http://www.mail-archive.com/pen-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu/msg55778.html
http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/7/gamson-j.html
Class Clowns
Joshua Gamson
The Oblongs, the WB network's new animated series that premiered on April
Fools' Day, opens with the sound of a flushing toilet. Chipper voices, who
could be singing about the Flintstones or Scooby Doo, sing the show's setup:
As cartoon waste flows from a fancy mansion down into a valley filled with
decrepit houses and power lines, the voices chirp about how "a chemical
spill came from the people living up on the Hill," and we get a glimpse of
the show's title family, living, fa-la-la, "by the landfill with hazardous
foam, in their happy, glowing home."
The Oblongs are the first television family marked by the deformities of
waste dumping. Milo, the little boy at the center of the show, is almost
physically normal--one eye is much smaller than the other--but he has what
the family doctor calls "typical Valley childhood ailments: ADD, OCD, TDD,
and of course foaming diarrhea." He used to go to a special school for "the
pathologically high-spirited." His mother, Pickles, a downwardly mobile
former Hill girl, is bald underneath a tall wig and drinks like a fish. His
sister, four-year-old Beth, is a tattletale with a cucumberlike tumor
growing out of her head; his twin brothers Chip and Biff are typical
adolescents, except for the fact that they are conjoined, with three legs
and three buttocks between them. His father, Bob, has no legs and no arms,
but nonetheless maintains an upbeat attitude, a decent assembly-line job at
the local poison-chemical plant, an active sex life, and can cut wood, give
charades clues, and light a barbecue with his head. Milo, dressed in a
T-shirt bearing the motto "No," hangs out with a club of misfits: Helga, who
is shaped like a giant pear and whose parents disappeared for a year, during
which time she lived off of crows and unsold cakes from a bakery dumpster;
Susie, a slouching Goth girl with a strange, depressed-Frenchwoman accent;
one-breasted Peggy, who spits and lisps, on account of the absence of a
lower jaw; and Mikey, a redhead with an extrabulbous behind. "It's funny,"
Mikey says of his butt. "And sad."
Aside from the occasional talk show or Dateline segment, the appearance of
such grotesques on television is quite unusual. But this is not your usual
freak show. The Oblongs aims at comic social commentary, and its target is
what the WB, that hotbed of radicalism, calls "the caste system in
America"--and also, not coincidentally, what WB Executive Vice President
Jordan Levin calls "a disenfranchised younger audience." Indeed, as Levin
told journalists at a recent press conference, here "the have-nots are the
heroes." The real monsters are the haves, who reside, literally and
figuratively, at the top of the Hill--especially the climbing Klimers.
George Klimer is Bob's greedy, patronizing boss at Globocide Industries, and
his wife is a zombie snob. Their son is a stupid bully, and their daughter
is leader of the Debbies--the rich, popular, spoiled girls, all named
Debbie, who look like Barbie dolls and like one another. The folks in the
Valley are well aware of what they have not and venture up the Hill
periodically for an envious glimpse. "Wow, she's got everything," says
Mikey, when Milo and his mates break into Debbie's room. "I've got just a
towel, a floor, and an old batting helmet to eat out of." Peggy, of the
missing jaw, lolls around on Debbie's bed. "Thish ish what I dream my
marital bed will be like," she says. "Except that it will contain a shwarthy
Lothario with a mashtersh in shpeech therapy."
Each episode is a little fable of class conflict, in which the oppressed
battle a bit of injustice and the oppressors get their comeuppance. In one,
Milo has to give away his beloved dog Scotty, who was making him "more hyper
than ever," and George Klimer descends from the Hill to take the dog in. But
when the Debbies discover Scotty "making" on the lawn, George removes him to
Animal Testing at Globocide, where the dog is used to test a cologne whose
side effect is narcolepsy and is caged next to a chimp in lipstick and high
heels and a beaver testing an exploding sombrero. "I don't hate you, Dad,"
Milo declares when he finds out Scotty's fate, "I hate the company you work
for." By the end of the episode, the Oblongs have donned black clothing,
broken into the factory, outwitted two sets of guards, battled Boss Klimer,
and set free Scotty and the rest of the animals. Klimer is doused with his
own narcolepsy-inducing cologne and blown up with his own exploding
sombrero--only to return for next week's show, of course. This is, after
all, a cartoon.
In another episode, a gun-toting, racist Bible-thumper named Mrs. Hubbard is
sent down the Hill by the mayor to reform the parenting skills in the
Valley. She offers to adopt humongous, abandoned Helga and give her a nice
home and self-esteem: "Lord, cleanse this heathen of her vile and disgusting
ways," she prays. Meanwhile, she turns Helga into a prim proselytizer who
goes door-to-door requesting donations to send Bibles into space. Helga's
eyes flash a desperate message when she and Mrs. Hubbard visit the Oblongs:
"HELP" on one eye and "ME" on the other. The Oblongs break into Mrs.
Hubbard's bedroom, where limbless Bob, bouncing around in a harness and a
thong, whips a startled Mrs. Hubbard, while Pickles snaps scandalous photos
to bring to the custody hearing. Owing to poor photography, the strategy
fails; but using the Internet Milo tracks down Helga's parents, who had
survived a plane crash by eating the other passengers, and Mrs. Hubbard is
nonetheless foiled.
As befits a cartoon, the satire is broad--drawn, like the characters, with
big, bold outlines and not much complexity: Rich people are pretty on the
outside and ugly on the inside, and poor people are hideous on the outside
but happy inside. But in a media culture that barely acknowledges the
existence of a class system, it's striking to find a show premised on making
fun of it. In fact, with The Oblongs--which joins shows like The Simpsons
and King of the Hill, made by the same company, Film Roman--the genre of
class-conscious cartoons has now reached critical mass. It is safe to say,
and a bit chilling, that the American media's most direct and critical
representations of class inequality are taking place in cartoons, the only
spots on television that make no claims whatsoever to realism.
Underground cartoonist Angus Oblong, the show's originator, can hardly be
said to have an upbeat sensibility. The Oblongs is based on characters from
his self-published Children's Tragedies strip and the subsequent book Creepy
Susie and 13 Other Tragic Tales for Troubled Children, and among his
upcoming projects is a mock children's book called Mommy Is Going to Die.
Yet it is quite clear that, in its move onto television, his vision has been
transformed into something lighter and friendlier and more familiar, so that
The Oblongs breaks new ground without feeling especially groundbreaking.
Oblong himself told The Sacramento Bee not long ago, in fact, that he was
"really shocked" by the first episode. "I thought we were designing a dark,
mesmerizing show," he said, "but it is so bright and colorful." The
brightening was as much thematic as visual: From Oblong's original
proposition of a show about Milo's clubhouse of "deformed kids who can't
otherwise get friends," the show became one with a happy, lovable family at
its center. As the show's executive producer, Bruce Helford, put
it--sounding much like a satire of an executive producer--"The people from
the Valley are all lovable," so lovable that "when I watch it, I can't help
but feel, God, I want to hug all of them." Most likely, this undarkening is
some combination of caution and habit, the usual routine of television
producers fearing unlikable characters and attempting to duplicate the
success of other shows--in this case, most obviously, The Simpsons. (An
executive producer of The Oblongs, Jace Richdale, was a co-creator of The
Simpsons.) Perhaps it is also a wise, if unfortunate, assessment of what
audiences will and will not "relate to" and therefore watch in high enough
numbers.
Whatever the motivation, in the WB's satire of "the caste system, "the shat
upon are happier than the shitters. As the network's Levin declared to
television critics, "Audiences will relate to The Oblongs, where
love-and-family is more important than what the folks on the Hill have." And
Helford added that "the heart of the show is how people in a really
dysfunctional environment, who have nothing, who are put upon--with all the
things they have to put up with, they are still a really good functioning
family and happy, healthy, loving people," while "these people who are
supposedly perfect," the Hill people, "are really, really fucked up
emotionally." This is a nice fantasy for alienated teenagers, but it leads
to a pulling back from the edginess that is meant to be the show's selling
point. The moral superiority of the oppressed, the persistence of love in
the midst of adversity--these romanticized visions of class escape satirical
scrutiny. Even animated television seems unable to allow a more cutting, and
probably funnier, possibility: that being dumped on by people higher on the
hill can generate something other than a happy, healthy, huggable family.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
bit of lunacy>
2001-04-20
25TH SHOT FOUND IN POKEMON CARTOONS
Psychologists in the Russia's southern city of Krasnodar have called on
the Russian government to ban televising of the Pokemon Japanese cartoon.
The cartoon has already been televised on Russia's state-controlled ORT
nationwide television network, as many countries, including Japan itself,
have tabooed it. Krasodar psychologists assert that a 25th shot system is
applied in the cartoon which negatively affects children's subconsciousness.
As a result of this shot's impact, a ''neurolinguistic programming'' occurs,
or, to put it in other words, zombying. The psychologists characterize this
phenomena as the ''intellectual genocide.'' In their view, the cartoon calls
for cruelty and aggression, while numerous signs on the heroes' costumes
symbolize death.
Svali: I'm not sure what the "25th shot system" is, but obviously Russia has
recognized it as some sort of subliminal frame set that has a detrimental
effect on children (why am I not surprised, I've already shared my opinion
of Pokemon...). And Magicke, another card game, is even worse. Also, think
of the role playing games that teens get sucked into, such as D&D online, or
Diablo, and others. The list goes on.
