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Feb 25

Wax Rainbows

There are a few combinations in life that create magic.  Things that simply belong together and would not be nearly as grand standing alone.  Peanut butter and jelly, cookies and milk, both qualify.  There is another combination though, that for me, defines my childhood.  It is what occurs when you combine melted wax with color pigmentation – Crayola Crayons.

I remember the sheer joy I felt when opening a new 64-pack of the crayons in the early 70s.    The perfect fit of each one as it stood tall  in the custom-made box with built-in sharpener.  I would spend hours experimenting with the different shades  in my coloring books.  The only downside of coloring was when a crayon broke.  What a shame to no longer have perfect rows of lean soldiers.  The afflicted crayon could never stand straight again and you knew it was only a matter of time before others fell victim to play.

As we read in Chudacoff’s chapter, Children at Play, many toys were targeted specifically for boys or girls.(180)  Not so with crayons.  Both sexes could enjoy coloring.  Parents were happy because crayons were inexpensive, and stimulated the imagination.

Two chemists, Howard Smith and Edwin Binney came up with the non-toxic formula in 1903.  They named their new company “Crayola” which means “oily chalk” in French.  The exact Crayola formula is highly guarded, but you can see how crayons are made in this 1974 Sesame Street video.

uploaded by KitsuneDarkStalker on youtube, 2007

Over the past 109 years, colors have been discontinued, added, and changed.  The history behind the names is quite fascinating.  On the Crayola website, you can find a chronology of the names.  Today there are more than 100 colors and the appeal for crayons continues for both the young and young-at-heart.

 

Feb 24

Third Reading Journal Prompt: Kids and TV: Critical Views

In 1982's horror movie "Poltergeist," Kid + TV = No Good.

For this reading prompt, find an article by a present-day critic of TV’s influence on children. Link to the piece, summarize the critic’s arguments, and contextualize them by telling your reader as much about the critic as you know (conservative? liberal? parent? psychologist? politician? doctor?) Then, compare and contrast this criticism with some of the historical critiques of television we have encountered in our reading this past week—either the critiques that Spigel and Chudacoff describe in their histories of the reception of TV, or the critique that Bradbury himself mounts in his “The Veldt.” Does your critic have anything new to say about children and TV? If so, what social or technological conditions do you think may have caused this new critique to emerge?

Feb 22

Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation

From as far back as I can remember, I have always had a love for video games. My earliest memories of video games are of my sisters and I playing Mario World on the Super Nintendo. Almost all of the games my sisters and I owned were Mario games for the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64. Then, the PlayStation was released. Because Mario was a Nintendo franchise, I began to play other, more challenging games. One of the first PlayStation games I owned was Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation was developed by Core Design Ltd. and published by Eidos Interactive, Inc. in 1999 for PC, PlayStation, and later Sega Dreamcast. This action and puzzle-solving game, set mainly in Egypt, presents Lara Croft, tomb raider, who, after uncovering a lost tomb and unwittingly releasing the ancient god Set, must do whatever it takes to reimprison Set and save the world from total annihilation while also being pursued by her arch-rival, archaeologist Werner Von Croy.

While I enjoyed the adventure and puzzle-solving aspect of this game, perhaps the aspect I loved most about Tomb Raider was the fact that the main character of the game was a female. In video games especially, it is rare to see this. However, when I grew older I realized that, while the main character is indeed a girl, she is obviously sexualized. In the game, Lara Croft has a ridiculously proportioned body, with her hips and breasts being way bigger than the rest of her body. She is seen multiple times in the game wearing clothing that is way too small for her and also climbing and sliding down poles that just happen to be in the tombs. While reading David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, I couldn’t help but relate the comic books that portrayed women with poorly proportioned bodies in skimpy clothes to Lara Croft, because it is essentially the same thing. This is especially true with comics like Wonder Woman, in which the story line revolves around a dominant heroine saving the world. However, even though these types of comics books can almost be directly related in terms of content to this game, Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation faced a significantly less controversy than the comic books, which shows how society’s views on pop culture have changed over the past fifty years.

PlayStation disc cover of "Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation" game, developed by Core Design Ltd. and released in 1999 by Eidos Interactive, Inc.

Feb 22

Spongebob Squarepants

While watching the Kukla, Fran, and Ollie clip in Monday’s class, I could not help but think of a contemporary children’s show that adults enjoy watching. I am speaking of Spongebob Squarepants. First aired in 1999 on Nickelodeon, Spongebob Squarepants has enjoyed mass success for the past thirteen years. While it was obviously marketed for children, it has been a very popular show for people of all ages. It has aired on both MTV and Spike TV, which are intended for more adult and young adult audiences. I still enjoy Spongebob on occasion, and I find jokes in old episodes that I did not understand enough to get when I watched the show at nine years old.  Of course, that is not a suprise, since the creator, Stephen Hillenburg, and a lot of the people behind the scenes were involved with Rocko’s Modern Life. Rocko’s Modern Life is an older Nickelodeon cartoon that is notorious for it’s provocative jokes that were geared towards the adult crowd. The clip I included is a short YouTube compilation of 10 more adult jokes in Spongebob Squarepants. Adult Jokes in Spongebob Squarepants. The compilation was put together by YouTube user maishah123 in January of 2010.  When I thought of Spigel’s “transgression of generational roles,” I thought of this show immediately. First of all, there is a large adult following of Spongebob. There is also adult content integrated into the writing.  There is even, at times, an adult figure in the show.  My association of Spongebob Squarepants with the ideas conveyed by Spigel helped me to grasp those ideas.

Feb 21

A Christmas Story

Growing up in a very typical American family, I was very used to the idea of tradition throughout my childhood. Of course, we had many different traditions that we practiced each year, but the ones I always looked forward to were the ones that fell right around the Christmas holidays.  One of the best parts of Christmas Eve was when my parents and my brother and I would gather around the TV to watch A Christmas Story before we all went to sleep. This movie has always been special to me, but I started thinking about it for a different reason after we watched the clip from Tom Corbett, Space Cadet in class.

A Christmas Story was a movie made in 1983 that showcased a typical 1940s middle-class family and their trials and tribulations they experience at Christmas time one year. This film stood out to me for two different reasons that pertained to our class after reading Spigel and watching the short clips in class on Monday. First of all, looking back and realizing how young I was when I started watching this movie was startling. There is definitely adult humor incorporated into the film, and there are also some parts that include curse words. However, the fact that this film is broadcasted on TBS for 24 hours straight on Christmas Eve and Christmas day makes me think I was not the only child being entertained by this movie during the holiday season.

The second reason I thought of A Christmas Story while watching the short clips is because there is a very similar scene to the one in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet where he is plainly advertising Kraft Dairy Fresh Caramels. The scene in A Christmas Story shows the main character getting very excited about receiving his Little Orphan Annie Decoder Pen to decode a message at the end of the radio show. He ends up being disappointed when the message is “Be sure to drink your Ovaltine.” This is another example of the very direct advertising technique used during the 1940s and 1950s. The product placement would have directly appealed to the younger generation since Ovaltine in primarily drank by younger children.

Feb 15

Beanie Babies

When I was three years old my mom got me Lucky the Ladybug, my first Beanie Baby.  Lucky quickly became one of my favorite toys and after receiving her I wanted all of the Beanie Babies.  Back when I was growing up I would spend hours playing with my stuffed animals.  For some reason they were more appealing to me then regular dolls.  I suppose since they were animals it allowed me to use my imagination more.  Beanie Babies were a huge deal for me and for many other kids when I was in elementary school.  Beanie Babies were stuffed animals made by Ty Warner Inc. in 1993 with only nine different animals at the time and they eventually became extremely popular in the late nineties. There were several different animals and styles that you could collect and I wanted all of them.  The more Beanie Babies I had, the more crazy and exciting adventures we could go on.  Many parents got their kids Beanie Babies so they could collect them and have them be worth something someday, and many limited collections are very valuable.  Some rare collections can go from hundreds to even thousands of dollars in certain markets.  I, personally, wanted the stuffed animals with the sole intent of playing with them.  Their bright colors and individualized name tags were very appealing to kids because they all seemed to have their very own personality.   Beanie Babies were definitely a very popular childhood item, which relates to the reading by Stearns and Cross.  They state that “an array of new consumer products was aimed at children” (Stearns 3).  These stuffed animals were directly aimed at kid’s imaginations.  They also were not necessarily gender specified like dolls; boys and girls could both collect the stuffed animals without feeling pressure from friends or their parents for collecting them.

Google Images

Feb 15

In SOPA/PIPA debate, Paramount seeks out young allies

After the widespread reactions against the anti-piracy initiatives SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP Act), supporter of the bills, Paramount, directed its efforts towards educating the educated by reaching out to universities with prominent law schools in a letter sent out earlier this month. Paramount hopes to address the issue of “content theft, its challenges, and possible ways to address it” either in a “formal presentation followed by an open discussion period or to participate in a class session”.
The author of the article, “Paramount Wants To Talk To Students About How They’re All Thieves & Then Ask For Ideas On What To Do” and its follow up “More Details About Paramount’s Offer To Law Schools To Teach Them About The Evils Of ‘Content Theft'”, Mike Masnick, interprets the effort as a way of convincing “the next generation of lawyers to come help them try to cripple the internet”  and further spreading the moral panic phrase of “content theft” by presenting the destructive effects of copyright infringement.

Many websites participated in the strike against SOPA and PIPA. Bills that are supported by companies like Paramount Pictures.

This seems fairly similar to the discussion over the moral panics caused by comic books in the 1950s. The “defendants” in both cases have had to defend freedoms and their right to expression -be it through horror/crime comics or through a video mashup of “The Fighter” and “Mark Wahlberg talks to animals”. In either case, it appears that those who have been rallying against the methods of expression have had intimidation on their side -either threatening with jail time, fines, or shutting down the hosts- to further their cause. Hopefully this time, there aren’t as many casualties.

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