The Barackopter

The Barackopter

The label on that vehicle Obama’s riding is a little too small, even with the cartoon’s size bumped up a bit from usual. It reads “Clean Energy.”

This cartoon is based on a speech the President made recently calling for an end to America’s dependence on fossil fuels, in response to several recent disasters involving them, including the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Before the speech, I was considering a variety of different gags, including a story with Walt Kelly’s characters from Pogo, and a bit involving B.P. Richfield and Earl Sinclair from the highly-underrated early-’90s sitcom Dinosaurs. But both of these were quite long, and involved references to things most people wouldn’t recognize, so I tried to come up with something a little more-succinct and less-esoteric than either.

The gag I went with involves a reference to the first episode of The Flintstones. In the episode, Barney Rubble invents a helicopter he dubs the “Barneycopter,” but Fred insists on calling it the “Flintstone Flyer.” Then, they use Barney’s amazing invention for the mundane purpose of skipping a trip to the opera to go bowling instead. Whatever you want to call it, I thought the prehistoric helicopter looked sort of like a windmill, so I figured it would be a good symbol for renewable energy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 11:49 pm and is filed under Cartoons & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “The Barackopter”

By » softmoney (June 12th, 2010 at 2:10 pm)

too bad barack hussein has done nothing at all to seriously discourage the use of fossil fuels. if anything, he’s worked with the big energy firms in order to stifle any serious alternative energies. nice try but hes a shit president

Not that I fully disagree with you, but perhaps I would be more inclined to your point of view if you weren’t seemingly using his middle name as a pejorative like a member of Glenn Beck’s audience

Who should be piloting the clean-energy device instead?

By » softmoney (June 14th, 2010 at 10:25 pm)

nikoli tesla

Nikola Tesla is dead. Long live Nikola Tesla.

By » LagomorphMan (June 15th, 2010 at 10:25 pm)

I don’t think softmoney was trying to offer legitimate criticism, but just, as is fairly common, suggesting that anything said in defense or support of Obama is equal to blind worship and loyalty to the man. Personally, I honestly can’t think of anyone else who would fit in place of Obama in this strip. Though I do agree that Obama has not done as much as I’d like to ween us off of oil. Though I never really expected him (or any elected official, really) to do so.

Though now that I think about it… Out of boredom, I read the opinion page of the New York Daily News while on break today, and someone pointed out that over 30 years ago, Jimmy Carter warned us about the necessity to turn away from fossil fuels, to conserve what we have and to do more with less. He was pretty much shot down because new technologies would take too long to come to fruition and we all know how much the public hates long-term solutions. But had we listened to him then, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess today. So maybe Jimmy Carter would make for a good substitute for Obama in this particular instance.

By » SpicyNuts (July 13th, 2010 at 10:43 am)

How about Al Gore?

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