- [Narrator] Future Puppet News.
Finally news from a source you can trust.
Puppets from the year 3000.
With help from their senior time machine
they'll uncover history's most mysterious mysteries.
Traveling through space and time
for that hot, historical scoop.
Get ready for cold, hard facts from long, squishy puppets.
Voted least offensive by our evil alien overlords Zenu.
Future Puppet News, broadcasting the past from the future.
- Good evening film aficionados
and welcome to a special Earth Day chapter
of the Nook Du Cinema.
I am your auteur de jure, Douglas Welles.
I thought we talked about changing that title.
Fortunately today I won't be discussing
the usual popcorn dribble or the kind pumped out
by that hag, Coo.
No, my diet is saturated by with one of the newest films
from cinemas fresh, most dynamic, innovative young faces.
I am, of course, talking about me.
I present my latest masterpiece based
on a true American story, The Dust Bowl.
I will show you fear in a bowl full of dust.
Life, nature, madness, dust.
- I'm interrupting this highly inaccurate
and cliched student film with a breaking weather report.
Climate change is leading to bigger and bigger storms.
Right now we're seeing a massive tsunami
approaching Puppet-stan after last night's earthquake.
- Student film!
I'll have you know I never even set foot
inside a school.
- Listen here you little blob.
You don't know the first thing about The Dust Bowl.
- Hi-ya!
Sounded like that was getting a little tense.
- These earthquakes are becoming more frequent
because of fracking puppet morons like him.
- Please, as if a mere puppet could somehow
twist the winds of the environment.
And besides, she ruined my segment.
- He was inaccurately portraying The Dust Bowl.
One of the greatest mineralogical
and ecological disasters in world history
and his movie was awful.
- Well, she's fat.
- Laughing is fun.
Who-ha-who!
- That doesn't prove anything.
- Well, folks it looks like to settle this
we're going to have to take a trip back in the early
20th century America and find out what really
happened at the Dust Bowl.
- Who-ha-who.
- Oopsie-ouchie.
- Well before we get to the dust
let's take a look at how we got there.
Believe it or not this great clamity started
with the air of prosperity and ingenuity.
The expansion into the West and the creation
of the gas powered tractor meant that more territory
was being tilled and converted into farmland
than ever before.
Feeding an ever growing global demand for wheat
but also uprooting thousands of acres of topsoil.
No one anticipated the massive impact human action
could have on the land or the planet.
- Allegedly!
I don't remember any of this happening in my film.
Oh, everybody's a critique!
- Oh, then in 1929 the Great Depression hit
and suddenly the demand for wheat was gone.
But the damage to the soil was done.
- And soon they would feel the wrath of Mother Nature.
Much of the country experienced a drought
with some parts of the High Plains
not seeing enough precipitation for as long as
eight years and without water
eight years is a very long time.
It's estimated that in one year alone
as much as 850 million tons of topsoil
simply blew away and the loose soil created dust storms
that swept through the nation.
- That's right.
Giant clouds of dirt will push by storm with winds
up to 30 miles per hour.
And I'm here in the middle of one of those black lizards
with junior reporter slash recovering argo Hamblin Harrison.
Hamblin? Hamblin?
- Boy it's dusty up here!
In fact, the average dust storm
carried more dirt than it would take to build
two Panama canals.
Also they suck!
Chip, please feed my iguana!
- No.
The storms grew more frequent and more severe
with 14 one year and 38 the next.
In 1935 one of the most destructive storms
dubbed Black Sunday, winds reached up to 60 miles per hour
with dust so thick it blacked out the sun.
Back to you, Michelle.
- These weren't just dust storms.
They were electrified as static filled up
between the ground and dust particles in the air.
One dust storm, even had enough electricity
in the air to power all of New York City.
The increase in static electricity even led to many
farmers stopping shaking hands altogether.
They did this for fear of creating a dangerous shock
that could knock each other to the ground.
- But that wasn't the only change of culture.
No.
In the face of such biblical hardship
many resorted to superstitious practices such as
the killing of snakes.
- People tried anything to make it rain
even firing off rockets, carrying dynamite into the sky.
Let's not try that one.
- No promises rookie.
- Superstitions just like all that brown-gerf
nonsense where people are always on at that.
- Geeze Douglas!
People just want a healthy planet.
Why do you have to be such a Scrooge?
- Ha!
'Cause that's Sophomoric literary comparison,
I say bah-humbug and also you're fat.
- How are you just standing there?
- My horseshoe, it's lucky and heavy.
- I'm greatly depressed!
- In the harsh dry conditions of the Dust Bowl,
one of the only plants to prosper was the Russian thistle
or as it's better known as, the tumbleweed.
Times were so desperate people began to brine
the plant making it edible.
One town even tried to celebrate the practice
by holding Russian thistle week.
It tastes like mummified porcupine.
- Aw, oh, delicious.
Oh seems this so-called Dust Bowl is
more like a flavor bowl if you ask me.
Scrum-gelescent!
- Well I'll tell you what's not that word
you just made up, a plague of locusts.
Yes, on the rare occasion when the storm subsided.
The farmlands were overrun with
jack rabbits and grasshoppers.
Crowds of grasshoppers as large as 23,000 per acre
swarmed the heartland.
As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt put it
"what the sun left the grasshoppers took".
- Hey, why do you get the jackrabbit
and I get all these locusts?
Oh, god, again with the wind?!
That's it!
I'm putting in my two week's notice.
- Due to the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression
times were so hard many people stopped having
children all together, hitting the lowest birthrate
in the nation's history.
And what kids there were frequently jumped town,
riding the rails in search of a better life.
- But even in the darkest hour
all hope wasn't lost.
On May 11, 1934, the biggest storm of all
hit the east coast.
It was two miles high, spanning 1800 miles,
and weighed 350 million tons.
It affected the whole nation, dumping 12 million pounds
of dust on Chicago and hammering the eastern seaboard.
- What?
A world without Chicago style deep dish pizza?
That sounds terrible.
I thought you said all hope wasn't lost.
- It wasn't because even as these mighty winds
buffeted the Capitol building,
Congress was inside working to pass multiple
soil conservation bills to help save the land
and stop the dust storms from ravaging the country.
These are laws that still exist to this day
as part of the U.S. Farm Bill.
- My puppet god, what thrilling a ding-ma.
- That's right Douglas.
Because when people face reality
and work together we do incredible things
even in the face of overwhelming adversity.
- Very nice, Michelle.
Normally that's the kind of thing I say.
- Tell me, is there time?
What day is it?
What day is it?!
- It's Earth Day.
- Oh my dickens she's right!
Thank you for opening my eyes
and increasing the size of my already
dangerously enlarged heart.
Oh I'm off.
In fact, this very moment I'm gonna start work
on a new script about a certain handsome
young filmmaker with a character arc.
- I have no idea what just happened.
I feel irrelevant and hungry.
- For once Dale we're on the same page.
Anyway folks.
- From all of us here at Future Puppet News
we want to wish you a.
- Uh oh, look over there!
It's raining men.
Sounds like a situation that calls for a top
of the line meteorologist, huh, Michelle?
- Time for Michelle "Lightning" Garcia to strike!
- From all of us here at Future Puppet News
we want to wish you a Happy Earth Day
and remind you no matter what planet
you're on take care of it.
- Well, this must be the end call.
SoulPancake!
Subscribe and to watch more Future Puppet News
click over there.