20 years ago, The Onion anthropomorphized recyclables

We also revisit Burning Man, Match.com, a mad scientist facing budget cuts, and the 20th anniversary of "The O.C."

Welcome back to The Onion: 20 Years Later, where we review the print issue from 20 years ago, find out what’s still funny and examine the cultural impact. Today, we revisit Aug. 27, 2003.

Sometimes, this newsletter feels ancient — stories about 20th-century C-list celebrities, pre-internet technology, etc. This week is the opposite: Burning Man, online dating, reality TV, district attorneys getting soft on crime, diversity — all of this might be more relevant in 2023.

This issue also discusses “The O.C.,” which debuted 20 years ago this month. Feeling very old after that one.

If you’re new here, welcome! Sign up for more of this in your inbox each Sunday.

What issue is this?

This was Vol. 39, Issue 33, the 160th new Onion issue of the 2000s. There’s no archive of the 2003 website. Here’s what the website looked like in 2013 and today.

The front-page headlines “Scissors Kills Paper, Rock; Turns Blade on Self” and “Rear End Justifies Means” are no longer online. In 2008, the “Scissors …” headline was praised by Time magazine.

What was the top story, and other impressions?

Left: The empty Burning Man festival grounds. Right: Boulder resident Paul Sandley, who was halfway to Burning Man when his truck "totally konked."

I doubt I was aware of Burning Man in 2003, so I probably skipped over this. “No One Makes It To Burning Man Festival” mocks the stereotypical attendee for not getting their act together.

The excuses include:

• A silkscreen artist who forgot her bartering beads. Also, her friends didn’t secure Ecstasy in time.

• A Vermont college student who wrote down the wrong date (and also got evicted and got hepatitis from tacos).

• Doug "Crazyroot" Pycroft, who is so countercultural that he dislikes the “fascist” rules of Burning Man.

Plus, this Linux user and “cyber-conceptualist” whose elaborate plan was foiled:

"I was organizing this boss techno-art project called 'Off The Grid,'" Kaegle wrote. "We were going to set up computer terminals in various parts of the playa and have people use them. Then we'd feed the binary data from those terminals into this fractals program that [Silver Lake, CA software designer] Ricky [Thomas-Slater] wrote. Those fractals would be sent, on the fly, to a group of exiled Buddhist monks I befriended online. The monks would transform the fractals into a temporal sand painting, the making of which we would webcast live to everyone on the playa."

The emphasis on fractals makes me laugh.

This article is kind of a compliment — if The Onion targets you this viciously, you must be doing something right.

Characters from the culturally sensitive Department of Sanitation leaflet.

“Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables” is more relevant than ever, considering the public debate over DEI. (Please don’t have this fight in the comments!)

But in 2003, what inspired this article? Was the angle “the left making fun of itself”? Did an Onion writer come across a PSA with anthropomorphic characters?¹

Whatever the reason, the illustration is excellent — great work by that Onion staffer.

In the article itself, the Philadelphia Department of Sanitation hires freelance graphic artist Chrissie Bellisle to design the “RecyclaBuddies.”² Bellisle assumes the design should represent the city’s diversity.

Immediately, she runs into problems:

"For reasons of basic sensitivity, you don't want to make the Chinese take-out container an Asian," Bellisle said, as she flipped past a crossed-out pencil sketch of an Inuit ice-cream carton. "But, if you make the same type of container represent two different races, people notice. It's a delicate balancing act. I discovered that there were negative connotations attached to a surprising number of the things people throw out."

Bellisle feels trapped in this approach because the alternative also poses problems:

"Look at this grinning soda can giving the thumbs-up here," she said. "Everyone subconsciously assumes it's a Caucasian male."

Turns out, she’s right about this! Here’s what a city official has to say:

Added Franks: "We especially love that soda can giving the thumbs-up. I don't know what it is about that little guy, but we're thinking of making him the boss of the whole crew."

I love these articles because The Onion wants to make us uncomfortable with the disconnect between how we say we feel and how we actually think and behave.

That said, writing about them makes me nervous! I’m always concerned I’m missing something obvious. Please let me know in the comments what I’ve overlooked.

A couple of other notes:

• The city doesn’t explicitly ask for diversity — the graphic designer felt an internal pressure to do so. And Bellisle’s imagination seems … excessive:

  • "I have no idea how to make the plastic milk jug look gay," Bellisle said. "I don't want to make him a bottle of water, for obvious reasons.”

• Someone I know texted this week about diversity training at their new job. The training used centaurs as an example. So … look, we still struggle to talk about this stuff.

Politics in the news

The 1st time Judge Roy Moore was in the public eye was 20 years ago, when “The Ten Commandments Ruling” saw his fellow state justices vote against him to remove a massive monument from the state Supreme Court building. Moore was eventually removed as chief justice.

These jokes aren’t amazing — we have a lazy “dumb Southerner” joke, among other tropes.

Meanwhile, The Onion continued to cover the California gubernatorial recall — through Hollywood columnist Jackie Harvey, of all people! In “Billy Crystal Passed Over... Again!” Harvey mistakes the comic Gallagher³ for Peter Gallagher of “The O.C.”:

How Gallagher can be on a new series while he's running for governor of California and smashing vegetables with a mallet is a mystery to me. I wish I had one-tenth of that man's energy.

Harvey also makes an endorsement:

It's also not fair that the sitting governor requires a majority vote to remain in office, as opposed to the plurality an opponent needs to unseat him. Personally, I'd vote for Arnold any day of the week. Who's going to say no to the Terminator? He'll "erase" that deficit like no one else can—that's for sure.

In response to Enron, the California energy crisis and related events, Congress worked on energy legislation in summer 2003.

“The New Energy Bill” has decent jokes — “Have some sub-committee check into solar panels and wind machines and all that crap” is prescient. “Rolling blackouts to be named ‘Olde Tyme Nights’” made me laugh, too.

Finally, I thought Reddy Kilowatt was a clever Onion invention, but it’s a real corporate mascot that’s almost 100 years old!

Non sequiturs

These are items I wanted to mention but don’t really fit elsewhere:

“Japan Spotted Hovering Over Algeria” is very silly, but in a good way.

“Old El Paso Introduces Emergency Taco Kit” is fine, although I prefer this 2017 Conan sketch for absurd taco scenarios.

“King Latifah Returns for Wife” has made me laugh for 20 years. It’s a simple joke, but it clicks with my brain.

“Japan Spotted Hovering Over Algeria” is another weird one, but I like the absurdity.

Area People doing Area Things

Mortis packs up the lab he was forced to surrender.

There are many reasons to love The Onion: The one-liners, the political jokes, the mocking of celebrities, the local columnists. Then there’s articles like “Mad Scientist's Plot Thwarted By Budget Cuts,” which dares to take the cultural trope of “mad science” very seriously.

After all, few stories about mad scientists explain how they fund their work! Who builds their equipment, much less their secret lairs?

In this case, Dr. Edward Mortis of Brookhaven Laboratories depends on federal funding — until most of that money is eliminated:

"My positronic raygun was nearly complete," said Mortis at a press conference Tuesday. "With one gigagram of destructonium [a rare element mined from a meteor belt that passes Earth once every 29 years], I could have ruled the world!"

He’s known as a powerful writer, which helped him get funding for many years. I love this little detail about Mortis’ office:

Mortis' three-tiered approach to conquering the universe so impressed Brookhaven Laboratories that he was hired out of graduate school and placed in the facility's dilapidated-castle wing.

Folks love to argue about wasteful government spending. Here’s one for you: Mortis was getting $2 billion a year before suffering a 90% cut in funding. He blames number-crunching bureaucrats:

"They expect me to work with $200 million?" Mortis said. "My legion of armed robots now sits in a storage center outside D.C. The robots have been denied the very function of their being! I ask, what good are killer robots if they will never be activated and set to killing? It's so typical that the buffoons at NSF stop me now, when I'm already half done. It's so frustrating."

There’s also a story of “a horde of beast men” he released in Denver.

This is simply great writing. If you run into someone who’s never heard of The Onion, you could do worse than sharing this article.

A "seriously freaked out" Friedman scrolls through the Match.com web site.

The 1st time I remember someone mentioning Match.com was in 2004 or ‘05 — someone’s sister got engaged to a guy she met on the website. And while no one says “personal ad” nowadays, “Horrified Teen Stumbles Upon Divorced Mom's Personal Ad” feels timeless — teenagers do not want to see their parents trying to get laid, much less publicly.

16-year-old Derek Friedman discovers his mom’s dating profile when he and his friends are scrolling through listings. Is that what teens were doing in 2003?

Friedman knew that men were calling the house for his mother (Susan), but he didn’t realize the extent of her dating activity. Interestingly, he is especially bothered by Susan’s false claim of loving the outdoors.

There’s also this detail, which seems traumatizing on its own:

"A few months ago, I was flipping through one of those underwear catalogs that my mom gets," Friedman said. "She'd circled all this black-lace, strapless stuff, and a couple of thongs. Now I know she's gonna wear that stuff for some guy she met on the Internet. That's so nasty."

“Flipping through one of those underwear catalogs” made more sense 20 years ago, when almost all readers grew up with mail-order catalogs.

This profile is very difficult to read, but you can see what dating websites looked like 20 years ago.

Other Area People items include:

• “Public Urinator Gives Passerby Dirty Look”: Literally marking your territory, I guess.

• “Son In Iraq Or Something”: Unlike most military mothers, she doesn’t even open his letters!

• “Great Lover Also Great At Slinking Out”: I enjoyed the closing line: “Millagro was unable to be found for comment.”

• “Woman Only Dates On National Television Now”: All too true. Reality TV is a scourge, y’all. I hadn’t heard of the show “For Love or Money,” whose premise is depressing even for reality TV.

Were the infographics good?

“With Whom Are We Avoiding Eye Contact?” is a good reminder that nobody uses “whom” anymore. I’m a professional editor, and even I try to write around it.

The jokes are strong, with fun references to Jack Nicholson and Medusa. “Puppy who saw the whole thing” is my favorite.

Also, there was no Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1982, as the contest began in 1984.

What columnists ran?

I talked about “Billy Crystal Passed Over... Again!” earlier, but I love Jackie Harvey so much. And this column is particularly topical:

• He praises “Gigli,” a word he only recently learned how to pronounce, and says that people judged the movie because they didn’t like Ben and J-Lo’s relationship — and he probably has a point?

• He makes many incorrect assumptions about “The O.C.”:⁴

  • “Item! Fox is starting the fall season early this year with the steamy beach series The OP. That's shorthand for Ocean Pacific, and it stars Peter Gallagher as a fashion designer trying to re-launch his line of beach wear while raising a juvenile-delinquent kid.”

• This is the most wholesome Harvey mixup ever. The documentary is real, by the way:

  • “I saw this great documentary called Wings Migration. I went in thinking it was about one of my 10 favorite bands, Paul McCarthy's Wings (#6 on the list). Turns out, I was wrong, but joyously so—it was actually a nature documentary full of beautiful shots of migrating birds.”

• Harvey also comments on the Northeast blackout and the early 2000s show “Banzai.”

Our other columnist is the district attorney in Grand Rapids, S.D., in “Perhaps I've Been A Little Too Tough On Crime.” He questions whether he should stop trying to jail every criminal, much less seek the maximum sentence.

I’ve written this newsletter for almost 4 years. I’m not sure I’ve reviewed an Onion article where the context has shifted so much in 20 years. In 2003, the joke is that no DA would ever say this. In 2023, there are huge political fights about DAs accused of actually being too soft on crime.

The DA wonders whether incarceration is effective, noting that “Even with all the huffing and puffing down here at city hall, people are committing crimes as much as ever.”

He also seems to think that the only guilt that matters is your own:

Heck, I've done some things I'm not proud of. I used to sell fireworks when I was a boy. In college, I sometimes skipped my afternoon classes to drink beer. I was even late making a rent payment a couple months ago. I learned my lessons the hard way. No, I was never put in front of a court, but I was prosecuted by a much harsher D.A.: my conscience.

What was the best horoscope?

While the horoscopes yet again feature office romance, my favorite is Taurus:

Taurus | April 20 to May 20

The way you relate to others will only be subtly altered by your new habit of carrying a constantly firing Gatling gun under each arm.

What holds up best?

“Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables” feels as relevant as ever, whether you think that’s good or bad.

What holds up worst?

There are a few glaring word choices in this issue that are now archaic at best, offensive at worst.

What would be done differently today?

That district attorney column could still exist, I guess? But it would be much more politically charged.

Online dating isn’t that interesting today — and certainly not shocking. “Horrified Teen Stumbles Upon Divorced Mom's Personal Ad” probably doesn’t exist today, and certainly not as a long-form article.

Thank you

Grateful to have everyone here. Let me know what you enjoyed, what I missed, or any Onion stories these reminded you of!

Next week, we revisit … the Jerky Boys? Plus, columnist Larry Groznic returns.

1. My favorite type of Onion story involves anthropomorphized animals, especially talking-animal columnists. I covered one of these in 2022, although we’re years away from “Stop Anthropomorphizing Me,” the best of the best.

2. Funny enough, in April 2023, research was published suggesting anthropomorphic characters can encourage recycling.

3. Gallagher, the watermelon smasher, finished 16th in the recall vote. What a time in America. Here’s a Washington Post story about his campaign.

4. I had to look this up, but Peter Gallagher plays a public defender. We watched a lot of this show during my last 2 years of college. There was a drinking game, too, which included things like “drink if Ben McKenzie says more than 1-2 sentences in a row.”