Russia’s Channel One has used a fan poster from Team Fortress 2 in the historical program “World War 1” to show the type of propaganda the US military used during the war.
According to the program, the posters were created by the US Committee on Public Information to depict the Germans as monsters. “The American public had to firmly acknowledge that the Germans were evil” the narrator of the program said, as the image was shown.
The image in question.
And, well, the poster sure does look evil. I mean, it’s a soldier eating a baby! Let’s be more specific, this isn’t any old soldier, this is the Soldier, a class and character from Team Fortress 2. This poster was actually created by user TankTaur as an entry for a Team Fortress 2 propaganda contest. I guess the creators of the program weren’t up to scratch on their Team Fortress 2 knowledge. If you want to check out the entire documentary, watch it here, head to ten minutes in, and voila, the poster is there. The entire show is in Russian, but you don’t exactly need to understand the words to know whether it’s a Team Fortress 2 poster or not.
The still from the show picturing the poster.
I seriously don’t understand how this was actually used. It says “join Team Demoman TODAY”, did the creators of the documentary see this and just brush it off? Maybe they mistook “Team Demoman” as slang for “the US Military” or something?
Props to TankTaur for creating such a convincing poster by the way. This has actually been great publicity for him, he’s even acknowledged the use on his page:
“Apparently this was featured on Russian television as an example of actual historical US propaganda. It’s an easy mistake to make, I’m sure.”
The Russians who do know that the poster is from a game are expressing shame for their country: “ПИЗДЕЦ!!! Ashamed for my country… Sorry guys.” I hope Putin isn’t too angry about this whole mistake.
If you’d like to hear more about this author, contact him on Twitter @TKazGaming.