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Mr. Meaty Meets the Hippies

Normally in our popular culture, the hippie is represented as a fairly benign, burned out and ultimately harmless individual. One afternoon a cartoon my daughter was watching a show called Mr. Meaty on the Nickleodeon network. It looked pretty funny with some of the unconventional animation I’ve grown to love, but the plot cast the hippies in a completely different light.

The show begins showing a conscientious kid working at a fast food restaurant called Mr. Meaty. Everything in the place comes from the same computerized machine, but his job is to feed the machine the correct ingredients at the right time. He’s overwhelmed by his job, and combined with the ineptness of the kids taking the orders, the restaurant crew is nearly lynched by unhappy customers.

After the fracas subsides, the manager from Soy What? (the vegetarian restaurant across the corridor in the mall) invites him to work for Soy What, where he assures him his labor will be valued. The manager has his long blond hair in dreadlocks, a nose ring and of course, the uniform is tye-died.

After a boring day at work (because nobody goes to Soy What) the manager invites him to join in a drumming circle after the mall closes. To his horror he’s the guest of honor at a human sacrifice, which is part of the hippies’ circle of life ceremony.

He’s tied to a table with hemp rope of course)with an apple in his mouth as the drumming begins. Suddenly his friend from Mr. Meaty barges in, wielding pepperoni numchucks with which he renders the hippies helpless. It’s double defeat for the hippies when after defeat in battle they all end up working at Mr. Meat.

It’s unusual enough to see the hippie culture referred to in the mainstream media, but I found the stereotypes very amusing, and perhaps even a little controversial for Nickleodeon. One of the members of the drumming circle is playing a digidiroo (one of those long Australian pipe things) but it looks conspicuously like something else, especially given the expression on the character’s face when he takes a break from playing.

What amused me the most was their unusual portrayal of the hippies as the evil characters. They started out with the traditional spin on hippies, but when they became cannibals from which the characters needed to be rescued, I nearly died laughing.

Sometimes I fear our kids aren’t exposed enough to crunchy culture, but this little glimpse of Nickleodeon gave some hope for the future.

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