I am against censorship. The recent news that Tom and Jerry will be edited in Europe to remove smoking scenes is absurd! So it’s not ok for Tom to smoke, but it’s ok for Jerry to electrocute him, chop him up, and all the other behaviours kids may imitate from watching cartoons. Even racist stuff has a place in our culture so that we can see what was acceptable back then, why it was acceptable and why it’s not acceptable today. I think it can be educational and also show how every immigrant group has gone through racist depictions in our multi-media. However, what I don’t like is unequal treatment people seem to give the different races and ethnic groups when it comes to apologizing. Here are two screenshots from the original Three Little Pigs.

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I don’t usually blog about TV shows, but this Simpsons episode was so bad, there wasn’t even a point in the writers even trying. They should have just taken a week off and worked on a better show. The show started off on a funny note, although we’ve seen it before a few too many times. Bart was behaving badly and so Homer and Marge took him to therapy. This time they recommended having him play the drums. Above, they used this to create a really funny parody of the White Stripes video where the drums keep multiplying as they go on. However, things took a turn for the predictable and the episode went for a downturn when Bart ends up being picked up for a Jazz band and Lisa doesn’t. She gets jealous and, predictably, that is how we get the show back to the reset point. (meaning, as in every Simpsons episode, we have to get back to where we started so that the show doesn’t need to maintain continuity -except where it’s funny)

I read a book a few years ago called “Don’t Tell the Grownups” about how some authors hid their dangerous messages in the form of children’s book. As I was listening to some music from the cartoon Animaniacs, I also heard some hidden messages that the kids might not quite understand. For example, in a song where the Warner Brothers sing the names of the US Presidents, they end the song with, “…the one in charge is plain to see, it’s Clinton - first name Hilary.” So even in this kid’s show we see the joke that Hilary is in charge of the White House instead of Bill Clinton. This is pretty mild, but even more contentious is where Yakko sings all of the countries in the world. He mentions Taiwan as one of the countries. As we all know, we’re supposed to pretend that Taiwan is part of China when, for all intents and purposes, it is its own country in all but name. But here we are training kids that it is its own country - very interesting!

Football just gets in the way of the commercials I want to watch. So what did I do to kill time in between? I hacked Python, of course! I found a bit of humor in this, don’t know if you will if you haven’t taken CS classes.

> li [‘a’, ‘b’, ’new’, ‘mpilgrim’, ‘z’, ’example’, ’new’, ‘False’] > “False” in li True False is True! Kinda like turn left, right? hehe…

To sum up the opinion my wife and I have of the current cartoons out there for kids: they stink! The animation style is very strange and certain shows like Ed, Edd, and Eddy have a really strange palette. We pine for the cartoons of our youth. So we were very happy today to find out that, after three years of searching the web constantly, we found Duck Tales and Rescue Rangers Season 1 on sale at Best Buy. Part of the Disney Afternoon, Duck Tales was one of our favorite cartoons and represents the first time cartoons were taken seriously by studios. It kept me entertained for many a day as I sat and watched the degenerates of Duckburg try and bilk Scrooge McDuck out of his money. We’ve been watching the videos recently and the nostalgia is great! These DVDs are a must for anyone who grew up on the Disney Afternoon.

Today I read something that delighted me! On the back of the volume 2 DVD of Tom and Jerry it read “this dvd is intended for adult collectors and may contain material unsuitable for small children.” Why did it make me happy? Because it’s finally an admission that cartoons were not created originally created for children. Most of the cartoons played prior to movies with adult and/or family audiences. So I hate this sanitizing of cartoons that has been occuring on some of the box sets lately. Also, there were some cartoons which would never have been made into today’s PC world. But they WERE made and I think it is an important cultural history that we preserve these cartoons instead of putting them in the closet. We need to see these cartoons and understand why they are wrong and why they were ok back then. I think it’s important and the past can’t be changed, so don’t try to change the record! So I will enjoy this DVD more than I have enjoyed most recently.

Fanservice (or fan service) is a vaguely defined term used in visual media, particularly in the anime fandom (in Japanese, it is simply spoken as “service (saabisu)”), to refer to elements in a story that while potentially superfluous to a storyline, are designed to amuse or excite the audience. It is sometimes used in a derogatory manner when presented in a clumsy, pandering fashion or is the only thing notable about a series. Since it is extremely subjective, the most common uses are listed.