They De-Tumblrized Ms. Frizzle
@transfagsculine
#how do yall whitewash a white woman
why would you leave this in the tags lmao
Allow me to explain:
Everyone dropping this pic
And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead
These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES
This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.
Also others have said it before me but I couldn't find it in the scroll backs but they whitewashed all the kids too. They same face syndromed everyone to either be easier to draw or be more ambiguous so as not to offend or both or something, and it just makes me sad
Fuck it I did the digging cause I'm still mad
And that’s not even to mention what they did to the bus itself.
The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.
HOW DO Y’ALL WHITEWASH A BUS?!
It's gives "anti abortion Jehova's Witness cartoon" now
This, I find, is an excellent example of how “aesthetic cleanliness” usually just means making something less interesting. Taking the bus and Frizz’s dresses as a relatively unproblematic, but very stupid, example first. What the showrunners have done here is seen the visuals of the original show and tried to declutter them for the tastes of modern audiences. The issue is that the taste they’re catering to is that of parents because they are generally choosing what children watch, and those parents don’t like clutter, and they see all of those fun shapes and colors as visual noise. YouTuber Tantacrul has a great video on how this effects children in music education. In short it’s why no children’s music toys have the capabilities for experimentation that normal instruments do, parents can’t stand “inharmonious sounds”
The much bigger problem here comes when this design philosophy bleeds into the character designs. What they’ve tried to do is make the show easier to look at by smoothing everything out making it all look a little more “cohesive.” Problem is that when you homogenize everything you, well… homogenize everything. Skin tones are lightened, curls are straightened, Noses are smoothed, fat kids are made skinny, it all becomes less diverse and less interesting. It paints a picture of an executive who thinks that people of color and other marginalized people won’t sell, their version of the magic school bus will be much neater, much more fitting to show our kids.
TL;DR:
Problem a) they tried to declutter the visuals to cater to modern parents who like “clean aesthetics,” without considering what will be fun for kids to watch
Problem b) in doing so they whitewashed the character designs and send the deeply insidious message that certain people don’t fit the desired aesthetic and are thus, not fit to be represented in kids tv
Brutally I suspect it's also because the 'cleaner' visuals are less detailed and therefore take less time to animate and are therefore cheaper to produce
Why pay an already overworked animator for ten hours of actually good content when you can pay them for five hours of 'modernised' (read: shittier) content?
I hate being the “when *I* was a kid, we had REAL [insert thing here]” older generation, but…
When I was a kid, we had real representation on TV.
Captain Planet and the Planeteers: a continuation of the original Captain Planet, same cast and premise. From left: Kwame from Africa, Linka from the Soviet Union (changed to “Eastern Europe” in later seasons), Captain Planet (a force created by Gaia), Matí from South America, Yi from Asia, and Wheeler from North America. Not pictured: Gaia, spirit of Earth, ambiguously brown and probably supposed to represent various indigenous cultures. The representation here has an additional layer of “oh wow” because in the US in the 1980s you did not acknowledge that someone from the USSR could be a good person EVER. Linka ran the risk of every single episode being labeled pro-Soviet propaganda. The show has never been rebooted, although apparently Leonardo DiCaprio wants to do a reboot movie. I anticipate that Gaia will go from being a pretty-but-not-sexualized probably-indigenous-of-some-kind 40something to a busty white 19-year-old and Linka will be “reimagined” as Western European, completely missing the entire point of the original.
Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. While Jason David Frank (Green Ranger) wasn’t Native American, he was certainly believed to be in the schoolyard, and never committed any act that would cause that association to lead to bad stereotypes—basically he became accidental representation and wasn’t going to betray that trust. Thuy Trang (Yellow Ranger) was Vietnamese-American and credited under her own name, and Walter Jones (Black Ranger) was dark-skinned but never a “Black best friend” or “sassy Black boy.” He was a full and valuable member of the team. Yes, the uniform colors are unfortunate, but it’s also likely they’re pure coincidence—brighter colors were often assigned to female characters, and within only a couple years
Here’s the current Power Rangers cast.
There are four non-white characters in this crew, which is great, EXCEPT YOU’D NEVER KNOW IT TO LOOK AT THEM. Two of the people in this image are Latine. Can you figure out which two? I fucking can’t.
This one was actually slightly before my time but I feel the need to post it here to ask when the last time was that you saw a Native American main character who’s also a hero. Was it weird? YES! Would a reboot have to deal with the fact that someone on the production team heard the term “spirit animal” and very clearly misunderstood what it meant? YES! Would it be really fucking cool to have a show for kids these days with a Native protagonist who chooses to be a mediator rather than to solve problems by force? YES!!! If you’re an anime fan, BraveStarr was basically the original Vash the Stampede (albeit human and without all the accidental destruction)!
Not only has BraveStarr never been rebooted, I can’t even find evidence it’s ever been mined for ideas. Any reboot would have to do some serious work because concepts of what was acceptable in the 1980s are, well, dated, but done right it could be really cool.
While everyone else was yelling about Enola Holmes and how cool it was to finally get girl detectives, I was wondering what ever happened to my girl Shelby Woo and her grandfather’s detective agency.
How about Gullah Gullah Island? With a cast of real Gullah Geechee people, talking about actual Gullah Geechee culture, often using and explaining the actual Geechee language? Do you know how often they’ve been represented in media? This. This is it. Gullah Gullah Island IS IT. It’s from the mid-90s. And this wasn’t a PBS show, where you expect greater diversity. This was on Nickelodeon. This was mainstream television.
There are two sets of two siblings in this photo, meaning we have one Asian family, one Black family, two white families…AND A JEWISH FAMILY. THE PICKLESES ARE JEWISH. THERE ARE TWO JEWISH HOLIDAY SPECIALS.
We had more characters of color, they were actually allowed to be DARK, they actually came from and celebrated different cultures.
Bring it back.
The above is correct in that in the 90s we had more Visually Dark Skin characters that were very Visually of different races (but some mildly can border on racist caricatures if not careful but that's another topic.)
It doesn't mean the lighter skin people of those races are less valid- they are and are VERY much worth having on screen too, it's just the current state of tv overall decided to use them mostly as the DEFAULT and the compounded nature of both racism and colorism is at work which benefits no one.
Not to mention they did actually attempt (I think they're working on it a bit more now?) to include more disabled characters back then. (I think there's been improvements over the last something odd years on that front to varying degrees.)
(ignore the read more it's me going on about Power Rangers mostly but the image above is missing the Orange Ranger who is an asian girl. Bringing the total of Seven rangers: Four boys, Three Girls which is actually a lot of girls on the same team for once!)
