The first piece (the meme) works with multiple techniques to persuade people towards Basil Boulevard. The intentional vagueness and hyperbole of “CRUSHES” conveys a kind of bandwagon that many more people are with Basil Boulevard and the Puppets are a minority. The parenthetical text and image of the meme convey that the Puppets are in denial and not facing the fact of the matter that more people watch Basil Boulevard than the Puppets. Also on a more meta level this meme is a half-parody of the crappy political memes that seem to circulate on Facebook every election cycle talking about false statistics and “the truth.”
The second piece (the poster) is very clearly calling back to the famous poster used by Barack Obama during his 2008 Presidential Campaign. The poster is using association in that regard, relaying the feelings of Obama on to Large Avian (Big Bird’s twin brother on Basil Boulevard.) The poster also makes a broad, optimistic claim about Large Avian and the entire Basil Boulevard platform, conflating the Basil Boulevard position to a brighter future.
The evaluation criteria does not specify if/how sources need to be cited so I will simply be including links to what I used instead of full Chicago style citations for very silly websites.
For the meme I used https://imgflip.com/memegenerator/Monkey-Puppet
For the poster I plugged this image https://sesameworkshop.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/presskit_ss_bio_bigbird-560×420.png into this website https://obamapostermaker.com/
