50 Millions Rubles Under the Sea: The Octonauts, Plausible Deniability, & Putin’s Oligarch’s
You’ve seen them on Disney or Netflix. Maybe your kids even have some of their books or toys. Five seasons, twelve specials, and three movies combined to be shown in over a hundred countries makes The Octonauts one of the most popular streaming children’s television shows in the World.
Based out of the United Kingdom and led by Captain Barnacles the Polar Bear, a former British Naval Officer, Kwazii the Cat, an ex-Pirate and cryptozoologist, and Peso a Penguin medic, The Octonauts are an adventurous crew of ten underwater and as of late, land science researchers dedicated to exploring, rescuing, and protecting other creatures across the globe.
But where does all the bloody money come from to fund their years of “research” and “expeditions?”
Because if you’ve paid any attention to their whereabouts and GPS positioning, while boasting a fleet of over twenty six high tech vehicles with both aviation and nautical capabilities, one day they’re in the Amazon River and the next day they’re cruising through the Indian Ocean.
In fact, The Octonuats have been documented swimming with Orcas and Beluga whales in the Arctic, medicating lemon sharks in the Caribbean, chartering through the Yangtze river in China, and even venturing as far deep down into the dark depths of the ocean as the uncharted Midnight Zone.
Traveling millions of miles around the world and back, providing medical facilities and technological support to any and all creatures they encounter, utilizing high tech aquatic and aviatic equipment to perform high risk rescues, and conducting hundreds of further explorations and thousands of undocumented experiments has to run up such a tab that even NASA has throw up their hands and take a bow.
The earth’s most precious resources and perhaps the answers to many questions about the world’s future lay deep below the water so it’s no wonder that someone would want to dominate the seven seas and what better way to take over the oceans than to pretend to be protecting them? It’s right out of the United States playbook for the Middle East!
Further questions abound? For example, how does one become an Octonaut? Is there a selection process? A specific criteria? Are you targeted at random while going through the car wash like in the CIA or caught on the take stealing money like in Internal Affairs? Is there an Octonauts Hell Week? A unit selection process? You’d think Kwazi with his questionable past as a Pirate would have been off the list so that leads one to believe that this isn’t any normal organization funded by a legitimate government. When pressed for an answer the BBC declined to comment. Brilliant.
Digging a little deeper into The Octonauts and the rest of their eclectic roster, even more questions start piling up like hot kelp cakes fresh out of the oven. Filling out their fanatical lineup of committed crew members is Shellington the Otter and biologist, Tweak the Rabbit engineer, Dashi the Dog and computer programmer, and Paani the Macqui monkey and hydrologist. That makes a total corps of ten highly intelligent and well trained animals all with extensive investigation and analysis experience each with unique scientific and medical backgrounds.
Now it’s one thing for an otter to have gotten a biology degree and another for a penguin to have successfully completed medical school, not to mention a dog and a bunny having the mental faculties to become an engineer and a programmer, but the most glaring of the inconsistencies surrounding these seafarers washes ashore when we get to the final three members of the Octonauts, Min the red panda and mapmaker, Tunip the half harbor seal/half vegetable cook, and Professor Inkling, an octopus and the peculiar intellectual guru who originally founded The Octonauts.
First of all, experimenting with animal and vegetable DNA cannot possibly be legal or officially sanctioned by the FDA or the Geneva Convention. A turnip and a seal together? I mean what kind of Dr. Moreau bollocks is that? Who do these limeys think they are playing God? For Chrissakes besides Tunip there’s seventeen different vegimals already. Who knows how many “mistakes” they made before they “developed” a true functioning vegimal? And then they taught it how to control the others! Who knows how many more poor animals are waiting their turn to be experimented upon, locked up in a cage somewhere trapped in the bowels of the Octopod in part that they don’t show you on television.
Then there is the latest edition to The Octonauts, Min, a red panda from China, who joined up with the team in Season Five without even a hint of a recruitment process or a whiff of a background check. A “Mapmaker” hailing from a known communist country, it was revealed that Min was an “Old Friend” of Professor Inkling who may or may not also share romantic feelings towards the Octopus. Quickly granted unfettered security clearance by Inkling without batting a tentacle, it seems not altogether un cloak and dagger like that he may have just waded The Octonauts right into a classic honey trap.
Because when it’s time to dive a little deeper into the murky past of Professor Inkling before you can say, “Bunch of munchy crunchy carrots,” you’ll be swept out in a rip current of international intrigue and into a murky pool of espionage, because academic records show that Professor Inkling was a lecturer at Cambridge University right about the same time that Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five were busy spilling state secrets to the Soviet Union.
Because it turns out that while studying culinary arts at Cambridge, Professor Inkling also spent time abroad in Europe where his primary traveling companion was none other than Yevgeny Prigozhin, aka “Putin’s Chef,” the suspected founder and financial backer of the Wagner Group, Russia’s preferred private military contractor for their dirty work in Africa, Syria, and now Ukraine.
So could The Octonauts actually be financed by mysterious Russian oligarchs tied to the former Soviet Union?
Who else could possibly fund all their “research” and “expeditions?” Who else would benefit the most from being able to utilize the plausible deniability of a bunch of cute little animals that were able to cross back and forth over international borders like they were bopping into different shops at the mall? It doesn’t take a veteran foreign service analyst or a creature report ending with a sweet dance break to see where the ripples begin and where they intend to end.
Cambridge connections, Wagner Group associations, inhumane vegetable experimentation, flirtation with communism, and unlimited funds and access to any country makes it hard to subscribe to The Octonauts as having an entirely peaceful mission. Or one that isn’t already compromised.
Buy their toys and watch their movies and tell your friends how intelligent and rewarding of a show it is for kids, but when it comes to The Octonauts, there’s simply more than meets the eye patch.
