Worse than Paw Patrol is Thomas the Tank Engine, a show about mentally handicapped trains forced by a literal monopoly guy into hard labor, with the threat of imprisonment or disassembly looming over those who refuse to obey.
I know we're making fun of the article here, but Thomas the Tank Engine has dialog lines like this: "Am I a useful train?", Fat Controller: "Yes, Thomas, you are". Being useful seems to be a big concern for the trains. Not being useful is horrific and means decommissioning, which is sensible in the real world, but it's a kid's show. Being old and weak means decommission/death?
It might be due to me being a Pole, my upbringing, and our history of WW II, but it triggers a light connotation with labor death camps whenever I hear the line.
For me it reminds me of a boy I knew growing up who later got diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, who was absolutely enamored with trains. He was very smart, if awkward at times - I always liked hanging out with him when he was in his element. But even early on I think he knew something was off, because he constantly asked questions along this line when we did things like play Halo co-op together. "Am I being helpful?" "Am I useful?" Once I got so annoyed by these questions I just said No and he didn't talk to me again after that.
There is something deeply, deeply sad to me about thinking through what kind of family life he might have had that he even felt the need to ask that question. I didn't grow up in a great environment either, but I never had any doubt that I was doing good things that would be a point of pride to most parents.
young children know what usefulness is, and they want to be useful, and they love being praised for being useful. "Everybody in the family pitches in and has a role to play to make dinner and set the table" types of repetitive lessons are very important to children; it's the type of emotional development that neglectful parents don't provide.
A lot of children's play is imitating what adults do, preferably alongside adults. If you are typing on a keyboard, either give your child another one or suffer them wanting to touch yours. I'm not an expert, but this ties in with an inherent sense of usefulness and participation.
A lot of traditional/popular children's stories are kind of dark. Hansel and Gretel - witch tries to eat the kids, they kill her in an oven. Harry Potter - fascist like guy kills the parents he kills him etc. I guess it helps deal with the real world that can be like that too. The early Thomas stories were written during WW2.
You could also explain The Wizard of Oz as "young girl travels to a foreign land and kills the first person she meets. She then teams up with three strangers to kill again"
The purpose of Thomas the Tank Engine is not to speculate on the ramifications of living in a world with sentient trains like some weird sci-fi novel. You are welcome to write that if you want, but fat chance producing something kids will enjoy.
Thomas the Tank Engine exists to delight children with the mystique of steam engines, and to provide the back drop for simple lessons on pro-social behavior that children can understand.
> Thomas the Tank Engine exists to delight children with the mystique of steam engines, and to provide the back drop for simple lessons on pro-social behavior that children can understand.
It's kind of weird seeing someone claim "lessons on pro-social behavior" in a direct reply to a quote on how the show depicts immurement as a reaction to refusing direct orders from the company owner.
The lesson it's supposed to teach is to be helpful to others, and that disobedience can lead to punishment. A fairly basic part of parenting, employment, fighting in the military or many other things that boys grow up to do.
This is a lesson nobody should learn. Blind disobedience ~never leads to anything good, and if you can be imprisoned forever because you were afraid of the rain, maybe it's society that is wrong.
> The lesson it's supposed to teach is to be helpful to others, and that disobedience can lead to punishment.
Unquestionable obedience to the company owner under the threat of immurement is not a basic part of parenting.
I also question how formatting our children to unquestionably accept fighting and dying in armed conflicts as being healthy and in their best interests.
The Fascist motto was “believe, obey, fight.” It is in line with the ideas you're trying to pass off as good parenting.
Again, that interpretation only makes sense if you are treating Thomas as a sci-fi novel for adults about sentient trains and the capitalist system, rather than as a fairy tale for children. Of course you will invariably butcher what the story was actually trying to convey.
The lessons of the episode are simple:
- you will not get what you want if you are selfish, mean, and unreasonable (Henry's paint is eventually spoiled anyway)
- if you disobey your parents, there will be consequences (like timeout). Note that Sir Topham hat (as a parental figure) while firm, was very patient with Henry.
My local PBS station showed Thomas the Tank Engine on almost infinite loop and so I came into the show in kind of the middle as a kid. I didn't know why Henry was so "bad" at his job and all of that, only that he was cranky and didn't seem to like everybody else that much.
Then this episode aired and my mother says I cried for two days over how Henry had been treated. (It didn't help that I was what was commonly called "a quiet child" and got picked on a lot for not wanting to play with other kids or just "being weird", something I think a lot of HN can relate to.) It wasn't long after that I stopped watching Thomas.
Years later, my kid picked up watching the show and learned how to record it on his TiVo. I made sure we watched that episode together.
>(It didn't help that I was what was commonly called "a quiet child" and got picked on a lot for not wanting to play with other kids or just "being weird", something I think a lot of HN can relate to.)
Yep. Turns out I was autistic, but since it wasn't in a way that that was a bother other people had I no clue until my late 30's.
Reading the episode description is really something else. They managed to perfectly capture the phenomenon of real life regular people casually being horrible cunts to each other, though I think they were probably just going for "shut up and obey".
Also, an apparently nostalgia-rich rose coloured recollection of the artistic expression present in earlier hand-animated cartoons that I suspect would not stand up to serious scrutiny.
I had to forbid Tom and Jerry to my toddler. It is just 95% violence, various forms of hitting someone on the head. And after my boy mimicked this behavior to his sister ... I stopped this good old times cartoon.
But then my peers and I watched literally hundreds of episodes of this show (not because we liked it, but because there were only 3 channels to choose from) and we never mimicked any of that behaviour further than regular dumb kid play violence.
toddler noun
: a person who toddles
especially : a young child usually between one *and three years old *
Sorry, but showing T&J to a three years old is entirely on you. You knew what it's literally a slapstick comedy with crash, bang and explosives.
Also, where is Hanna-Barbera T&J which was made between 1940 to 1960 and was made to be shown in cinemas for the adults. And after that... there is no T&J after that.
Maybe a toddler should not watch at all? Peppa Pig is actually interesting in that it has many puns/stereotypes in for the parents that go way over the children's heads.
Well, I am quite liberal by default and think children can handle way more, than most adults realize ... so he can discover what he likes and he liked Tom and Jerry, but there are certain limits of what is healthy and what is depicted as normal behavior. So bybye Tom and Jerry and Minions.
And the normal paw patrol behavior is mostly trying to figure out problems with the help of technology. So I think that is allright, even though the social interactions could be way better.
So apparently shows for little kids should have serialized plot lines with redemption arcs for villains, because kids are notoriously not lovers of repetitive stories and rewatching the same show dozens of times.
Also in what universe is a show fascist for telling kids they shouldn't automatically trust the government and authority figures? That sounds like a great lesson. Just because someone is powerful doesn't mean they're right. But even though the show does the exact opposite thing I guess publish or perish, can't really blame authors for churning out the crap that sells even if not really that well thought through. Gotta get those clicks from the people receptive to those specific keywords in article headlines
Ironically, all those TV news program clips at the start of the YouTube video also look like performance intended to manipulate the viewer in what to think.
" Specifically, the series implies that it is literal outsiders—migrants from
near and far—who bring crime and disorder to Adventure Bay and threaten the residents’ idyllic
life"
That sounds bad, but the evil guy is a stereotype white capitalist with a melon and the good mayor is a women of color.
But it has not the typical racist component, what one would think after reading your sentences. And whether banning foreign troublemakers is the wrong thing in general, is a quite lengthy discussion and not one I am willing to do here and now. (Because I don't think it is wrong in general, but I also don't think the Australian government is handling it fine)
OK, I have to say I couldn't bear myself to watch one full episode yet, but in my impression she was portrayed as the nice one, which also the name "Goodway" implies. (nice does not have to mean competent)
About "10% of each episode is dedicated to them jumping into their voltron vehicles": it's the story as old as capitalism and it's the same reason you have those long transformations in Sailor Moon, to give an actual example, but it applies to all off the mill series in anime, western and 'western' cartoons too.
The TV time is sold as slots (usually ~30m for animation), you can't buy some arbitrary amount of time - you buy the slot, you need a serious amount of money for the prime time slots;
a TV show requires money (big amounts of money) for the every second produced;
so it's the easiest way to lower amount of money spent per episode - animate once, show multiple times.
So the article in the post says paw patrol has no commerce, this paper says it's capitalist propaganda. So which is it? Socialist countries have oppressive police forces and incompetent administrators too.
It’s definitely post-colonial, neoliberal capitalist propaganda. However, I really had to study it deeply to come to that conclusion, because my initial thoughts was that it was overthinking of children’s television - but now I can understand that my very initial perspective was literally shaped by this neoliberal bullshittery.
Nah, I'd stick with overthinking - I think that when you start stringing together phrases like "post-colonial, neoliberal capitalist" to describe a thing, you're way in the overthinking land (and/or trying to confuse your interlocutor with rhetoric).
Yeah, really had to study it is a great way of saying really had to confirmation bias my way into it. First time really hearing about this show and I'm trying to find real examples of pro-laizzes-faire propaganda or facial or anything but all I'm getting is that people definitely thought real hard about this, pinky promise. I mean seriously this article is arguing that a show that shows authority figures are corrupt and incompetent is fascist. That's not like a counterexample to the claim in the article. The article claims that not blindly worshiping authority is fascist.
Next thing I'll be reading that the show promotes unhealthy habits by showing the kid eating vegetables and getting exercise
you just reacted to keywords with preprocessed refutal to a person claiming he had to put in effort to get out of precisely that behaviour. maybe you could use some introspection, self reflection and reading ?
Paw Patrol is a show where first a toy company made a line of toys and then wanted to have a show that would go with it. It is one big commercial for toys. There is not much of a redeeming value left.
When my daughter was watching the show she was always hyped up it is far too engaging for younger viewers and too basic for older viewers.
For family viewing I can recommend Octonauts - it is delightful for all ages.
I have a theory that someone found a bunch of cheap generic toys (vehicles, dogs, etc) and realised they could sell a lot of them if they slapped a logo on the side and made a cheap, below average cartoon that showed them to kids.
I’m almost certain that there are other examples of this too.
This is exactly what Transformers were in the 1980s: pre-existing Japanese toys whose existence had nothing to do with the retconned “Autobots vs. Decepticons” cartoon plot. That was invented to drive the toys into the American market.
> PAW Patrol is a Canadian computer-animated children's television series created by Keith Chapman and produced by Spin Master Entertainment, with animation provided by Guru Studio
> Spin Master Corp. is a Canadian multinational children's toy and entertainment company
Sorry, but in this case they are designed in concert: shitty toys and a cartoon to advert^W sell these shitty toys.
- Bluey
- Sarah & Duck
- Kiri & Lou
- Hey Duggee
- Numberblocks
- Little J & Big Cuz
There's also a few classics in Australia like "Little Ted's Big Adventures" and "Big Ted's Adventures" and "Little Joey's Big Adventures" or similar, about a dozen episodes each looking at vehicles/sports/animals.
Play school is great once kids get to about 3 or 4 years old, lots of variety, language, things to learn, playing with physical objects in interesting ways.
If you want more of an American style but don't like Paw Patrol, you could try Blaze (a monster truck show that teaches counting and light physics) or Bat Wheels (just Batman themes cars, but it's higher quality than PP).
Numberblocks in particular is amazing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
It starts at a very basic level (number 1 meets number 2) and covers things like counting, addition, multiplication, even and odd numbers, composite numbers (“super rectangles”), triangular numbers (“step squads”), cubes, prime numbers...
That might all sound very dry, but it’s also really well-written and hilarious. Many episodes are elaborate pastiches of musicals, heist movies, Star Wars and so on.
Octonauts are delightful. First it was a book series. I can also recommend Octonauts longer movies. My daughter remembers a few interesting facts about marine life thanks to all this. I also find them quite funny and cute.
Barbie: Dreamhouse Adventures is surprisingly good. Not my favorite though. There is another Barbie series that is pure garbage for me so be ware.
Puffin Rock is very nice. I
love to hear Irish accent there.
I can recommend a few from behind Iron curtain, which are without words and classics for me: Krtek, Reksio and Pomysłowy Dobromir (this one has engineering spirit). You can find them on YouTube.
With Paw Patrol though the formula of the show reminds me of a casino or modern gaming with loot boxes. I don't know how to compare Transformers to it, as I never seen the show, only a few comics. Maybe a Marlboro commercial? ;)
On the other hand, those pixels and their message are, what gets ingrained into the next generation.
So I do think, one should them take seriously. And personally I don't like Paw Patrol for my kids either, but I don't think it is that bad and the article blownup hyperbole. (also factual wrong, there is agriculture and production getting shown, but there are also worse things to criticize)
I've never seen Paw Patrol, but based on what I can deduce of its premise, complaining that "emergency services seem to be the only thing going on in this horrifying world" sounds like complaining that idiots trying to commit crimes is all that ever goes on in the world of the show Cops, or that the only things that seem to exist for the hosts of Top Gear are cars.
One thing that I definitely agree with from the article is that the quality in everything is much lower than it used to be. The cheap 3d visuals aside, the storylines, the dialogues etc. are so basic and crude. My daughter likes Fireman Sam and it's just so bad. It could be that previously nobody made something specifically for 4 year olds. I don't know. Someone mentioned Thomas the Tank Engine - I was stunned how bad it was when I first saw it.
Huh? What is so bad about it? It is simple, but not bad. It is a kids show, not deeply philosophical adult entertainment. It shows how easy and badly things can go wrong while playing and what the firemen will do to solve it.
My only critic with the show would be, that often problems could be solved way quicker, by the ordinary people, but everyone MUST call firemen sam as the first thing and then helplessly wait, till he arrives. But apart from that, I liked it waaay more, than paw patrol.
If that's the threshold than almost anything is good. It doesn't need to be philosophical, but there's a difference in giving an effort in creating something or just chucking out content. All the dialogue is just so basic it's almost weird and like listening to aliens pretending to be human. When they get a phone in about a new case you first hear the problem, then it gets repeated word for word to the crew, a.k.a. the very cheap way to add 15 seconds of content with 0 effort.
Yeah, and looney toons are bullying apologists, pokemon is child endangerment and animal cruelty, batman beats people instead of creating a better world with his money...
If we accept that kids are impressionable, it stands to reason that we should be impressing them with things that will help their development.
Is blind faith and dependence on eccentric billionaires and an omniscient police state responding to every minor disruption something we want to teach our kids?
I grew up watching animes from the 70s-80s-90s when there was a push in Japan for adapting western books and stories. Moomin, Heidi, Nils Holgersson etc. But whenever I see these modern western animated shows… They look like fast food turned into cartoon. Probably has
the
same
effect on kids’ brain too.
I wonder what the author would say if he would view now a couple of the cartoons he saw as a child. When I stumbled upon an old cartoon I was seeing I was kind of amazed/put-off by how stupid it felt and how many "bad messages" (according to my standard now) I would see.
I do not have much experience with the topic but my impression is that toddlers/kids experience things quite differently (ex: liking to see the same cartoon N times, with N rather large) so we should be careful when trying to draw conclusions about good and bad.
My daughter loves it so much she screamed Paw Patrol first thing in the morning few times for last 2 weeks, which is wild and super concerning (and annoying). She pulled one of the happiest smiles when I said she'll get to watch Paw Patrol. And she only gets 1 hour of screen time per week. How the hell it's so addictive?
Because it's not just your daughter that gets hooked up on it, but also nearly every kid in her daycare/kindergarten, every other kid she sees on the playground, etc. With so much Paw Patrol-branded merchandise everywhere, the show is stuck in the "pit of success", a self-reinforcing popularity loop.
And that's on top of the show being heavily optimized for its audience.
Paw Patrol raise so many questions. What happened to the community that they have to rely on a 10 year old and his puppies to provide emergency service? Speaking of puppies, how are they kept permanently as puppies? Where does the 10 year old get the funding for their headquarters and vehicles?
Many have and there seem to be cultural differences about this. In any event, the modern internet incentivises outlandish positions sincerely held. Thus sarcasm is indistinguishable from what is presented as a genuine (even if insane) belief (Poe's Law).
Peter Rabbit and his associates are the bad guys. Mr Macgregor, Mr Tod, and Old Brown are just trying to lead a simple quiet life but instead live under a reign of terror from the rabbit and squirrel gangs.
I'm reminded of the old joke when a critic looks at Mondrian's squares copycat at declares that artist is obviously suppressing his thoughts of incest with his sister. The tagline being "Sometimes our critique say more about us than the artists".
I mean it takes some mental effort to look at Paw Patrol or Thomas the Tank engine and spit out Communist Manifesto.
I cant' tell if the author is radical leftist enough to be serious or if they are just aping the radical leftist thought process so well it seems that way....
All jokes aside I also didn't like paw patrol and stopped showing it to daughter.
Here are my reasons
1. The episodes are mostly non stop action where, without any reflection/ or slow pace. Also 0 teachings for viewers
2. All primary decisions made by Rider. Paws have 0 agency.
----
There are lots of criticisms of other media in this thread. I will add my 2 cents
Superkitties. Every villain is justirier, just doesn't chose right approach. Even if they commit bad things one after another. And in the end of show moral of story is literally spelled out. Authors hammering it down too hard.
Brer Rabbit stories by Joel Harris (old books). I started reading aloud to kiddo and stopped, as some stories are too cruel and unfair. The world is unfair, but this is too early for kiddos age.
This article seems to be written by a religious zealot, and the fact that the article opens mentioning his concern of whether or not his friends at church nod in approval or not about what he does is very telling.
I have 2 young kids, and I select what they can watch. And I'm aware that when I was a kid I watched lots of violent shows like Tom and Jerry like someone else said, or even Dragon Ball which is a million times more violent, but I hesitate to let them watch other much more innocuous shows.
I'm an atheist, so I'm not burdened with religious prejudices, and I'm very open minded, I think everyone has a right to sleep with and love whoever they want, and to identify themselves as whoever they want, I also think no one should be discriminated against because of their skin tone, nationality, beliefs, identity, disabilities or anything else.
But I also understand the outrage against wokism. There is an episode in Ridley Jones which is a show for young kids, where there is a bison saying that it's non-binary and what are their preferred pronouns. This is completely unnecessary for the plot and those are subjects that go miles above the heads of the intended audience. Also in many of the latest Disney productions and other shows in Netflix there's been a lot of queer characters and gay/lesbian relationships, which is not necessarily a problem depending how it is treated, specially if the production is for teenagers and adults, but I think it's completely unnecessary and kind of force feeding to include that kind of topics in the shows for the youngest kids. That trend also brings us ludicrous contradictions like an upcoming version of Snow White and the 7 dwarves, which are not actually dwarves, I think there's maybe 1 dwarf only.
Having said that, there's so many examples of religious extremisms taking things to the, erm, well, extremes. And I'm not going to even mention Muslim Theocracies because I think those are ultimate level of autocratic religion fuelled fascist regimes. But for example in Catholic Poland, the children's show Teletubbies was banned because they said the purple teletubbie was gay.
I think there are lots of shows in Netflix that it would be wise to don't allow your kids to watch, depending on their age of course. But the concerns the article raises about Paw Patrol are honestly laughable. There's a lot of illogical things in kid's shows. Just look Spongebob Squarepants and you'll see that they're under the water but most of the time physics and everything else behaves as if they're not. In Paw Patrol I always asked myself how a 10 year old doesn't seem to have adult supervision and seems to have unlimited resources and money to fund his organization. But again, in this show puppies talk and can drive cars, so you can't expect it to be based on reality. Of course in this show there will always be some kind of trouble which the Paw Patrol will happily solve, but there wouldn't be much of a show if that wasn't the case, isn't it? I can think of many series I watched when I was a kid and teenager, that also show a different problem or villain in every episode, actually that's the case for a large number of series. Just think of those oldies Knight Rider, McGuiver, A Team... The same critiques applied to Paw Patrol in the article would applie to all of them.
Also it calls the Mayor in Paw Patrol tyrannical when there's no evidence of repression or autocracy in the show, and I find it funny that he fantasizes with a resistance composed of poets and religious types. As if religious types weren't on the oppressing end of autocracies most of the time along history.
Just go read the plot of the Sad Story of Henry and know it is just one of many bleak episodes: https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry