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.     

  

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.

Overanalyze This

You know it seems today that all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV.
But where are those good old fashioned values on which we used to rely.
Lucky there's a family guy.
Lucky there's a man who positively can do all the things that make us laugh and cry.

 But seriously, my name is Brandy Wilson.

 For my Studies in Pop Culture class I was tasked with creating a blog about some aspect of pop culture. I love television and knew early on my blog would cover some aspect of television. I wracked my brain and considered everything from a blog devoted totally to Glee (my favorite show) to one about reality TV.

 Then it came to me. I want to write a pop culture blog about a genre that itself comments and makes fun of pop culture. An animated series seemed perfect. Initially, I wanted to devote this blog only to Seth McFarlane's animated series trilogy Family Guy, American Dad, and the Cleveland Show. But the more I thought about it I wanted to include shows like The Boondocks and South Park which also regularly served as vehicles for social commentary and critique. I decided to expand my idea to include primetime animated series.

 Over the course of the semester I will analyze and dissect (they're cartoons so it won't hurt) elements of this genre. I'd like to explore why this has remained popular over the years. Through the course of this exploration I'm certain we'll see how these shows are able to get away with a lot of things live action shows with people can not get away with. Despite the obvious aesthetic difference, I expect we're going to find a lot of the same themes we see in regular television series: families, friends, trying to fit in, overcoming adversity, etc.

 I look forward to getting graded for watching cartoons. Academia is fantastic.