ARISE! THE CHURCH OF SUBGENIUS (1992)

SUPERWILD RECRUITMENT VIDEO FOR AN ORDER OF SCOFFERS AND BLASPHEMERS, DEDICATED TO TOTAL SLACK, DELVING INTO MOCKERY SCIENCE, SADOFUTURISTICS, MEGAPHYSICS ETC PP. WITH MARK MOTHERSBAUGH. 

The Church of the SubGenius is a “parody religion” organization that satirizes religion, conspiracy theories, unidentified flying objects, and popular culture. Originally based in Dallas, Texas, the Church of the SubGenius gained prominence[citation needed] in the 1980s and 1990s and maintains an active presence on the Internet. In 1996 the legal entity SubGenius Foundation, Inc. was established in Cleveland, Ohio. The Foundation’s president is “Reverend” Ivan Stang and the Vice President is Dr. Philo Drummond, a.k.a. Steve Wilcox. Publicly accessible cited figures from 1988 indicated a membership of 3,500, “more than 5,000” in 1990 and “close to 10,000” by 2003.

The church started with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1 in 1979. It found acceptance in underground pop-culture circles and has been embraced on college campuses, in the underground music scene, and on the Internet.

According to its “mythological” origins, the Church of the SubGenius claims to have been founded in the 1950s by the “world’s greatest salesman” J. R. “Bob” Dobbs. “Bob” Dobbs is depicted as a cartoon of a Ward Cleaver-like man smoking a pipe, an image originally seen in one of the many “can you draw this” ads commonly found in the back of comic books in the 1950s and 1960s.

Because of its similarities to the tenets of Discordianism, The Church of the SubGenius is often described as a syncretic offshoot of that belief. However, its members state that the organization developed on its own with the publication of SubGenius Pamphlet #1[citation needed] (also known as The World Ends Tomorrow And You May Die!) by Ivan Stang and Dr. Philo Drummond. A group that formed after Stang and Drummond began mailing their first pamphlet to publishers, using such pseudonyms as “Puzzling Evidence”, “Dr. Howl”, “Susie the Floozie”, “Palmer Vreedeez”, and “Pope Sternodox”, helped forward the literature to a number of underground pop-culture figures such as R. Crumb, Paul Mavrides, Harry S. Robins, the New Wave rock group Devo, and Erik Lindgren (producer and president of indie label Arf! Arf! Records in Boston), who embraced it and incorporated it into their work. Crumb’s promotion of the church through his comic book series Weirdo brought many new members into the fold, including artists, musicians, and writers. Their efforts resulted in the publication of the Book of the SubGenius in 1983, followed by Three-Fisted Tales of “Bob” in 1990, Revelation X: The “Bob” Apocryphon in 1994 and The SubGenius Psychlopaedia of Slack: The Bobliographon in 2006. In the late 1980s, the video ARISE! was produced by Cordt Holland and Ivan Stang, and narrated by “Dr. Hal” (Harry S. Robins), then distributed by Polygram.

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