Stewie Does Drag

 One of my favorite movies of all time is Tootsie. I'm a little on the older side, so for those who aren't familiar with the movie Dustin Hoffman is a struggling actor who can't get work so he decides to dress up like a woman and audition for a soap opera. Surprise, surprise he gets hired and mayhem ensues as he tries to simultaneously keep up the charade while juggling three potential love interests (one who thinks he's gay, one who thinks he's a lesbian, and one who thinks he's a woman). Oy.

 Apparently Seth McFarlane shares my love of the film, because the recent Family Guy episode, "Go Stewie Go," takes this plot almost directly as a story for Stewie. He wants to be cast on his favorite children's show Jolly Farms. Unfortunately, the show is only looking to hire little girls. Not to be discouraged, Stewie dresses up like a girl and is cast for the role. He's a big success, but soon develops a crush on one of his co-workers (a little girl who could be the animated double for Jessica Lange, it was so adorable).

 Both shows end the same way with Dustin and Stewie, unmasking themselves as men on camera during live tapings of their respective programs.

 As we explored the concept of Drag Kings, crossdressing, and androgyny in class this week, I thought this was a fascinating example for several reasons. First, while we know that Stewie opted to dress as a girl out of percieved necessity, its fascinating because Stewie's sexuality is at times questionable. Despite being a baby the show has on many instances hinted at him having same-sex attractions. On the other hand the show has also shown him having crushes on girls. Maybe we're to assume that Stewie is bisexual. I don't know. The point is the decision to dress up as a woman did not come out of him expressing his sexuality, whatever it may be. It was out of the desire to get a part on the show.

 While we're discussing Stewie's desires, I've always found his relationship with Brian very interesting. My personal belief is that Stewie might have a bit of a crush on Brian. This adds complexity to the show because we all know that Brian has a thing for Lois who is  married to Peter who just happens to be Brian's best friend and Stewie's dad. I've read analysis of the show that says the Brian/Stewie relationship is more of a father/son relationships since Peter is such a screwup. If you notice we almost never see scenes of Peter and Stewie together, always Brian and Stewie. Maybe that relationship can be interpreted as a Stewie looking to Brian as a surrogate father.

 As we discuss androgyny, I think Meg is a good case study. We know that she's a girl, but not necessarily by her attire. She wears the cap and glasses with t-shirt and jeans. Its not particularly fitted of feminine. She acts like a teenage girl, but her appearance doesn't really do much to emphasize that she is.

You can see the Family Guy episode discussed in this blog by clicking here.

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.

Robert Smith from the Cure vs. Barbara Streisand

     During our class discussion of Dick Hedbidge and subcultures, someone brought up Robert Smith and the Cure. It reminded me of the episode of South Park where Robert Smith came to rescue the city from certain destruction by an evil, giant Barbara Streisand robot.

    At face value this could appear to be an opportunity for some cool fight scenes between celebrity robot parodies. Barbara Streisand is probably a metaphor for the worst things about commercial and mainstream and Robert Smith is an example of alternative (i.e. the subculture). In the episode Barbara Streisand manages to steal this powerful triangle that turns her into this all-powerful, evil robot. She's mean and she's picking off the little guys trying to go up against her, but they're no match for her powers. That is until Robert Smith, who himself becomes a giant robot is able to take her out with a robot punch to the nose.

    We've learned that the best way to battle the dangerous, uncreative, often untalented, formulaic mainstream is for it to be met with some resistance from a subculture. In this instance its pop music versus alternative rock. The subculture was able to defeat the mainstream, but only after it in a sense took on elements of the mainstream. Robert Smith had to himself become an evil giant robot in order to beat the evil Streisand robot. This is particularly interesting for several reasons. Particularly The Cure went from being this subculture alternative until it gained some commercial success and ultimately defined a genre of music that would itself become mainstream through its popularity.

   What makes the Cure an interesting example for this case is the fact that the band is a subculture of a subculture.  If rock is a subculture to some, alternative rock is the subculture of that subculture. Even deeper is the fact that The Cure's musical style has been described as Gothic rock (Smith decries this label). That's an even deeper a subculture. Despite that the band has enjoyed great success and its been through becoming a giant evil robot (the mainstream) in a sense.

 Ok, now here's a cool, animated fight scene.     

  

The Boondocks vs. Hip Hop: The Battle for Black Folk's Soul

 
 The Boondocks follows the story of Huey Freeman, his brother Riley and grandfather Grandad. Huey, is ten years old but militantly Afro-centric, staunchly pro-Black, and extremely critical of black pop culture. The show began was a nationally syndicated comic strip by cartoonist Aaron McGruder before becoming a popular cartoon series on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim.

 As a black television show The Boondocks accomplishes something few other black television shows have been able to get away with. Its a social critique on black culture and its not usually a favorable one. McGruder has found a clever way to chide black people without seeming preachy, turning them off or seeming like he's pandering to whites. The show is able to do this because it uses humor and honesty to call out black people on some of our ridiculousness and ignorance. McGruder has made it cool to question the things we've been conditioned to believe represent black culture. It's hip, edgy and hilarious, and as a result has created a cult following and lots of controversy.

 The show has taken on self-hating blacks via his character Uncle Ruckus. He shamed the race for their support of R.Kelly during his child molestation trial and he even brought back Dr. Martin Luther King from the dead to scold blacks for their lack of progress despite all the work he'd done to move them forward. He even made fun of our love of chicken.

 One of the show's frequent targets is hip hop culture. Two fictional rappers, Gangstalicious and Thugnificent, were the source of two separate episodes. The Gangstalicious episode called gangster rappers out for using exaggerated masculinity to hide their homosexuality. In the Thugnificent episode there's a beef between the rapper and Grandad. Thugnificent goes on to release a popular dis record called "Eff Grandad" after the two get neighbors get into a spat over loud music. The show was mocking how asinine rap rivalries can be.

 It's obvious McGruder loves the genre (just listen to the show's theme song), but he has some issues with it. This was evidenced most notably when the show targeted BET, or as he called it Black Evil Television. This resonated with me because I boycotted the network for years. I refused to watch BET or promote its platform until just recently. And even now I watch on a very limited basis There's a line in Tricia Rose's piece: "A Style No One Can Deal with," where she says "as an alternative  means of status formation, hip hop style forges local identities for teenagers who understand their limited access to traditional access to social status attainment."That's BET  is problematic for me.

 If you want to crown yourselves the network of blacks you need to offer more representations of us than Moet-drinking, weed-smoking, materialistic, hypersexed creatures. As a black woman the constant image of my sisters dressed in thongs and bent over rented Bentleys became too much for me. Especially since it was one of the few images of black women being presented on the network. Tricia Rose speaks to authenticity, but what's more authentic is the idea that we are not just one thing we're multi-faceted. I'm sure some of us smoke weed and dance on cars in thongs, but most of us don't. BET lacked the balance. It subconsciously created a generation of youth raised to believe the route to status, money, and big-bootied girls is through rap music or the drug game. This was a problem for me

Apparently it was a problem for Aaron McGruder too:



The Boondocks is referencing an episode of the show he created where the heads of BET were depicted as Dr. Evil and No. 2 and their mission was the destruction of the black race. For reasons never really discussed the episode was banned and never aired. I looked for an episode of the show to include for this post, but could only find small clips. Its unfortunate, because I know a lot of people who could probably benefit from seeing it.

Oh well, in the words of Huey Freeman, "I guess I can dream, right."

Click here for a clip of the video "Eff Grandad" by Thugnificent and Lethal Interjection.

Why Pop Culture Needs Crap Sometimes (or How Mr. Hankey Makes TV a Better Place)

This week's class lecture about the validity and merits of good watchable crap versus utterly bad, totally unwatchable crap inspired this week's blog post.

Under normal circumstances a television program that featured feces as a character would get filed under juvenile, potty humor, distasteful. It's almost never an multiple Emmy-award winning and critically acclaimed television program.

That is unless that television show is South Park.

South Park is an animated series following the lives of four children, Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman, in South Park, Colorado. These kids cuss a lot, they regularly disrespect authority figures, and they stay in mischief. South Park has run 14 seasons and over that time has had its share of controversy, acclaim, celebrity cameos and memorable characters. The way the show takes on current events is witty and irreverent, while simultaneously being super smart and usually dead on.

Among those characters is Mr. Hankey. Mr. Hankey is quite simply a piece of excrement. He lives in the sewer and he talks. He first appeared on a Christmas episode of the show and is often a confidante to the little boys in South Park. Strangely enough, Mr. Hankey is apparently not the first animated feces character on television. Ren and Stimpy also featured such a character, "Nutty the Friendly Dump." (At least its good to know television has not neglected to represent the poo community.)

As gross as this sounds to me the Mr. Hankey character serves as a moral compass and often teaches good lessons to the boys. In his first episode, "Mr. Hankey: The Christmas Poo," the character encourages healthy eating. He was introduced to us delivering toys to all the kids who ate a high fiber diet (how many other television shows are giving that important message to kids.) Mr Hankey goes on to serve as a metaphor for the fact that no matter how we try to clean and sanitize things we as human beings are inherently dirty. (Not sure i agree with that, but a scholar with advanced degrees says so, so I'm willing to go with it.

Yet another analysis finds that Mr. Hankey mocks consumerism and the way that it has smeared, tainted, and essentially "shit on" the true meaning of Christmas. This goes well with Adorno's views of how mass production and capitalism is destroying or "shitting on" culture. Which is ironic considering some analyists of the series, including Alison Halsall in "Taking South Park Seriously" believe Mr. Hankey is a parody of Mickey Mouse. And we all Disney is classic capitalism at work.

Mr. Hankey is a rather extreme example, but its an effective one. Could creaters Trey Parker and Matt Stone have chosen something else to convey their points of dirtying up sanitized society or tainting the holiday spirit? Sure they could have, but I don't know that anything else would be as effective in conveying the point.

Crap is gross and disgusting. Literally and figuratively, it is a physical manifestation of all the things that are bad and wrong inside of us. The waste if you will. How it looks and turns out is a reflection of what we've been putting inside of us. In television the crap serves as a barometer for what's good and what's not in our world and society. We must let it do its job and then regularly purge it. Without a regular purging of the crap, things inside us can get pretty unhealthy. And that's good for no one.

Gone Hollywood

 When the Simpsons return from the summer hiatus in a few weeks, it will begin it's 22nd season. That's unheard of in today's television climate. It is the longest-running sitcom currently on television. It is also the longest-running animated show and scripted-primetime series still on television.

 The Simpsons began as a minute-long cartoon shorts that aired during the Tracy Ullman's sketch comedy show. The little family from Springfield gathered a following and eventually got their own series. The photo in the above right shows the family when they were a short sketch and the photo on the right is left is the Simpsons as we know them today. I like to imagine once they signed their TV deal some crackpot team of animated stylists (a la Carson Kressley of "Queer Eye") came in and cleaned the family up to give the stylish looks they have today.
  
 Twenty years later the show has spawned at least two movies, a couple of albums, and even a centerfold spread in Playboy for Marge (who still has the goods by the way). I remember when "Aye Carumba" and "Eat My Shorts" were like the cool catchphrases. I had a Simpson's lunchbox and outfits. My little brother (now a father with his own son) had Simpson tighty whiteys. And despite a small dip in ratings the show doesn't appear to be going anywhere.

 What's interesting about this show is the mass production and overexposure over the years has not seemed to diminish the fan's love of the show. The Simpsons have broken through. What probably should have been a be fad into an institution. If the show ends today it will have earned a fairly significant place in television and pop culture history. It's transcended generations. I watched it as a kid and now my nieces and nephews watch. And those Simpson's tchotchkes their nostalgia, a reminder of a wonderfully, happy time in my life.

 At the end of the day the Simpsons is a show about family. In twenty years very little about the show has changed. I think thats a big part of why its endured. Its a reminder that in a life where change is inevitable, we grow. We evolve. One thing in life should stay consistent and that's family.

 If you'd like to see a link to one of the original Simpsons cartoon shorts click here.

TV Industry Execs are Pricks Even in Cartoons

During yesterday's lecture my professor gave a visual example of how a person might come to TV executives with a great idea for a movie and then by the time the industry folks have had their way with it, it becomes this piece of shit mainstream work that is a shell of the former great idea.

 This reminded me of an episode of Family Guy. Regular viewers of the show might know that in addition to being the Griffin family's pet, a big time liberal, and raging alcoholic, Brian Griffin is also a failed, aspiring writer. The show has explored and referenced this in a few episodes.

 In last season's "Brian Griffin's House of Payne" episode, Stewie finds an old script Brian had written for a TV pilot. With some encouragement from Lois, Brian pitches his show to network executives. The executives love his premise, a touching drama about a 25-year-old single father raising his young daughter while trying to attend college, and decide to make the show.

 By the time Brian meets with them again, the execs have decided to make a few changes to the show:

• Instead of Elijah Wood for the father, the execs decided on James Woods
• Instead of his daughter being 4 or 5-years-old, its a hot teenage daughter preparing to start college.
• Instead of a drama, they change it to a comedy about a dad and his daughter who end up going to college together and the mayhem that ensues living in the same dorm room.
• Even the name changes from "What I Learned on Jefferson Street" to the not-at-all-offensive "Class-Holes" (Which I thought was fantastic by the way)

 By the time they're finish it's become a completely different show. It was exaggerated of course, but with Seth McFarlane and the writers being in TV so long, I'm certain its founded on a grain of truth. Plus McFarlane, through this show particularly, has become a social commentator and critic. I'm sure this episode was a statement of how the industry works. I'm curious how much of this particular episode had to be changed to appease the suits at Fox.

 Brian got a lot of flack for selling out, but how many people sell out just to get their product into the mainstream and millions of dollars. Is this always a bad thing? Class-holes was fantastically awful, but are there times where its a good thing? Is pop culture ever actually improved by this? Why do we always assume that indie and underground is always better? What do you think?

 If any of you'd like to watch this episode for yourself click here.