Degringolade

Today I want to tell you about the tale of Mr. Cig.

In the early 1950s, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, founded in 1875 and famous for its Camel, Newport, and Pall Mall brand cigarettes, faced a big problem: public suspicion about tobacco was growing and, most importantly, sales were going down. So, they were forced to come up with a plan to save the company, and they had to come up with it fast.

Although physicians had long suspected links between smoking tobacco and respiratory disease, these suspicions were largely ignored until 1950, when epidemiologists Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published a breakthrough study showing an undeniable link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer. This study, of course, threw the entire tobacco industry into a panic. The best tobacco minds in the world came together to figure out a way to discredit this damning new information. They cut lucrative deals with the film industry, placing branded cigarettes between the fingers of every glamorous movie star; they tripled spending on public advertising, ensuring every billboard and city bus was plastered with the smiling faces of smokers; they even ran blatant disinformation campaigns on public radio, discrediting Doll and Hill as quacks. But no matter what the tobacco companies did, sales still went down. Sales were plummeting, in fact. That is, until one day in 1951, John C. Whitaker, President of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, after many fruitless internal meetings, stumbled upon a brilliant idea entirely by accident.

And that idea was: Mr. Cig.

As told in a famous anecdote published in a local paper in 1951, John C. Whitaker, out of ideas during an internal board meeting, scribbled a quick drawing on his cocktail napkin. The scribble was like that of a child’s: a giant cigarette man with black-circle eyes and a curved-line smile, holding out a lit cigarette twirling with little smoke lines to a crudely drawn child lying in what looked to be a hospital bed. At first, Whitaker thought nothing of the drawing until, as outlined verbatim in the aforementioned local paper, an executive sitting next to him eyed the napkin and asked, “What’s that you’ve sketched there, then?” to which Mr. Whitaker famously replied, “Well, good sir, that there is Mr. Cig.”

It was decided right then and there that Mr. Cig would become the new mascot of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. The idea was that Mr. Cig would go to local hospitals and hand out free cigarettes to the infirm, some of whom would be children, emphasizing the calming, anxiety-reducing effects of smoking tobacco, which the physicians employed by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. linked to faster patient recovery, as there was some evidence that a calm, positive mind improved physical well-being. This idea was hailed as genius, and plans quickly progressed. The company immediately hired a local seamstress to craft the Mr. Cig costume. She simulated the cigarette paper with white cloth, wrapping it tightly around a giant tube of thick particle board; then she took real wood, charred it gray and black with fire, and painted the top orangish-red to simulate a lit cherry; then used industrial-strength plastic to create a bowl-like structure, which she glued to the top of the costume with industrial-strength adhesive; then she glued the faux-smoldering wood into the bowl, which completed the overall structure; but it was still missing something: the smiling, cartoon-like face, which was crucial to appealing to sick people, especially sick children; so she took large pieces of black felt, two circles and a curve, and glued them just below the faux-smoldering wood; then, as a last step, she cut two holes into the costume where a human’s arms would stick out, which was a crucial feature, as Mr. Cig would not be able to hand out cigarettes without arms. This process took weeks of toiling, but the seamstress completed the costume before the deadline. The costume was then reviewed by the entire R.J. Reynolds Tobacco marketing division, who collectively deemed it good.

But before Mr. Cig could tour the hospitals, there was one final question: who, exactly, would don the costume? Who would have the honor of becoming Mr. Cig?

Well, the bad news is, to this day, the identity of the original Mr. Cig is a mystery. Some believe it was the head of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco marketing division, William Slocum, who was a strong believer in the Mr. Cig project and very involved in the planning. Others believe it was John C. Whitaker inside that giant, cartoon-like cigarette man costume. Some suggest it was the ghost of R.J. Reynolds himself, making one last cancer-causing sales pitch from beyond the grave. What’s more likely, however, is that the original Mr. Cig was simply a low-level employee from the R.J. Reynolds marketing division who was perhaps voluntold to don the costume, but even if true, that employee’s name has unfortunately been lost to time.

What we do know, however, is that throughout the remainder of the 1950s, Mr. Cig, with his big smiling cartoon face and faux-smoldering cherry topper, traveled across the United States from hospital to hospital, handing out free cigarettes to the sick and infirm, some of whom were children and many of whom were dying from the very same lung cancer caused by the cigarettes themselves. Mr. Cig was also prepped with various pro-tobacco talking points, many of which were backed by sketchy scientific data provided by physicians paid by Big Tobacco, and he would rattle off these talking points to every doctor and patient he visited. Sometimes he would even leave them with whole cartons of free cigarettes, which were accepted most graciously because the immediate calming effects of the tobacco did indeed alleviate patient suffering in the short term, albeit only unknowingly hastening their demise in the long term. Of course, Mr. Cig was aware of this but, being a faithful servant of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, he continued carrying out his reaper-like duties without question. But Mr. Cig did not just give out free cigarettes and pro-smoking rhetoric, as that would not be very profitable; he also set up cigarette machines in each hospital he visited, and these cigarette machines sold products at a high markup to leech as much money from the dying patients as possible, all while the hospitals received a small cut of the profits.

It is impossible to say how many lives were lost as a result of Mr. Cig’s efforts, but one thing is certain: what Mr. Cig did was utterly detestable. We can say this for certain because it is true.

Or is it?

Well, it is certainly true that if Mr. Cig had indeed handed out cigarettes to dying hospital patients, that would have been considered utterly detestable. The negative health impacts of smoking tobacco are well-documented and backed by decades of research, and there was strong evidence of this even back in the 1950s. But the problem is, Mr. Cig did not hand out cigarettes to dying hospital patients at all, because Mr. Cig never existed, or at least I am pretty sure he never existed. The story above, about Mr. Cig, is an elaborate fabrication on my part, based on supposedly real information documented in a single article posted online on November 24, 2025. You can read it in archive format here. It is roughly two paragraphs long and contains a supposedly real picture of Mr. Cig handing a lit cigarette to a hospital patient circa 1948. But as far as I can tell, this picture does not depict reality, and the events outlined never actually happened. There is no real evidence whatsoever backing up the existence of Mr. Cig outside of this short shock article, which itself has no citations.

But the problem here is not so much that Mr. Cig did not exist, or that the vintag.es article is blatantly lying to us; it is that, even now, after doing a bunch of research, I am still not sure if Mr. Cig existed or not.

When my friend sent me the Mr. Cig article via text message with the question, “Do you think this is real?”, I went down a sort of online rabbit hole to find out the truth, and I got stuck in that rabbit hole for about an hour. Most of my research was spent doing keyword searches, trying to find older articles to corroborate the Mr. Cig story he had sent me, but I could not find anything dated before 2025. I even checked the Wikipedia articles for various tobacco companies, playing fast and loose with the Ctrl+F hotkey on phrases like “Mr. Cig,” “Mr. Ciggy,” “mascot,” and whatnot, but that too was a fruitless exercise. I found a Facebook post that referenced the same article, and I found a Reddit post too, wherein people just accepted the story at face value because, hell, it seems like something a tobacco company would actually do. But I could find no real historical record of Mr. Cig. He did not seem to exist. I got to thinking that, if there is no real evidence, how come people seem to just believe this story to be true? And that’s when it hit me: people believe this to be true because, accompanying the article, there is a seemingly real picture of Mr. Cig, and this picture looks very realistic: black and white, showing a correctly proportioned man with an era-appropriate hairstyle, and the hospital bed looks as if it could have been from the 1940s or 1950s. Photos add credibility; they trick our senses in a way, make us put our cynical guards down. The only truly weird thing about the photo is Mr. Cig himself who, although creepy as hell, looks real enough, certainly not outside the realm of possibility. And there were no obvious alterations to the photo, at least not that I noticed upon first or second glance. But after seeing the photo a third time, it hit me: based on the location of the spiraling smoke lines, Mr. Cig is handing the man a lit cigarette with the lit end facing out, meaning that if the man grabbed the cigarette, he would burn himself. I thought to myself, surely the esteemed Mr. Cig, a paragon of cigarette-smoking excellence, would not hand a cigarette to someone in this way; certainly he knew the basic etiquette of passing a cigarette. And that’s when I knew that the photo of Mr. Cig was AI-generated.

But the problem was, even after coming to this conclusion, I felt that I was still no closer to the truth. Upon emerging from the Mr. Cig research rabbit hole, I was actually more confused than when I had first jumped into the hole. I found that, on the one hand, there’s strong evidence that Mr. Cig did not exist, considering the lack of historical record and the AI-generated photo, and it’s no coincidence that Mr. Cig only started showing up in 2025, the year photorealistic AI-generated images became a thing. But on the other hand, there is nothing saying otherwise. In fact, everyone online seems to think that Mr. Cig was a real mascot who actually handed out free cigarettes at hospitals. And, if enough people believe something, does that make it true? Does consensus dictate reality? Although I believe it very likely that Mr. Cig is a total fabrication, it now seems impossible for me to know for certain, and this disturbs me because it reveals something about the world we live in, something dark and twisted.

It reveals that we live in a world of falsehoods, an era of post-truth.

I’m not the greatest storyteller in the world, but the story I crafted up there, about Mr. Cig, was intended to be believable although entirely misleading. For example, I researched and used historical facts like the names of the actual people who worked at R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. circa 1950, per public record, and I even referenced a real research paper published by Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill. I did this because these types of factual details add a layer of believability to the Mr. Cig story, even though everything around those facts was totally made up. I was weaving fact with falsehood on purpose, not only to foster a sense of credibility with the reader but also to make a point. That being, this is a very common rhetorical trick used in journalism. People are more likely to eat bullshit if it’s hidden within a tasty-looking meal. But this is just the first layer of falsehood. In the year 2026, it goes much deeper than that.

In the past, if you were so inclined, you could simply fact-check the story, look things up about it online, go through an exercise similar to the one I outlined in the previous paragraphs to determine a story’s veracity, but nowadays the facts are not so clear-cut. Often you will find conflicting sources supporting both sides of whatever it is you’re researching. On the one hand, this has always been the case, especially since the advent of the internet and the echo chambers spawned from it, but nowadays, with the advent of AI, a bullshit term I’m only using because it’s common tongue, it’s incredibly easy for someone to generate a very real-sounding story and post it online. And to make it worse, as of at least 2025, it’s also now incredibly easy to generate a very real-looking photo to accompany that very real-sounding, albeit totally fabricated, story. Someone could even use AI to generate a real-looking research paper in PDF format to support the details of their fake story. So now, not only are we contending with tricky journalism and internet echo chambers, we’re also contending with totally fake but seemingly factual data that’s incredibly simple to generate. And the technology is only getting better. Just a year ago, AI-generated photos were full of obvious errors and telling glossy sheens, but now, as of the year 2025, ChatGPT can spit out photorealistic images that are nearly indistinguishable from those taken with the highest-end cameras, and we’re also seeing high-quality AI-generated videos and audio recordings. Meaning, with each passing day, it’s becoming harder and harder to discern fact from fiction. We are now living in a post-truth era.

You may be thinking something like, “Well, I can tell the difference,” but what about your crazy aunt on Facebook who keeps sharing fake stories about how Elon Musk created a tiny-home colony for people on Mars, can she tell the difference? And what about your hyper-conservative grandpa who keeps sharing stories about how all the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential rally photos were themselves AI-generated? And what about the countless people who share obviously AI-generated recipes, or innocuous, feel-good fake stories about dogs saving babies from being locked in hot cars or whatever? A few years ago, this kind of stuff was obvious, but now? Now it’s almost impossible to tell. Hell, there’s a whole subreddit called “Is it AI?” wherein people debate back and forth about the veracity of some very real-looking stuff. More and more, people are unable to tell the difference between reality and irreality.

Your first gut reaction to this might be to treat everything you read, see, and hear as fiction until sufficiently proven otherwise, but this line of thinking actually does you a disservice, because there will come a day when something you read will be very relevant to your life, yet you won’t believe it because, well, everything around you might be AI-generated, so why would you believe anything? And even if you do believe something, who’s to say that the people around you believe it? They’re drowning in the AI-generated slop swamp just like you, so they’ve been conditioned not to believe anything too. Hell, there may come a day when, let’s say, the president of the United States kills someone on live television, but who’s to say that the recording wasn’t just AI? What’s to stop the president himself from claiming that the recording was AI? In that case, perhaps half the country will believe the president and the other half won’t, but in reality, due to the level of AI-generated obfuscation going on in the world, neither side will truly know what happened.

This is the danger we are putting ourselves in. Mr. Cig is just the tip of the iceberg.

In this post-truth era, how long do you think you will be able to tell the difference between fact and fiction?

How long, do you think, until Mr. Cig tricks you?

“Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld.”

As Jack Black would say, my son yearns for the mines. He’s 2.8 years old and loves A Minecraft Movie. He stands on top of our living-room coffee table shouting CHICKEN JOCKEY and singing the Lava Chicken song. And he asks to watch the movie every day.

And that’s fine. It entertains him, which is a hard thing to do considering he’s inherited all my worst attention-deficit qualities, meaning, for me, the movie is a brief respite from his normal hyperactive madness. But by extension, considering he watches the movie every day, I've watched A Minecraft Movie maybe six hundred times by now, or at least it’s felt that way, because, despite its fairly standard runtime, it’s an excruciatingly torturous experience that feels much longer than it actually is. This is especially true on rewatches, when you start to notice how the plot is totally contrived, how most of the characters exist for no real reason, and how the pacing resembles my son’s own hyperactive thought-process, which is probably why he likes the movie so much. For example, the first forty-five minutes of the film, before they even enter the Minecraft world, are set in the real world, introduce a bunch of characters that do not matter to the plot whatsoever, and play out like a poor recreation of Napoleon Dynamite, cutting from one weird scene to another very quickly, complete with forced-quirky humor that feels like it was focus-grouped in the early 2000s, with lines delivered by middle-aged women like, “You can bag me up and take me to the curb anytime, but you gotta bungee the lid 'cause I got a lot of raccoons in there,” which feels highly inappropriate considering this is a fucking kids’ movie.

I don’t really want to harp on all the problems with the movie because there are way too many to count, and because that’s not really the point of this journal entry, and also because A Minecraft Movie is a kids’ movie first and foremost, so who the fuck actually cares. But I feel it’s important to let you know that this same take-me-to-the-curb woman later becomes romantically involved with a Minecraft villager who has a huge nose and massive block head that look as if human flesh has been stretched way too tightly over them, and he communicates only in creepy, sometimes pained grunts. The whole thing amounts to total nightmare fuel. In fact, most of the CGI in this movie is total nightmare fuel, as all the denizens of the Minecraft world have fleshy, real-world texturing over their clearly video-game-like block bodies, sometimes with nasty little hairs poking out here and there, which makes for some seriously unsettling imagery that could have only come from the mind of one seriously disturbed individual, presumably Jared Hess, the director, who also directed, you guessed it, Napoleon Dynamite.

Of course, much like the first forty-five minutes of A Minecraft Movie and the weird interspecies-romance subplot, everything I’ve typed up so far is pretty much irrelevant to both the plot of the movie and the point I’m trying to make with this journal entry, which is that, despite being a video-game movie made for kids, it tries to shoehorn what I feel is a very anti-kids message, which is what I'm about to get into here. And this message disturbs me because it mirrors something that I think about and wrestle with literally every day. It is something that I think no child should be forced to think about, especially when they just tuned in to watch Jack Black do funny things in a world inspired by their favorite video game, Minecraft.

But before I can analyze the overall message of the film, which is actually very deliberate, not something the script accidentally stumbles into, I have to provide some background for two of the more important characters.

The first important character is, of course, Steve. Steve’s story is one of escapism. The movie opens with a montage of Steve throughout the years. He starts as a young child who, for whatever reason, yearns for the mines, observing them from afar, dreaming of the day when he can get into those caves and do some digging or whatever. But before long, real life kicks in, and suddenly Steve, now a grotesque fat man in his thirties, is a paper pusher at some corporate office, depressed and without purpose. “My name is Steve. And as a child, I yearned for the mines. But it didn't really work out. So, I did a terrible thing. I grew up.” Toward the end of the montage, Steve has a little epiphany, so he quits his job to follow his dream. From that point, he spends all his free time mining in a nearby quarry, eventually unearthing a glowing blue cube, the Earth Crystal, which opens a portal to the Overworld, i.e. the Minecraft world, where he spends the next several years mining, crafting, and building stuff, basically escaping his real-world responsibilities. In the Overworld, he makes a wolf friend named Dennis, and at some point, he discovers an underworld full of pig-like monsters commanded by Malgosha, an evil piglin sorceress. Things happen and Malgosha captures Steve, demanding that he give her the Earth Crystal so that she can take over the universe or whatever, but Steve refuses, sending Dennis off with the Earth Crystal to hide it in the real world beyond the portal. This leads into the start of the movie, where the whole Napoleon Dynamite rip-off kicks in.

The second important character is Garrett “The Garbage Man” Garrison, played by that same guy who did Game of Thrones and Aquaman or whatever, Jason Momoa. Before the events of the film, he was a child video-game prodigy, having won many video game tournaments and corporate sponsorships, which set him up for financial success and inflated his ego to an absurd degree. However, by the start of the film, he’s squandered all his sponsorship money and is now a washed-up, overweight, mullet-wearing middle-aged man who owns a retro video game store aptly named “Game Over World.” Maybe you can see where this is going. His store is filled to the brim with old stuff from his youth: classic video game consoles, arcade cabinets, ancient CRTs, retro boomboxes, that sort of stuff. One gets the impression that Garrett is a nostalgia junkie obsessed with his childhood. He’s much like that one character from Napoleon Dynamite, the ex-football-player uncle who points at the far-off mountains and says, “How much you wanna bet I can throw a football over them mountains?” Both of these characters live in the past, refusing to move on from their glory days. In fact, all Garrett ever talks about is how he was once the greatest video-game player in the world, which is played for laughs, as Garrett does have some self-awareness about his situation, constantly trying to downplay his boasting by pretending that he doesn’t actually care: “Gamer of the Year, 1989. Whatever. I barely think about it.” Yet despite this, he’s started a mentorship program for people who want to “win at the game of life,” using his own life as a model, even though his own life is in shambles because he is stuck, unable to move on from his glory days. Now, his store is being foreclosed on, and his obnoxious arrogance has made him few friends. After a series of incredibly stupid events, he stumbles into the Minecraft world, where he quickly realizes that he can use Minecraft-world diamonds to make a profit and thus save his soon-to-be-foreclosed retro game store, Game Over World.

Watching this movie, as an adult man in his thirties, I am reminded of my own follies. This is what so disturbs me about the film. In Garrett, I see myself. In Steve, I see myself. This may sound ridiculous, considering this is a kids’ movie for kids, but it is true nevertheless. Like Garrett, my office is my Game Over World. I have games in here from my childhood, from the early 2000s, collecting dust on bookshelves and tables, like a shrine to my youth. In a drawer just to the left of me: jewel-case copies of all the PlayStation Final Fantasy games, Chrono Cross, Arc the Lad, and SaGa Frontier; original Xbox games in their cheap plastic cases, like Panzer Dragoon, Halo, Mega Man Anniversary, and Morrowind; even some old issues of Nintendo Power from the days when I wore a bowl cut. Even further left, on a wooden table that holds my Xbox 360 and Nintendo Switch, old 360 games stand upright between bookends: Fable, Skyrim, Orange Box, Blue Dragon, Oblivion, and more. Next to that, favorite DVDs I’ve had since I was a rebellious teenager: the whole Cowboy Bebop collection, Lost in Translation, the entire Boondocks series, the movie Collateral starring Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise, and so on, all stacked atop each other, their spines facing out, creating a border of nostalgia around the one thing that helps me escape reality: the television set.

Like Steve, I find myself inexplicably drawn to the television, becoming sucked into the pixely glow. I try to fight it, tell myself that gaming has run its course, that it doesn’t bring me the same pleasure it once did, that I could be doing anything else with my time, but night after night I still find myself sitting there, in front of the screen, burning my retinas with the colors of escapism. There is no moderation in my hobbies. I play till ungodly hours. I eschew other things I’d like to be doing, like reading and writing, to stare into this nostalgic glow. I have reached an age where the act of playing video games triggers thoughts of wasted time and irresponsibility, yet there I am, night after night, still doing it, still playing the games, surrounded by all the old things I love. I foster times and places redolent of those long past, not to remind me of them, but to hide within them. I do this every night, to forget, or perhaps to run away from, what I have become, what we all eventually become.

They say age is just a number, that you can be young forever, but at a certain age, the shadow of responsibility catches up with you, and before you know it, maturity has slain the child inside. Your thinking changes, becomes more pragmatic and wise, and while this is enlightening in some ways, it is also scary as hell. What am I to do with myself? Who am I to become? Am I contributing to society in a meaningful way? What is a “meaningful way,” actually? Why do I tell myself that it doesn’t matter when I know, deep down, that it does? The nihilistic excuses start slipping away, replaced by some vague feeling of expectations being missed, but these expectations are not the expectations of your parents, or your teachers, or your boss, but of someone else entirely: you. They are your own expectations, dormant for years, coming to greet you. And the greeting is most unwelcome.

In this way, it is not A Minecraft Movie that disturbs me, but this: my own maturity.

But herein lies my problem with A Minecraft Movie. It is not that the movie has poor pacing, or that the writing is frankly abysmal, or all the weird sexual innuendos, or even the fleshy block people, or how everything looks obviously green-screened. It is that the movie, which is targeted toward kids, tries hard to make the very kids watching it grow up.

By the end of the movie, as you might imagine, both Steve’s and Garrett’s shadow catches up with them, they mature, they end up renouncing their old escapist ways, abandoning the Minecraft world, which the movie treats as an obvious metaphor for escapism, and basically they get jobs in the real world, and the movie totes this as some existential win for the characters. And maybe it is. Maybe it is an existential win for Steve and Garrett, who have spent most of their adulthood running away from their own responsibilities. Maybe this is a good lesson for the adults watching the film, maybe a win for them. But this is not a win for whom the movie is targeted.

Natalie: Are you sure you don't want to come back?
Steve: Yeah, I'm staying here. I got a bunch more stuff I want to build.
Natalie: Why don't you bring some of that magic to the real world?
(The humans enter the portal as Steve ponders about it. Finally, he makes a decision.)
Steve: Screw it. I’m coming with.
(Finally, he heads into the portal to return to the real world.)
Steve: (voiceover) Turns out, if you're brave enough, you can make the real world… your Overworld. 

When a child goes to sit down in a movie theater to watch a funny movie about their favorite video game, they should not be force-fed some adult narrative about how escapism is terrible and how they should quickly start growing up. Children do not come into the theater thinking about the Game Over World foreclosure notice they just got in the mail. They do not, and should not, think about these things.

So, Mr. Jared Hess, if you’re reading this, I do not like your movie. In fact, I hate it. Stop fucking trying to make kids grow up. You are an asshole.

These are lessons children’s movies should not teach, as they are inappropriate for children. These lessons are things that cannot and should not be taught by corporate media. A child must find these things out for themselves, and when they do, their shadow will have caught up with them, and they will no longer be a child. At that point, they will be something else. And this is not something to celebrate. This is something to mourn. 

Mr. Jared Hess, by subjecting children to your terrible movie, you are hastening the shadow of maturity, and this, I believe, is flat-out evil. So I can only hope that this was an accident, an oversight, rather than your true intent. Otherwise, you sir are a monster.

Stop trying to put kids in Game Over World. This is the domain of adults, not children.