As you may have heard, Newsweek is going out of business at the end of the year. But Jeff Smith notes that the “Best Deal!” for a Newsweek subscription is still two years:

This is a really good ad for Obama. He isn’t perfect, but I think he deserves this:

My friend Will was (and maybe still is) a big fan of Kimba the White Lion. It was a kids’ show when we were, well, kids. (Funny that!) I was reminded of it yesterday when Dependable Renegade published the photo on the left. (It was originally from BuzzFeed.)

I was never that big a fan of the show. I liked it well enough, but I was more of a Speed Racer fan. It had a chimpanzee!

The picture prompted me to go looking for episodes of the show online. There aren’t that many, but I found the following entire episode. It is the one where Kimba starts having “urges”—if you know what I mean:

What is remarkable about this cartoon is how revolutionary it is. It presents humans in a very bad light. All they do is run around and screw everything up. Kind of like in real life. In this episode, a German filmmaker sets the forest on fire so he can get a great helicopter shot of the animals running away. Then he captures Kimba’s girlfriend (Kimba’s got a girlfriend!) and tries to put her in the middle of a fire for the climax of the film.

Kimba the White Lion is a refreshing change of pace from most cartoons today. I don’t think a producer today could get away with making a show that was so explicitly environmental—especially with no “good” humans. Of course, maybe the point isn’t environmentalism. It also works as anti-imperialist. Either way: it’s un-American!