Badass Broadcast: Commie Cartoons! Martian Revolution, The Evils of Jazz and More

Tommy Swenson sends in some proletariat-promoting propaganda from Lenin's Laff-Factory - a trio of West-whacking Commie Cartoons!

First up (embedded above) is Interplanetary Revolution (An Event Likely to Occur in 1929). In this strange, surreal and odd short from 1924, a comrade blasts off to Mars in order to battle the capitalists who have settled there. He wants to keep the Red Planet red! There's an outsider art beauty to the cartoon, and while the prediction of solar systematic uprisings was way off, 1929 did see capitalism take a big hit with the stock market crash.

Next is Someone Else's Voice, a 1949 kulture klash piece. All the birds of the forest sing a harmonious old fashioned song, but the mockingbird discovers foreign birdsong and tries to import it. That bird does swings some mean jazz! 

This cartoon is the most nuts of the three because it's like a bizarro version of a regular cartoon. The whole premise is about the crushing of individuality and happiness in the conformity of the crowd. In America this jazzbird would have turned the woods into a haven for hepcats, but in Soviet Russia the free-thinker is worn down. Destruction of the human spirit!

It's especially nuts because it so adequately apes the Disney style. Uncle Walt - pro-Nazi, militantly anti-Commie and a happy namer-of-names in the 50s - must have been seeing red.

Finally we have Our Answer to the Gloating Capitalist World. Made in 1924, shortly after the death of Lenin, this very short piece rattles of a series of Russkie accomplishments, as if to tell the running dogs of Western Imperialism "We ain't going nowhere."