Disney Subsidiary’s Antichrist Cartoon
The preview for this “adult cartoon” aired during the LSU-Florida State football game, much to the chagrin of parents.
Much to the distress of families hoping to enjoy their favorite college football team on opening weekend, parents were scrambling for the remote when the trailer for a new show, “Little Demon,” flashed across their screens.
“Little Demon” is a creation of FX, which is a subsidiary of Disney. It will air on Thursday nights on FX and then will be available for streaming the following day on Hulu (of which Disney also owns a majority).
The show is about a 13-year-old girl and her mother trying to navigate life … with the added complication that the young teen is the daughter of Satan and therefore the antichrist. Though animated, there is plenty of gore, witchcraft, murder, cursing, and making light of Satan.
There are a few aspects of this shock-and-awe campaign that need to be addressed.
First, the very idea of cartoons for adults, though a widely employed genre, is deceiving. The fact that they are cartoons — typically the genre of children’s entertainment — lures many a child into their world because of the false sense of familiarity that it evokes.
Second, the timing of this commercial during a family-friendly event is disturbing and infuriating — though this also is not a new tactic. “Little Demon” is hardly the only adult content advertised during football games, which shows a blatant disregard and disrespect for families. When I was a child, my parents decided to get rid of TV because of this very issue. Even in the ‘90s, you couldn’t watch a sporting event without being bombarded with inappropriate-for-children advertising.
Third, in some of the trailers that surfaced on YouTube, the common theme was making light of actual evil and Satanic content. One of the concerned parents was Congressman Mike Johnson of Louisiana. In his social media post on Monday, he said:
The shocking ending to the LSU opener was not the most disturbing part of the game last night. For me, that came during a commercial break in the second quarter when the television audience was presented with the trailer for a new FX cartoon “sitcom” entitled, “LITTLE DEMON.”
I couldn’t get to the remote fast enough to shield my 11-year-old from the preview, and I wonder how many other children were exposed to it — and how many millions more will tune in to the new series, owned and marketed by DISNEY.
The trailer included dark images of Hell, demons, and satanic imagery, and an explanation that the main character is… the Antichrist(!).
Disney provides this surreal description: “Thirteen years after being impregnated by Satan, a reluctant mother, Laura, and her Antichrist daughter, Chrissy, attempt to live an ordinary life in Delaware, but are constantly thwarted by monstrous forces, including Satan, who yearns for custody of his daughter’s soul.”
The actress who voices Laura said in an interview, “I love that we are normalizing paganism. Laura is a pagan. She’s a witch. She’s jacked.”
Another online review explains that Chrissy discovers she’s the Antichrist “in grisly fashion, quickly reducing a gaggle of school bullies into piles of red goo in what turns out to be the first of many spectacularly gory sequences. Chrissy doesn’t seem overly concerned by the whole triple-murder thing, shrugging it off with an easy-breezy attitude that sets the tone for the rest of 'Little Demon.’”
“Most of the show’s best moments come when it leans into its hellish premise and plumbs the depths of its own depravity. It’s likely you’ve never seen a man punch a hole in his own face before or heard the words, ‘Let’s go boil some babies while their heads are still soft’ in quite that order and, after two decades of South Park, Family Guy, and other cartoon shock merchants, an animated series finding new ways to disgust is a genuine achievement.”
WHAT IN THE WORLD?!?
I could write volumes this morning, and unpack pages of Bible verses here, but instead I’m just going to state the obvious: Please be careful. Our job as parents is to guard the hearts and minds of our kids. This culture has become alarmingly dark and desensitized and this is not a game. Disney and FX have decided to embrace and market what is clearly evil. STAY FAR FROM IT.
“Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8)
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Of course, there was already a fact-check by Snopes on this subject. It begrudgingly admitted: “While we can’t fact-check someone’s opinion of a trailer for a comedy cartoon series that’s made for adults, airs at a later hour, and stars comedic actor Danny DeVito to voice Satan, we can verify whether the information mentioned in Johnson’s Facebook post was true. After looking into the matter, we found that Johnson did not misinform regarding ‘Little Demon’s’ plot, cast, and reviews.” In other words, it’s all true.
A parents group called One Million Moms has started a petition to get this show off the air and cancel the series. The petition lists several of the complains that Rep. Johnson did, as well as this: “Rather than being represented as dangerous, demonic, and terrifying, Satan is depicted as an average, middle-aged, cardigan-wearing suburban dad.” It already has 24,000 signatures.
“Little Demon” is hardly the first venture into satanic glorification, though it is the first one to do so through a cartoon. It is very sad that those in the Hollywood industry have strayed so far that creating a series like this is just another day at the office. God help us.