Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for December 02, 2020

Well, acceptance is increasing. Maybe someday, unicorns will be able to show themselves to humans without the Shield of Boringness.

Really not narrowing it down… wow we watched some messed up stuff when we were younger.

“It was a different time” applies to a lot of things. Mostly Disney movies where some characters smoked.

That’s in fact one of the major dualities around the great British 70s sitcom “Mind Your Language”.

It focuses on an ESL class taught by Jeremy Brown (Barry Evans), full of minorities, all of whom have their issues and accents with learning the language, played up for comic effect.

The BBC canned the show after three seasons fearing racial backlash from the countries and communities mentioned…

…which, ironically, turned out…

…to be its biggest fans! And even today they still want more!

Why? Because the “stereotypes” reflected their memories of the old country and harmonized with their experiences in the new one! (As they still do, and you need to be an ESL teacher – like my college “twin sister”, now living and teaching in Orleans – to get this)

So maybe while Marlo Thomas and John Ritter have suffered the passage of time…

…Barry Evans, Albert Moses, Francoise Pascal and George Camiller will weather through.

(For more on cultural differences between the old and the new, watch “Bob Hearts Abishola”)

Whoa. I’m pretty sure that laying that on a kid is bad parenting. Though if I recall correctly (not quite 70 years later), I pretty much figured that all adults were too lame to pay attention to, unless there was a potential for punishment or food…

I was pondering this topic earlier. Like we will ban song of the South or F-Troop or part of Dumbo but Hogan’s Heroes is still on nd we ll still love “A Christmas Story”

A couple years ago I tried to watch an episode of ALF. All I could think was, “I can’t believe this was one of my favorite shows in the 80s!”

That’s for sure. I didn’t know the LGBTQA+ group didn’t exist until years later since they weren’t blatant with it in the kids shows I watched. It wasn’t until Modern Family that I was shown that they form family units

I’ve read a lot of ‘40s comic books—it’s weird how one can be nostalgic about an era that ended before one was born—and WOW I’ve seen things. “It was a different time,” indeed. But I understand (and, to a degree, accept) that, without condoning or making excuses for the truly deplorable stuff. And it wasn’t all awful; even in wartime Batman or the Justice Society would park the jingoism for a brief moment and celebrate American diversity.

But this is also true of some of my favorite British TV comedies from years past. The Young Ones or Father Ted would get “risky” while making fun of racism, but Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers would occasionally be straight-up racist. (And there’s MY ultimate heartbreaker—seeing that John Cleese has aged over recent years into just another hypocritical reactionary bigot, and realizing that even back then he was probably the source of the uglier stuff in the aforementioned shows.)

So if MGM wants to tack a disclaimer to the beginning of Gone With The Wind, or Disney wants to keep Song of the South locked in the vault, or Warners doesn’t want to release certain cartoons because of blatantly bigoted content, that’s fine by me. It’s theirs to do with as they please—and I know the ones bawling “censorship” the loudest are simply angry that society is growing up and they don’t want to come with.

It’s cyclical. The kids of today will be horrified at how offensive the entertainment of their children will be.

For tomorrow, your judginess will weigh you like a millstone.

Or, many people today are overly sensitive scolds incapable of seeing the humor in things from times past.

The show business now is worst than in the previous century.

I really like mom.

When I see this sort of thing come up, I always ask who it is that is really offended by whatever perceived slight is being made. The problem is that while some slights have been legitimately identified as being offensive to the people that are being slighted, others are simply the result of where a slight is imagined and is called out not by those that are slighted but by those that perceive some possible situation that, in the end, doesn’t exist. Too often, especially these days, some cry-bully will kvetch about some word or other that they believe has an offensive meaning and insist we do not use it. The most recent example I came across was the word “boob”. Somebody got really upset when they heard it. (My response was to enquire if they had ever seen The Beatles in Yellow Submarine, in particular the scenes featuring Jeremy Hillary Boob Phd.)

This is starting to get boring

As an example of how any common truth can turn out to be misguided with more knowledge, I like to mention to those particularly militant, self righteous, in your face vegans that some scientists just recently discovered plants make a tiny scream-like noise only when damaged or harvested. Plus, that whole hectares-wide mushroom/forest tree communication thing….. just pointing out in this sinful world there is no such thing as a cruelty-free lunch. yeah, I’m not proud, but it is a satisfying guilty takedown. here’s a link https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-record-stressed-out-plants-emitting-ultrasonic-squeals-180973716/

Probably the best advice ever!

Preachiness, however, is eternal.

At least the 90’s showed some progress. Shows like Friends and Gilmore Girls tried to rectify some of the male domination.

Better than Dion releasing a song in the early 60’s that’s casually misogynistic (though The Wanderer still kind of slaps).

What if there’s a story arc where Phoebe & Marigold use magic to travel to the future and they meet “Adult Phoebe”?!

The Flintstones existed in a time when commercials weren’t kept separate from the shows, and they had commercials for cigarettes embedded in the show (along with incredibly sexist tropes).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAExoSozc2c

It’s also that as a child some of that stuff would go over your head no matter what decade it is. We didn’t notice it because of what she explained but also because well…we were kids! lol

In other words: the powers that be decided everything is offensive. So the alphabet group gets their collective panties in a wad over notheing.

Just LOOK at her dad’s expression while her mom was saying “GO MY CHILD! Luxuriate in your blessful ignorance!”

they must be watching the dana carvey show