Conformity and Control, The Story of Green Eggs and Jam
By: TheSarcasmLord

After watching Green Eggs and Jam, many people laugh at the silly video and take it for nothing more than meaningless entertainment, but in fact it has some deep meaning. Green Eggs and Jam by Jason Gastrow is a parody and perspective shift of the classic book Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, and can be viewed here on youtube. In Green Eggs and Jam, Gastrow takes the original concept of Green Eggs and Ham and follows the idea that in actuality Sam is fairly pushy for trying to force his opinion onto others. This aspect is not touched on in the original book, and it brings up the important point that if someone’s opinion is contrary to another person’s it should be …show more content…
This is important because in Green Eggs and Ham, the main characters are Sam and an un-named character. This distinction shows two critical points, first that the events of Green Eggs and Jam most likely take place after the events of Green Eggs and Ham as opposed to being an alternate of the same story; Secondly it shows that Sam has an overly elevated value of self importance because the opposing character in the original version was not considered important enough to be given or referred to by a name. This is further illustrated in the next few seconds of Green Eggs and Jam in which he repeats “I am Sam.” “‘Sam I am.’ he concluded”, implying that his name carries great weight and the world should know who he is. The extreme closeups and the uptilted angle with the wind blowing in Sam’s hair illustrate Sam’s self righteousness and the comical inflation of importance. Starting the video out by glorifying Sam like that helps to convey how Sam sees himself, and in fact the first few seconds are built specifically to reveal the inner workings of Sam’s mind and his self centered nature. The start to Gastrow’s video sets the scene to purpose that Green Eggs and Ham was written biasedly towards Sam’s self righteous perspective, and after the events of that book he seeks to set the record …show more content…
His video states that society only has the power we give it and thus it is completely under our control and is our responsibility to do so correctly. Other points Gastrow makes are about understanding different points of view rather than trying to force a point of view upon someone. Self centeredness is a huge problem in today’s world and Gastrow does an excellent job in illustrating that through Sam’s self righteousness, and inability to accept that he isn’t always right. Truly a huge amount of depth within less than two minutes of video. In other words, it's a mastapiece