If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (GAM029)

## Hosts

Noah Lugeons

Heath Enwright

Eli Bosnick

***If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?*** is an anti-communist Christian progananda film from 1971. I don't really know what to say here. Ah, I don't think… I don't think I can describe it to you other than just naming the things that happen on screen in order, so I should probably just go ahead and start reciting the movie frame for frame I guess.

### **Opening Phrase**

Where each week we watch another selection from Christian cinema, because nothing else will quiet the screaming lambs.

### **How [Incredible] Was It?**

This was the greatest thing that's *ever* happened to anyone, especially me. I've been blown on a rollercoaster, and this was by far scarier, more arousing. There's nothing to describe this—this movie—the words I'm going to say are true. So you know how I go "Hey, it's like a BLEH"? It's like a preacher who was crazy somehow managed to illustrate all of his crazy preaching with video clips. That's the craziest thing I could say, because that's what this movie *is*.

### **Best Worst**

* Eli: ...not accidentally catching the actors smiling, breathing, and otherwise being fine when they're supposed to be dead.
* Noah: ...makeup.
* Noah: ...costuming.

### **Notes**

* This episode features the first explicit "Best Worst" segment.
* Other movies from Ron Ormond (before he found Jesus) include *Outlaw Women*, *Frontier Women*, *Mesa of Lost Women*, and *Untamed Mistress*.
* This film began as a sermon Pirkle preached at Camp Zion in 1968, which was released as a [pamphlet] and spoken word album, before being adapted into the film and its accompanying soundtrack album.

### **Jokes**

* "So, I feel like before we even get into it we have to kind of give everyone an idea of what exactly we're watching, and I think Eli really just did spell it: it's literally a crazy person ranting for almost an hour with some of his mental ejecta being acted out. That's all it is—there's no plot, there aren't characters who have actions and whatnot—it's just craziness with skits. And we *keep* coming back to this guy, this guy Estus Pirkle. Estus Pirkle looks like Anderson Cooper's homophobic dad. I cannot—and we just wat—he's just staring into the camera the entire movie. He looks like Alfred E. Neuman grew up to be a tax attorney. He's the worst looking human I've ever—and we just *keep* going back to his face. He looks like the word 'businessman' shat its pants. That's what he looks like. He looks like Ron Howard got scared by a ghost as a child, and just never made it out okay. He looks like a three-day-old Chinese food nightmare about *Green Acres*. He is the worse thing I have ever seen, and I've been blown on a rollercoaster. He is the worst... thing. (5:28)
* "So, and of course we're looking at more ketchup covered children here, and then he offers up this quote: 'One of the leading communists of the day said, and I quote, "I dream of the day when the last congressman is strangled with the guts of the last preacher, and the Christians love blood so much so we should give it to…" ' Okay, I'm not quoting any more, but that's the quote he throws out, right? So, I had to look this up—and every time I dug into anything in this movie it was just a boundless well of more shit. This honestly could be a trilogy; we could have done three episodes just on this fifty-two minute movie. Okay, so here's where than quote comes from: it's falsely attributed to Gus Hall (who was the former leader of the Communist Party of the USA) by a guy named Kenneth Goff, okay? So now, Goff is a crazy Christan anti-communist preacher just like Pirkle, who says he was a member of the communist party for three years like that one guy said he was a Satanist so that he could really scare peopleb with it. So, of course I had to dig into this Goff guy. In addition to his claims about what Gus Hall said in a secret mission that only he recorded, these are other claims that this guy made in writing (in his books): the Holocaust never happened; water fluoridation is a communist plot to make us more docile; Hitler was a Jewish communist, was still alive in the seventies, and was going to rise up to lead the Communist Revolution worldwide; and that hippies and desegregation were a communist plot. *That*is where Pirkle is getting the information that he is relaying to us *from*. [Eli: Okay, now say so the crazy stuff that Goff said that *wasn't* true. People will be confused.]" (52:02)

### **Interstitials**

* Noah Apologizes (9:07)
* Selections from *The McGuffey Reader (48:36)*
* Eli Bosnick v. William Lane Craig (49:02)
* "Tie her head to the Jeep!" (49:29)

### **Tropes**

* Boss in a Bit Part
* Christians Don't Know How the World Works
* Conspicuous American Flag
* Deathbed Proselytizing
* Indoctrination of Children
* Not Christian Enough

### **Links**

* Episode on Audioboom
* Episode on Youtube
* Episode on Patreon
* Film on YouTube \*Film on NWR
* Film on Archive.org
* IMDB