Shyamalan, of course, had nothing to do with the movie “Soylent Green” where, it turns out (spoiler!) that the popular new food was made of people. (It wasn’t so in the book it was made from, but that’s another rant.)
The Grinch was a green Dr. Seuss character, and one of Seuss’s books was “Green Eggs and Ham”. The title is ambiguous, and I don’t have a copy to check the illustrations as to whether the ham was green, in addition to the eggs.
But Shyamalan is known for plot twists. Having the green ham made from a green character would perhaps not be out of place for one of his movies.
So, the humor is just juxtaposing Seuss, “Green Eggs and Ham”, the Grinch, “Soylent Green”, and Shyamalan.
“The title is ambiguous, and I don’t have a copy to check the illustrations as to whether the ham was green, in addition to the eggs.”
Ham was definitely green. It was Green Eggs and Green Ham.
Soylent Green Eggs and Ham is a good before and after pun.
“Would you like it in a pinch?
Would you like it from a grinch?”
The component are all correct, and there is a (weak) connection between them (just the color “green”, nothing else), and I even have to admit that the drawings are acceptable (not great, but not nearly as bad as they could have been). However, the comic still fails, because the dialog has no meter, nor rhyme, nor anything else about it that seems catchy. If it’s supposed to be a parody of Dr. Seuss, then it has to sound at least a little like something he might have written.
“However, the comic still fails, because the dialog has no meter, nor rhyme, nor anything else about it that seems catchy.”
Here’s one of the million sure to come:
You say the Grinch is soylent green?
I was wondering where he’d been!
I do not like Grinch-fashioned ham!
I do not like it, Sam I am!
I am afraid of Soylent Green
I know not where the Grinch has been
What do I think of eggs and ham?
If it is green, I’ll say “No, ma’am!”
Not in a church, nor from a steeple
Won’t eat that food, It’s made from people.
If you like books but have myopia
Fahrenheit 451 is the better dystopia
Burma-Shave
“If it’s supposed to be a parody of Dr. Seuss, then it has to sound at least a little like something he might have written.”
It’s also a parody of the movie, and it sounds exactly like a line from the movie. This seems passable to me.
The plot of Soylent Green, similarly to the plot of the Matrix, bothers me with how obviously inconsistent the plan is with even the most basic understanding of energy conservation.
The French title of “Soylent green” is “Soleil vert” (literally “Green Sun”).
Catlover – That was MARvelous!! (And yes, ‘451F’ IS the better book AND movie)
Tangent: I wonder if this comic was inspired by the real-life Soylent product line, which purports to be a complete diet just like the factory-made foods in the story.
Is the premise that people are being grown to be fed to other people (definitely not efficient), or just that there is not enough food and are too many people, so we are turning some into food? I definitely understood it the other way.
To be more candid – I always thought the real twist of Soylent Green has to be that “the oceans are dying” – the food shortage for which cannibalism is a temporary solution – rather than the fact of cannibalism itself, since it is already known in-movie that the government is killing people. Eating dead people might disrespect them, but I think most living people would feel more disrespected from being killed.
The premise of Soylent Green is not that turning to cannibalism is a complete and total solution to the overpopulation problem.
The premise is that the number of human beings has grown so large that no source of protein can be ignored.
All of human technology is ultimately geared to the single outcome of allowing the Earth’s biosphere to support more individual human beings. Starting with the invention of agriculture, then engineering to convert more natural;s lands to become more human habitat, pushing out whatever local flora and fauna were there before. Eventually, you reach a point where the entire biosphere has been converted to the project of keeping human beings alive. If our numbers keep increasing beyond that point…
I assume the recipe book they use is ‘To Serve Man’ . . .
Cream of Wheat: As I understand it, the premise is that there is not enough food, so some are turned into food. That is admittedly better than growing people to be fed to other people, which puts it one step above the Matrix. But even the idea that dead humans can provide a major food source, rather than a tiny, tiny sliver that’s almost completely inconsequential in fending off mass starvation, is pretty off.
@ Olivier – I remember hearing about a French tongue-twister that consisted of the word (or pronunciation?) of “vert” multiple times. Are you familiar with it? If so, can you provide a rendition?
P.S. I think I heard it in context of the German saying “Wer nichts wird, wird Wirt“, which is pronounced “ver nix virt, virt virt”, and means roughly: “one who will become nothing will be a barkeeper.”
Winter Wallaby: So your objection is that soylent green could not be as widely distributed as it seems to be in the movie, given how few dead people and how many hungry there seem to be? Good point.
But surely soylent green is a possible thing a starving government might try, and, if it proves futile, that the ratios might be changed and the more horrific scenario of mass killing/production until the population reaches a sustainable level be shortly on the way. I guess I just take the premise to be about desperation rather than sustainability.
There’s an old joke about a guy who owns two adjacent mink farms. His business plan is to feed the minks in Farm A with the corpses of minks from Farm B, and vice versa, and sell all the skins from both farms. No input and clear profit!
My complaint of the movie was the effort put into making soylent green with every corpses carefully wrapped in linen and cloth and going down a conveyor belt and six are seven people hand processing each was inefficient for the idea they were just dumping them but I can put that to producers sensibility.
Anyway, Soylent Green was not efficient. There were shortages and food lines lasting hours and they frequently ran out. Although was marketed as a great innovation of the use of plankton and famine would have occurred if it hadn’t been developed. It still wasn’t enough. (And when it was discovered there was no plankton left in oceans the question was what *was* it actually made from.)
Also it’s overlooked that regular food still existed. It was just extremely expensive (several thousand dollars for a jar of strawberry jam) and a luxury only for the very rich. There was still some country side and farms but they were all guarded with deadly force.
Kilby: “As-tu vu le ver vert allant vers le verre en verre vert ?”= Have you seen the green worm going towards the green glass drinking glass ?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Shyamalan, of course, had nothing to do with the movie “Soylent Green” where, it turns out (spoiler!) that the popular new food was made of people. (It wasn’t so in the book it was made from, but that’s another rant.)
The Grinch was a green Dr. Seuss character, and one of Seuss’s books was “Green Eggs and Ham”. The title is ambiguous, and I don’t have a copy to check the illustrations as to whether the ham was green, in addition to the eggs.
But Shyamalan is known for plot twists. Having the green ham made from a green character would perhaps not be out of place for one of his movies.
So, the humor is just juxtaposing Seuss, “Green Eggs and Ham”, the Grinch, “Soylent Green”, and Shyamalan.
“The title is ambiguous, and I don’t have a copy to check the illustrations as to whether the ham was green, in addition to the eggs.”
Ham was definitely green. It was Green Eggs and Green Ham.
Soylent Green Eggs and Ham is a good before and after pun.
“Would you like it in a pinch?
Would you like it from a grinch?”
The component are all correct, and there is a (weak) connection between them (just the color “green”, nothing else), and I even have to admit that the drawings are acceptable (not great, but not nearly as bad as they could have been). However, the comic still fails, because the dialog has no meter, nor rhyme, nor anything else about it that seems catchy. If it’s supposed to be a parody of Dr. Seuss, then it has to sound at least a little like something he might have written.
“However, the comic still fails, because the dialog has no meter, nor rhyme, nor anything else about it that seems catchy.”
Here’s one of the million sure to come:
You say the Grinch is soylent green?
I was wondering where he’d been!
I do not like Grinch-fashioned ham!
I do not like it, Sam I am!
I am afraid of Soylent Green
I know not where the Grinch has been
What do I think of eggs and ham?
If it is green, I’ll say “No, ma’am!”
Not in a church, nor from a steeple
Won’t eat that food, It’s made from people.
If you like books but have myopia
Fahrenheit 451 is the better dystopia
Burma-Shave
“If it’s supposed to be a parody of Dr. Seuss, then it has to sound at least a little like something he might have written.”
It’s also a parody of the movie, and it sounds exactly like a line from the movie. This seems passable to me.
The plot of Soylent Green, similarly to the plot of the Matrix, bothers me with how obviously inconsistent the plan is with even the most basic understanding of energy conservation.
The French title of “Soylent green” is “Soleil vert” (literally “Green Sun”).
Catlover – That was MARvelous!! (And yes, ‘451F’ IS the better book AND movie)
Tangent: I wonder if this comic was inspired by the real-life Soylent product line, which purports to be a complete diet just like the factory-made foods in the story.
Is the premise that people are being grown to be fed to other people (definitely not efficient), or just that there is not enough food and are too many people, so we are turning some into food? I definitely understood it the other way.
To be more candid – I always thought the real twist of Soylent Green has to be that “the oceans are dying” – the food shortage for which cannibalism is a temporary solution – rather than the fact of cannibalism itself, since it is already known in-movie that the government is killing people. Eating dead people might disrespect them, but I think most living people would feel more disrespected from being killed.
The premise of Soylent Green is not that turning to cannibalism is a complete and total solution to the overpopulation problem.
The premise is that the number of human beings has grown so large that no source of protein can be ignored.
All of human technology is ultimately geared to the single outcome of allowing the Earth’s biosphere to support more individual human beings. Starting with the invention of agriculture, then engineering to convert more natural;s lands to become more human habitat, pushing out whatever local flora and fauna were there before. Eventually, you reach a point where the entire biosphere has been converted to the project of keeping human beings alive. If our numbers keep increasing beyond that point…
I assume the recipe book they use is ‘To Serve Man’ . . .
Cream of Wheat: As I understand it, the premise is that there is not enough food, so some are turned into food. That is admittedly better than growing people to be fed to other people, which puts it one step above the Matrix. But even the idea that dead humans can provide a major food source, rather than a tiny, tiny sliver that’s almost completely inconsequential in fending off mass starvation, is pretty off.
@ Olivier – I remember hearing about a French tongue-twister that consisted of the word (or pronunciation?) of “vert” multiple times. Are you familiar with it? If so, can you provide a rendition?
P.S. I think I heard it in context of the German saying “Wer nichts wird, wird Wirt“, which is pronounced “ver nix virt, virt virt”, and means roughly: “one who will become nothing will be a barkeeper.”
Winter Wallaby: So your objection is that soylent green could not be as widely distributed as it seems to be in the movie, given how few dead people and how many hungry there seem to be? Good point.
But surely soylent green is a possible thing a starving government might try, and, if it proves futile, that the ratios might be changed and the more horrific scenario of mass killing/production until the population reaches a sustainable level be shortly on the way. I guess I just take the premise to be about desperation rather than sustainability.
There’s an old joke about a guy who owns two adjacent mink farms. His business plan is to feed the minks in Farm A with the corpses of minks from Farm B, and vice versa, and sell all the skins from both farms. No input and clear profit!
My complaint of the movie was the effort put into making soylent green with every corpses carefully wrapped in linen and cloth and going down a conveyor belt and six are seven people hand processing each was inefficient for the idea they were just dumping them but I can put that to producers sensibility.
Anyway, Soylent Green was not efficient. There were shortages and food lines lasting hours and they frequently ran out. Although was marketed as a great innovation of the use of plankton and famine would have occurred if it hadn’t been developed. It still wasn’t enough. (And when it was discovered there was no plankton left in oceans the question was what *was* it actually made from.)
Also it’s overlooked that regular food still existed. It was just extremely expensive (several thousand dollars for a jar of strawberry jam) and a luxury only for the very rich. There was still some country side and farms but they were all guarded with deadly force.
Kilby: “As-tu vu le ver vert allant vers le verre en verre vert ?”= Have you seen the green worm going towards the green glass drinking glass ?