Reefer Madness

“When danger’s near, exploit their fear” (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical scene 13) is the main underlying theme of Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical. Governments across the globe know this practice, many of them using such propaganda in wartime, most famously for both World Wars. From posters advising young men and women how to live their lives, to the outrageously inaccurate stories and articles of American journalist William Randolph Hearst, governments have tried to manipulate their citizens’ minds for centuries. Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, directed by Andy Fickman, is the 1940’s-based movie rendition of the Broadway play by Dan Studney and Kevin Murphy (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, Pop Entertainment), that pokes fun at one particular movie-form of this propaganda, the 1936 public service film simply known as Reefer Madness.

Merriam Webster’s Deluxe Dictionary defines propaganda as, “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumors for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.”(Merriam Webster’s Deluxe Dictionary pg. 1466) This propaganda plagues the original Reefer Madness to a point that many actually found the movie quite funny, prompting the satirical Reefer Madness: The Musical’s emergence in 1999, which later became Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, a movie that debuted, quite popularly, in the Sundance Film Festival (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, Pop Entertainment, online), and was later broadcasted on the Showtime movie network.

In the opening scene, there is a large crowd of parents gathering in a schoolroom, and receiving a pamphlet reading, “Tell your children! Marijuana, America’s new drug menace” (a notable reference to the original movie, in which that was a subtitle.) Upon arriving in the room, everyone takes a seat, and the Lecturer proceeds to ask the parents to take pictures of their children out of their wallets to look at. After doing so, he tells them their children are “targets of a new drug menace” known as marijuana, an obvious form of propaganda through fear of loved ones in danger. The group then breaks into a song, as expected in any musical, about marijuana and it’s effects on teenagers. Said song also is packed with propaganda, such as the opening line, “Creeping like a Communist/it’s knocking at our doors/turning all our children into hooligans and whores.” (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical scene 1) Only three lines in and the satire is already clearly prominent. The use of words like Communist and Socialist (also said in the song) in the 1930’s and 1940’s scared multitudes of Americans, not to mention the possibility of their beloved offspring becoming some moral-free creature.