I was watching Robot Chicken the other night when my lady love brought up how disgusting\disturbing she thought the show was with all of the violence and whatnot. [Shakes head …I think I was just channeling Dr. Christopher Turk for a second there]
Today I asked her how that show was different from the cartoons we grew up watching. Wily E. Coyote suffered far worse at the hands of his own ineptitude, and the high manufacturing and quality control standards of the (obviously based in China) ACME corporation. Tom Cat was cut up and lacerated in far more ways than the most diabolical sushi chef could have ever imagined; not too mention suffering through levels of blunt force trauma that would make the boys that play with the supercollider envious. Do we even have to bring up the indignities that Elmer J. Fudd suffered at the hands, errr…I mean to say paws, of our favorite cross dressing member of the Leporidae family. Her response to my query was “I don’t know…. It’s just different” I of course respect her opinion but have a hard time seeing why she feels that way. Granted, the gore is a bit more pronounced on R.C. but I think red play dough looks just like red play dough, even when it is squirting out of a Rocky Balboa action figure’s eye socket. I, in many ways, find this much more cartoonish than a shotgun blast to a ducks face or Tom getting his tail stuck in the chop-o-matic. In the cartoon the gore is self and medium consistent, and therefore more realistic. Whereas the stop action animated play dough gore just looks silly ”bleeding” out of a plastic toy. To me it’s more reminiscent of when Stretch Armstrong sprung a leak, than of various viscera.
As I sit here typing, the thought occurs to me that in the case of R.C., it may just be that I am male and she is female, and as children we played with our toys in drastically different ways. I realize that the things that the characters on R.C. do to each other,albeit with significantly more sarcasm and cynicism, are the same things that little boys have been imagining when they are playing with their action figures since before G.I. Joe was in basic training. I have watched a friend’s granddaughter play with her dolls (yes, boys have action figures, girls have dolls) and I don’t recall ever hearing Dora scream out in pain because Thomas the tank engine ran over her at the behest of the Dark Lord of the Sith. In point of fact I think the train said “excuses me please” on that particular afternoon, and as I recollect, Darth Vader was no where to be seen. I do on the other hand, remember my friends and me conceiving, and acting out things with our star wars figures that would have made Torquemada wince, then give full points for style and originality. Nothing can surpass little boys sheer capacity for creative fiendishness; to quote a certain excessively rotund, dead, movie icon “The horror, the horror…”
(Big lit nerd points if you can remember who originally made that pronouncement and in what book. Don't cheat and Google it ya' filthy heathen) Maybe this is the appeal of R.C. it’s like playing with our toys allover again, except this time the production values are slightly higher.
So what’s your take on the issue?
5 comments:
I think it really has a great deal more to do with the gore factor than the violence factor. I have noticed, within myself, that I will watch all manner of violence and never bat an eye, but the moment something more than a trickle of blood or gore appears it becomes a complete turn-off. And that is across the board whether it is a movie or a cartoon.
Is it because I am a girl.. maybe. I'm not a psych person and have done absolutely no research on it - but through life I have learned that there are many viewpoints and such that tend to be primarily of one sex or the other.
However, I have a feeling that often it isn't so much the actual violence as it is the protrayal of the realistic aftermath (blood & gore) of that violence that is what your wonderful lady love and many women react to.
At least “R.C.”…….
wait, wait I have to deal with that first. Brian come on man you spell out Torquemada but you abbreviate Robot Chicken. On top of that you don’t even give us the perfunctory hereby know as R.C. notification.
ANYWAY.
Back to the response…..
At least ROBOT CHICKEN put the gore out there. All these people decrying the violence in today’s TV are the same masses that giggled at the Three Stooges and Popeye (the most violent cartoon ever produced with a violent act every 2 seconds on average). Then as the v chip censers out any “bad” content we wonder as our kids can’t compete or why were are running down the government protect me road. Hell nothing goes wrong that can’t be fixed in 22 minutes. I say we need to see more of it all, but screw this weak stuff that is produced edited and slicked up for primetime. No, no, no, we need Sierra Leone in our living rooms 24/7, the street life of orphans in Darfur, North Korean starvation live and in living color. Maybe instead of looking away we need to look into the abyss. You see people use to see this type of stuff in their own home towns or flee from conflicts that crashed through the living room wall as the cannons thundered across the country side. We have not, as a society we have been protected by the oceans and by our own good fortunes we have escaped. This will not last and we had better prepare or I forecast a landscape full of catatonic living corpses that cannot come to terms with how “ unfair it all is”!
Bwaaaaaahaaaaaa!!!!!!!!
Mea culpa,mea culpa, mea maxima culpa
BTW did you know that most spell checkers hate Latin...
I think part of it is motivation. In many old cartoons first was the story then came the catastrophes. Usually the bad things happened to those who deserved them either throgh being "bad" or their own stupidity. Now it seems that it starts with what gross thing can be thought of then how could it go in a story. Also its random there is no sense of karma for lack of a better word. I also confess that I hate Three Stooges about as much. In general I have a low tolerance for slapstick. A bit is funny more is just dumb.
Did anyone see the 2007 Academy Award winning short "Madame Tutli-Putli"? I was able to insta-watch it through Netflix (love the "Watch Instantly" feature!). Anyhow, it won, I think, because the characters, though puppets, tapped this uncanny human frailty. I found it beautiful, but very disturbing. This conversation kind of reminded me of how certain works of art/animation have these qualities.
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