Sesame Street teaches girls about Self-esteem...

[Mupp]

Forgot about Kingston, but the rest...um....like I stated in my post. It ended up a good thing and you reiterated my statement back to me that a rare exception to the rule could be a good thing. Not sure if you digested my entire paragraph before reacting.

Oh, I read all of it, I just wanted to point out Kingston and reiterate.

 

[Drtooth]

Forgot about Kingston, but the rest...um....like I stated in my post. It ended up a good thing and you reiterated my statement back to me that a rare exception to the rule could be a good thing. Not sure if you digested my entire paragraph before reacting.

I see what you mean, myself.. though you gotta admit, a lot of the stark light pink AM's looked very white. Other than Kingston, the only time I saw a decidedly African American flesh tone on a Muppet was also recently in The Closer parody. But then again, that's a caricature.

It's why so many cartoonists went with animal characters. They aren't specified as a race. It's a very tricky situation, and I think that this time they pulled it off great.

Besides, I'm sure kids are young enough that they still have a little color blindness to them to know it speaks for anybody. The song from that musical says "everyone's a little bit racist" and that's something that you unfortunately learn as you get older. Would you believe I learned a certain slur from watching a show about how terrible the slur was?

 

[Mupp]

Forgot about Kingston, but the rest...um....like I stated in my post. It ended up a good thing and you reiterated my statement back to me that a rare exception to the rule could be a good thing. Not sure if you digested my entire paragraph before reacting.

And by the way...


The only African American Muppets have been;

Clifford, Kingston, and Roosevelt Franklin

Both Clifford and Roosevelt Franklin have been the target of criticism for being stereotypes. (More so with Roosevelt though) Probably in part because it was never explicitly stated that those two were supposed to be African American except for their voices.

And think about this;

On The Simpsons, all African American characters are brown, not yellow.

That Muppet colors "rule" is sort of unwritten. There are just some things that you can't mess around with, otherwise they come across as being un-tasteful to many.

I guess what I meant before is, I can't understand why you were upset even for a minute. What they did was good, and they dodged a bullet by not making her green, lavender, or whatever.

 

[Redsonga]

I think it sort of speaks to those of us who aren't the target group and just happen to have curly hair to . So much energy is spent trying to make us hate what we are born with, we need more of these songs for grown ups to :3

 

[Drtooth]

Here's how I take it.

The standard stereotype of beauty is basically tallish (but not too tall) bone thin white chick with straight (but not too straight) blond hair. Girls have been killing themselves for that standard of beauty... a waste because no matter how good you look only a handful of anyone ages gracefully like Helen Mirren or Judy Densch. What I see here is a case of a little girl who basically says "I'm different from that standard and I like it."

Oddly enough, they managed to do something similar (but not as catchy) on an Elmo's World cartoon segment. The one about "The Kingdom where everyone had the same hair cut" or something.

I dunno...

but Girls need that "I'm different from the arbitrary standard of beauty, but I like it and phooey on airbrushed phoneys" type message. And even if they do match up to that standard, hey! You gotta feel good for yourself. I felt terrible about myself in high school and I'm a mess today. That sort of thing can warp a kid more than all the poorly dubbed pinball cartoons, Wicked Witch guest shots, and celebrity cleavage behind a body suit put together. Especially with all this bullying in the news (why no one looked at bullying back in 1999 when the you know what happened is beyond me, but better at all than never), kids especially girls need to feel good about themselves.

And in that organic Sesame Street/Mr. Rogers way too.

 

[Redsonga]

The weird thing is the news seems to think that the bullying started with Facebook being around when really IMHO, all facebook did was make it easier to have another place to take the bullying when not long ago if you were at home you were at least safe from it for a while...

We need more positive songs and safe places for kids. My safe place use to be Mr. Rogers. Now that his show is off my PBS I wonder were todays little children have to go besides Sesame Street (which is good but only one show or Dora (which...doesn't have that much emotional support now that I think about it :\).

 

[frogboy4]

And by the way...


The only African American Muppets have been;

Clifford, Kingston, and Roosevelt Franklin

Both Clifford and Roosevelt Franklin have been the target of criticism for being stereotypes. (More so with Roosevelt though) Probably in part because it was never explicitly stated that those two were supposed to be African American except for their voices.

And think about this;

On The Simpsons, all African American characters are brown, not yellow.

That Muppet colors "rule" is sort of unwritten. There are just some things that you can't mess around with, otherwise they come across as being un-tasteful to many.

I guess what I meant before is, I can't understand why you were upset even for a minute. What they did was good, and they dodged a bullet by not making her green, lavender, or whatever.

Yeah, I wasn't keen on Clifford at first, but he is an amazingly designed puppet with striking colors. And that's the thing...especially with Sesame Street. 99.9% of the characters on Sesame Street are orange, green, blue and purple rather than different shades of actual human skin-tones. The brown felt works in this piece, but I like that Roosevelt is a little purple fella and Rosita is an aqua-colored fruit bat. They leave it to the human counterparts to represent the literal visual differences. Again, I like what they've done with this sketch. They could have done it either brown or purple IMHO and it just surprised me at first until I actually watched it. It's probably one of the cutest and sweetest things Sesame's done in years!

By the way, there have been other Muppets intended to represent blacks and other ethnic groups than included on your list, but I'll leave it up to you to search that out on your own. It's more fun that way.

 

[Drtooth]

The weird thing is the news seems to think that the bullying started with Facebook being around when really IMHO, all facebook did was make it easier to have another place to take the bullying when not long ago if you were at home you were at least safe from it for a while...

Well, on a technicality, it started a little before that, with that attractive girl that killed herself. Of course, she was the bully where she came from, and this all started because of "Mean Girls" type behavior, when some catty girl lost her boyfriend or something to her... I still think all girls need to watch Mean Girls to get an unflattering mirror of what that sort of bullying entails. What bugs me is that it was the media being the media again, only caring when an attractive person gets hurt. If she were a fat, pimple faced, glasses wearing girl that killed herself, everyone would be "Oh well."

I think the Facebook homophobia cases were more of a wake up call. And I'm thankful something's actually coming out of that. Though, I have to object to celebrities speaking out and saying "It gets better." Sometimes it just doesn't, but you have to face it anyway. Besides... those guys are the few cases where they became celebrities in the first place.

But the time to speak was when School Shootings started up. Bullying warps kids in ways you can't imagine. Some can take it, some can't, some get bludgeoned with their cruelty until they have to take very drastic matters to stop it. And sometimes those end in suicide or murder. And for the longest time, the victims got the advice of "just ignore it... the school board does." There is nothing sicker than destroying someone's life and soul for a cheap laugh to make oneself feel better... or just FOR a cheap laugh. Why kids like that aren't forced to take counseling and the victims do is beyond me.

 

[frogboy4]

Well, on a technicality, it started a little before that, with that attractive girl that killed herself. Of course, she was the bully where she came from, and this all started because of "Mean Girls" type behavior, when some catty girl lost her boyfriend or something to her... I still think all girls need to watch Mean Girls to get an unflattering mirror of what that sort of bullying entails. What bugs me is that it was the media being the media again, only caring when an attractive person gets hurt. If she were a fat, pimple faced, glasses wearing girl that killed herself, everyone would be "Oh well."

I think the Facebook homophobia cases were more of a wake up call. And I'm thankful something's actually coming out of that. Though, I have to object to celebrities speaking out and saying "It gets better." Sometimes it just doesn't, but you have to face it anyway. Besides... those guys are the few cases where they became celebrities in the first place.

But the time to speak was when School Shootings started up. Bullying warps kids in ways you can't imagine. Some can take it, some can't, some get bludgeoned with their cruelty until they have to take very drastic matters to stop it. And sometimes those end in suicide or murder. And for the longest time, the victims got the advice of "just ignore it... the school board does." There is nothing sicker than destroying someone's life and soul for a cheap laugh to make oneself feel better... or just FOR a cheap laugh. Why kids like that aren't forced to take counseling and the victims do is beyond me.

Agreed. Bullying has always been around, but I'm glad not to be a young person growing up in the age of iphones, youtube and facebook. School life can be toxic enough without these added tools that can be used for such malicious purposes.

I also think our culture has devolved into one of judgment as entertainment whether it be Judge Judy yelling at poor people, programs taunting overweight people to lose weight as some sort of exploitative contest or shows invading the privacy of mentally ill hoarders. This is all entertainment designed to taunt human imperfection under the thin guise of lending a hand to those who are in crisis and it's recorded for posterity. Heck, some of it is even packaged in DVD sets!

Too much of our culture endorses taunting as entertainment and that's the greatest perpetrator of harm done to young people. It's merely packaged in different media. It's good that Sesame Street stepped up to make this segment and let it go viral amid all the garbage online. It's success proves there's a market for positive messages!

 

[Drtooth]

I tell yah... I saw what classy things Facebook had to offer on its bumper sticker collection over my sister's shoulders one day a couple years ago. And we were both shocked. Making fun of people with special needs, making fun of fat people, and some really bitter, disgusting racist political stuff (even before Obama was elected)... what's really terrible about the whole thing isn't just that people can slam you, you can recruit people to slam others. All from a bunch of Eric Cartman wannabes. People LOVE trash talking, people LOVE bullying... they love watching trashy TV where everyone is mean because they want to feel better about themselves.

It's like the movie Dinner for Schmucks. People who are odd, eccentric, or strange that just want to live their lives get harassed by nasty people who don't even look out for each other, and would throw their so called friends under a bus if it meant getting a tiny bit more ahead. It's a sick little thing wired in human nature, and if anything else, someone should send the message that people who do that should at least feel like monsters.

I've always been glad that there are shows that talk about this stuff and discourage sadly acceptable anti-social behavior. Mentioning reality shows is the nail on the head. But stuff going as far back as Fat Albert tried to instill morals in kids. Why we're whining about what's moral and what's not and completely ignoring the basics is hypocritical. After a while kids see that those sorts of morals don't apply, and quickly become bullies, thugs, and the office sleazeball that would get you fired for going to the bathroom to take your cubicle.

In short, I'm glad Sesame Street is doing this... too bad no one's doing it for older people.