#046: The Fundamentalist Fear of Fantasy, Part II (w/ Hertzey Hertz)

A Leap of Doubt

This episode is the second and final part of the conversation I had with my friend Hertzey Hertz on her show a couple years ago on her YouTube show Hertzey Talks, and which she has given me permission to mirror here on my own podcast. In Part I, Hertzey and I discussed one aspect of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, what I have called “The Fundamentalist Fear of Fantasy.” We are responding point-by-point to two evangelists who in the early 1980s produced a program titled Deception of a Generation, in which they railed against what they perceived to be the evils of children’s fantasy cartoons and toys.

As I said in the intro to Part I last week, Hertzey and I had a great time simultaneously mocking and critiquing/debunking all the outlandish and factually incorrect claims these two evangelists, Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips, made in their program. Our discussion I think serves to say something profound about the psychology of religious fundamentalism and why it reacts in certain ways that to us today seem outlandish and ridiculous to various things in popular culture that they viewed as a threat to their evangelical hegemony.

And now in this episode, we pick up where we left off last week, chronicling our two evangelists’ fear of such toys, shows and movies as Ken and Barbie dolls, Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, E.T., The Smurfs, superhero comic books, G.I. Joe, Transformers, etc., etc. The list goes and on and on.

Links:

The original YouTube show with Hertzey Hertz on Hertzey Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJAsrj32aZo

Deception of a Generation (1984), the video we are responding to, is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hnjdq32u-MU

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The opening intro and closing outro were written by Nathan Dickey, produced and edited by Rich Lyons and read by Deanna Joy Lyons.

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