1001 Animations: The Butter Battle Book

Show: Dr. Seuss TV Specials
Episode: N/A
Year: 1989

Writer(s): Dr. Seuss
Director(s): Ralph Bakshi (Supervising), Kent Butterworth (Animation), David Marshall (Animation)

Since the 1930s, Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel has delighted the children of the world with his beautiful stories crafted in rhyme, and what makes him so special is that all of these stories have stood the test of time. We all know about How The Grinch Stole Christmas!, The Cat in the Hat (piss off, Universal Pictures) and even The Lorax (again, fuck you, Universal Pictures), but even his more obscure stories have their places in history. And yes, I know many of them are silly like Hop on Pop, There's a Wocket in My Pocket! and Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?. But The Butter Battle Book may very well be his greatest and most relevant creation he has ever made.

 

When this book was published in 1984, the United States was already waist deep in the Cold War. 5 years later from the fighting and squall, came the collapse of the Berlin Wall (I'm not so good with the rhyming, I'll stop now), and 4 days afterwards aired the animated adaptation of what many consider to be the darkest and bleakest story Dr. Seuss ever penned. This is by far the most accurate animated adaption of Seuss' works ever made; even he himself said as much giving it a high praise. The special itself was produced and directed by legendary dark age animator Ralph Bakshi, and was one of the last things he did before he fell from grace and almost stopped doing animation altogether.

 

War… war never changes. This is one of the few absolute universal truths. For millennia, people have fought over the most ridiculous things, even over truly stupid things like whether or not you should bare arms using guns! Have any of you ever read Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift? One thing most people forget about that novel was why Lilliput and Blefuscu went to war: it was essentially a holy war over how a soft-boiled egg's shell should be split. Isn't that the stupidest thing? Well yeah, that was Swift's intention as it was a satire on the futility of war. The Butter Battle Book follows in its footsteps by updating the message to be on the dangers of a nuclear war. And yes, I am aware of the 1955 MGM cartoon Good Will to Men, which did the same thing, but I feel this needed more exposure; anyhow, that was just an updated version of the 1939 cartoon Peace on Earth. Granted, it is one of The 50 Greatest Cartoons, and maybe I'll tackle both some day around Christmas.

 

This is story of the Yooks and the Zooks, who fight over who is right in how to butter your bread. We have the civil Yooks who butter side up, and the mischievous Zooks who butter side down. And what starts as segregation and a petty conflict escalates into a full on dick measuring contest, with the Yooks developing bigger and more complicated weapons to scare the Zooks. But of course, the Zooks are ALSO developing their own ways to counteract the Yooks’ weapons, seeming to come out ahead every time. This discourages our main "protagonist" of a Yook soldier who tells this tale to his grandson. In this war, he was lead by a Ronald Regan caricature that always told him to never surrender or lose hope while giving him the weapons needed. I should also point out that for the most part, neither side actually uses the weapons they have hoping they manage to scare the other side.

 

But that all changes in the end when the Yooks and the Zooks begin to devise the same weapons. First they both poise with their own "Utterly Sputters", and soon, both sides develop their own methods of mutual assured destruction: a small, but powerful red bomb called the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo". The buildup to its reveal and the creation of such a weapon has visuals on par with Halloween Is Grinch Night and it's truly a frightening sight! But the really scary part is that this story has no ending. It ends with the Yook and Zook who kick-started this whole mess poised to destroy one another with a bomb in each of their hands, neither side backing down or letting up while both sides races take shelter underground, as if it would do them any good. This is one of the few times in animation where a cliffhanger ending is the best possible outcome, because in a nuclear war, there is no happy ending.

The Butter Battle Book is owned by Warner Brothers and Turner Broadcasting.

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