Monkeys Are The New Zombies

Why Monkeys are the New Zombies By Christopher J. Garcia

As a computer historian, I’m frequently obligated to tell museum visitors about Moore’s Law. If you have never heard of Moore’s Law, tune to NPR anytime they’re talking about tech matters and it’ll come up. Moore’s Law, as stated by Gordon Moore on the occasion of a press conference during the early days of Fairchild Semiconductor, states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months. There is another law that I often bring up: Garcia’s Law. Garcia’s Law, as first stated by me on the occasion of trying to impress a beautiful Goth Chick while drinking cheap Scotch in a San Diego hotel bar, states that the lowbrow intelligencia will turn around a favorite theme or fad every sixteen months. Both laws are as permanent and true as the flow of money from poor suckers to rich providers and we can never look back to the old ways; progress only carries us forward into bold new worlds. Usually, the turnover is fast, sometimes brutal, with Elvez Castillo t-shirts or StreetFiti jackets cluttering the unused portion of hipsters’ closets. Today, we’re in the middle of a rare estuary formed as one beloved phenomenon dies and another arises. It is in this vein that I proclaim: Monkeys Are The New Zombies! I cannot deny that I am, in fact, a major proponent of zombie culture. I’ve written about the zombie mania that began sweeping the nation in early 2004 and I’ve worked tirelessly towards the public acceptance of the zombie way of life...or undead life, as it were. I co-authored the concept of the ZomBat, undead Australian marsupials that will devour all mankind…once they find a way off the continent. So big ups to zombies from

me, and I’m not alone. There are lots of folks who watch obscure zombie films and play zombie-themed video games or listen to novelty records or make up their own Member of the International Brotherhood of Theme Park Zombies bumper stickers. The Zombistas like myself celebrate the walking dead through constant devotion to our zombie cultural heritage. So you can understand why I hate to admit that monkeys are the new zombies. And there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Sadly, in times of yore, the two could have co-existed in the hearts and spending habits of so many international bright young things, but this marks the end of the zombie way. No more can one walk through the mall and find zombie shirts in Hot Topic, zombie toys in Kay-Bee, zombie promotional ice cream flavors at Baskin Robbins. Those days are gone. There’s only room in the hearts of Hipster Nation for either monkey or zombie, and that place is now taken by a monkey who will never share the spotlight. Let’s take it back to the beginning. Monkeys evolved somewhere between four and six million years ago. The movement of the earth, coupled with all sorts of genetic variation, led to the more than 200 species that live, or lived, on almost every inhabitable piece of Earth. Some think that monkeys fared better than many other animals because their appearance is close enough to humans that we’d feel bad killing them for food, and in many places religion and local custom disallows harming monkeys in any way. (While “monkey” actually only refers to two of three groups of primates, the current US educational system authorizes all primates, aside from humans, to be called monkeys.) Zombies are a different story. No one knows when tales of the first zombies came to be, but they certainly originated about the same time as legends of werewolves and

vampires began to grow. Stories of the Haitian zombies of the eighteenth century are a good start, but there are tales dating back much further of creatures that we would consider zombies, including Draugrs, Norse warriors who came back from the dead to attack those that remained alive. The American Voodoo conception of zombie seems to originate in a Niger-Congo name for a snake god. The concept would arrive with some of the earliest slaves brought to the Americas from the region as early as the sixteenth century. It was Zora Neale Hurston who first made many high- minded Americans aware of zombies with her 1937 story “Tell My Horse” about Felicia Felix-Mentor, a woman who had been buried in 1907 but was seen around town for the next 30 years…or maybe not. The current, popular idea of the zombie comes from film. The earliest American zombie films were made in the 1930s. “White Zombie” is often called the first zombie film, though such claims are always questionable when dealing with ‘firsts’ and directors egos. There’s always someone who claims they did it before whoever gets the credit. In the 1950s, the rise of the B-movie led to a few more zombie films, but it was the 1960s and 70s that really launched what the modern zombie. You can really pin it on George A. Romero. Romero’s epic zombie films—“Night of the Living Dead,” “Dawn of the Dead,” and “Day of the Dead”—are all zombie classics, embraced by both sides of the oft-divided film snob community. They were all very successful, raking in millions of dollars on miniscule budgets. Romero used the films as grand social commentary on consumerism, which engaged the higher brow communities, but also featured the gore that would keep the lowest common denominator buying tickets. Romero’s films defined zombies; a culture grew around their mythoi.

Zombies started to recapture attention in the late 1990s when small-time filmmakers, often using digital cameras, started making a lot of cheap zombie films, such as “Hot Wax Zombies on Wheels,” “Zombie Doom,” and “Zombie! Vs. Mardi Gras”. It wasn’t unusual to see one or two make their way onto the film festival circuits. These indie flicks, along with a rise in the production of mainstream, big-budget zombie films, brought zombies out into the open and got the disciples of pop culture commentators like Joe Bob Briggs (All Praise Be Unto He!) and the urban-dwelling hipster crowd interested in zombies for the first time since the days when Romero films were required college dorm and art house viewing. The introduction of the board game Zombies!!!, along with various re-issues and remakes of the Romero zombie classics along with films like “Resident Evil,” (2002) “Shawn of the Dead”(2004) and “28 Days Later,” (2003) all brought about a new love of zombie culture. 2005 will probably be remembered as the high point, with films like “Zombie-American” by The Daily Show’s Ed Helms and “City of the Dead,” along with the formation of the Living Dead Girlz Zombie Dance Team Except… You see, monkey culture has been on the rise for more than a decade, too. In 1999, the genius recording/comic book artist James Kolchalka Superstar recorded a song called “Monkey vs. Robot” and then animated it for Spike & Mike’s. It told the story of monkeys battling robots in the eternal struggle between the technology-centre of our brains and our primitive sex-food-fun instincts. Both the film and song gained a following, and the release of the Monkey vs. Robot graphic novel furthered its popularity. The monkey always won over the hearts of those that saw it. I point to this moment as the start of the monkey gaining the upper hand on the zombie in the minds of the hip. College

Radio DJs bought the record, bought the comic books, and when several students made their own versions of the video, the monkeys usually won the battle. While zombies were still just starting to show they deserved the main stage, monkeys were making strides towards dethroning them. While there have been literally hundreds of popular monkeys in our culture (Lancelot Link Secret Chimp, Marcel from Friends, Monsieur Eek, the Discworld Librarian, Cheeta from Tarzan, J. Fred Muggs from The Today Show, etc.), in recent years, many references to monkey behaviors have become popular t-shirt phrases. At any live college rock-type show in the US you can find shirts that read “I Fling Poo,” “Prehensile Tail” and “Uses Primitive Tools” accompanied by images. The word “monkey” also appears in a bevy of band names, notably the Bay Area ska combo Monkey, the 1960s manufactured rock group The Monkees, and current superstars Gorillaz. Recently, the 1970s Japanese television show “Monkey,” and its catchy theme song, has gained a new audience via file-sharing and mash-ups. The show gained enough of a following to be used as the source for referential gags on “Hollywood Squares” and VH-1 specials. As both the zombie and monkey trends seemed to rise at the same time, with the zombies taking the faster track, is interesting to note that the way of the zombie and the way of the monkey are not compatible. The grim aesthetic of zombie-kind, even when played for laughs, just does not compute when put alongside the cheery comedic monkey and his antics. I dare you to look a baboon in the face and not laugh. It can’t be done. The two cultures are now entirely mutually exclusive. After a period of coexistence, the former leader’s is watching its stock drop in favor of the ape.

In the 1990s, many monkeys began showing up in films as sidekicks. Building on the tradition of films like “Every Which Way But Loose,” there were a series of monkey films in the 1990s, including “Dunston Checks In” and “Monkey Trouble.” “Monkeybone” took a more adult approach to the genre: the monkey symbolized the Trickster side of a comic creator’s mind. There were many films in the 1990s that used monkeys as comical foils. At the end of Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats,” Jay and Silent Bob walk down a long and lonesome road with an orangutan, and Mark Hamill’s 2003 film “Comic Book: The Movie” uses a monkey as a part of the comedy surrounding the madeup comic hero Commander Courage. The monkey movie trend continued as the zombie resurgence pushed ahead. In fact, in 2003, there was a rare double: in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” Captain Barbossa’s crew is cursed to walk the Earth knowing nothing of the pleasures of life nor can they find death. That fits nicely with zombie theory. One of the crew, officially, it would seem, was Barbossa’s pet monkey. We see the monkey in the moonlight in its living, rotted death form. The only other Zombie/Monkey connection I can find is the Sumatran Rat Monkey of DeadAlive. While not a zombie, it is its bite that causes the people of New Zealand to become flesh-eating monsters of the semi-dead. There are many zombie animals in the Re-Animator films as well, though there’s only one monkey that seems to fit both bills. As the years ran on towards today, it became obvious that there were things afoot that would forever change the landscape. Zombie culture could only go so far. Horror interspersed with comedy can work well in the mainstream culture, but graphic zombie stuff is a hard sell to the masses. The average Joe can only take so much of zombie baby

births (2004’s “Dawn of the Dead”) or guys jumping from severed limb to severed limb (“DeadAlive”) Sure, zombie movies might open with big weekends and strong return business, but really only a small segment of the movie-going audience enjoys this type of film. Though the fans are rabid, it’s rare to find converts outside of junior high schools. While more and more is targeted towards these Uberfans at festivals run by groups like The Chainsaw Mafia, zombieness is slipping out of the mainstream consciousness. Monkeys, on the other hand, are ready to explode. There’s a movie called “King Kong” from 1933. It was remade in 1976 (and nearly killed the tradition of remakes). Peter Jackson wanted to make another “King Kong” for years, and he finally had his way, releasing it in late 2005. It was wellreceived, though not the blockbuster that people were expecting. But the release did get various ape and monkey references back into the mainstream again. You can usually judge a subculture by sketch comedy, and the MadTV skit “Brokeback Kong,” along with “King Kong” jokes on SNL’s “Weekend Update” all indicate a growth for monkeys that zombies just don’t share. With the run-up to the release of the Curious George movie, there’s been another explosion in monkey stuff. T-shirts, commercials, trailers, toys at Burger King, they all point towards monkeys. A typical signal of what’s cool to the pop elite is what is displayed at indie comic tables at conventions like Wondercon in San Francisco. This year, there were no fewer than six full comics with monkeys as main characters (including the excellent “The Motherless One” by Gene Yang). In contrast, I managed to find only one zombie title. It’s a telling that the hardest of the hard core are now producing more material from monkeys than zombies. Truly, though the zombie flag flew

so high as recently as last October, now we find ourselves, in a world run by monkeys. They’ve beaten back the zombie threat and are climbing the nearest skyscraper to gloat over the masses below. There’s a new sheriff in town, and this one’s alive and hairy.