I guess the elephant in the room for me is; when did “zombie day” become something that occurs as a faculty-sanctioned event in public schools, and in mid-November of all things?
Anyone ever heard of this before?
Swords to Plowshares upthread has already mentioned the videogame “Call of Duty”.
Recently there have also been a lot of tabletop wargames and roleplaying games set in a “Weird World War II” with both Allies and Axis powers using occult magic and monsters in order to win the war. Zombies, vampires, werewolves and mutants abound in this setting, especially on the Axis side.
All this is probably predicated on the occult and mystical beliefs supposedly held by the higher-ups in the Nazi party.
Isn’t that the basis for Hellboy?
Oh, schools like to come up with that sort of thing. Pajamas Day, Crazy Hair Day, Spirit Day (wear the school colors), Movie Star Day. They seem to think it’s necessary nowadays. Zombie Day is just the middle-school version for young teens who are too cool for the elementary crowd.
That’s a line you never cross. Everyone hates Illinois Nazis.
Unlike zombies, there were plans to make real Nazi werewolves.:eek:
My daughter plays Austria. I’ve asked she never wear her Iron Cross. It has too much negative meaning for older folks.
We had dress-up days during Homecoming Week in high school (mid-80s), all leading up to School Spirit Day on the Friday of the game, where we’d wear the school colors.
I mostly remember Neon Day and an attempt at a Toga Day.
Damn kids with their Call of Duty Nazi zombies. Back in my day we had Nazi zombies in Doom, and we liked it that way!
Back in my day we had Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein, in top-down maps with profile characters and we kicked their asses!
Yeah, but it wasn’t until Doom that the Nazis actually turned undead! Unless you count episode 2, but technically they were mutants from medical experiments, rather than zombies.
My teenage son asked me to leave the room where his friends and he were playing because I asked this question. At length. Grammar and perhaps sentence diagramming were mentioned. The upshot? They’re zombie Nazis, because they were Nazis first, and then zombies…not that anyone else probably cares.
And then it’s only…No. I won’t do it. Darn you to heck Zebra, you and your sick sense of humor.
So if you signed up the zombies for the National Socialist Party they’d be Nazi zombies, but the dead usually aren’t politically active, except in Chicago.
I hate Illinois Nazi zombies.
This. To children today, Nazis are practically cartoon bad guys - in this case, literally so from the video game. Nazis are a stereotypical bad guy, and Hitler is just a “historical bad guy” like Napoleon or Ghengis Khan. Nazis and Pirates and Ninjas are all just pop culture referents.
The problem is there is some small subpopulation that uses Nazi symbolism and Hitler admiration as a real world political symbol for a message of violence and hate. Thus this imagery can’t quite get fully desensitized, because there’s still a racist connection to the swastika. So someone dressing up for Halloween and deciding instead of being Dracula or Frankenstein or a zombie decides instead to dress up as that other funny bad guy, Hitler, and gets sent home from school to change clothes for being insensitive. Kid didn’t mean to be an icon for bigotry and anti-semitism. He just thought Hitler would be an iconic “bad guy” costume.
So there is some tiny fragment of population that would dress up like Hitler out of admiration or as a form of intimidation, and a subset of the population oversensitized to the appearance of catering to that imagery and mentality, and a lot of kids who look on Hitler and Nazis and ancient history stereotypical bad guys who get caught in the middle.
These kids said “Zombies, fun! Hey, let’s dress like the zombies in CoD - we’ll be zombie Nazis! Yea!”
Nobody was thinking “Hey, we can dress up like zombies and be mean to Jews! Woohoo!”
Except for Cartman.
In a way, I gotta imagine this situation must piss the real neo-Nazis off no end.
Any of these games involve Britain’s various Wiccan covens & Magickal Orders being commissioned to co-ordinate rituals against the Axis? Because that is alleged also to have happened. The most elaborate version of the story is that Ian Fleming was the Gov’t man who contacted Aleister Crowley to in turn recruit said covens & orders for the effort.