I think Burns is a sweet and calming presence, the way he pauses as if he's in a personal conversation with the viewer on the other side of the screen. That's been the stuff of children's shows since the 1950s, the illusion that the person on the screen is seeing me. I remember "Romper Room":
But the NYT dream of somebody on their side to counteract the "manosphere"? It's just sad to continually display the neediness for someone to help you defeat Joe Rogan... a man who was on your side and is still trying to be on your side.
"Pick a movie or TV show to watch together as a family, without checking a your phone. 'TV is underrated in the age of short form video, if you’re worried about their attention span,' says Devorah Heitner, author of 'Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World.' 'It’s an opportunity to connect, and it’s also an opportunity to have a shared vocabulary.'"
Did you ever think it would come to this, that the situation with children would get so bad that watching more TV would come to be regarded as therapeutic?!
That's a free access link, so you can see multiple other issues, such as the painful dissonance for parents who want to get their kids off the devices but hate to be on the same page with Trump and Bobby.
"The Trump administration has defended the prosecution as a warning that no one is above the law, while many Democrats, lawyers and former judges have denounced it as an assault on the judiciary...."
[E]arlier this month, more than 150 former state and federal judges signed a letter to Ms. Bondi calling the arrest of Judge Dugan an attempt to intimidate the judiciary. “This cynical effort undermines the rule of law,” that letter said, “and destroys the trust the American people have in the nation’s judges to administer justice in the courtrooms and in the halls of justice across the land.”
"Leaders of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit corporation that produces the show, hope that children will develop deeper relationships with the characters — and with the show — if they see the same Muppets every episode, really get to know them. But that means downgrading beloved Muppet stars who have been there since the start to supporting roles: Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, the Count and Oscar the Grouch.... Hoping to deepen the connection children feel with the characters, [Kay Wilson Stallings, who was promoted to chief creative development and production officer in 2020] pared the core cast down to just four Muppets: Elmo, Abby Cadabby, Cookie Monster and Grover.... Competing shows featured just a handful of central characters. Too many, she reasoned, and kids would not connect with anyone.... Wilson Stallings was matter of fact about the decision, saying it was based on market research, not nostalgia. 'We’re leaning into the characters that resonate most with our audience,' she said...."
"... with no other actors or props or anything, just sort of standing in a void for years and years. My real job was listening. Most children’s television talks to the camera, right? That’s kind of an established convention. But what 'Blue’s Clues' did that I think was really a breakthrough is we listened. I worked really hard on making that as believable as possible. And that was becoming more and more challenging every day to do. The entire time I was on that show, I was struggling with undiagnosed, severe clinical depression and I didn’t know what was going on. That made my job extra hard."
"Disney has been pushed to toe the leftist gender line, and it is doing just that.... Now it’s clear that Disney’s commitment to exposing children to inappropriate indoctrination on transgenderism goes far deeper than its opposition to the Florida law.... Why should kids be getting any sort of gender-identity lesson in school or at a theme park?"
Asks Karol Markowicz, in "I’m quitting Disney after seeing it boast about pushing ‘gender theory’" (NY Post), reacting to a statement by Disney Television Animation executive producer Latoya Raveneau that she has a "not-at-all-secret gay agenda" and she was "adding queerness" whenever she could and "no one was trying to stop" her.
Markowicz pretends that the theme park never delivered a gender-identity lesson, but of course it did. You can deny it by restricting the meaning of gender-identity lesson, but that's a con. Cinderella, Snow White... etc. etc.... that was always delivering a gender message. It was indoctrination, just the indoctrination that was traditional and conventional. The princess idea didn't come straight from your little daughter's head. It's a meme that she was infected with. And it's pretty shallow and inane.
I don't know if Latoya Raveneau's vision is deep and intelligent. I suspect it's not. If it forces people out of Disney's suffocating embrace, I think that's good. And now what will you do to feed the souls of your children?
Markowicz continues:
And why should Disney be in the business of sexualizing kids in any
direction?
As if Cinderella's love for the prince is not sexual! Is your idea of Cinderella just someone who loves fancy clothes and lavish parties? And that too is a sexual orientation: She's not attracted to human beings but to riches and glittering surfaces. Cinderella is better if what she is looking for is real love from a worthy man. That's age-appropriate sexual orientation.
"The unidentified Cypress College educator was apparently triggered Wednesday during 19-year-old business major Braden Ellis’ Zoom presentation on cancel culture in the US, in which he noted how even animated kids TV shows such as 'Paw Patrol' have come under fire from unhinged cop-haters.... 'You’re saying police officers should be revered, viewed as heroes? They belong on TV shows with children?'"
ADDED: The teacher says that if she were experiencing a home invasion, she would not call the police. Asked what she would do, she's at a loss, and seems to be realizing that she'd have no way to defend herself. By contrast, in mere conversation, she's extremely defensive. She can't seem to relax and allow the student to make his presentation and to use questioning to teach, to help him develop his mind. I think that's a fascinating combination — to be so defensive in your professional role toward someone who isn't even attacking you, but coming to you for education, and then to be so without any defense at all when you are the victim of violence. It's utterly ass-backwards.
"Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe."
The NY Post reports, adding "It’s unstated precisely what Disney considers to be offensive on the show, but some characters depict Native American, Middle Eastern and Asian people. And in season five, legendary country singer Johnny Cash is seen performing in front of a Confederate flag."
"Native American, Middle Eastern and Asian people"? The ethnic group I remember getting poked fun at was the Swedish...
But who cares about the feelings of the Swedish these days?
These shows were made between 1976 and 1981. Basically, during the Carter administration. Disney wants to be able to keep showing them and has — clunkily but wisely — slapped on a warning to fend off demands that the show be taken off the air. I'd like to give Disney some support here. They have a big old archive and they ought to make it available, not replace it all with paternalistic... maternalistic pablum.
I'm seeing some criticism like: "Nothing screams offensive like fury puppets. When I think of a cultural danger to society, it’s obviously Jim Henson’s Muppets."
I object... and not just because that critic wrote "fury" for "furry." I object because that criticism is offensive to puppets.
Puppets can excel at delivering offense. Here's an example of striving to use puppets to offend:
From the clip: "[Puppets are] human enough to be believable, but imaginary enough to be convincing when they're doing things that are crazy."
Read about "Spitting Image" and its U.S. counterpart "D.C. Follies." There are deliberately offensive puppets — real satire. I'd like to see more of that — satire of specific individuals.
But many things done with puppets are just stereotypes. I know I had some marionettes when I was a child circa 1960. One was a clown. One was a cowboy. And one was a Chinese person. It was blatant stereotyping, similar to the idea of the Chinese seen in "Fantasia":
"Fantasia" is, of course, one of the gems of the Disney archive. There are people today who would demand that no one be allowed to see that film — that film and many other works of art. Disney seems to be trying to manage the pressure. I wouldn't just laugh at Disney for taking its problem seriously and putting up a warning.
"This program includes negative depictions" — ha ha. How can you do comedy without negative depictions? Isn't that the whole idea?
ADDED: "Gary, I hate to break it to you, but the world is on the brink of disaster...."
AND: Speaking of "South Park" and disclaimers, "South Park" has always — or it seems like always — begun with this disclaimer (which is also a parody of disclaimers):
"But Joel said it destroyed his childhood. When he was 6, I was 11. The program put stress on the smallest kids. They got the most attention and were the least equipped to deal with it.... Once the show went on television they kept Joel, because he was so well known, but the general age got lower and lower. I’m guessing that experience was pretty sour for him. No real competition and no real comradeship."
In her 1982 memoir “Whatever Happened to the Quiz Kids? Perils and Profits of Growing Up Gifted,” Ruth Duskin Feldman, the show’s literature buff (she died in 2015), noted the rampant anti-Semitism of the time. “When we moved through crowds,” she wrote, “there were loud remarks of ‘Oh, they’re all Jews!’”
The show moved to television after the war, and the cameras did not favor a maturing Joel, who stayed on until he was 16, the dutiful son to a controlling stage mother, [Joel's son] Michael Kupperman said.
Though the producers brought in younger and cuter children to field questions, Joel’s hand was always up, sometimes blocking the faces of the smaller children, which didn’t make for riveting TV, as Michael put it — a spectacle made only worse by Joel’s robotic demeanor, which made him seem priggish....
Later, Joel Feldman heard over and over from people who said they grew up hating him. He reinvented himself as a philosophy professor and taught ethics for 50 years. His wife said, "He wanted to retreat into the life of the mind, and in many ways he succeeded. He really lived in his head."
I'm familiar with work of the son, Michael Kupperman. He's a comics artist, and he figured out a way to do a graphic memoir about his father, "All the Answers":
['The Quiz Kids'] would inspire J.D. Salinger’s fictional Jewish Glass family, whose children were all featured on a fictional radio quiz show and grew into deeply neurotic adults. Like Kupperman, Seymour Glass fast tracks to a Ph.D. In his 2010 book “Theories of Human Nature,” Kupperman appeared to wink at Salinger as a kindred spirit, describing him as “a well known example of someone who retreated from his celebrity, as did the actress Greta Garbo.”
"... he's still hoping to pedal his red Schwinn back into America's hearts... [H]e's been pitching studios on The Pee-wee Herman Story, a very un-Pee-wee-sounding screenplay that takes his puckish TV persona into dark and unexpected territory (Pee-wee gets sent to a mental hospital for shock treatment for his alcoholism, no joke).... In today's overstuffed entertainment landscape, it's hard to imagine a lane for a sexagenarian man-child who talks to his furniture.... 'People have argued I've done everything consciously or unconsciously to destroy [the character],' he says. 'But it's the brand that won't die. It's still around.'"
At first, he was conceived as a super-geeky stand-up comedian who cracked extremely blue jokes. But the character evolved, with Reubens drawing inspiration from the children's entertainment of his youth — Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo and Rocky and Bullwinkle in particular. And then one day Reubens slipped into the now-iconic costume — the suit was a loaner from Groundlings founder Gary Austin, the bow tie he grabbed from a pile of accessories backstage — and something inside him clicked.
"It dawned on me that I could actually become Pee-wee Herman," he says. "I could do something that was conceptual art, and the only person who would really know it was conceptual was me."
"Because the design of the film was really to try and speak to people I don’t necessarily agree with.... [Mr. Rogers is] a rare subject that doesn’t have cultural baggage. Because he connects with us before we have identities, as little kids, he’s a rare figure that kind of transcends so much of the cultural division that we have... I felt like that title [The Radical Mister Rogers] in the context of the era that we’re in, would turn off people who needed to see it."
So said Morgan Neville, the director of the 2018 documentary that was released as "Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" He was talking to the Producers Guild of America in late 2018 and referring to a decision he made just after Donald Trump was elected.
The documentary is available on HBO on Demand (or Amazon). I happened to watch it last night. Highly recommended. It is not political at all. It is very focused on how to talk to children (very slowly and quietly and with great awareness of how strong their feelings are). The only politics I can think of is the mention that Rogers was "a lifelong Republican" and a lovely segment in which he testifies to the Senate Subcommittee on Communications about public TV financing. Here's a clip of that fantastic testimony (from 1969).
Watch the whole thing because it ends with a great punchline from the Senator, John Pastore, who'd been opposed to public TV funding and starts out being kind of mean to Mr. Rogers. I bet nearly everyone watching the documentary assumes Pastore was a Republican. I know I did. The film doesn't tell you, but — I'm seeing it now — he was a Democrat.
"In this endeavor [Maxwell King, in "The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers,"] seems obsessed with Rogers’s sexuality—though to be fair, a lot of people are, with the apparent exception of his wife, Joanne, to whom he was married for fifty years. King seems to almost reluctantly settle on 'androgynous' when he might have just left it with what Rogers told a friend: 'Well, you know, I must be right smack in the middle. Because I have found women attractive, and I have found men attractive.' This would satisfy a preschooler but is too loose for King, who treats his subject’s sex life as if he were conducting a police investigation: 'There was no double life. And without exception, close associates concluded that Fred Rogers was absolutely faithful to his marriage vows.'... [In the film 'Won't You Be My Neighbor'], François Clemmons, the opera singer who played Officer Clemmons on the show, testifies that, as a gay man, he would have known if Fred Rogers was gay: 'I spent enough time with him that if there was a gay vibe I would have picked it up.' This statement turns out to be complicated by the fact that Rogers initially asked Clemmons to hide his sexuality for fear of scaring sponsors, and encouraged him to marry (which he did).... 'I’m thinking about many different ways of saying I love you,' Rogers tells Clemmons in [one] episode. 'You’ll find many ways to understand what love is,' Clemmons sings. Rogers then notes the way memories are called up by actions, like being in a pool. At the show’s close, Clemmons returns to sing a spiritual, with Rogers beaming. 'I’m so proud of you, François!' Rogers says at one point. It’s hard not to see it as an apology."
"But the subculture referred to [in the state media outlet Global Times] is a more serious phenomenon. It is called shehuiren, which translates directly as 'a member of society,' but is used to describe rowdy young adults, particularly young men. How did an animated farm animal meant for preschoolers come to be associated with millennials who are labeled by state media as 'slackers' and the 'antithesis of the young generation the [Chinese Communist] Party tries to cultivate'?"
Any characters designed for children that you'd like to rail against. This is a potentially huge topic. Please try to go big with it. Don't just wander around inside the comfortable topic Communists Are Repressive. Look at the characters we invite and encourage young people to identify with. Quite aside from government censorship, private citizens make choices about what to give to our children. Where are we going wrong? What did you latch onto as a child that took you down a dark path?
That's the front-page teaser at the Houston Chronicle for what turns out to be about the creater of "Ren & Stimpy." If this man, John Kricfalusi, did what the women say, he deserves condemnation.
But "Ren & Stimpy" does not deserve to be called "beloved." It was great, but not in a soft, gooey way. It had edge — in content and especially in visual style.
The cartoon always presented a deliberately ugly, in-your-face challenge to common decency. That's what we reveled in, at the time. So it's not as if some sweet, children-oriented pop-culture figure turned out to have a dark side. The dark side was in the cartoon all along. If you loved it, look at yourself.
1) That time Ren plucked bloody nerve-endings out of his toothless mouth...
2) When Ren's face was mercilessly grated against sharp stubble...
4) Ren beats in his own skull with a claw hammer after using the 'happy machine'...
6) [Ren] gives a vivid description of how he's going to mutilate his cousin and Stimpy...
8) Ren and Stimpy end up naked in the bath with a random family...
13) Ren basically simulates sex while sawing wood behind Stimpy...
Did you let your kids watch what was grooming them for pornography? Or is your memory at little fuzzy and you just remember that "Ren & Stimpy" was another 2-animals cartoon, like "Tom & Jerry"?
"The actor Simon Barnes, best known for playing Tinky Winky in the BBC children’s series Teletubbies, has died aged 52," The Guardian reports.
He became embroiled in a furore over the sexuality of Tinky Winky, who was accused of being a gay role model who could be morally damaging to children by evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell in 1999. “He is purple – the gay-pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle – the gay-pride symbol,’’ he wrote in the National Liberty Journal.
“People always ask me if Tinky Winky is gay,” Barnes said. “But the character is supposed to be a three-year-old so the question is really quite silly.”
"The comedian, who has acknowledged sexual misconduct, was dubbed out of 'Gravity Falls' episodes," HuffPo reports.
Wow. It's hard to believe this was ever considered okay:
It's awful what we expose kids to. How could that ever have been a Disney cartoon (quite aside from what we may know or believe Louis C.K. does in his off time)?
"It’s a way to have people in the room talking and being entertaining, but it doesn’t require anything of me. I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me. And, and, they’re there for me, and I can, I can receive from the TV, I can receive entertainment and stimulation. Without having to give anything back but the most tangential kind of attention. And that is very seductive. The problem is it’s also very empty. Because one of the differences about having a real person there is that number one, I’ve gotta do some work. Like, he pays attention to me, I gotta pay attention to him. You know: I watch him, he watches me. The stress level goes up. But there’s also, there’s something nourishing about it, because I think like as creatures, we’ve all got to figure out how to be together in the same room. And so TV is like candy in that it’s more pleasurable and easier than the real food. But it also doesn’t have any of the nourishment of real food. And the thing, what the book is supposed to be about is, What has happened to us, that I’m now willing—and I do this too—that I’m willing to derive enormous amounts of my sense of community and awareness of other people, from television? But I’m not willing to undergo the stress and awkwardness and potential shit of dealing with real people."
I'm reading this book after watching the movie based on this book, "The End of the Tour" (which is free on Amazon Prime). The movie is good for those who (like me) enjoy watching 2 people have a long conversation.
ADDED: "I mean, I can see them, they can’t see me." But just the other day, on one of his Periscopes, Scott Adams deadpanned the joke that the app had been upgraded to enable him to see his viewers. And remember how "Romper Room" regularly assured children that it was able to see them through the TV:
And of course the TVs in "1984" were spying on everyone everywhere, and who doesn't worry that our computer/phone screens are 2-way?
DFW was expressing sadness about the 1-way quality of television. But that was in the context of also feeling sad about using TV as a substitute for in-person human interaction. He confessed to an "addiction" to television and — in the book — says "I’ll watch five or six, I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours."
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