Rupert Murdoch May Have Just Killed the Best Political Ads of All Time

If you’ve never seen the cult classic movie Idiocracy, do yourself a favor and fix that this weekend. The movie was amusing at the time of its release, but now it’s just scarily prophetic. The basic gist of the movie is that humanity is not proceeding on a path towards total enlightenment, but is rather getting gradually dumber as each generation arrives. The main character of the movie is a person of average intelligence in 2006 who is sent forward in time and suddenly finds himself the smartest man alive.

Anyway, fans of the movie have been hopping up and down and screaming that the Trump campaign’s success to this point proves that we are living in the time period foretold by the movie. The movie’s creators agreed and wanted to cut a series of anti-Trump commercials featuring the awesome Terry Crews reprising his role as President Camacho. However, Fox owns the rights to all Idiocracy-related content, and allegedly the order came down from Murdoch to deep-six the entire idea:

Earlier this summer, we reported that Idiocracy collaborators Etan Cohen and Mike Judge were teaming up to make a series of apt “President Camacho”-themed anti-Trump ads. All they needed was the go ahead from 20th Century Fox, which owns the rights to the disturbingly prescient comedy from 2006. As it turns out, they didn’t get it—Fox declined, and the ads are effectively dead, but that shouldn’t really surprise anyone given that Fox boss Rupert Murdoch is pretty open about his support of Donald Trump. According to The Daily Beast, Terry Crews was on board for the ads, but even Terry Crews is no match for Murdoch’s absolute power.

“It kind of fell apart,” Judge told The Daily Beast. “It was announced that they [the ads] were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first. Doing something satirical like that is better if you just don’t say, ‘Here we come with the anti-Trump ads!’ Also, when Terry heard that announcement he wasn’t happy about it.”

Sigh. What might have been. I guess we’ll all just have to dawn our Brawndo caps and imagine what these awesome ads would have looked like.

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