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Mar 9

All Girls Are Princesses

A Little Princess movie cover (1995)

One of my all time favorite movies is A Little Princess. It is based on the 1905 book by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story line follows a young girl named Sara Crewe who is born and raised in India to her wealthy soldier father. He sends her to an upscale London boarding school to receive a formal education. The headmistress, Miss Minchin, is cold and cruel to say the least. Then, when she receives word that Sara’s father was killed in the war and would not be paying for Sara to stay at the school, she tells Sara her only choice is to live in the attic as a servant or else she will be kicked out on the street. Sara never loses hope or the ability to see the good in everything. Her father always told her elaborate stories about princesses in India and she used those stories to keep the other girls at the boarding school feeling positive. They would meet her in the attic nightly and secretly listen to her optimistic stories. Miss Minchin does everything in her power to keep the girls from using this power of imagination. She believes it to be a waste of time and that they should be doing more productive things with their time. She even takes Sara’s locket, the only part of her father she has to hold on to. (Spoiler alert) In the end, she finds that her father is much closer than she thought. He is alive and recovering from an explosion with the help of a friend from India. They are reunited and Sara takes one of her new orphaned friends with  her and her father back to India after ensuring that Miss Minchin is fired.

Needless to say, the moral of the story is that imagination is a powerful tool that makes life better and can helpThe orphaned girls tell stories in the attic you through hard times. Another main point is to never lose hope in yourself or others. This is a powerful message to send to children considering, the issues we have been discussing in class. Combining my love for this movie and my new knowledge from class, an idea from our Chudacoff reading came to mind. “Advertisers quickly learned that they could merge a “backstory” of fantasy with a product to create a meaningful relationship between product and child.” (course packet) I realize this is not necessarily a product advertisement but this movie is definitely pro-imagination and the writers use this dramatic story line to drive home the point that children need imagination in their life.

We discussed in class whether or not children should tap in to this source of creativity when they play or if play should be focused more on productive ideas like easy bake ovens or toy work benches. My answer is no. The ability to be optimistic and make light of a challenging situation begins with the ability to see the good in everything. I believe this starts with the ability to be creative and expand the definition of real life.

A very important line from the movie is when Sara says “All girls are princesses”. This brings to mind the Free To Be You and Me readings and discussions. I believe this movie is very relevant to this piece. The story, “Ladies First” seems to say that girls should not claim to be ladies or princesses based on the entitlement that comes with it. However, this movie shows that this gender idea can be used for good to make a young, troubled girl feel special and loved.

 

Mar 9

GI Joe: A Real American Fantasy

For this post I watched the twenty-second episode from the first season of GI Joe: A Real American Hero, titled “The Funhouse.” In this episode, Cobra Commander has kidnapped a group of scientists and imprisoned them in his temple base in South America. Cobra imprisoned the scientists to try and draw the GI Joe team into an elaborate fun house of traps that he constructed inside the island base. At the end of the episode the team overcomes Cobra’s traps and rescues the group of scientists, all before the bomb planted by Cobra underneath the base explodes.

This episode of GI Joe relates well to Cross’ ideas that PLC’s in the 1980’s showed children a fantasy world that didn’t relate to the actual world around them. According to Cross, toys and t.v. characters of the 1980s’s,” fought in fantastic miniworlds of rocketry and lasers where the child could not fully identify with the creature or violent acts he performed” (Cross, 291). This idea ties in with the GI Joe series. In the episode both Cobra and the Joe team utilize weapons that fire lasers, and real bullets are never actually displayed. This allows the child watching the show to fantasize that no one is ever actually killed in conflict. The victims of laser wounds always get up later if they are an important character to the show. By idealizing combat in this way, the child is completely removed from the actual horrors of battle, and never has to rationalize the violence they are shown. The Cobra enemies presented are also made to look more like robot soldiers than actual people, which further removes children from reality, as countless waves of faceless Cobra soldiers are mowed down in the Joe assault on the base. In this way, television  producers in the 1980’s could show fantasy conflicts and weapons without having to worry about excessive backlash from concerned parents over the televised violence.

 

 

Mar 9

How to Motivate Change Without the Stigma

Controversial "Stop Sugarcoating It Georgia" ad campaign

Controversial "Stop Sugarcoating It Georgia" ad campaign

 

Do anti-obesity advertisements effectively promote healthy lifestyles, or do they merely stigmatize ill-fated children who have grown up in unhealthy households? One recent news article, published by NPR correspondent Kathy Lohr, argues the latter.

Lohr’s argument centers around the “Stop Sugarcoating It, Georgia” ad campaign, which uses scare tactics similar to those found in anti-smoking and anti-methamphetamine advertisements, in an attempt to reverse the growing trend of childhood obesity in a state with “the second highest number of obese kids in the country.” Lohr claims that while the message of healthy living is an important one, the tactics being used may provide more harm than good, as they disparage the same children who are already made to feel inadequate through the perpetual teasing and bullying they endure both at school and on the playground.

In addition to being detrimental to a child’s self-esteem, these advertisements may actually promote the exact behavior that they are trying to prevent, as Georgia State University professor Rodney Lyn states, “we know that stigmatization leads to lower self-esteem, potential depression. We know that kids will engage in physical activity less because they feel like they’re going to be embarrassed. So there are all these other negative effects.” So the question becomes, why does society continue to employ stigma as a motivator for change, when positive reinforcement has proven itself a much more effective tool?

In relation to class discussion, this is very much the same question brought up by the Free to Be story, “Ladies First,” where a young girl is eaten by a group of tigers due to her inability to recognize the negative consequences of her condescending and stuck-up attitude. “Ladies First,” similarly to Georgia’s anti-obesity campaign, focuses on a child’s negative quality, rather than a positive one, which may lead to many children thinking that they are inherently flawed in some way, when in reality, the problem may be caused more directly by the child receiving poor parenting than by the child itself. This potentially damaging effect of children viewing themselves as flawed may be the reason that “this ‘bad’ female subject [was] somewhat unusual for the Free to Be series, which [tended] to celebrate conventional images of bold and adventurous girls rather than to condemn conventional ones” (235). But if that is the case, it would seem to be in everyone’s best interest to focus solely on children’s positive attributes, rather than negative ones. That way, an obese or overly bratty child will be more inclined to change, as they won’t see themselves as holistically flawed individuals, but rather they will be able to isolate the problem, making change seem far more attainable.

 

 

Mar 9

GI Joe: Can We Learn From It?

For this blog I watched episode two of a miniseries of GI Joe: A Real American Hero titled, “Slaves of the Cobra Master”.  In this episode it was found out that the terrorist organization Cobra has three elements that enable them to make a machine that can enslave anybody on earth, from the presidents of the world to the Russian army.  The GI Joe team has to try and find all of these elements in order to build their own machine.  In this episode they fight their way through robots, lasers, and radioactive gas in order to obtain one of the three elements.  While this is going on, one of their other team members, Duke, is in a cage death match at the Cobra headquarters, but gets help from a slave girl to escape.

 

To connect this PLC to the Cross reading, there were a few different aspects of the episode that stood out.  First, let me preface this by saying that in the 1960s, GI Joe was a show that glorified real war, but in the 1980s episodes enemies were, “not communist or capitalist, foreign or American, black or white.  They were other worldly or unreal” (Cross pg 291).  This shows that shows changed in the 1980s to more fantasy like shows that didn’t really portray the real aspects of life and this was Cross’ biggest fear.  He felt that in the past shows would teach kids about the past so they could learn a lesson for the future, but that in the PLCs of the 80s this was not the case as shows were in “perpetual” change with fantasy like plots.  In this particular episode, GI Joe wasn’t just one American hero, but a team of special forces that fought using lasers and futuristic trucks to defeat the Cobra terrorist organization that seemed like it was from another world as the leader talked and acted like a snake.  These weapons and vehicles are not real (unless our military looks like star wars) and this is the part of the show that backs up what Cross was saying that kids can’t learn from shows like this that don’t portray real life.

 

There was part of the show that could go against Cross’ idea, and this was the Cobra organization.  They are called a terrorist organization and this is something that we do deal with in real life.  And in one point in the show, the American delegate responding to Cobra says basically that ‘they will never give in to terrorists’s’.  So while it is different context, this is a lesson for kids who watch the show to always fight for freedom, but according to Cross, lessons couldn’t be learned from these fantasy PLCs.

Mar 8

Giga Pets

In the Gary Cross reading he begins saying that, “By the 1980’s play was divorced from the constraints of parents and the real worlds …The dolls and playsets that encouraged girls to act out their mothers’ roles were replaced by Barbie’s fantasies of personal consumptions.” (290) However, my favorite toy from childhood combined elements of fantasy and “playing mom,” I’m referring to the pop culture phenomenon of the 1990’s, the “Giga Pet.”

Giga Pets were launched by Tiger Electronics in 1997, and were the “it” gift that holiday season.  Luckily, they were rather affordable at just $9.99 and kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds could afford them. You would care for virtual pet on a knuckle-sized screen that was connected to a keychain. You were responsible for feeding your pet, making sure it slept, and playing with it.  If you could not fulfill these responsibilities then your pet died.

I often wondered if my mom was as obsessed with me as I was with my Giga Pet dog.  I remembered I was almost eight years old when I received my first one, and the following day I went to the zoo. I didn’t notice a single animal though, neither did my two cousins, sister, or the two neighbors we went with as we all were looking down at our virtual pet key chains the entire time. Finally at lunchtime my dad and my uncle confiscated our “toys” as they were annoyed they had paid for us to come to the zoo to play with fake pets when live animals surrounded us.  I felt like someone had kidnapped my child and I should call the police.  What if my dog died while in my dad’s pocket for the next few hours?! When we got back to the car my dad handed back our pets, and they were all safe and sleeping. A week later I lost my Giga Pet and was on the next thing.  So, Gary Cross while toys might change, one thing doesn’t, kids will always lose their toys.


Giga Pets Commercial by TheDlisted

Mar 8

Red Rocket

Gary Cross’ article, “Spinning out of Control,” states that “the old view that children should learn from the past and prepare for the future is inevitably subverted in a consumer culture where memory and hope get lost in the blur of perpetual change.” I would agree for the most part, that most children’s television shows are pointless and mindless entertainment. However some shows were able to capture young audiences as well as teach them valuable lessons.  G.I. Joe is a good example of a perfect balance between fantasy and (somewhat) reality.  The episode that I watched was entitled “Red Rocket’s Glare,” which was about Cobra Command trying to blow up the world (surprise, surprise ).  Cobra Command was able to buy out a lot of small locally owned businesses across the country and turn them into a series of fast food restaurants called, Red Rockets.  The Joe’s first discovered that something was a midst when they took a short leave of absence to visit one of their teammate’s Aunt’s newly owned Red Rocket restaurant.   There they discovered that a biker gang (with ray guns) was hired by Cobra Command to harass these restaurants so they could lose money and have to sell their business to evil conglomerate Extensive Enterprise, which (surprise, surprise ) is owned by Cobra.  The Joe’s are able to fend off the bikers but in turn trigger Cobra’s attack on the world by launching all of the rockets on top of the restaurants which turned out to be actual rockets and not just props (surprise, surprise ). But in the end, the Joe’s prevailed again through teamwork, intelligence, and some really good resources.

 

Mar 8

Barbie Car

Growing up with a twin sister, our parents were not really concerned with us not having anyone to play with.  Granted, we always got tired of playing together, but looking back I see how blessed I was to of always had a partner in crime.  My family moved around a lot because of my Dad’s job, so we never had a lot of toys.  Only enough that could fit in this little trunk we had, but when I was 4 years old I won a Barbie car from McDonalds.  It was by far the coolest thing in the world to me. My sister and I would ride around the yard in that until the battery would die every single day.  In my opinion the car was just as much a treat for us kids as it was for our parents, because when we were busy playing with the Barbie car for hours, we were not bugging them to play with us.  We are always talking in class about the parent’s responsibility to entertain the children.  As one of my classmates said on Wednesday, I feel that you know exactly what you are getting into when you have kids, so it is your responsibility to watch after them and make sure they are happy.  My parents did a wonderful job of raising my sister and me, I just wish that parents these days would spend a little less time on the internet or watching television, and spend it with their kids.  The problem is that parents get so swept up into their jobs and other interests, that they literally do not have the time anymore.  This problem is especially bad with single parents. If the next generation has any chance of becoming successful, it all starts with how you’re raised.

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