Who says you can't learn anything from television?

 About two weeks ago the Simpson did something it had never done before.

 In more than 20 years on television, few things have changed about the Simpsons. No one ever ages. No one ever changes clothes. No one ever changes their hair. The show is pretty consistent.

 The one thing that does change from week to week is their opening sequence. For each of the nearly 500 episodes (484 to date) there has been a completely different opening sequence. The show has one opening that it makes variations to each week. Each week Bart is writing something different on the chalkboard, sometimes Lisa plays a different song on her saxophone, and at the end the family always comes to the couch in a different way.

 The powers-that-be at the Simpson invited British graffiti artist and political activist Banksy to storyboard the opening sequence. This was the first time the show'd ever invited an artist to create the opening sequence.

What resulted was quite controversial. Have a look for yourself:



 Kind of a downer right? But child labor laws and deplorable working conditions exist. Sure no ones using unicorns to put the holes in DVDs, but its pretty inhumane in some places. We as Americans benefit from it and don't even realize it. This two-minute snippet brought more awareness to this issue than any legislation or books or magazine article ever did. Millions of viewers tuned into watch this. The sequence made news worldwide, online news outlets, etc. At the time of this blog post more than 4 million people had watched the clip on YouTube. That alone could be enough to mobilize a movement and create pretty significant social change.

 Television is powerful. Just because a show is animated doesn't mean that it can't teach us about the world and the society we live in. All semester I've tried to demonstate how animated shows critique the culture of our society. The shows tend to be more subtle and less blatant than this, but they're a commentary all the same.

 I get really passionate when people say you can't learn anything from television. I completely disagree. Intellectual people understand there are lessons in everything. Some might consider Jersey Shore trash TV at its worst. I say that its introduced us to a regional subculture and lingo I'd previously been unfamiliar with. (GTL, anyone?) One can analyze this show for lots of interesting sociological themes like the representations of gender and masculinity, surveillance culture, human sexuality, etc. Its all in your perspective.

 I guess the point I'm making is you can't discount television as an idiot box and you can't discount animation as being purely for kids. There's a lot we can learn from television whether Banksy or Snooki's doing the teaching.