



It’s Sparlock Mania! Two weeks ago, a Pixar-style Jehovah’s Witness cartoon featuring a “bad” toy named Sparlock the Wizard leaked onto the Internet.

The video features four main characters: Caleb, Caleb’s mom, a toy named Sparlock the Warrior Wizard, and Satan.

You can watch the full two-and-a-half-minute cartoon here, and it’s also been featured on PZ Meyer’s popular blog Pharyngula, but here’s a quick rundown (Spoiler Alert: Your toys are made of demons!):

A young boy named Caleb comes home from school with an awesome wizard toy named Sparlock. He happily flies Sparlock around the room (like you do) until his mother notices his inappropriate (i.e., 100% appropriate) childhood behavior. With a concerned brow and a tinfoil hat the size of Area 51, Caleb’s mom sits him at the kitchen table and pulls some hardcore Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-style guilt-tripping. She explains that the toy is “bad” because it’s essentially possessed by the Devil. It seems that Caleb has inadvertently been making God sad and Satan happy.

Using interrogation tactics that could easily garner her a hearing in The Hague, Caleb’s mom then asks a bunch of manipulative leading questions and shows her seven-year-old a creepy photo of Adam and Eve…whom God HATES! Do you want God to hate you?

After being emotionally waterboarded for a few minutes, Caleb finally concedes that he needs to throw the toy out. Clearly! Shit, he’s practically killing God! As a grand finale, Mom-of-the-Year watches Caleb as he throws his own toy in the trash. Then she tells him that he’s made God happy. Even though God doesn’t exist and she just made the whole thing up. Yay! The God who doesn’t exist isn’t mad at you anymore about the demons that don’t exist in a toy that is made of plastic! Fuck reality! Let’s ride bikes!

Immediately, the Internet responded. Sparlock became a mascot of all things that are mindfucky and gross. There are Facebook groups, memes, video mashups, a Sparlock Twitter, and 1,600 comments on Reddit.

It seems that people have a problem with, you know, fucking with your children’s heads and taking away their toys in the name of religion. And they responded with art.

—KYRIA ABRAHAMS