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World wars don't come out of nowhere... not even World War Zs. So

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what exactly led to the Second World War making its explosive debut? Well, the [Man appears after flames on stage]

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Great Depression had definitely made the 1930s no cakewalk for Americans, but it

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was even less of a cakewalk for the rest of the world. It was more of a cupcake

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walk, or worse, a walk with no cake at all. While the United States was off in [Cakes disappear and man walking on them falls]

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its own corner with a prozac and a box of tissues, both Europe and Asia were about

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to explode with their own crises. A violent civil war raged in Spain, where a

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wobbly alliance of communists and democrats fought a desperate fight

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against general Francisco Franco's fascists. Say that three times fast...

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or don't, because it's just sad. Over in the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin had

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risen to power and made a hobby out of imprisoning and executing many of his

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political enemies, and probably a pony or two just for fun. And in the East, Japan [Pony is caught in net and dragged away]

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had invaded Manchuria and threatened to conquer China. On top of it all, the Great

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Depression was not just an American thing. Like an obnoxious American pop

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star, it was dominating the world. Some European countries found a solution to

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their economic problems in fascism. Benito Mussolini, fascist dictator of

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Italy and winner of the most-fun-to-say name award, had been waging war in

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Ethiopia for five years running. Using chemical weapons like mustard gas, [Explosions over Ethiopia on a map of Africa]

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Italian troops were busy slaughtering thousands of innocent people. Oh so not

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cool, dude. Downtrodden after their humiliation in World War I, Germans

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rallied around their new leader, Adolf Hitler, who called for Aryan blood

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purity. Hitler launched an aggressive campaign to unify the German race

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throughout Europe. We're all pretty familiar with his shtick, and it wasn't

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funny. All this turned out to be a grade-A recipe for World War. Well, how did

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America react to this rising tension? By acting like Miracle Max: yelling "I'm

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not listening." Real war broke out in 1939, but the American public mostly stuck

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their heads deeper in the sand. But eventually, the ostrich technique wasn't [Lots of people on a beach with their heads stuck in the sand]

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cutting it anymore. In the end, staying out of World War II proved impossible.

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By the middle of 1941, President Roosevelt had committed American ships

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to an undeclared and possibly illegal naval war with Germany

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in the North Atlantic, and on December 7, 1941 any question of whether America

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would stay neutral went the way of the dodo. America had been blowing

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raspberries at an increasingly aggressive Japan, to which the Japanese

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responded by bombing an American naval station at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. It was a [Japanese bombers fly over America]

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bad day for surfers and the world. Okay, mostly the world.

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