The Real Ratatouille?

A month or so ago, an old friend of mine was in town and we were having a couple of PBRs at a local bar.   We were talking about the website when he said to me “You should talk with A****, you know that Ratatouille movies about him“.  A**** is a mutal friend of ours that he still sees regularly but that I haven’t seen in years.  I was pretty skeptical at first.  In fact, I thought that he was just fucking around with me, but I got A****’s number from him anyway and gave him a call.  I reached an answering machine and left a message to let him know that I wanted to find out what what all of the this Ratatouille jive was all about.  I hadn’t heard anything back and figured that all he would say to me was, “KB is full of shit!  He thinks that I look like that fucking PIXAR cartoon“.  A couple of weeks ago, however, I did recieve an email from A**** and what he had to say was a completely different story all together.  I felt that the email was compelling and I told him that I was going to post it, especially since the much hyped DVD release was yesterday.  He agreed and sent an added paragraph which has been added to the beginning. Below is his statement unedited and its content does not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of MonsterFresh.com.
Thank you
–Dead C

” Most people regret the things they say when they are drunk or under the influence. It is quite the opposite for me, sobriety makes me do and say crazy shit. Needless to say I wrote this SOBER first thing in the morning. It’s something absolutely true and not very shocking; ABC/Disney is unoriginal and racist. Ratatouille is the latest monstrosity to devour American’s Federal Reserve notes like so much cheese, and I will tell you a firsthand account of being exploited by Mickey with both intellectual property and likeness rights. I will never watch this film unless I get a Canal St. bootleg and even then I would rather spend my $.99 on a 20 oz of purple flavored Faygo. Don’t pay for anything TWDC (The Walt Disney Company) makes or is associated with!! ” –A****

My name is A***. If you ask me what I am I will say human. “Be more specific“. “I have a penis?” “No what is your ethnicity“.   “Oh, mixed race“.   People really get pissed when you don’t categorize yourself.  From my experience, folks who are half black consider themselves black.  So I represent Libya & Ireland & Scotland, but the Irish won’t have me, I don’t speak Arabic.  Man would I have a problem inside jail.  My point is you can’t tell where I come from by looking @ me. To your average Joe, my name could sound Italian; I guess I look Greek, maybe?

My old man owned a restaurant and all my friends are cooks so naturally I picked it up. It’s fulfilling with the added reward of being unchallenging. So fast forward to 2005, I get a job cooking for the Riverside Commissary, in the ABC building at Walt Disney Studios right across from the Feature Animation Studio. . The clientele varies from the middle aged Executive Assistant with adequacy problems and dirty-butt computer animators, to rap stars (LL Cool J, Fat Joe & Terror Squad) to B Movie Actors past their prime trying to get a shot at an ABC sitcom like Daniel Baldwin (he’s the real fat one) and Tori Spelling.  Once when Johnny Depp was on the set on Pirates the chef said, “If you see him don’t say anything   please“.  What am I going to tell him, to take some acting lessons from LL?

The ABC building is an 11 story building in Burbank, and sticks out like a sore thumb @ the 134/210/I-5 interchange. It is also a rat infested kitchen nightmare.  Gordon Ramsay would shit his pants.  We caught this fat, fat rat one day and the chef goes “____, kill that rat“.  So I take it outside to the parking lot between the commissary and the animation studio and set it free.  Fuck, I’d be eating here too if I was a rat. Well that turned into an ordeal, a big one and soon everyone knows I let it go rather than kill it, I kind of got in trouble and it got blown out of proportion.  They still have a rat problem

Disney is constantly laying people off, which is why they are always stating gains on Wall Street and their stock remains strong. This makes the employees walk the halls in constant fear of underachievement and they are all vying for the same jobs.  This mass disgruntlement rolls down the hill and the worker bees at TWDC harass the caterers to the point of near postal insanity.  My disgruntled ass was always returning comments to the artists, especially when they’d criticize the food.  “Pork chops again?“, they’d say to which I’d reply, “Why is Finding Nemo’s dad such a tight-ass neurotic Jew“.  All the animators are plain yogurt, and like 2 Korean dudes. They all dress like shit and have bad haircuts.  One guy wore the same converse hoody for like a year straight.  No color, no flavor.  I wonder where they animate the proud family?   When anyone wanted to discuss my work I’d flip it twice fold and it made me stand out among my fellow cooks (almost exclusively Latin-American immigrants, I’m a Libyan-American immigrant).  Even better, I’d let my opinions be known when not even provoked; Chicken Little was an all white cast of all white trash (Zach Braff? Ugh!) even though it supposedly takes place in Sherman Oaks (Oaky Oaks, haha real creative assholes).   Like the time I asked the lead animators about Meet the Robinsons, “What there aren’t any brown people in the future?” I actually reused that line from the Jetsons movie from 1990 starring Tiffany as daughter Judy (hey, at least she has an interracial relationship with Apollo Blue in that film) so, they’re comparable and I love getting to reuse my comedy routines when applicable.  So, I was notorious around there for crushing animators.  Apparently there was a chat board and blogs dedicated to the shit I’d say, but you have to be on the Disney Network to access it.  A lot of them really liked me because I’m real and reasonable that’s why they’ve cursed me for eternity with the homage known as Ratatouille.

Let’s discuss TWDC (the Walt Disney company) a moment; they influence every facet of entertainment from films and music to videogames. We’ve all read classic Disney strips featuring Mickey hunting packs of “wild niggers“, scribed and inked by none other than the Nazi sympathizer. A favorite cartoon feature of mine recently released from the Disney “vault” was the Jungle Book based on Rudyard Kipling books. (Kipling; a brit, notorious racist, imperialist and militarist born in Bombay) The only one with a person with brown skin, (the Arabs in Aladdin are Caucasian) and he’s the only human character, and the hero, and the protagonist.  That’s not why I liked it when I was young, I didn’t even notice because I saw a man cub in a loincloth. They still have yet to make a feature with brown people, just one at a time please. I didn’t realize that Louie king of the apes was supposed black American jazz musician, and all the whooping chimps were his homies, I just knew that they wanted to walk and talk like Mowgli.  Brown people en masse are frightening to America which is why they are represented by Monkeys and more complimentary: Lions in the Lion King. This wasn’t their first offense by any means, but Disney basically set the pace for themselves and the competing entertainment world to feature any people any way they saw fit.  Like the gay neighbor in Breakfast at Tiffany’s who was turned Chinese instead in the final script.  You can say that the animations reflect the attitudes at the time of the movie’s release.  So the giant dildo on the cover of The Little Mermaid represents?

The decade I grew up in, the 1980’s, seemed overly racially progressive in the visual medias. A trend of Hollywood empowering people of color took place, like the Indian dude from Short Circuit. It seemed the future was now (ex. Jem & the Holograms, G.I. Joe, Ghostbusters, Captain Planet, all multiracial) and the future held real creativity(Image comics were a bunch of pissed disheartened Marvel writers and Artists who wanted creative freedom and made the fastest selling most successful comics in history starring a multiracial cast of supremely powerful heroes, some antipatriotic and homosexual), not just ” hey let’s make the Jellyfish on Shark Tale (DreamWorks) offensively Jamaican.”

Examples of successful books and films and games that characterize race are Star Wars (The Trade Fed are Japanese, Jawas and Tusken Raiders are Arabs, Hutts are Jews, Lando is a traitor) and The Lord of the Rings (the evil tribes from the east and the south join the tribes of orcs, evil mud creatures born of sorcery) even Super Mario, my favorite, is an awful greasy wop.  Like in 1997, when Mario 64 came out, and you finally hear Mario’s voice the cheapest Italian accent say “Let’sah GO!”  And really everyone is doing it and its all fucking O.K because we’ve all heard these complaints before and no one does anything.

A few more examples of racial categorization and association from The Walt Disney Company; 7 Dwarves live in recluse like they should, and are known by their social debilitations.  Pinocchio bags uneducated Italian gypsy, that fuckers name is Stromboli.  Darth Vader and Mufasa are like the only “black king” characters ever, both voiced by the king of Zamunda (another progressive racial film)  Tigger from Pooh, Worf from Star Trek, and Barrett from Final Fantasy (the only black guy in a video game besides Mike Tyson, all obnoxious black guys that nullify anything that was OVERdone in the 80’s to empower “colored folks“).  If you remember the original words to “Arabian Nights” song they say, “where they cut off your ears if they don’t like your face, it’s barbaric but its home”.  Which anti-Islamic goon is responsible for that one. It pissed off enough folks that they changed it for the home release but I always remember being personally offended as an Arab-type person.  I was a smart enough kid that by the time I was old enough to decide what I liked for myself (age 9?) I completely disassociated myself from anything fake, racist, or cheesy (basically America), and it did make me suffer a little because knocking everything can be a risk as well as a reward in the sense that you can miss out on truly awesome stuff when not paying attention (like Missy Elliott, or Batman: The Dark Knight).  Never mind my Lavender Mafia conspiracy theories, where is the tolerance, and who is blowing the whistle on people for producing art that subconsciously affect popular opinion.  Just because it’s a Walt Disney classic doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be ripped off the shelves and burned so that future generations can thank us for freeing their psyches from the mental locks imposed by a certain fascist mouse.  This is how I felt going in there, imagine after 2 years of work.  Mickey is more like a fucking rat.

Then I find out that the new animated feature is about rats in a kitchen, that’s ok I guess you need your inspiration from somewhere. But it gets worse, they make all the cooks greasy foreigners that fucking look just like me and  the other cooks. I saw the fat one looks just like this Mexican dude Simon Aguilera, squinty eyed and poncho villa mustache but the main character, (named fucking Linguini the most racist Italian slur since Stromboli from Pinnocchio) is supposed to be me!! I was shocked; anyone who knows me and my manners knows that this lanky big nosed foreigner featured  WAS ME!  A____ _________ is Linguini the simpleton loser cook! Sure he’s been Anglicized, but it’s so obviously a caricature I can’t help but think that they dug up these artists off the boardwalk Venice Beach style.

I guess that was their revenge for my honesty in their swindles. They steal every idea ever given. They steal ideas from DreamWorks (Ants/Bugs Life, Nemo/Sharks Tale) and ruin everything by owning it eventually. While talking with one of the animators I once let it slip that I’d love to see an animated feature that took place in Mario bros. or Nintendo world like Captain N or a MMORPG like World of Warcraft or the like.  I would not be fucking surprised at all if that is either their next or next after that animated feature, so listen carefully remember my words here, Hollywood fucking does.