are
dark. Bambi's mom dies, Pinocchio gets kidnapped and sold into
slavery! ππππ ππππ πππππ πππππ. But Zootopia may just be the darkest of the
bunch. If you haven't seen it, you totally should. Right now, in fact. Not
only is it a fun movie, but, uh, this video is just riddled with spoilers so consider
yourself warned. To get you up though Zootopia tells the story of Judy Hopps.
An ambitious young rabbit who fulfills her dream of becoming the first rabbit
police officer in the history of this all-animal society. Here in Zootopia,
predators and prey co-exist peacefully, but some predators have mysteriously
gone missing as of late and it's up to Judy to crack the case. Not only is it a really fun detective
story, Zootopia also shined some light on really important social issues, like how
goshdarn slow the DMV is! (picture flash sound) Gah! Simultaneously hilarious, but just downright depressing. But when you
look beyond its cute animals as humans cover, Zootopia is truly a story about race. The
idea of the minority group in society: The Predators. Facing prejudice and
mistreatment from the majority is a pretty thinly veiled allusion to
America's spotty history of race relations. Don't believe me? We see an ice cream
parlor refuse to serve a predator, police being quicker to draw weapons
against predators, and even Judy hypothesizes that predators are
biologically more savage than prey. Man, those are some heavy themes! I feel
bad for those parents who made the "responsible choice" to take their kids to Zootopia instead of
Deadpool! A good idea but now I have to try and explain eugenics to a
four-year-old. But while the "Zootopia is about racism" concept may not be
surprising to an astute viewer, it goes even deeper than that. Because this children's
movie about a rabbit who just wants to be a cop is actually a retelling of a
long-standing conspiracy theory that crack cocaine was devised to destroy black communities in America! Bet you didn't see that one coming. Whoa-ho, time out MatPat! You, the skeptical viewer (HEY DID YOU CALL ME A DOG HOW DARE YOU) are probably shouting "Disney may go dark, but
they don't go THAT dark!" (OR DO THEY) Hey, I understand your skepticism but
Disney is no stranger to drug use. Remember when Dumbo drinks some water
that has champagne in it and gets so wasted that he hallucinates pink
elephants and wakes up hungover in a tree? Or when Alice from Alice in
Wonderland eats some special mushrooms that make her perceptions of reality
change? And when it comes to drugs there's even a Breaking Bad joke in the movie!
And if you want to see how dark Disney is willing to go, did you watch Maleficent? If you did you
probably understand that that was pretty much a fairy tale retelling of the story
of a rape survivor! Yeah, Disney makes fun animated movies
that are for kids, but they sure aren't afraid to tackle some pretty intense
stuff for the benefit of the adults in the audience. So, why not crack cocaine? And by that I
mean why would they not talk about crack cocaine and not why should we all do crack cocaine (Oh). Crack
is wack kids (Hey copying me I see)! Just say no! Other Reagan-era slogans. Now obviously the
movie's characters don't smoke actual crack, but Zootopia has its own substance
called Night Howler. And the similarities between crack and Night Howlers are
pretty surprising! One last reminder that it's about to strike Spoiler o'clock, so
if you're afraid of turning back into a pumpkin it's time to run away from the ball now. The ball
being this video... That metaphor just spun wildly out of control. Spoilers ahead, let's go. Evidence number
one: Night Howler serum and crack are both synthesized from harmless plants.
As we see in Zootopia, Night Howlers are flowers that grow wild on Judy's
parents' carrot farm. Nobody had any idea that they were key to some psychotropic
drug, until a fox tells them so. Even after they've been harvested, Judy
mistakes the bulbs for onions when she stops a weasel who's stealing them to
turn them into Night Howler serum. Similarly, if you took Crack Cocaine back
to its most basic form, you'd probably walk right on past it without another
thought. Crack, and Cocaine in general, comes from
the leaves of the Coca plant, which is indigenous to much of South and Central America. Raw Coca is so harmless that most people
make it into tea, or put it into habit-forming sodas back in the day. But
concentrating coca extract from several pounds of leaves results in a few grams
of pure Colombian nose candy. Of course then you have to chemically
treat the powder version of Cocaine and cook it to turn it into Crack, so there
is a lot of lab work that goes into turning leaves into crack. And in
Zootopia we get a good look at the complicated chemistry lab used to
produce Night Howler serum by Doug the sheep and his partners. Given the variety and sophistication of
equipment we see in the lab it's reasonable to conclude that synthesizing
Night Howler serum and crack cocaine are similar processes. But this leads to one
question: why crack and not something like, say, crystal meth? I mean again,
there's a breaking bad reference in the scene after all. Well, here's the thing: crystal meth isn't
made from living plant matter. Meth's active ingredients are usually synthesized from chemical sources,
like cough medicine. Besides we all know that the only use Walter White has for
flowers is poisoning innocent children. Hoho, isn't this a happy episode?
Can't wait for this one to get suggested against all those disney toy unboxing
videos. Anyway let's cheer things up a bit.
Here's a cute picture of a sloth. Aww, he's such a cutesie! [MatPat pls control yourself] Oh ho ho, lookit dis guy! [MatPat back to crack pls] Alright, back to crack. Evidence number
two: Night Howlers and crack cocaine effect user in the same way. While Zootopia doesn't tell us a whole
lot about what it's like to be on Night Howler serum, we can get some clues by
observing those who are under its influence. Emmitt Otterton scratches up
the entire back seat of his limousine, rambles incoherently about the night
howlers and then attacks his driver for no reason. When Judy goes to question the
driver, we see that the night howlers affect animals almost instantly as one
second they're having a pleasant conversation and the next he goes
full-on rage virus on her. So Night Howler effects include mania, incoherence and near-instant aggression. How does this compare with crack? Speaking from personal experience, I... have
no idea. No experience in the drug realm. Trust me, we go to some pretty crazy
lengths to research these episodes but uh... not that far. I'm not passing out crack pipes in the
Edit room and taking notes. However a butt ton of internet research
shows that it matches up pretty well. Effects of smoking crack include
restlessness, anxiety, irritability, and in large doses, aggression, paranoia and
delusions. Running through walls, however... not on that list. Sorry, Dave. As for how fast you feel the
effects of crack after you've smoked it, it's hard to locate an exact number but
smoking the drug is the fastest way to get it into your bloodstream outside of
injecting it, and some of the most official sounding people on the internet
talking about crack claim that it works almost instantly. Obviously the drugs aren't meant to be
exactly the same - this is an allegory after all - but based
on their effects they might as well be. Evidence number three: Night Howlers and
crack affect the same groups. Zootopia makes a point to make sure that
we know that predators are the minority, and that predators are the only ones quote unquote "going savage" as a result
of the Night Howler serum. While the movie doesn't explicitly tell
us which minority predators are, it's pretty clear that we're talking about
African-Americans. I alluded to it before but we see Nick Wilde the fox denied
service at an ice cream parlor simply because he's a predator, and the tension
between Zootopia's police force and predators is a transparent allusion to
the issues brought up in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Also
Assistant Mayor Bellwether tells us that Zootopia's population is ten percent
predator: a very similar mark to the twelve point three percent of the U.S.
population that's African-American. The Predators are also all disappearing from
Zootopia's Precinct 1, which is referred to as the city center when Judy is
assigned to it at her graduation from the police academy. All of this mirrors the group that was
hit hardest by crack cocaine in the 1980s: inner-city
African-Americans. A paper by future freakonomics Steven Levitt stated that the incidence
of crack usage per capita was ten times as high in large cities with low-income
urban populations such as New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Crack
also affected black communities really disproportionately, as during the crack
boom of the eighties and early nineties, eighty-five percent of arrests made
related to crack were of African-Americans. But I'm sure some of you are probably still
skeptical. Sure Night Howlers make you act like you're on crack, affected
minority communities and come from plants. So what? In this movie there's a big
government conspiracy around the Night Howlers. Assistant Mayor Bellwether is
the one behind the drug getting spread, developing a serum that her minions
administered to predators via dart gun. She admits that she began the conspiracy
to ensure that the prey majority could keep the peace by making everyone afraid
of predators. As she puts it, fear always works. But it's not like in real life there was
some big government conspiracy to provide african americans with crack out
of paranoia for national safety, right? Right?? WELL, evidence number four: Night
Howlers and crack are both government conspiracies. There are some OG theorists
out there who believe that the crack cocaine epidemic back in the nineteen
eighties came from a similar kind of government conspiracy, as that showed in
Zootopia. Before we go on let me take a minute to get serious. I should mention that this is a really
controversial theory and not one to take lightly. If you're interested in any of this, do
some research and reading for yourself. There's no way that in the final minutes
of my video on Zootopia that i can give this topic the true depth and explanation
that it deserves. It's my goal with this show to just inspire you guys, to learn
more about the world around you, and not always take new stories at face value. Anyway, regardless of the truth of this
theory, it reeks of the events depicted in Zootopia. In 1996, a San JosΓ© journalist
named Gary Webb wrote a three-part report called Dark Alliance, which
exposed a complicated web of connections between the American government and the
spread of crack cocaine in the predominantly African-American
neighborhood of South Los Angeles. Like I've already said it's a really
complicated story that i won't get too deep into here, but basically America,
afraid of the spread of communism during the Cold War, supported a "gorilla" [lol]
resistance group known as the Contras. Not those gorillas, guerrilla. Though it's an easy mistake considering that
this is Zootopia... You know what, nevermind. Just use gorillas, use the gorillas. And
no, the Contras is not referring to the old NES game. Anyway this support in the
Contras resulted in the CIA becoming involved with a bunch of drug smugglers. And this is a hundred percent true a
Senate report confirmed that the drug traffickers had been provided with
federal money. Once the funding for the Contras ran out,
they were given the green light to raise money for themselves. And how do you do
that if you're a small Central American country? Lemonade stands? Bake sales? Nope! Drugs. They flooded the west coast
with cheap cocaine, while the government willingly looked the other way - or, as some speculate, provided planes to
aid in the shipment of the narcotics between countries. By 1987 crack was ravaging practically
all of America's large cities, hitting low-income black neighborhoods the
hardest. The dealer who started it all? A man by the name of Ricky Ross believes
that spreading cracked african-americans was a conscious choice by the government;
one that then President Ronald Reagan made out of a desire to keep the country
safe from the Soviet Union and the spread of communism. Ross has said, quote: "I
believe that they felt it was more valuable to sacrifice a particular
sector of America, and a race of people in America, in order to save the whole
country" end quote. It's an idea that Mayor Lionheart echoes towards the end
of Zootopia, saying that they did quote: "The wrong thing for the right
reasons" end quote. Zootopia even seems like it's
making references to specific instances of the crack epidemic. In the movie Mayor
Lionheart gets set up to make it look like he's behind the Night Howler scheme
and gets put in jail - only to return to power after his release. It's awfully similar to Washington DC
Mayor Marion Barry who was caught smoking crack, jailed and then reelected
as mayor when he was released from prison. Stay classy, DC. Long story short, the
level of government involvement with the spread of crack in America is still in
question, but if I ever go missing know it was the government silencing me for
this video. Or the one where I researched atomic bombs and Batman. Or my old
Polybius video back on Game Theory. Man I've got to be on so many watch
lists at this point. [They gon' get you, MatPat.] Anyway, there you have it. Zootopia: educating our
children about a government conspiracy to spread an organic rage drug to
inner-city minority groups. Kinda makes you yearn for the simpler days
of princesses with Stockholm Syndrome. But hey, that's just a theory - a depressing theory - and a conspiracy
theory! But most of all, a Film Theory! Aaaaaand... cut!
At 4:20, Judy doesn't mistake the bulbs for onions, she recognizes them immediately, it is the police chief who calls them moldy onions.ο»Ώ
Wow. Mat Pat gettin' dark.
Because I'm basically a cord-cutter, I managed to not hear about this movie at all before this video.
This movie sounds amazing.
It sounds like this theory isn't exactly groundbreaking, but I like how MatPat states his goal is to make people unaware of this stuff to go out and learn a bit more.
Really interesting theory. I haven't seen Zootopia yet, but I didn't think I'd see a allegory of drug trafficking and corruption to create paranoia.
I had a lot of problems with this theory, I even went so far as to make a video about it, and while I do make a few jabs and bad jokes, I back up my claims on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VebAUx5rFuc