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(Hint: it starts with “Feminist” and ends with “Agitprop”)
If the “every-guy” doesn’t dream of becoming a super-girl, he should
If Feminists designed, then crafted a training-bra of a Saturday morning cartoon it couldn’t end up much better than Discovery Communications and Hasbro Inc’s, new “SheZow,” which premiered June 1, 2013 on kids’ cable channel, The Hub.[1]
It’s the story of an every boy, you know, say one with the totally asexual non-name, Guy, yet who’s described as an “extreme dude.” Guy’s so extreme perhaps even he gets the name-slight, and so right off the bat he usurps the rightful heir to his dead-aunt’s super-girl-power + famous-villain fighting legacy: his twin sister, Kelly.
It needs a down-graded TV-rating
Though the SheZow network’s primary market is “2 to 11,” the new show’s rated TV-7-FV for the Fantasy Violence content. An online sidebar poll at The Hub clearly indicates the program is intended for still impressionable girls (and probably their mothers), therefore I strongly suggest it be given a new cautionary note in its TV-rating.
Though I’m confident the show will fail, nevertheless it warrants a rating of, “FVaM.” For Fantasy-Violence-AGAINST MALES, for reasons I will clearly detail in this essay.
Every week from now on, hilarity, no doubt, will ensue
Of course The Hub should try new ideas. Of course they should strive to make money…it’s what keeps them on-air and pays all those staff salaries. After all, according to Joe Flint in the L.A. Times, in the last 2 ½ years Hasbro has sunk 2/3’s of a BILLION DOLLARS into this children’s TV venture.[2]Private money. Earned money. NOT gimme/government handout money.
Damn straight they have the right to make and market toys and other show peripherals. And though in that recent Times article “kids’ networks” sound like they’re caving to political-correctness by curtailing food-related advertising, they shouldn’t. They shouldn’t feel pressured to parent their viewers in any arena, even nutritional. TV shows in general, and The Hub in particular, aren’t making kids fat. Well, until kids hold the purse strings. They’re just mimicking their disengaged, out-of-control, fat parents (or fat single-moms).
It’s a good thing that entertainment corporations are perceived as “selling” stuff. We taxpayers can’t afford a bunch of networks wallowing at the Government trough: PBS’s mooching is already too much. Sure, execs like Hub CEO, Margaret Loesch probably earn golden parachutes from those ad-revenues; I’m convinced, though, hands on animating creatives in the industry are building up some nice golden umbrellas for themselves, as well. They’re having a hell of a fun-time at work, too, I’d bet.
Cartoons have always incorporated “adult elements”
I get that. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. For example in the Dark Ages, when I was a kid, Rocky & Bullwinkle’s nemesis was actually a duo. Cold-war Soviet spies, named Boris and Natasha. (Wait a minute…so that’s where I got brainwashed into thinking I should be tall and unnaturally slender. No wonder I’m so depressed.)
Anyway, the R & B show’s weekly medley of cartoons was jam-packed with kartoon-Kremlin-directed plots against the unsuspecting headliners, and their various allies & associates, who were mostly bumbling military generals and bombastic government know-it-alls. So sure, the politics went far over the heads of the “intended” audience (me), but it of course supplied plenty of laughs for our parents and whatever other adult viewers were out there.
It doesn’t mean, though, that we didn’t absorb any of those underlying messages: I mean, to this day I don’t just love flying squirrels, I also despise government (especially the statist/totalitarian/Commie-flavored ones) and government-bombasts of all kinds.
Perpetuating a meme
In what I’ve seen online of SheZow, from a 12 minute Episode 1[3] along with the cast of characters & villains, there isn’t one single player that doesn’t act culturally-subversive. Meaning they perpetuate and proliferate the sexist/feminist meme, “See, Males-and-Masculinity are bad.”
Within the first two minutes of the, perhaps shortened, online version of SheZow, Episode 1, the 12-year-old twins are demonstrating who’s the boss in this brave new parent-free world. Budding feminist Kelly quickly puts the kibosh on Guy’s front-yard rough-housing, i.e. skateboarding, with friend, Raz (I’m assuming; not positively ID’d); she then menacingly “glares” her brother into leaving that friend behind. Guy then follows her into the house like a whipped puppy, eyes deferentially downcast.
Next, and in stereotypically reckless-male fashion, Guy misbehaves at his sister-assigned task. But…in doing so the boy uncovers the dead aunt’s hidden talisman-of-superpower. How? By carelessly tossing Auntie’s antiques about the basement where the two undirected kids are working. But, Lordy-Lordy, then he compounds this sin with a single reckless grab. Merely by snatching the just found magical ring from the hands of the Every (you-go-) Girl, Kelly, and mocking the ring’s power (hence, mocking comic book character SheZow) he upsets countless generations of (innocent, trusting, unprotected) hereditary female power and collective-glory. Going even beyond upsetting, he overturns it; suddenly embodies it, literally.
[And isn’t that just what the Patriarchy supposedly did to the Matriarchy, so long ago? Snatched away millennia of peaceful, orderly, empathetic leadership?]
But now the male-bashing can get even “funnier”
With a SWOOSH! Guy’s-a-gal. Or, rather, a pinky-purple drag-hooker: from his skunk-striped long locks and opera length gloves above the waist, to his mini-skirt, leopard leggings, and thigh-high boots down below. After all, it’s just what every “Guy’s” sister dreams of turning a brother into, isn’t it!
[Let’s not even go to the in-between, under that mini… Oh, and don’t think about pink elephants, either.]
Once the so-called “extreme dude” is transmogrified – and, hence, in his place – sister Kelly begins to take almost sadistic pleasure in his every misstep as a “super-girl.” Whether it’s allowing him to leap from a great height, knowing all along the SheZow character can’t fly, gleefully laughing as he smacks to the pavement several stories below, or as he goes wildly out of control and crashes through a brick wall.
Proof that Hub “creatives” & Feminists agree: Males are Bad
Check out the SheZow pages for yourself. You’ll note that the heroine’s opponents/villains total 10…a full eight are male; that’s 80%. So what happened to Equal Opportunity (to be “bad”) on the way to all that Workplace/Personal Empowerment, eh? Not only is the male-female split skewed, but all eight males embody stereotypically “patriarchal” qualities, as I’ll briefly show below.
Male #1 “Boxter,” the twins’ father: he’s an opponent, not a “villain” per se; but consider his bio. It states he literally hates SheZow because she routinely interferes with his police work (read: men’s work).
[Compare this male character’s blatant stupidity – he is after all supposed to be a “crime-stopper”-slash-public safety officer – to his (ex-?) wife “Droosha.” Her bio reads like a heroine named, Single-Mother: “loving, hilarious, mom…poetic artist who supports HER kids in their endeavors and she loves SheZow.”]
Male #2 “Mega Monkey”: he’s “very condescending” and “wants to be worshipped.”
[I mean, what male doesn’t want to be worshipped, right?]
Male # 3 “Cold Finger”: though Timmy Burr’s a kid-villain, they make a point of saying he lives at home with his mother (as if most kids either live on their own, or perhaps to differentiate him from the twins inferred two-parent home); “something happened” between him and SheZow so now he “has it in for (her).”
[It’s possible that since the twins’ aunt was SheZow for many years, the “lives at home with his mother” (in the basement, right?) reference is a failure-to-launch barb. Besides, don’t all boys – and men – have it in for strong, independent women? I hafta wonder why, though, he doesn’t blame his mother for everything that’s wrong in his life, or for not trying to stop what would appear to have been something the previous SheZow did (creepy!) to the even tinier-Timmy?]
Male #4 “Mocktopus”: he’s annoying, condescending (in that he mocks “what people say”), and he has a high-pitched voice (of all things). He’s also self-defeating and “more dangerous to himself than…to others.” These latter two traits don’t really make for a very good villain, so in fact he seems more like a wuss-puss, a mere speedbump, or a feminist’s wet-dream, rather than a true opponent.
[You’ll notice the writers have a “thing” for males with high-pitched voices. To make them more girl-friendly, or just plain “girly,” I wonder?]
Male #5 “Major Attitude”: Since he’s “ex-military” he’s pretty much all starched-uniform, no substance. He still dreams of “taking over (back?) the world,” though, but like the wuss-puss, above, the Major is never successful, and is “actually a softy…self-conscious about his (wait for it…) high-pitched voice.”
[Hm-m-m…again with the unmanly voice. And is a male, who’s “never successful” in his attempt to take back the world just a bit too cocky on the part of Feminism? I mean, we hear the I-Am Woman roaring every day, but who, pray tell, is it that keeps the lights on and the store shelves stocked to this day, ladies?]
Male #6 “Tatoozala” (like Methuselah, I presume): he’s this world’s oldest tattooed White male. But he’s also some kind of magician, since he brings his inked creatures to life to attack our “heroine.”
[Isn’t that just like an old White guy? Getting something else – or somebody else – like tattoos or armed drones, say, to do their bidding, to do their down & dirty work…remotely.]
Male #7 “Brouhaha” (perhaps, Bro-ha-ha): he’s a quote-unquote trickster, from the Happy Days all feminists love-to-hate…the 1950’s. This male also has a very annoying vocal shortcoming: his laugh. But we’re told he, personally, likes it that way. (Typical insensitive male that he is.) He’s pictured holding a pie, which he’s presumably about to toss at some innocent girl, super-girl, or cross-dresser.
[Who knows, perhaps by tossing said sugary bomb this anthropomorphized character will become immortalized in a fictional public service campaign. To protect cartoon girls from cartoon violence perpetrated by mythological male cartoon-creatures or cartoon-cretins.]
Male #8 Le Pigeon: this last villainous creature embodies and therefore takes a jab at several key “conservative” (read: Patriarchal, White, male) concepts: Capitalism, the Founders & their Founding Principles, along with a guns/weaponry bonus. Since the competitive, decidedly masculine profit-motivated economic system that spawned “genetically modified” Western agriculture products is evil (not to mention they make feeding ourselves and a large portion of the rest of the world possible), so too are those products. By extension, Le (genetically-modified) Pigeon is also evil to his core.
The bird looks distinctly like a bald eagle, with its heavy raptor beak and outstretched/iconically posed wings (the grey tones notwithstanding); it’s wearing “Ben Franklin-esque” glasses. It sports some sort of a gun (or other weapon) which may also be a play on both WWII French resistance fighters, or it may reference the more recent 21st century American-conservative allusions to military passivity on the part of France during the early years of the Iraq war. (Remember the re-naming of French fries, to Freedom fries?)
Finally, the female “baddies”
The two female “villains” are described benignly, if not apologetically. The first in silly terms; the second in somewhat pathetic terms:
Female #1 “SheZap”: she’s a “clone and shadow side” of the super-girl character. The worst thing about her? She calls SheZow “toots.”
[Wow. That’ll give the viewers non-stop nightmares and provide endless plot-twisting opportunities for the writers, I’m sure.]
Female #2 “Tara” (clearly no relation to a AVfM’s “Dr. Tara”): this old broad is a former friend of the twins’ dead aunt. She resented the other’s popularity and now feels “forgotten and bitter.” Tara once was a super-heroine, though now she’s “intent on destroying SheZow.”
[I’m rather surprised the feminist-overlords let this stereotypical “liberated” broad character slide under the radar. Tara wasted her youth chasing career-fame and failed. Now what’s she got besides wrinkles, dull greying hair, and a grand delusion? Oh, I forgot: a WASP waist. But as to the delusion, she doesn’t seem to realize her rival, old auntie, is already dead…which means there’s actually nothing left for her to do. Except to maybe consider lipo for those thighs, girl-fren!]
Much ado about a failure
With Hasbro feeling the heat for merchandising too much on The Hub, SheZow is destined to fail financially (and that’s all that matters in a real business). After all, it won’t attract little boys. Though they certainly would play with a gun-toting bird, or a pie-throwing fox, sorry Charlie, those violent “action figures” just won’t happen.
And how many little girls want super-She dolls that they know are boys, “underneath?” Not to mention the 8-out-of-10 villain “dolls” would only come with one outfit (hence one pair of shoes).
But even if this blatant poke-fun-at-the-everyguy show flops, the moustache-twirling Feminist apparatchiks will be ba-a-a-ack. Like Snidley Whiplash before them, they, too, will happily tie the little Nells – and the little Neils – to the train tracks, sacrificing even “the children’s” Saturday mornings to their loco-female supremacist-motives.
—Now you’ve gotten a whiff of the deep dark agenda that’s under the mini-skirt of “SheZow”–
Online References Used
[1] Show overview and character bios from: http://www.hubworld.com/shezow/shows/shezow/cast-gallery
“SheZow (overview)
Twelve-year-old Guy is an extreme dude who inherits the power ring of his deceased aunt – the amazing superhero SheZow! The ring gives him villain-battling super powers, but was meant to be worn by a girl and the result is absolutely she-larious!”
Rating : TV-Y7 (FV)
“Guy
A lovable yet mischievous tween who hates responsibility, Guy Hamdon is suddenly forced to save the world as the legendary female superhero SheZow. Trapped inside a crazy female superhero costume with big hair, high heeled go-go boots and she-mazing superpowers like mega strength and she-riffic speed, Guy “plays” the part of heroine on his way to becoming a super man.”
“Kelly
Head of the International SheZow Fan Club, Kelly fancies herself an expert on all things “SheZow” and all things in general. She’s an adorable do-gooder who was destined to become SheZow, until her twin brother snatched the power ring and her fate right out of the palm of her hand. Not that she’s bitter or anything.”
“Maz
Completely genuine and enthusiastic to a fault, Maz is like a brother to Guy. He loves being SheZow’s sidekick, dressing as an array of creative personalities like Bed Head, Nick of Time and Captain Debacle just to name a few. So, which sidekick is he going to be today? Who knows? Anything and everything is possible.”
[2] http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-fi-ct-hub-20130528,0,5722419.story
[3] Season 1: Episode 1 http://www.hubworld.com/watch/2418448836001/shezow-shezow-happens-ep-1-season-1-episode
About the network: http://corporate.discovery.com/brands/us/hub/
“The Hub is a multi-platform joint venture between Discovery Communications and Hasbro, Inc., that entertains, enlightens, empowers and educates children and their families. The cable television network features original programming as well as content from Discovery’s library of award-winning children’s educational programming; from Hasbro’s rich portfolio of entertainment and educational properties built during the past 90 years; and from leading third-party producers worldwide.”
About the network’s website: http://www.hubworld.com/about-us
“Hubworld.com (the website you’re on right now) is a playful and transformative world, where kids & families can explore endless, play-driven opportunities.”
TV ratings delineated: http://www.tvguidelines.org/ratings.htm
