Psychedelics are having a moment. Denver, Oakland, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Detroit all decriminalized psilocybin. So if you go there, the cops won’t bother you while you smell sounds and hear colors. Oregon straight up legalized it for “therapeutic use,” and as we all know, therapy benefits everyone. Now the writer Michael Pollan has a show where all he does is talk about changing your mind and opening your brain up to the expanse of the universe that lives in your heart. I literally want his job, but alas, I’m stuck here making internet. At any rate, in 1984, psychedelics were still very much illegal, so if you wanted to explore what’s on the other side of a mirror, you had to seek out some heshers or old hippies who could hook your ass up with some hallucinogens. Now, most folks tripped their dicks off and then woke up the next day to go work at Domino’s and live out the rest of their lives. But a select few took every single one of the thoughts that came to them during their journey of self-discovery and created a forty-minute animation about a team of space rangers and a villain named Lord Egghead. Now I’m not sure if filmmakers Steve Segal and Phil Trumbo actually ate a Lunchable stuffed with shrooms and acid before creating Futuropolis, but I certainly hope they did because it would explain so much. And so little.
Capt. Garth, Lt. Luna, Cosmo, and Spud travel around the solar system in their spaceship. Meanwhile a madman with a bushy mustache (that’s how you know he’s a madman) is using his mutation ray to turn innocents into toys, which he stores in a glass jar, as one does. Can our brave space rangers stop him? Cue the theme song, “Fly, Rangers, Fly,” which sounds like if Devo and The Doors had a baby that’s so ugly, it’s cute. As cloyingly twee as the plot and song are, they’re secondary to what really makes Futuropolis an exceptional piece of filmmaking: the visuals.
Written and directed by artists and animators Steve Segal and Phil Trumbo, Futuropolis is an exploration of different animation styles and film genres. There’s a mixture of colorful hand-drawn animation reminiscent of Yellow Submarine and stop-motion antics where our heroes spin on the ground and or get cut in half. There are also extended live action sequences that journey through different genres, including sci-fi, Westerns, 1940s propaganda films, and zany Nickelodeon shows. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a fight between two cavemen and an “intermission” with a classic animation of popcorn popping and cups of soda dancing around (it’s an absolute delight). The film changes styles and bounces seamlessly between animation and live action, often combining them both. The backgrounds are beautifully hand-drawn, and the sets and props are larger than life and charmingly homemade. The aesthetic is strong and consistent; it’s obvious that there was a lot of thought and work put into every single detail of this production. Futuropolis feels like an incredibly ambitious reel used to audition for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. And it must have worked because both Segal and Trumbo worked on the show in the animation department (Trumbo won an Emmy for it).
Words can never fully explain the intense ideation of an acid trip, and Futuropolis is the same. You must experience it to fully understand. So turn on, tune in, and drop out.
