Entry 92: "Whora the Explorer??"

Yo!

Okay, okay... I've been away for a bit longer than I'd have liked... I just moved earlier this month, and my blogging computer's been on the fritz since, so I'm using an alternate computer to try to get things up to speed. I'm using this weekend to play catch-up with the big topics I should have covered over the last four weeks.

Let's start with Dora the Explorer.

Two days after my last post, I found THIS news story about the House of Barbie, Mattel, and Viacom subsidiary Nickelodeon unveiling a mysterious silhouette image of what they claimed was the first piece in a new branded image for the character that...

"empowers girls to influence and change the lives of Dora and her new friends"

Here's the image in question:

On Monday, DailyStab.com leaked the real thing:

Hmmmm. (*cue Vader voice) I find your lack of youth disturbing.

Now for the side-by-side:

Wait a minute.... They shouldn't be that close together! We all saw Timecop! How many times do I have to say that the same matter can't exist in two places at once......!?!

.................Much better.

Anyway, the controversy in this comes from various parents' groups going up-in-arms over sweet, wholesome, original-recipe Dora getting overly maturized into a version of herself that's arguably completely unlike what this character would have been like by this point (New Dora is approximately 12 years old). I mean, it's not like there's something to these fears of unnecessarily revamping girl-friendly fictional characters into made-up, shallow, fashion-crazed shadows of their former selves......

Oh, wait. I almost forgot. Nickelodeon has done this before:

...Heck, sometimes it happens in reverse order of release:

Oh, and let's not forget about the literal grandmother of vulgar girls' toys:

Geez, that Barbie one says it all, huh? From "Ready for summertime days and nights" to "Rover, I'm gonna scoop your poop, all right?" to "Roxanne... You don't have to put on the red light" in only fifty years. Impressive. Or not.

Getting back to Dora though, some believe this is a very unhealthy step in the wrong direction in the evolution of this brand, others say they don't believe in evolution, and that Sarah Palin will rise again in 2012. Personally, I'm grateful that the sluttiness is not strong with this one. Thankfully, the worst we have to worry about with this, at the beginning anyway, is adjusting to Dora learning more about how to use her parents' credit card at the mall, and less about the Spanish word for "library."

............."La Biblioteca," I believe.

Look, I'm not a parent, or a tweenage girl, but seriously folks, we all know there's something to be said for being careful of what we expose kids to under the pretext of child-friendly fun. That Black-Canary Barbie on the right in the above photo, for example. If you had told a woman twenty or thirty years ago that there's a good chance her young daughter would be dressing her dolls in fishnet stockings and goth-friendly leather jackets, you might have altered the future so that you have to play Chuck Berry songs at the Enchantment Under the Sea ball, or your then-teenage parents won't fall in love and you'll cease to exist.

Robert Zemeckis movies aside, you'd probably be institutionalized. Today's Toys R Us catalog however verifies a dark reality where we can't help but question where and when the line of morality in marketing images and strategies to children is finally crossed. What press release will have to be released before we start holding these companies accountable for what they try to sell our kids? And let's not kid ourselves by thinking even for a moment that it'll stop or even get better with suddenly promoting fashion and shopping over knowledge and exploration, like Dora has done. Dora's still getting plenty of young viewers as it is, but I guess that's not good enough. Spongebob's tenth anniversary is this year. and did they change their character designs eight years in? NO! Did Bart and Lisa Simpson enter puberty, twenty years in? NO! Whatever happened to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it?"

Bottom Line: It could've turned out much, MUCH worse. Since this HAS to exist, I'm on the side of the bloggers who say let's wait til the pilot hits air, and see what they have to offer. Then criticize the crap out of it once they overstep their bounds and cross over to the whore side. All we have to go on with this is a silhouette and a colorized leak image. We have no idea how the general tone for the show's final execution will go. Seriously, the remake/follow-up version could've been worse:

(*shudders)

...But that's just me.

Also, what the crap did that press release mean by "NEW" friends? Is Boots wearing Hush Puppies now? Has Swiper finally stopped swiping? Did he get arrested? Will he be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff? How do you set bail for a cartoon fox? Why am I overthinking this? Next post'll be more mature.

I gotta play some Bad Company. Get all this preteen girly crap outta my mind. Those three Star Wars references I wrote into this post just aren't enough, I'm sorry.

Later.

-D.

Entry 91: "Toonami Jettison"

Yo!

First off, Happy Valentine's Day... Or, for some of you, VERY Happy Valentine's Day!

So what's been happening since I've been away from the blog.... We finally inaugurated a Black president, busted Alex Rodriguez, Michael Phelps and various tax-dodging Presidential cabinet members, 24 finally came back while Circuit City's going away.....

And then there's this:



I'll get back to that last topic.... and start off with a less appallingly tragic one.

For the last few weeks, visitors to http://toonamijetstream.com have been greeted with a pseudo-redirect page bearing this image (click for more legible quality):


Explanation: Since the unceremonious cancellation of Cartoon Network's signature action-animation block Toonami in September, the streaming-video sister website Toonami Jetstream, running since Summer 2007, has been the last surviving trace of classic Toonami, still going. The end of Jetstream this month officially means the final nail in Toonami's coffin has been hit unremovably hard.

Now, I want to think that this is a pure business-priority/bandwidth-managing decision, what with the show dead and gone, and certain Massively-Multiplayer games (meaning FusionFall) and streaming video sites requiring a lot of bandwidth (don't forget, aside from CN Video, Adult Swim Fix is still operational... for now), cuts had to be made. Plus, the economic crisis we're still in just isn't getting fixed fast enough (I know, it's all Obama's fault!!! Psych, of course), which certainly isn't making the situation any better.

Here again, people still remember the history of this network defined in no small part by the Toonami brand. Not to sound like a cheesy broken record if I've said it before, but it was and always will be a bit of a crime to callously discard historic franchises still in their prime, or at least not so far off the deep end that they're beyond rescue. Don't forget, we still don't know exactly WHY Toonami was cancelled, but all we have to go on is Steven Blum (CGI-rendered host TOM's voice actor) ending the final broadcast by saying "until we meet again," which is just a cruel tease.

The Naruto fans may not be complaining as much, since all they have to do is change their bookmarks around a bit to accomodate the seat-change of moving over to CN Video. Come on. Everyone grew up once. Everyone remembers how amazingly awesome weekends used to be. You know, every time a legendary program block, or show, gets cancelled, an angel gets its wings.

--oh wait, that was that Jimmy Stewart.

Seriously, you can make the argument that when something like that happens, people actually view it as, in a sense, the death of an old friend who helped make growing up tolerable. Yeah, we know it's television. But when broadcasting old classics:



...gets completely replaced by newer, yet almost never better-quality stuff (no better case-in-point than this clip):



...it reinforces the belief that as time goes on, if crap is all kids growing up now have to be exposed to, that's all that they'll think is quality because the airwaves are oversaturated with what focus groups and the like think is the next big thing to get those target audience demographics sucked into crazy entertainment trends younger and younger. Naturally, the intelligence level has to fall lower and lower to follow suit, condescendingly.

Executives... Audiences at any age are smarter than you guys seem to give us credit for...

At this rate...

Suddenly, Mike Judge's Idiocracy movie isn't so much of a crazy work of fiction anymore. Especially when MY kids' generation looks back on the High School Musical trilogy as classic cinema the kids today don't appreciate.

Bottom Line: It's just sad to constantly read about network decision-makers proving Mel Brooks right:

"It's good to be the king."

Heaven help us all.

Later.
-D.


Oh, one final note: Tuesday is the big digital transition day, meaning this weekend is your last chance for seeing something other than static on a standard analog TV antenna. Enjoy it (and Presidents' Day) while it/they last(s).