For those of you that get worked up at how the advertising media portray men to women, a blast from the past from Ace of Spades. Click on the picture at the bottom of the post.
Also, check out the fake kick from the same post. Exquisite. Pity it was just in a preseason game:
Category: Theater
About the Author
3 Responses to Doofus Dads’ Predecessor
Leave a Reply
please enter your email address on this page.
Ha ha, times certainly have changed. Today an ad like that would be as unthinkable as one with black children eating watermelon and fried chicken.
We have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly (a free gift offer sort of thing), and a recent article about the difficulty of writing TV scripts pointed out that writing workplace sitcoms is very hard nowadays because it is no longer permitted to show a woman character as scatterbrained or lazy or indeed as anything less than fully competent on the job. Even the classic I Love Lucy episode showing Lucy’s misadventures in the candy factory could no longer be made.
I’m not sure that’s true about the difficulty in writing female characters. The top female in The Office is smart and competent and I suppose the #2 (Angela) is as well, but you still have Kelly and Meredith, both of whom are walking punchlines. Parks & Recreation also has a Michael Scottesque lead. She isn’t bad at her job, but she is pretty silly and scatterbrained and at times lamebrained. All of the characters are pretty screwy except one male and one female character.
I guess it is more of a challenge, though. I remember a black actor writing an article for some publication frustrated with the tendency of some black activists to object to every black character as either a stereotype or a whitewash. I think it does illustrate the challenges.
I actually asked some minorities about it on a usenet for comic books and they gave me some pretty good advice: insert more than one minority (even if the second has a small role), demonstrate some differences between the characters to illustrate some range and you’ll undercut a lot of the objections.
I think that the same applies to female characters. If the only female character or all the female characters are ditze or layabouts, that’s a problem. But if you’ve got a “good” one or two, you can get away with a bad one.
Of course, no such balance is required for whites and males, but such is the way of the world.
I think that the same applies to female characters. If the only female character or all the female characters are ditze or layabouts, that’s a problem. But if you’ve got a “good” one or two, you can get away with a bad one.
Seinfeld was a case that seems to prove the opposite but really doesn’t. Elaine, the only major woman character, certainly was quirky and portrayed in a generally non-flattering manner, but the writers were able to get away with it because all the male characters were just as quirky. Of course, the show first went on the air close to 20 years ago, when political correctness was far weaker than it is today. It could well be that a modern remake would have to show Elaine as an unflawed character.