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The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

theguardian.com

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Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#81

Post by dragonwriter »

KSteffensen wrote: post #11

The same content warning has been added to 'Aladdin' (the 1992 cartoon, not the Will Smith shameless money grab). I'm wading into shark-filled waters here but could someone please explain the racist bits of Aladdin to me?

> the Will Smith shameless money grab

I have yet to come up with any explanation besides racism for why the live action Aladdin, and specifically the casting of Smith as the Genie, is the thing among all the recent live-action Disney remake films and TV recyclings that is disproportionately singled out for this treatment. I mean, sure Disney is a particularly aggressive money making machine and this description is accurate for basically everything they ever do, but why this one gets singled out above all others?

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#82

Post by BrandoElFollito »

mcphage wrote: post #45
jpm_sd wrote: post #6

I adored the Muppet Show as a kid. Tried watching it with my daughters this weekend, since it just became available. "Dad, this is weird. This is really weird. It's not even a show! Just weird little scenes!" ["not even a show" = no connective plot] These kids have all kinds of precision-engineered laser-guided entertainment aimed squarely at their cerebral cortex. They don't need the Muppet Show like I did, I guess.

The show also emphasized the guest stars, who even for me are often a generation out of recognizing, so there's no way my young children have any idea who they are. If they were modern celebrities your kids might have more patience for them.

So imagine how it was for us in France, we had no idea who the guests were and there was nobody who could tell us.

When I watched the show as a kid I did not know they were supposed to be famous, I though they were just people from the street.

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#83

Post by ojnabieoot »

dragonwriter wrote: post #80
ojnabieoot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aladdin was obviously not intended to be racist and was probably made by people with good intentions. The same could be said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Song of the South. But 1992 was a dramatically more racist and reactionary era than 2021, and the 1992 film really is unacceptably racist to show to children. It is impossible to ignore that Jasmine/Aladdin both have light skin, European faces, and American accents, whe…

> But 1992 was a dramatically more racist and reactionary era than 2021 No, IMO, it wasn't. It was a dramatically less antiracist era, which isn't the same thing. (That is, active racism wasn't much more prevalent in 1992, and maybe even less prevalent, but active antiracism —especially in the US concerning targeted groups other than blacks—was much less prevalent.)

You are just wrong: in the early 90s 55% of US whites were opposed to interracial marriage (compared to 13% opposition in 2013) [1]. In my view this one shocking and outrageous stat is enough to refute your point. But also look at the political world then. Ron Paul was selling virulently racist propaganda in 1992 while serving as a representative [2]. Someone simply could not get away with that today - even Steve Scalise would call for them to be expelled from the House. In 1990 David Duke came dangerously close to becoming a US senator (after serving four years as a representative) and in 1992 was still very powerful in LA politics. This was the era that Rush Limbaugh rose to great fame (and he certainly had the most racist major radio program the country had seen since the 60s). Hatred towards homosexuals was standard - it was rare even for even snooty liberal art films to treat gay people like human beings (showing off drag queens was representation enough).

The country has become more progressive since then (despite the Republicans specifically becoming more reactionary on the whole).

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Paul_newsletters

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#84

Post by BrandoElFollito »

rawfan wrote: post #40
beervirus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No warning needed. It’s ok to mock them if they’re white.

Germany here. We're fine being mocked for being white, thank you very much. Even my neighbors from Gambia, Spain or Columbia are fine with that as a reminder for our shitty history, to keep the remembering alive to never repeat that shit.

I think that Germany has gone too far with that. I am the third generation after the war (born in the 70's) and I have friendly feelings about Germany. I am French and our countries fought for millenia, and there there was Pétain and everything.

My German friends told me that WW2 at school was presented in much details, explaining how Germans fucked up. Some people still expect Germans to apologize 80 years after the fact.

If I was German I would be pissed off and I am not surprised that the are neo-Nazi waves because of that. The treaty of Versailles should have taught everyone a lesson.

My children speak German and when they meet penpals from Heilderberg you could see that history was history for them (they child not care less, they had Instagram stuff to share).

With this in mind, I still do not know what to make out of this : https://youtu.be/HMQkV5cTuoY

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#85

Post by dragonwriter »

ojnabieoot wrote: post #83
dragonwriter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But 1992 was a dramatically more racist and reactionary era than 2021 No, IMO, it wasn't. It was a dramatically less antiracist era, which isn't the same thing. (That is, active racism wasn't much more prevalent in 1992, and maybe even less prevalent, but active antiracism —especially in the US concerning targeted groups other than blacks—was much less prevalent.)

You are just wrong: in the early 90s 55% of US whites were opposed to interracial marriage (compared to 13% opposition in 2013) [1]. In my view this one shocking and outrageous stat is enough to refute your point. But also look at the political world then. Ron Paul was selling virulently racist propaganda in 1992 while serving as a representative [2]. Someone simply could not get away with that today - even Steve Sca…

> in the early 90s 55% of US whites were opposed to interracial marriage

In the early 90s, roughly 80% of whites were opposed to laws against interracial marriage, but a larger share thought “disapproved” of it. Was that racism, or an assessment of it's viability based on life experience of older adults growing up a society where racism had always been prevalent? A hint might be that it wasn't until the mid-1990s that Black support for interracial marriage started climbing from where it had been since the 1970s. [0][1]

> . In 1990 David Duke came dangerously close to becoming a US senator (after serving four years as a representative) and in 1992 was still very powerful in LA politics.

And in 2000 his superior performance with his appeal to his white supremacist base was explicitly cited by Donald J. Trump when he dropped his bid for the Reform Party nomination—before reinventing himself politically and coming back 16-years later using the same tactics and appeal to the same ideals to win first a major party nomination and then the Presidency.

Whites in America seem to think that racism continued being less of a problem over time through to today, but for blacks, in a number of areas, that perception increased starting in the late 1990s. [2]

> The country has really become dramatically more progressive since then (despite the Republicans specifically becoming more reactionary on the whole).

I think that's arguably true, but only in a way consistent with my description earlier: it is much more that (a significant subset of) the not-racist segment has become much more actively anti-racist than that the country has become less racist. This has also resulted in racial issues being much more polarizing.

[0] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/programs/racial-attitudes

[1] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/ra...

[2] https://igpa.uillinois.edu/sites/igpa.uillinois.edu/files/ra...

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#86

Post by kebman »

loudmax wrote: post #54
kebman wrote: post #21

Hey, didn't Disney make those war-time toons where they made fun of Germans? I guess they'll probably slap a warning on them now...

Germans? If you're going to look into Disney wartime propaganda films, Disney made some anti-Japanese cartoons that in retrospect are pretty overtly racist. I'm not bringing this up to make Disney out as any kind of villain. These old films are a reflection of the times they were made. The nation was at war and Disney wanted to do their part to help the effort. Times change.

So when they do it to the Japanese, it's racism, but when they do it to the Germans, it somehow isn't?

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#87

Post by anoonmoose »

prepend wrote: post #78
_zn02 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disney is putting a content warning before content they think might need a warning. There is no content in Mulan that they think needs a warning, so there is no need to put a content warning in. What you're doing is whataboutism, and imo it doesn't sound like any solution would make you happy.

You think there’s no content that needs a warning, but others may. And that’s kind of the point (people may be hurt remembering civil war and slavery and people may be hurt knowing that the content supported the construction and operation of concentration camps, etc). I’m not concerned with being happy, I’m just trying to understand the value system that Disney is using to make these notices. I don’t think it’s poten…

I think you are, perhaps intentionally, missing my point. If they had shot all of the scenes that they did shoot in China somewhere else, the movie ("the content") would be exactly the same, but you would have nothing to complain about. Which means your complaint isn't the content of the movie, it's how/where they filmed it. Disney isn't adding random warnings, they are adding content warnings- warnings about content. You do not find the content of the film objectional, you find where they filmed it objectional, and those are two different things.

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#88

Post by loudmax »

kebman wrote: post #86
loudmax wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germans? If you're going to look into Disney wartime propaganda films, Disney made some anti-Japanese cartoons that in retrospect are pretty overtly racist. I'm not bringing this up to make Disney out as any kind of villain. These old films are a reflection of the times they were made. The nation was at war and Disney wanted to do their part to help the effort. Times change.

So when they do it to the Japanese, it's racism, but when they do it to the Germans, it somehow isn't?

Well, yes, of course.

The Germans were the same race as the whites that dominated America in the 1940's, including Walt Disney himself. To think that race played no part of the propaganda of the times is delusional.

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#89

Post by mcphage »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #82
mcphage wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The show also emphasized the guest stars, who even for me are often a generation out of recognizing, so there's no way my young children have any idea who they are. If they were modern celebrities your kids might have more patience for them.

So imagine how it was for us in France, we had no idea who the guests were and there was nobody who could tell us. When I watched the show as a kid I did not know they were supposed to be famous, I though they were just people from the street.

> When I watched the show as a kid I did not know they were supposed to be famous, I though they were just people from the street.

I love this :-)

Re: The Muppet Show: Disney+ adds content warning of negative depictions of cultures

#90

Post by KSteffensen »

dragonwriter wrote: post #81
KSteffensen wrote: post #11

The same content warning has been added to 'Aladdin' (the 1992 cartoon, not the Will Smith shameless money grab). I'm wading into shark-filled waters here but could someone please explain the racist bits of Aladdin to me?

> the Will Smith shameless money grab I have yet to come up with any explanation besides racism for why the live action Aladdin, and specifically the casting of Smith as the Genie, is the thing among all the recent live-action Disney remake films and TV recyclings that is disproportionately singled out for this treatment. I mean, sure Disney is a particularly aggressive money making machine and this description is ac…

I'm not singling out Aladdin.

IMO all the live action remakes are shameless money grabs. Remakes in general are creative bankruptcy. Very rarely do they bring something new to the table.

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