Children's Movie 'Furry Vengeance' Preaches Eco Message, Includes Social Action Campaign

April 27th, 2010 5:58 PM

Young adults of a certain age will remember the 1992 environmental agitprop movie "FernGully," in which inhabitants of the last rainforest fight to save their environment. Well, bad ideas die hard. "Furry Vengeance," a new live-action children's movie starring Brendan Fraser and Brooke Shields, picks up where "FernGully" left off, thinly veiling its tree-hugging agenda with cheap laughs and cute, furry animals.

The story revolves around a real estate developer (Brendan Fraser) who is hired to slash down a forest in Oregon and convert it into a shopping mall (enter FernGully-like bulldozers). This, of course, upsets the local woodland critters, who, as the movie's Web site says, seek revenge by turning a "peaceful cul-de-sac under construction into a battefield of epic proportions." The movie's catch phrase reads, "He came. He saw. They conquered."

Fraser's co-star, Brooke Shields, recently said in an interview with Fox News' "Pop Tarts" that she was concerned with the growing skepticism surrounding global warming. She admitted that "Furry Vengeance" is an "eco message" but insisted that it's not "something that we're preaching." Shields must not consider infiltrating elementary schools across the nation as "preaching."

Although she didn't mention it, the Fox News article added that Shields and the rest of her "Furry Vengeance" co-stars created a social action campaign to debut in tandem with the film on April 30. The campaign was created with the help of Participant Media, an L.A.-based company that finances, produces, and distributes entertainment that advocates left-wing social change. Their list includes the tree-hugging book "Girls Gone Green" and the "global-warning" movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

"The campaign," Fox News reported, "will focus on further advocating the message of wildlife and habitat preservation in over 16,000 schools across the country and educate pupils on the effects everyday decisions have on their terrain."

This isn't the first time that environmental activists have turned their propaganda on children. Last year CMI reported on Nickelodeon's multimedia campaign called "The Big Green Help." The network encouraged its young viewers to become major finger-waggers by asking their parents to replace their lightbulbs, not buy bottled water, and turn off their car while waiting.