Elements of pure, 180 proof awesome which reside in this poster:
1. It has a central image which homages Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. album cover. Born in the U.S.A, mind you, was an album cover so cool that it caused almost everyone in America in 1984-including the entire Reagan Administration, who tried to license it for Reagan's reelection campaign-to assume the Springsteen's catchy but cynical and anti-establishment anthem was patriotic.
2. He is wearing a musket in a holster. Not only does this make the ad even more compelling from an aesthetic point of view, it reminds potential costumers who remember any of their 11th grade history that Andrew Jackson was the biggest badass to ever be allowed within the borders of D.C. let alone be allowed to run the country. This was a man who dueled people more often than he changed his shirt, who once purposely got shot in a duel so he would have more time to aim for a killshot while his opponent reloaded. A man whose stated one of his major goals during his presidency was to dissolve the national bank, and personally opposed paper money, but was put on the 20 dollar bill anyway. (He was put on it in 1928, replacing Grover Cleveland*, an action I can only explain through my theory that Andrew Jackson's ghost visited the head of the Treasury in 1927 and threatened to ghost-duel him to death if he didn't put Jackson's face on the denomination of bill that would be most widely used 70 years from that time due to its availability in ATMs.
3. The show is called "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" for god sakes, and the poster wisely displays this in a huge and impactful font**
The "History just got all sexypants" tag line is pretty dumb, but even if the rest of the poster was of puppies frolicking in a field, that would not be able to negate the badassery of the title and central image, all of which are aided by the fact that its a play about the President who shot the most people (Richard Nixon's post-resignation string of botched liquor store robberies excluded).
Its too bad they didn't let the guy who designed this poster write the entire musical. I just suffered through the soundtrack album stream over at this musical's official website, and its terrible.
Andrew Jackson's ghost is gonna duel the shit out of everyone involved in this musical. It portrays him as a whiny emo kid. Really this isn't an exaggeration. It is even in the plot description. The music from the entire play is in the genre of Panic! At the Disco style pop emo drivel. With Jackson screaming agnstily about how much he loves Populism. Wiki says this is supposed to be a satire, so I reserved judgement until taking in all the material available on the show's official site, and can now safely say, whatever the intentions where, it comes across as a play trying to earnestly portray Andrew Jackson as angstfilled and and Michel Cera like.
Their seems to be an alarming trend recently toward wussifying our most Pirate-esque President. Drunk History (a web series from Will Ferrel's "Funny or Die" website) recently did a piece where they had Andrew Jackson as a conscientious objector and he was actually played by famed whiny emo douchebag Michael Cera.
Obviously the video's makers decided to use Cera to portray Jackson since the narrator trying to relay the story from memory (who is legitimately drunk) seems to think Andrew Jackson was like this, and they made a video of Cera in a costume acting like a wimp to continue the gag.
But I still don't cotton to people trying to Hipster-ify our most cantankerous of Presidents. Which is why I'm not posting any of the music from this play here, or the drunk history video where Michael Cera "acts" by having that same stupid expression he has in every movie he is in. Instead I will leave you with 30 seconds of Jon Stewart making stuff up about Andrew Jackson:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Intro - Old Hickory Andrew Jackson | ||||
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Footnote(s)
*This is neither here nor there but I rarely get to point out that Grover Cleveland is one of my favorite presidents, so I thought i would do so here. This for a myriad of reasons, but obviously partly because he shares his name with my favorite character from Sesame Street.
**Though not in the font Impact
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