“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.
At the song's conclusion, the lecturer begins to play a movie set in the late 1930's in Anytown, U.S.A. The movie, starring a boy named James Fennimore Harper (often simply called Jimmy) and his romantic interest, Mary Lane, begins with Jimmy helping Mary study William Shakespeare's “Romeo and Juliet,” and it is understandable that here they also break into a song, comparing themselves to Romeo and Juliet, albeit incorrectly. As the song comes to close, the narrator/lecturer comes into the scene, disguised as a trash man, and suggests schools should teach more from the Bible than from writers like “Bill Shakespeare,” also propaganda on a more religious level.
The film then cuts to the “Reefer Den” where the audience is introduced to Jack Stone, the man with an apparent marijuana green-thumb, Mae Coleman, the owner of the home, and Sally DeBains, and Ralph Wiley, two “reefer fiends” who are respectively a sexually promiscuous woman and a college dropout. The scene begins with these four waking up from an evidently marijuana-ridden night. The home's mail number is 420, which is reference to modern pop-culture, where 420 is a number often associated with smoking marijuana. As soon as everyone is awake and lively, Jack goes on his never-ending quest to find more clients at the local Five and Dime store, which Mae is opposed to. She makes this opposition quite clear during her song, in which she states that Jack has, on a few occasions, raped her while under the influence of this “unspeakable scourge.” (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical scene 1)
The lecturer then has his assistant change the reel of the projector, as to continue the movie. In this pause, one viewer by the name of Paul Kochinski airs out his opinion, saying that he disagreed with the lecturer and notable American journalist William Randolph Hearst, who had said that marijuana is highly addictive, more so than heroin or cocaine. Mr. Kochinski references his brother-in-law who “had himself a problem with the heroin” and goes on to say, “Let me tell you, there's nothing more addictive than that stuff.” (Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical scene 4) The Lecturer scoffs at this man and suggests, due to his Polish last name, that he is a Communist, again showing blatant political fear propaganda at its finest.
