January 20, 2006

-This week eSLASHculture takes a look into the future. The following is an excerpt from the November 24, 2014 online edition of Entertainment Weekly, the DVD Review Section.

It's Boot Time!  "Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad: Season One"

    It is only 2014, but America is already consumed by a massive wave of nostalgia for the "Oughts."  Week after week cultural artifacts from the tumultuous first ten years of the Twenty-First Century - the Crazy Oughts - keep washing ashore here at Entertainment Weekly.  The results vary from the good (who can resist the new "Complete Veronica Mars" with all nine seasons on one Xeno Disc?) to the bad (does anyone really need all seven hundred episodes of "Nick and Jessica's Celebrity Divorce Court"?) to the nearly incomprehensible.  In that category we include this week's Spotlight TV DVD:  "Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad: Season One."

    To appreciate "American Boot Squad" you must consider it in its context.  The show premiered in September of 2008 after Hillary Clinton had just won the presidential election in a landslide, easily defeating incumbent Dick Chaney who throughout the campaign struggled to distance himself from the legacy of his ousted former running mate ex-president George W. Bush.  With Bush hiding out in Mexico and the Republican Party in shambles, the Bible Belt Right Wing was paralyzed with fear over the prospect of a new age of Liberalism sweeping from the coasts of the United States across the American Heartlands.  It is no surprise that Toby Keith, a hugely popular country singer from the "redneck/know nothing" school, would accept an offer to star in the Country Music Network's first ever hour long science fiction series.  With Chelsea Clinton's weekly sexy spy show "The Democrat D.O.L.L. Squad" a smash hit on NBC, the story of a futuristic Right Wing rebel hero seemed like savvy counter-programming.  Though he had absolutely no acting experience, Keith seemed a perfect fit having made his name with both xenophobic pro-war anthems and bad boy country songs about drinkin', partyin', and honky-tonkin'.  Here was a hero for the Right Wing's troubled times: an aw shucks, good old boy, man of the people who could beat up an evil Liberal ideologue with a bike chain one minute and then whoop it up with the fellahs drinkin' and chasin' the ladies at the club the next.

    The show's still amusing premise postulates a horrifying liberal American dystopia in the not-too-distant future in the year 2020 when the power mad Liberal Matrix Force has seized control of the courts, the legislature, and installed deranged supermodel Kate Moss (playing herself in all her drugged up splendor) in the White House as President to do their sinister bidding.  It is a bizarre fantasy world of mandatory abortions, forced gay marriages, and physician supervised yearly marijuana inoculations for everyone over the age of fifteen.  In this immoral Left Wing wasteland, Toby Keith is positioned as a Right Wing cracker Scarlet Pimpernel fighting the forces of tolerance and unrestrained equality.  Traveling the strife torn land every week using their cover as a touring country and western band to dupe the Matrix' secret police force, Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad are fearless revolutionaries helping the long suppressed Conservative Underground.  With his trademark ragged straw Stetson hat, a ready smile, and a regular dose of repellant violence, Keith and his band of brutal backwoods toughs take on hazardous missions to foment a new Right Wing revolution.  Whether it is smuggling Bibles into the Forbidden Zone of Boston or rescuing disgraced rebel leader Bill O'Reilly from his cell in the secret prisons of New Jersey, no job is too dangerous or morally challenging for Keith and the American Boot Squad.  When faced by the enemies of Conservative ideology, the Boot Squad is always ready to dispense homespun justice by punishing public menaces such as liberal Supreme Court Justices, ACLU lawyers, and fourth grade science teachers who instruct their students on the theory of evolution.  These enemies of the Moral Majority are dispatched with extreme prejudice.  The calling card for the Boot Squad is their famous "bootings" with their victims found bound, gagged, and with an immense, ornate leather boot stuffed up their behinds.  Though the show was cancelled after its initial run of thirteen weeks, episodes such as "This Boot's For Hire," "The Long Good Boot," "Boot Me Up Before You Go-Go," "Boot Is the Color of My True Love's Hair," and "The Boot Vinci Code" are still capable of astounding viewers with their wrong-headedness and ideological purity.  Week after week, Keith and the American Boot Squad resort to bone crunching, bloody, unrepentant violence to beat back the dark forces of liberal humanism. Week after week they are pursued by a bumbling FBI taskforce headed by wacky Inspector Saul Goldberg, played by Jason Biggs.  Week after week, the Liberal Matrix Force and  is outwitted by Keith and his merry band of jean-clad, in-bred, shit kicking, redneck louts. 

    Sadly, the show was cancelled after only thirteen episodes and viewers were never allowed to see if Keith ever got hitched up with his romantic interest, sexy, sultry rodeo clown Clarabelle McCoy.  As played by twenty year old Dakota Fanning fresh out her first stint in rehab, McCoy is a spitfire leading her own secret revolt against the Matrix by smuggling outlawed Evangelical ministers to Mexico and lending a hand to Keith whenever their paths cross.  She is haunted by her tragic past after witnessing the death of her father, a Baptist minister, when she was five years old as he was run over by a huge sequined Donna Summer-themed float in a Gay Pride parade in El Paso, Texas.  Fanning gives an intense performance portraying Clarabelle as a mix of earthy sensuality , pinpoint-pupilled manic energy, and tightly coiled Right Wing menace.  The flames of her passion for the beer bellied freedom fighter were first kindled in key episode "To Boot a Mockingbird" when she and Toby Keith go on a suicide mission to steal and destroy the Constitution of the United States of America.  Standout episode "Boot-y-licious" shows Clarabelle's passion turn to jealousy and then to violence as Toby Keith goes undercover in black face posing as Slick Shaggy Buck, a country rapper.  Working his way into the heart of new Leftist-Extremist Supreme Court Justice Mildred Blodgut, Keith finds himself both repelled and attracted to the dykey jurist as he schemes to steal the contents of her hard drive.  As played by a fresh-from-rehab-yet-again-for-diet-pill-addiction Mary Kate Olsen, Justice Blodgut sizzles in her scenes projecting a combination of raw suppressed sexual energy, pilled-up fingernail chewing agitation, and androgynous self-loathing.  The climactic fight sequence between Clarabelle and Justice Blodgut takes place in the judge's chambers while Keith hangs upside down from the ceiling downloading the secret list of the Supreme Court's Liberal paymasters.  What starts out as a poorly choreographed series of half-hearted karate chops and listless windmill kicks explodes into real, raw edged violence as the two actresses who clearly did not like each other start to brawl in earnest.  The scene degenerates into a frenzied blur of vicious hair pulling and clawing. The two, tiny, rail thin actresses, one playing a remorseless neo-con vigilante the other playing a bleeding heart social totalitarian, writhe around frantically thrashing away at each other on the floor of the set, inadvertently playing out in allegory the ideological war between the Right and Left that was tearing apart the nation.  It is moments like this that make "Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad" compellingly bad TV.

    On the negative side, the most consistent flaw of the show is the shoddy performance of its star.  In a bonus featurette, Mr. Keith comes to his own defense,  "I never said I was no actor.  I just wanted to do the show so I could collect a check, drink beer on set, and chase tail all day.  Hell, it worked out great for me."  Sadly, that rustic joie de vivre doesn't translate well on the little screen.  Mr. Keith when bored or distracted on camera tended to drift off and resort to some of the tried and true tricks and stagecraft he learned while playing the honky-tonk circuit.  In the episode "All the President's Boots," the key scene goes awry.  The Boot Squad breaks into top secret Area 57 on the outskirts of San Francisco and steals Dick Cheney's brain.  As mad scientist Carl von Rovenstein prepares to bring the diseased organ back to life, Toby Keith, while standing in the background, clearly looses focus and begins to burp the alphabet and play pocket banjo with his crotch until the scene finally drags to an end.

    On the positive side, each episode ends with Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad onstage rocking out after the successful completion of another mission.  Each week the band plays another of the pot bellied patriot's crowd pleasing anthems.  A special bonus feature allows the viewer to skip all the rest of the episodes and watch an extended live concert stitching together all the songs.  From the rousing "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)" to "Hey Iraq (You Can Kiss My Ass)" to "Who's Your Daddy Now (Iran)" the song list reads serves as a miniature history lesson on America's misguided foreign policy and overreaching military aspiration in the "Oughts."  Even lesser conflicts are highlighted in songs like "I Want Jordan (To Give me a Reach Around)," "Tell Syria (To Fondle My Balls)," and "I've Got France in My Pants (And I Want to Dance.)" 

    Destined to be the source of trivia questions for years to come, true connoisseurs of the Crazy Oughts should seriously consider picking up a copy of "Toby Keith and the American Boot Squad" to put in their collections right next to their copies of 50 Cent's inspirational HBO series "The Road Less Traveled, You Punk Ass Bitch" and the complete unrated five volume set of "The Bush Girls Gone Wild."