Underneath all the silly cartoon antics,
the movie who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Is really about a real life conspiracy
to destroy electric rail in the United States,
specifically in the greater Los Angeles area.
Now, really early in the movie,
there's a punchline where Eddie essentially says,
it would be absurd to own a car in the city of Los Angeles.
Hey, Mister,
Ain't you got a car? Who needs a car in LA?
We got the best public transportation system in the world.
That line is supposed to be really funny to a modern audience
because
Los Angeles has a notoriously terrible public transportation system.
It's gotten a little better recently,
but it's still awful.
You need a car to do basically anything in Los Angeles
and half for a really long time.
But that wasn't always the case.
There was a point when LA had one of the best,
if not the best, public rail system in the world.
It was fast, it was efficient,
it was cheap. In fact,
most cities in the United States,
sort of mid size cities, had a rail network at one point.
First they buy the red car,
then they want to get their hands on Toontown.
The movie references a real life conspiracy lead by General Motors
that included oil companies,
the predecessors to Exxon and Chevron.
It included Firestone tire.
It included Mack truck and Graham buses.
They all got together
and they bought up all of these rail systems all over the country.
ST. Louis, Baltimore,
Oakland and Los Angeles.
And then they systematically made them less efficient
and then eventually dismantled them completely.
The villain in Roger Rabbit is a character named Judge Doom.
And in addition to traumatizing every child who saw this movie,
uh, he is sort of the embodiment of this General Motors conspiracy.
Nobody's gonna drive this lousy freeway
when they can take the red car for a nickel.
Oh, they'll drive.
They'll have to. You see,
I bought the red car so I could dismantle it.
The plan was to replace the rail networks with bus service
that was purposely designed to be unreliable.
It's slow, gets caught in traffic,
really annoying. Uh,
that forces people to buy cars.
If they wanna get to work on time,
they have to own their own car. Right?
You can get the whole populace of Los Angeles
to have to buy a massive luxury item
and going to debt to do so.
That benefits all the companies involved in this conspiracy.
There's a widespread belief that the transition
from a public transit system
to an extremely car centric society in the US was inevitable.
But that's not true. It was purposely destroyed.
It was purposely defunded.
The thing about public transit is that it needs public investment
on the local level, on the state level,
and on the federal level. But all of that began shifting into highways,
partially because of the highway lobby,
which General Motors was also involved in the movie
Judge Doom is going to destroy Toon Town
to make way for a massive highway expansion.
But in real life, those highway expansions
often went through black and Latino neighborhoods.
So making way for the 1:01 and other highways,
it raised those communities to the ground.
But in who Framed Roger Rabbit,
there are no people of color in the movie at all.
The writers
were clearly trying to comment on that racist history of Los Angeles,
but in using cartoons as metaphors,
they sort of ended up erasing it,
which is more than a little ironic.