…no.
Just… no.
NOOOOOOO.
Top comment: Even then, if they’re just going for a Jetson-ish “modern” 50s family, they could be disgustingly liberal and accepting. “Oh dear, Brat and Dog have killed another cat. He’s probably just in that rebelling stage. Now go take out the recycling, honey, while I finish paying my taxes and we’ll all hug it out until dinner. Then, we destroy the world.” — Zifnab
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Please, please don’t let Grant Morrison see this.
(Also, those costumes. Aparo-style!)
Hate to say it, but I kind of like the idea of “Father Knows Best” crossed with nuclear robot terrorists. Not saying that the implementation was good, or that the whole thing isn’t horribly dated, but the idea isn’t without merit. Take a Nextwave tounge-in-cheek approach to it all.
Picture it: a mad scientist becomes convinced society is sure to meet its destruction. American values will be lost in a tide of Communism, Catholicism, and miscegenation! So he builds a true American family of robots, and puts them in storage for 50 years (surely the foes of America will triumph by then, what with Kennedy in charge). And then, in the modern day, they wake up.
At first they may seem pretty heroic. They preach simpler values, they do genuine good (stop bank robberies, break up drug dealing rings, etc.), and get a lot of sponsorship from certain right-wing elements within the US. But then they decide it’s time to speak out against the problems they see (homosexual marriage, the “War on Christianity”, etc.), and the reports start coming in that their actions are highly dangerous to those they fight and the environment around them. As society reacts against them they decide they have to “fix” things, despite the fact people don’t want them fixed.
And then you can do the whole “does a robot programmed to believe something, really believe it?” What happens when the kids rebel and Mom and Dad are divided on whether or not they need to be reprogrammed (“they’re obviously malfunctioning”): robo-family counseling? Meanwhile, they’re leaking radioactive goo, driving down property values in their neighborhood, and generally falling apart in every since of the word.
“Mom and Dad stopped speaking after they had to put Dog down and Brat ran away. Later Dad stopped talking to anybody. I visited for Thanksgiving last year, and Mom had put him in storage. ‘It’s just easier this way for us’ she told me. I hear Brat’s working with Star Labs or some such now. Kinda’ surprising, but he always did like showing off and watching things explode. I hear they’re going to upgrade his personality and maybe his body soon; make him into an adult. Good luck. Sis tried her hand at pornography, but nobody wanted to work with her. STDs are one thing, but bowel cancer tends to scare them off. Shame really; it’s really obvious whenever one of us is leaking radioactive waste, and we’re safe the rest of the time. As for me, I still serve the Lord, going door to door teaching people about the Prophet Joseph Smith and the message that was given to him.”
God I have too much free time.
Do I sense a little jealousy? Can Rex turn himself into large amounts of radioactive fallout? No. I thought not.
It’s all a matter of adversaries. When they fight the Outsiders, it’s kind of tasteless. But when they fight Richard Feynman, this shit is off the hook.
“Mom produces an electromagnetic pulse, which can not only shock fatally, but can disable all electronic equipment in the immediate vicinity.”
Doesn’t that include… robots?
Now I want to see her at the kitchen table, drinking from a coffee mug with “If Mom ain’t operational, nobody’s operational!” on the side.
dirge93, there was this episode of Buffy…
(to PMMJ)
Yeah, but it was just a metaphorical “mom’s new boyfriend is a psycho” horror story.
Here I see some sort of exercise in the dream of Atomic America realizing it has no place in the reality of Modern America.
Like Fallout in reverse, or some such directional tangent.
Actually, wasn’t the Atomic Family or something like it featured in one of Chuck Austen’s plodding JLA “Pain of the Gods” issues?
I’ll say the same thing I said when Dave Campbell took on the Nuclear Family a few years ago, as part of his series on lame villains:
These guys are a brilliant, subversive, weird idea that could be totally hilarious and/or creepy in the right hands. You guys are haters.
Dog’s name is Dog.
Have we found the hidden origin of Rex?
Ok, I’ve never run across these characters before, and it doesn’t look like I’m missing too much. It always creeps me out when mother and father characters refer to each other as “Mother” and “Father” (or in this case the names of the characters seem to be “Mom” and “Dad”). Androids or no, that’s just freaky. It gives me flashbacks to The People Under the Stairs.
That younger son looks psycho.
HitTheTargets: That’s what I was thinking. A modern take on the death of the Nuclear Age, only without the mutants and atomic bombs.
dirge93: Actually your idea reminds me of this movie I saw many, many years ago staring Ed Bagley Jr. Him and his family were insectoid aliens come to Earth to conquer it, but under the guise of The Perfect Family. Only life isn’t like an episode of Leave It to Beaver and in a few years or so the family was falling apart. I remember very well that the daughter got knocked up by some human punk. I think the son was turning into a deliquent himself. The parents marrage was suffering and their plans for invasion went out the window because the family’s personal problems kept getting in the way.
I think in the end they all moved to Brazil to live in the rain forest, away from humanity and to raise the daughter’s brood.
Weird movie.
But what about the Force of July?
Looks like I was a little off, but I didn’t see the movie from the very beginning.
From imdb:
Meet the Applegates (1990) Giant preying mantis living in a South American jungle decide to move into suburban USA. Disguised as humans, the mantis are planning something.. Could it be connected to dad’s job in the power station perhaps? One day the daughter mantis forgets WHAT she really is when she’s with her boyfriend.. oops. Written by s jones
Huh. I thought MGK had done this troupe before. Or maybe he just mentioned them in passing.
Three things of relative importance
1. I like dirge’s setup.
2. John must have freaked when he saw Father from Kids Next Door
3. For MGK: http://www.lolpix.com/pictures/11/Funny_Pictures_550.htm
These guys would definitely make for an awesome story. However, there is not a comic book writer alive who will not turn them into cheap anti-conservative strawmen. In making them a caricature of Atomic America, they will also be homophobic, racist, and probably hypocritical fundamentalists, because, as we know, all Christians are like that, right?
Just thinking how utterly predictable they’re characterizations would be makes me rage.
rbx5:
You know, while I generally dislike caricatures of the fifties (since they ignore all the real, interesting politics of the time), you have to admit that there’s not many ways to make the model citizens of that era look good. Mind you, there aren’t many ways to make the model citizens of any era look good. But if you’ve got someone who insists that things are “fine and looking forward” during a time of immense institutionalized discrimination and warring imperialistic political blocs, even if you do everything you can to flesh them out, they’re still going to come off as a massive tool.
rbx5- Raging over a hypothetical situation? I’m an angry dude but not that angry.
But yeah, a little boy and his dog turning into deadly nuclear fallout is kind of fucked up, and not in an entertaining way.
I could swear that a version of the Nuclear Family actually re-appeared in the Battle for Bludhaven.
rbx5,
1. Name one other part of the American political spectrum that tries to enforce an objective set of “family values”.
2. Name one non-Christian religious group that sees itself as a political default in the US.
That said, there are plenty of other ways to use this family unit. I’m seeing something between a cross of Disturbing Behavior (1998) and Evergreen (Twilight Zone, Season 1, Episode 1, 2002).
I think they were going for disgustingly Leave it to Beaver, which isn’t necessarily “conservative” per say so much as it is 50s middle America. If they manage to slip a gay / race / religion sub plot into a “Nuclear Family” comic, I will be horrifically impressed. Even then, if they’re just going for a Jetson-ish “modern” 50s family, they could be disgustingly liberal and accepting. “Oh dear, Brat and Dog have killed another cat. He’s probably just in that rebelling stage. Now go take out the recycling, honey, while I finish paying my taxes and we’ll all hug it out until dinner. Then, we destroy the world.”
I mean, the whole “I’m going to build a robot family to teach people the horrors of nuclear war by blowing up a major city” sounds a lot more like a crazy Greenpeace activist plot than a crazy fundie conservative stereotype.
I think the trick to the Nuclear Family is to make them at least a little sympathetic. Not just caricatures, but people you have to feel some pity for. To some extent you should even like or envy them.
The balancing act between idealized 50’s America and the reality of “double oughts” modern America is what sets good writers apart from bad ones. Personally, based on this reply thread alone, I can see a heck of a story about both conservatives and liberals wanting to use them as strawmen for their own agendas (and of course neither side will ever admit to having an “agenda” since that’s a dirty word). Problem being, I’d want to use them to promote my own agenda.
And now I know how the story ends….
Zifnab: “Oh dear, Brat and Dog have killed another cat. He’s probably just in that rebelling stage. Now go take out the recycling, honey, while I finish paying my taxes and we’ll all hug it out until dinner. Then, we destroy the world.”
That last line had be loling.
I dunno what’s up with you, MGK, but this shit is pretty awesome. Even without reimagining them to be all relevant, that is a pretty rad set of abilities they have.
Ex: I like the idea of a team whose powers are based on the stages of an atomic explosion, but to turn that into a pun on “the nuclear family” is bad taste.
NCallahan has a great point: there is, literally, nothing the addition of Richard Feynmann does not make awesome. For example: bongos, vans, and Tuva (or bust!).
Nuclear Family vs. the Warwheel. Who wins?
Nuclear Family driving the Warwheel. Does this raise Nuclear Family’s score, or lower the Warwheel Score?
This post really sells lunacy of this idea short. People, this family is the perfect enemy for the Doom Patrol, as they go after crazy kitschy stuff like this all the time.
Do the Doom Patrol still fight crazy kitschy stuff like this? I haven’t kept up with the new series, but from what I’ve heard down the grape vine, it’s mostly just folks fighting nostalgia villains and sitting around being Blessed With Suck.
On the subject of the Nuclear Family and aging social values — you have to remember that these are robots. They aren’t going to making moral choices. They’re going to be programed with moral blank spots. They are literally not going to see things we take as givens. They wouldn’t, for example, dislike gay people — they’d just automatically recognize gay people has mentally handicapped, because that was the medical standard when they were built. They wouldn’t know what any disease discovered after 1957 is. They’d still associate Islam with the popular news image of Elijah Muhammad. That’s where the element of horror would come from.
LOL, well done. 😀
Why, you blasphemous motherfucker.
I believe if Doom sees that he will kill Wolverine in a fit of jealousy. (And there will be much rejoicing from everybody who is sick to fucking death of Wolverine…or to put it less verbosely, “almost everybody.”)
Yeah, and if they were called something else and didn’t have Stepford Wife smiles I could maybe feel sorry for the people they were modeled after. As they appear here, though, I want them to go away forever.
The Warwheel can always get another driver, but the Nuclear Family will keep on being the Nuclear Family until somebody goes to the trouble of reinventing them.
Is it me, or did the Outsiders have the weirdest villains? Nuclear Family definitely deserves a higher score than 11.
Couldn’t be Rex’s origin anyway.
Rex fought in WW deuce. Therefore, Dog was merely inspired by him.
And we see how feeble evil’s attempts to mimic good are.
So that’s who they are. I saw an Outsiders cover with a mushroom cloud that had a man’s face (with a pipe) on it. Weird shit.
Didn’t the Powerpuff Girls fight a group like this?
and yeah i love the concept too
i keep thinking that they all talk like Manhattan. except Dog, he is jut dead on the inside.
Wow. I used to have this comic and yes the Outsiders had some very odd villians. The issue where Superman and GeoForce beat the crap out of each other was a favorite of mine.
Nice blog by the way. I’m glad I found it.
P.S. You should totally write Doctor Strange, but I want to write the Nighthawk/Valkrie/Hellcat era Defenders.
It’s like Curious George’s Man with the Yellow Hat meets The Addams Family meets Fallout 3
No one else things they look like a mirror world First Family from Astro City? Maybe it’s just the pipe and the fact I’m exhausted.
No, no. PLEASE LET GRANT MORRISON SEE THIS.
Were they in 52, or was that a different amazingly wrong-headed notion?
@brebal: And, somehow, I see “Dallas” in here as well, for some odd reason.
Phhft! “Not really alive, therefore can’t die.” Oh, like Rex ISN’T prepared for radioactive zombie-like folks!
Did the youngest son grow up to be Dexter?
Come on, man, this concept’s great! Killer nuclear androids that think they’re the lead players in ‘Leave It To Beaver’! If you’re going to say it’s terrible, at least say why. Don’t just give us a big “NO” and leave it at that.
They all look like they’re thinking about how to eviscerate me.
All Mike Barr’s Outsiders villains were a) goofy, b) lame, c) based off some kind of pun, and d) seriously weird. I think he must have found the secret DC writer water cooler that Haney, Drake, and Kanigher used to drink from.
I wonder if Dad’s last name is Manly Pipe?
“Hi I’m Mr. Dad Manly Pipe and I’m here to give you CANCER!”
But can he turn into a car?
Hmmm…you guys all have a point (replying to the replies to my [post). I hadn’t thought of any of that.
Seconding “Let Morrison see this.” Damn All and Darling-Come-Home from Morrison’s Doom Patrol are perfect examples of ludicrous 50’s-family stereotypes made disturbing and lethal. Mr. Jones, also.
I remember thinking that the Nuclear Family was a relatively not retarded idea for some reason; Frankly, it seems like the kind of silly pop culture-y villain group that populated the 90s more than anything else. So, while they still sucked, they were before their time.
But even if they weren’t they’d still fucking suck.
You know, these guys have been brought back recently, they were shown working for the Society during that God awful “battle for Bludhaven” mini a while back.