You know, a soldier in a Batman cape smacking people around for being stupid on an Army base should not be nearly this funny.
Bagram Batman is essentially a series of PSA featuring cheesy acting, a cartoonish sensibility, and a halfway decent Christian Bale impression.
On paper it sounds terrible. But in motion…
Granted, beating up somebody who listens to Taylor Swift falls under the umbrella of “public service”, but the others show the same somewhat wacky and off-beat sensibility:
These aren’t just goofing around, by the way: They’re posted to the US Army’s official YouTube channel and are used to educate soldiers about the basics of not getting killed for stupid reasons overseas. You can find more of them here.
We’ve yet to hear from DC what it thinks of these, but if nothing else, it’s both a lot funnier than that IRS Star Trek parody and likely a lot cheaper.
![[avatar]](http://p.uproxxcdn.com/photo/569/thumb)
That’s pretty legit. Would Definatly break up a 2 hour power point safety breifing.
If you’ve ever watched a little something called AFN, you’d know these were the best safety commercials the military has ever put out.
I have not, but they’ve replaced Private Snafu in my affections.
What JTRO said. I did two deployments to Iraq and they were mostly spent in a TOC, so I saw far more shitty AFN commercials than a single human being should be exposed to.
Just for Dan’s edification: AFN (Armed Forces Network) is the TV you get overseas in the military. For certain legal reasons they can’t make a profit off commercials, so during commercial breaks they would play all these self-produced, low-budget safety and educational shorts. They range from sterile and terrible to actually very clever and witty.
They have the same charm as the Sweded videos from “Be Kind Rewind” and they’ve been making them since the beginning of the Cold War. There’s dozens of them on YouTube and they really bring back some great memories of growing up on Army posts in Europe.
My favorite that I can remember is one about respecting government vehicles. It’s along the lines of “You wouldn’t steal a car, you wouldn’t steal a purse, but you steal movies? Piracy IS stealing.” This one ends with a couple of screwball soldiers doing what they shouldn’t: They take a government minivan to a local race track and go all Sort of Fast, Kind of But Not Really Furious with it. With a minivan, I can’t stress that enough.
However, knowing soldiers I’m sure that this commercial had some basis in real events.
I’M NOT WEARING HOCKEY PADS.