The Cloak (Remastered)

For a number of years the official upload of my 2006 cartoon “The Cloak” has been unlisted on YouTube, and unavailable via any of my channel’s playlists. Today I’ve uploaded a new version to the channel—it’s still unlisted, but will now appear in the “Animations” playlist alongside the rest of my cartoons. This new version has been (lightly) upscaled to 1080p, and I’ve made a handful of minor audio fixes. For instance, the “delicious crab meat” music is now mixed louder. The low mixing has bothered me for decades!

More importantly, three different lines have been swapped with alternate dialogue that I recorded while working on the cartoon back in 2005 / 2006. When I made “The Cloak” I did a bunch of improv takes for most of the script’s lines, and thankfully I still have access to all of those files. Given the fact that the character of The Cloak doesn’t have a mouth, it was a fairly simple process to swap one take for another.

Why make these changes? The Cloak was intentionally written as a bigot—a living manifestation of U.S. anti-communist paranoia during the Cold War era. It was intended as satire, but I wrote it during a time in my artistic career in which I had an extremely unsteady hand at satire writing. Many of the jokes I wrote did not serve the function of satire, they only served to strengthen the bigotry I was attempting to satirize. Some of the lines didn’t even make sense in terms of the character’s specific biases. Worst of all, people would repeat the bigotry of The Cloak as if his words were fun catchphrases… and no wonder! I wrote his dialogue as energetic, bombastic, snappy, and easily quotable.

Many years later I would create a similar character, “Detective Heart of America.” This character was the physical manifestation of post-9/11 U.S. nationalism, and with the movie in particular I think I did a much better job hitting my intended target. Heart of America, like The Cloak, is a bigot. But, his bigotry is much more clearly presented as foolish. The joke is on him, the joke is not on the people he looks down on.

The satirical target of “Detective Heart of America” was also a much more relevant one. The beliefs being satirized were current, and influencing the modern world. They were not long-dead ideas being reanimated for the sake of a safe target. Detective Heart of America was a less cowardly, and less useless form of satire.

So, why make these changes now? The primary reason is, I get asked about The Cloak’s unavailability a lot and wanted there to be a version available that I could easily and comfortably point to. The secondary reason is, although the satire on display in the cartoon was wildly out of date in 2006, it is unfortunately not nearly so irrelevant in 2025. It’s still a poor, paper-thin form of satire wrapped loosely around edgy 2000s absurdism, but The Cloak’s specific flavor of paranoid bigotry is once again the driving force in U.S. politics.

Should you watch this cartoon if you haven’t already seen it? If you love edgy 2000s absurdism, sure. But please note, even with the edits, there is a content warning for: bigotry, murder, body horror, and animal abuse. If that doesn’t sound like something you'd like to watch, you’re safe to skip this particular artifact.

In addition to the YouTube upload, I’ve added a high quality download of the cartoon to the “Animations” section of the FilmCow Google Drive.