If there's one reason we're glad to see the Weekly World News survived American Media's lack of faith in the brand, it's so we can be greeted with holiday cheer from the paper's mascot, Bat Boy.
It's taken just two weeks for the protests against Prop. 8 to go from historical moment to Weekly World News pop-culture parody, which has to be a record. There really needs to be some sort of index based off of the time it takes between an event happening and the moment a Bat Boy article is done about said event.
Or maybe this is how Neil McGinness over at Bat Boy LTD, who recently bought Weekly World News from David Pecker, is reinventing the rag as culturally ironic?
When sources revealed that Weekly World News, that infamous conspiracy tabloid, was being sold, no one figured it would be this soon before the new owners launched their Onion-esque makeover of the magazine.
The new Weekly World News is more topical than its predecessor, featuring mainly election-related jokes and Photoshopped pictures of the candidates with Bat Boy or Bigfoot. Hmm…is it just us or is the website set up exactly like Politico?
But if you wanted to know what the new owners at Bat Boy L.L.C. thought of our current polls, you don't have to look any farther than the front page, featuring a Bat Boy-endorsing Obama, and a tongue-in-cheek timeline of what Sarah Palin believes evolution looks like, titled "Palin-tology."
WWN only exists online for now, which new owner Neil McGinness says makes more sense in terms of advertising dollars. At this point, does anyone want to put their half-cooked stories into print anymore?
Oh, but let's not forget the merchandising:
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Weekly World News, the quintessential conspiracy rag, is getting a tongue-in-cheek makeover by its new owners, Bat Boy LTD. Taking it's name from one of WWN well-known leads, Bat Boy is buying the supermarket tabloid from AMI and plans to reinvent the weekly "kind of like Marvel before it got into movies." Take that, comic book sellouts, cheapening the genre of "graphic novels" for the sake of the allmighty dollar!
Okay, so how does this new Weekly World News plan to make money? Why, merchandising and movie deals of course!
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"For three years, under various pseudonyms," writes journo Stan Sinberg, "I 'reported' that the real reason for global warming was that teenage space aliens were stealing our glaciers for party ice, that the judicial system was in chaos because a thief stole 'the book' that judges throw at them, that leftovers from the Last Supper were found in a man's fridge, and that a man who killed a fly was arrested for 'pesticide' (the police chief chided, 'That's why we have a SWAT team'). And several hundred more 'scoops.'"
Now, Weekly World News (the self-proclaimed "World's Only Reliable Newspaper) has published its last-ever issue,
And the supermarket checkout lines will be, as Sinberg laments, "an emptier, less imaginative place."
