'Red Dawn 2: Yellow Peril': White People Finally Win One

by Abe Sauer

One of the links passed around Twitter by China watchers yesterday was a photo gallery of “little warriors playing the game ‘Defend the Diaoyu Islands.’” (The Islands being the disputed territory that sparked the nation’s recent anti-Japan protests.) Armed with plastic assault rifles and (adorable!) berets, the children completed boot camp-like obstacle courses such as shimmying under razor wire (kidding; just string) while gripping tiny Chinese flags in their mouths (not kidding).

It’s been two-and-a-half years since we first wrote about the Red Dawn reboot after coming across an early script. Then, the film’s original 2010 release date was postponed; in the interim, the army invading America was changed from Chinese to North Korean.

And now, it’s here. One adult Youtube user in America was so inspired by this Thanksgiving’s release of the rebooted Red Dawn that he filmed the series “The Road to RED DAWN,” all about how to “defend America from North Koreans.” His guns were not plastic. In the videos, your host Brandon proceeds to “shoot this guy up with a whole bunch of other stuff.” “I got some incendiary shotgun rounds,” Brandon teases, before firing them with no result.

But Brandon makes up for his shotgun’s lack of incineration when, because “this guy looks like he’s on his knees,” the host executes the North Korean General Nguyen Ngoc Loan-style. Though Brandon “is not usually a fan of execution style kills,” he reasons, “we live here and they don’t.” Hey Republicans, I think we found an architect, spokesman and catchphrase for your new immigration platform.

But don’t judge the show just by its Red Dawn material; “Dual Wielding AK-47’s” [sic] looks exactly like the kind of “responsible gun owner” educational program the NRA is always talking about. (Go watch the episode now before Obama outlaws guns on Youtube.)

“This guy,” the target in the videos, is a life-size (get it, because they’re underfed) North Korean soldier target manufactured with embedded “blood” packets so he bleeds when you shoot (KILL) him. Of course the targets are only for fun, because we all know North Koreans don’t actually have blood but instead acidic goop that, if touched, will make one favor single-payer healthcare. (Also, the women have sideways vaginas.)

You can get your own “Bleeding North Korean Life-Sized Tactical Mannequin Target” for just $89.95:

“Each Patent Pending Soldier is cloned in our San Diego, California facility and is hand painted to accurately resemble a North Korean Soldier that just finished spreading his Communist oppression, to give you that realistic look so you genuinely feel the hate.”

Also available, a bleeding Osama bin Laden “Terrorist” target just in case any red-blooded American gun owner wants to play the game “American President Barack Obama.”

As for the film, a review of an early version said the film contained a line about how the blue states have already been subdued thanks to their restrictive gun control laws, leaving only the red states and their weapons stockpiles to fight off all the North Koreans. Though, as the movie takes place in Washington — a blue state — it seems the film may suffer from at least one technical inaccuracy. Also, the original script contained the line:

“Cue Toby Keith’s ‘Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.’ As the Wolverines listen, they actually manage a few smiles — “

If that’s been removed, Americans should rise up and kill the spineless Hollywood communists that watered down the original story just to pander to copyright attorneys.

But a personal favorite passage from the original script was about Mao:

JED (O.S.)
When I was over in Baghdad…

They stop — all eyes to Jed who’s picked this moment to marshall their mutual rage — to get them to take a breath as:

JED (CONT’D)
We took a class in how to deal
with the locals who thought we’d
overstayed our welcome…

Everyone trading looks, wondering where he’s going with this…

JED (CONT’D)
It’s ironic, but… we learned of a
guy named Mao Tse-Tung… He brought the
communists to power in China back in the 30’s.
He did it by modernizing a certain
kind of warfare. The kind where you fire a shot
or toss a grenade and then you disappear…
you blend back in… but then when the time’s
right, you bomb a roadblock… and disappear…
You keep making little gains until one day so
the theory goes — and I saw it work — your friends,
your neighbors… they start doing the same…
That’s when you know you’re on to something…

DARYL
So… what you’re saying… is that we —

JED
We should be smart, patient —

MATT
But we start killing them, right?

JED
Yeah…
(then)
And we keep doing it until they fucking leave.

Off this — the birth of an insurgency —

Anyway, one needn’t be a gun nut — nor a Sinophobe — to irrationally celebrate Red Dawn. Hipster forward operating base Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin played host to the film’s quiet premiere in September. There, founder Tim League dressed as Kim Jung-il (Jung-un?) — complete with “slanty eyes” glasses — to host a Red Dawn party that transformed the “Austin American Legion into a maximum-security prison for the ultimate Red Dawn shindig.” At the party, it was promised, “Prisoners will experience mandatory enjoyment from delousing stations as well as free prison tattoos and head-shaves.” Attendees were, presumably, allowed to eat and drink.

But it’s not just the East Asians who get the shaft in the new Red Dawn. An excellent early review posted at Racebending sums it up: “If you are brown, and North Korea ever invades, and your white friends decide to launch a guerrilla resistance movement, DO NOT JOIN THEM. They will get you killed. Because the Red Dawn remake really manages to off every single brown kid in the movie.” Sounds like Bill O’Reilly has a new favorite film.

Previously: Meet Mike Sui, A Dude From Wisconsin Who’s Now China’s Biggest Viral Star

Abe Sauer is the author of the book How to be: North Dakota. Email him at abesauer AT gmail.com.