Skip to content

Posts from the ‘Archive of Childhood’ Category

Feb 15

2 Comments

Mario! and Super Mario Bros!

This short melody is very familiar with every body.

Yes! this is Super Mario Bros Theme Song  in acapella version.

When I was in elementary school, I ran to home right after school to play Super Mario Bros faster than my younger brother. I was humming this song when i was running to home.

Super Mario Bros are the one of the famous character in the world. Kid to grandfather, boys and girls, most of people know Super Mario Bros. Many people think that Super Mario Bros is the first Mario game from Nintendo, but  it was not the first game of Mario. In 1981, when Nintendo arcade game company is in bad economic situation, president of Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, create an arcade game to save the company. ‘Miyamoto came up with the idea of a game in which the playable character has to make his way through an obstacle course consisting of sloped platforms, ladders and rolling barrels. Miyamoto named the game Donkey Kong, and its main protagonist “Jumpman”. Donkey Kong was big hit in North america arcade game industry and then Miyamoto named ‘Jumpman’ to ‘Mario’ , name from Italian warehouse man who came to receive rent from Nintendo company. So the Mario was created. After Mario’s first appear, Mario has appeared over 200 games titles and also in many of movies and comics. Mario series are still available in the market.

At the time of my young age,around 9-10, Super Mario games were so popular, Price was about $120 in American currency but when we transfer this money to present currency, it is worth about value of $500. It was very expensive to have game system, therefore most of my friends’s dream were receiving game system. Since Mario was male character in the game, it might influence on the girl’s gender identity as statement from the  Elizabeth Segel “the girl reader ,no doubt, identified with these enviable heroes as she read, and, theoretically, she could have used them as role models in the dearth of fictional female alternatives to tamed tomboys and saintly sisters.”(177).  However I don’t agree with her because when children play roles as Mario’s characters, boy always wanted to play Mario brothers and girls always wanted to play princess Peach. Therefore, girl didn’t have many of influence on gender identity.

 

Feb 15

Mulan

My childhood was largely centered around Disney movies. My parents loved (the majority) of these films because they felt Disney often had a moral or teaching hidden within the story line. I loved them because my parents allowed my sisters and I to watch them religiously. When I was young, I would go through phases where I just watched a movie on repeat; Mulan was one of these.

The movie Mulan is centered around Fa Mulan, a young women and only child of the Fa Family, who has failed to fulfill the traditional Chinese duty of becoming a desirable bride. However, when the Huns begin to invade, the empire calls one man from every family to arms. Because the only male in the Fa Family is Mulan’s father, who is elderly and cannot walk properly, Mulan disguises herself and takes her father’s spot in battle against the Huns, sacrificing her life if she is to be caught. Mulan was produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and released on June 19, 1998, by Walt Disney Pictures. The film grossed over $304 million and received Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations.

Mulan is an interesting character because, unlike other Disney princesses, her actions are centered around bettering her family to where other Disney princesses focus their actions around winning over their Prince Charming. This relates to our multiple class discussions on gender roles. Often, the women (especially princesses) in Disney movies focus around winning over a guy by whatever means necessary. For example, Ariel in The Little Mermaid sacrifices her voice. However, many Disney movies centered around men do not focus on the male making major sacrifices for love. Therefore, Mulan is a special and unique Disney character because she sacrificed her life in order to save her family rather than to fulfill her own selfish desires of finding love.


Official Mulan Trailer, youtube.com

 

 

Feb 15

The Proud Family

Picture Credited to epguides.com

A favorite cartoon of mine at the age of 10 was The Proud Family on Disney Channel. It started airing in 2001, and depicted positive family life in  African American culture. As far as I knew, this was the only cartoon of this kind on television, although there were a few live action sitcoms on before and after The Proud Family aired.  The show was centered around a smart, respectable, 14 year old girl named Penny Proud. She lived in a house with both parents, and her grandmother. They lived in a nice neighborhood in which they were not the only minorities, and Penny’s cast of friends were very diverse.  This cartoon came as a model that African Americans did not have to live the way they were generalized.  At the time it was one of very few shows on Disney that featured a majority minority cast.  High profile black entertainers, such as Tommy Davidson and Kyla Pratt and  others found here, were able to become part of a television show that was a model for the black community. My family growing up was very much like the family depicted on The Proud Family.  To me, this show was a depiction of a life to which I could relate. It was a show, along with Family Matters, That’s So Raven, and Kenan and Kel, that black people had to be proud to allow their children to watch. It was relevant to issues that black families faced, and was a correct depiction of the unity and cohesion within the black family in a very positive sense.

Feb 14

Eminem

 

Eminem wanted poster

Eminem wanted poster (poster.net)

When the white rapper Eminem, formerly known as Marshall Bruce Mathers III, came on to the hip-hop scene in 1998, he quickly became every parents’ worst nightmare; he was overtly homophobic, excessively violent, and blatantly misogynistic, but most importantly, in a hip-hop culture largely dominated by African Americans, he was a face that middle-class, white children could relate to.

For a mere fifteen dollars, which could easily be saved up from allowance and lunch money, any kid (myself among them) could purchase one of Eminem’s albums on their own, despite the Parental Advisory sticker on the cover of the album, which was supposed to prohibit children under seventeen from buying the album but which was loosely enforced.

Much like the moral panic of the 1940’s and 50’s surrounding comic books, the controversy surrounding Eminem and his impact on children became a national talking point, with much of the public split between whether he should be considered a poetic genius or whether he was simply corrupting the minds of the youth. Just as comic books were thought to have been “the direct contributing cause of many incidents of juvenile delinquency and to the imbedding of immoral and unhealthy ideas” (144), so too were Eminem’s vulgar lyrics, though perhaps with a bit more merit.

Following the release of Eminem’s second album, The Marshall Mathers LP in 2002, the Eminem controversy boiled over even further as Eminem began to receive criticism from an audience he had not expected: kids. Students at Sheffield University decided to ban their own radio station from playing any of Eminem’s songs because, according to Dan Morfitt, the head of music at the station, “three people out of a student community of 20,000 complained.” This event, similar to the comic book burnings cited by David Hajdu, begs the question of whether kids themselves were actually offended, or whether the decision to ban Eminem was actually just “the puppetmastery of reactionary adults exploiting children too sheepish to defend their own enthusiasms” (119).

The controversy surrounding Eminem hardly hurt his sales, however, as he went on to be the best selling artist of the decade, proving, just as comics had during their golden era, that the more parents hate something, the more kids can’t get enough of it.

 

 

Feb 14

Power Rangers

Television has been entertaining people since the 1950’s. Even I was drawn

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

into this mechanical box since the bright pixels entered my pupils. As a kid I would spend countless hours watching one of my favorite cartoons, the Power Rangers. My mother would always try to make me to watch something much more educational, like Bill Nye the Science Guy, Barney & Friends, or other didactic cartoons on the screen. She believed that by watching Power Rangers I was becoming more aggressive and unrealistic versus knowledgeable and grounded. I am fairly certain she would agree with Peter Stearns’s statement that “TV seemed to be promoting a craving for violence and fantasy among children (Pg 15).”

Despite critics such as Stearns and my mother, the Power Rangers remains a widely viewed show on the air. The first season of Power Rangers, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, aired in 1993 and became an instant hit on Fox Kids Network. Sixteen seasons later, it has now expanded to other networks such as ABC station, Jettix, and Nickelodeon. Its latest season, Power Rangers Super Samurai, will air on February 18, 2012. The Power Rangers epic run seems to have no ending, the original creator, Haim Saban, is still working on additional seasons.

The large audience still watching the show has not discouraged viewers from labeling it as a violent action show targeting children. Nicole Jarosz claims the show promotes violence as a way to solve problems. According to Jarosz, since the Power Rangers always solve a problem by fighting and ridding themselves of the bad guy, children believe this is the way to solve problems. They fight their way out of trouble thinking everything will turn out OK with no consequences. In California State University, a study was done to find the answer to this intriguing question. Children were divided in two groups, one group was showed an episode of Power Rangers and the other was not. The groups were then released to a play and the number of acts of aggression were recorded for each child. The observers noticed that the children that saw Power Rangers were more aggressive then the ones that did not, especially the boys. It is studies like these that entices people to believe violence on television impacts the viewer. My mom may have been a tad correct after all.

 

Kid playing around as Power Rangers, until the teach ruins their fun.

Feb 13

Furbies

In 1998, the widely known childhood toy, Furby, was launched to the public. Furby was a furry hamster like robotic creature that could talk and turn its head and bat its eyelashed. Furbies had two languages built into them, furbish and english, and were said to speak less furbish and more english as they grow. Tiger electronics began selling these furry robots for $35 and as they became more popular around the holidays, some parents were paying up to $300 per toy.  At first they were a cute, fun, toy for children until they started getting labeled, “creepy,” and were becoming banned across America. As this toy grew in popularity, some could argue that it became a moral panic.

At the peak of the Furby’s popularity, rumors started spreading and putting a negative light on Furby.  Because it gradually learned english, adults were worried that the toy actually repeated words said around it. Some parents swore that their children were able to teach furby curse words for it to repeat back to them. Americans were saying that this toy is an “immediate and real danger.” The National Security Agency thought that when people would take the toys home, they would repeat secret information that they had heard. Some bloggers even said that Furbies were a “chinese spy targeted at the youth of America.” With negative headlines labeling these toys as dangerous and creepy, they were quickly removed from homes across America.

At this time, some Americans believed that Furby was a threat to social values, while others argued that it was an innocent toy. Parents argued that children were taking an interest in learning new curse words to teach to their toy and Americans were worried that their private information was being stored in Furby. While these rumors were eventually proven as false, there was a period of time that Furbies caused a moral panic throughout America.

Feb 12

It’s Time to DUEL

Yugi picture from http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/6800000/Yami-Yugi-yu-gi-oh-6816369-1024-768.jpg

Growing up as the only child in my house from age 10 onward, I had a good amount of alone time and as a result had the privilege of exercising my active imagination. I would spend hours combobulating elaborate adventures for my action figures and was gravitated to fantasy worlds portraying heros that would fight evil to save their friends. “Yugioh” (a graphic novel in Japan before expanding to other forms of media here in the United States in 2002), allowed children this opportunity to project themselves as a hero, just as Jerry Siegal “saw Superman as a kind of projection of his own self-image or his own fantasies about himself” (Hajdu, pg. 30). The plot of “Yugioh” was one in which the protagonist, a young boy named Yugi, played a card game known as “Duel Monsters” to save the world and become “the King of Games”. You can probably decipher from that what the next step was for an entrepreneur looking to capitalize.  Any possible “Yugioh” memorabilia you could imagine you could obtain; from blankets, movies, and video games to lunch-boxes, toothbrushes, and whitey-tighties. This economic demand for all that was “Yugioh” highly inflated prices, allowing for some of the rarest trading cards to sell for hundreds of dollars (http://most-expensive.net/yugioh-cards). With great hype though, especially around products targeted to children, comes controversy. At my school the cards were eventually banned as it reportedly caused kids to partake in stealing and other violent acts. I can even recall a story in the national news reporting that a child killed their parents because the parents would not buy them more “Yugioh” cards. I do not intend to trivialize murder but, it seems ironic looking back upon that story after reading about similar happenings during the “Ten-Cent Plague” in which the mother of a boy who killed himself “told authorities that the boy was an incessant reader of comic books and was re-enacting a scene from one of them” (Hajdu, pg. 88). It is eery how history tends to repeat itself. I believe though, parents are quick to blame the media for any acting out that occurs because there is no way their kid is the rotten egg. For the most part, parents do not really understand the new fads that are taking place among children. Just as we determined in class that comic books did not depict gruesome violence page among page, but were rather stigmatized, “Yugioh” cards became the same. Yes, you did compete with “monsters” and “spells” in an effort to lower your opponents “life points” to zero, but the game was more strategy than anything. It took hours to establish my deck that could counteract every possible scenario so that I could win. Also, rather than playing alone in my room it allowed me to meet a different niche of people and expand my friends outside of just sports. Besides that, “Yugioh” was just downright cool. The show possibly has the best theme song for any cartoon ever. Take a look below!

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »