Last night's episode of The Boondocks once again reflected the cleverness of Aaron McGruder's imagination. Who else would be able to take a classic Horror movie and combine it with a classic Hip-Hop movie, to make a statement about today's out of control youth? Check out the episode "Smoking With Cigarettes," below.
This episode features the adventures of everyone's favorite bad a** Riley Freeman and his new best friend Lamilton Taeshawn. Lamilton is a disturbed child who gets pleasure out of doing delinquent things. He feels like doing the wrong thing will eventually make him a huge star. This due to the fact that a majority of his activities landed him repeatedly on the evening news. With Riley by his side, the boys wreak havoc on the suburb of Woodcrest. They do everything from stealing cars to throwing a burning mattress off a bridge into oncoming traffic. Meanwhile Lamilton's former psychiatrist is following him around, trying to get him locked up permanently. However, things go sour when Riley gets tired of being bad and is ready to leave Lamilton alone. Lamilton isn't ready to let Riley go and keeps him as a friend via gunpoint. In the end, Riley and Lamilton battle things out on the rooftop of a school and Lamilton takes what appears to be a fatal fall. But when Riley looks over the edge, Lamilton is up and ends up in a battle with his former psychiatrist instead. Riley leaves the roof and returns to his brother and granddad.
As mentioned earlier, what made this episode clever was it's execution. McGruder used the premise of Horror movie classic Halloween to create Lamilton's story. He then ended the episode out with the premise and popular scene from the old school Hip-Hop movie Juice. It takes some pretty slick thinking to connect those two movies and make it work. I mean the common theme of disturbed youth is obvious, but those two movies don't ordinarily go together. Props to McGruder for thinking outside of the box. In regards to the message here, there are a lot of out of control youth out there. And whatever the reason for this epidemic, I do agree that medicating them all or locking them up is not necessarily the answer. I believe if someone took up some quality time with these youngsters and helped guide them on the right path, they would be alright. A lot of the responsibility falls on the parents but those of us in the community could do more too. Not saying that all of the youth can be saved, but there are some out there with potential. Just something to think about. -MinM
The little boy in this episode is actually based on a real 7 year old that stole his grandmas SUV. I saw it on youtube, just type in 7 year old steals grandmas car
Posted by: Demond | June 22, 2010 at 01:22 PM