I just read this thing on this website "projectknow", called "Reverse Photoshopping Cartoons", which is a gallery of images and explanations as to why they project a bad body image onto the kids who watch the show. I'm wondering what your thoughts would be on Gohan's entry- It states that teenagers would have a hard time relating to a kid who's completely jacked, and how they might react to their concerns about their body, along with some info about the show and some statistical information.
I’m not gonna pretend to be an expert on childhood obesity, or the effect mass media has on self-image. But I’m wary of articles like these where supposed “experts” try to blame art for society’s woes.
I grew up in the 1980′s, when hysterical adults were worried about satanism for some dumb reason, and a lot of crackpots wanted to find occult references in just about every Saturday morning cartoon on television. The Smurfs were supposed to be satanic, mostly because they used magic as a plot device. I think the hysteria died down by the end of the decade, but here’s an article that discusses a crackpot author targeting the Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers being blasphemous, so this was clearly a thing well into the 90′s. And it was always the same weak-ass argument. “The Smurfs have a character called Papa Smurf, but the Bible says that God is the Father, so there.” Or, “The characters on M.A.S.K. get special powers from their masks, but the Bible says all power comes from God.” It becomes very clear that the people who want you to worry about this stuff get uncomfortable with any sort of televised program that isn’t live footage of a church service. I prefer to think you can be religious and still have a healthy imagination. Even if Papa Smurf really was a satanist, I could still watch his adventures on TV without becoming one myself. I managed to watch Knight Rider without turning into a talking car.
The reason I use “expert” in quotes is because the one tell I picked up on at a very early age is that these kinds of demagogues never do their homework. They like to take shots at pop culture without taking the time to understand or appreciate it. I knew this when pundits would try to criticize my favorite shows for being glorified toy commercials. But they were clearly more than that, and I knew it, because shows like “Transformers” kicked ass. I wanted to buy the toys because the show was written so well that I wanted to make my own Transformer stories with the toys. But nobody wants to see that. They just want to reduce it to a cynical soundbyte so they can pretend to be smart.
In the case of this Project Know article, I see the same thing happening all over again. For openers, the article appears to be written in 2014, and it makes the argument that “cartoons today are slightly different than they were in the past – and this could be having a less-than-positive influence when it comes to reflecting the average person’s physique.” And what cartoons does it use to support this argument?
Dragon Ball Z (1989-1996)
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (1969-1970)
Totally Spies! (2001-2014)
Now, I will grant that a lot of these shows are still on the air today in one form or another, but the point I’m getting at is that they originated a long-ass time ago. The character model for Shaggy has been virtually unchanged since the Nixon administration. He’s been a beanpole for nearly fifty years of near-continuous appearances on American television. Super Saiyan 2 Gohan didn’t hit the U.S. until 2001 or so, but the character model was locked in somewhere around 1993. Daria was introduced in an episode of Beavis and Butthead from 1993. So it’s stupid for Project Know to argue that things have changed when all of these examples are character designs that are literally decades old.
The most recent example they have is Robin from Teen Titans. Basically, he’s really skinny-looking, and the argument is that “his lanky form, thin legs, and wiry arms don’t bear much resemblance to a typical teen today,” and so he “may be a demoralizing role model.” I find this funny, because here’s the version of Robin I grew up with:
Basically, they made him look like a grown-ass man, only a little shorter than the others. How old was Robin supposed to be here? 13? 17? 22? No one ever really spelled that out. I’m pretty sure a lot of this was because they were trying to ape the appearance of Burt Ward in the 1960′s live action Batman show, where Ward was a grown-ass man playing a high-school student.
What Project Know fails to grasp is that the “lanky” design of 2003 was kind of the exception that proves the rule. Most depictions of Dick Grayson make him look jacked up because he grew up as a trapeze artist before he got involved with Batman. The original conceit of the character was that he’s the only kid who can hang with Batman because he’s so insanely buff and agile.
In other words, the usual design for Robin looks a lot like SSJ2 Gohan from DBZ, which “ripple with muscles,” according to Project Know. They say teens would be “unlikely to see their physique being reflected” in Gohan’s body, which is kind of how I felt about Robin thirty-odd years ago. And I suppose 2003 animated Robin resembles how I might have felt about the Shaggy thirty-odd years ago. Except I didn’t give a fuck how Shaggy looked, because I was more into He-Man.
He-Man got a bad rap from everybody. Concerned Parents worried that he was too violent, and I’m sure his ridiculous physique got him in trouble with somebody, and there were all sorts of pagan sorcery and pseudo-occult imagery in the franchise. But if you actually sat down an watched his cartoon, the moral would be something like “Make sure you tell your grandparents how much you love them!” because He-Man was secure in his masculinity. I think my favorite episode is when He-Man’s dad refuses to fight a guy because that’s not how kings are supposed to behave.
It’s the same thing people don’t get about DBZ. Yeah, everyone’s jacked up, but He-Man wasn’t a bodybuilding tutorial. The muscles were just to get your attention so you’d hang around long enough to learn how to be a good person. You see people make good choices and bad choices, and everyone learns from the consequences of those decisions. And they’re really, really buff. That’s the motif.
As impossible as the figures in the cartoon were, the toys all looked like this:
He-Man toys didn’t make a lick of sense and nobody gave a shit because they were toys, not anatomy textbooks. You could barely get that shield to stay on his arm, and there was nowhere to put his axe when he wasn’t using it. His bracers were flesh-colored because Mattel said “fuck you, that’s why”. I won’t presume to speak for every MoTU fan of my generation, but I never cried myself to sleep at night because I couldn’t be as muscular and absurdly proportioned as He-Man.
I don’t know how it is for women, but I doubt Daria’s skinny limbs were behind whatever self-image problems they have. From what I’ve seen of Daria, everyone’s incredibly skinny, and they make the “pretty girls” taller and even skinnier to get across that Daria isn’t One of Them. Everything’s relative, after all. It’s the same way Shaggy’s only skinny because Fred is a lot bulkier by comparison. I don’t know if Daria got the formula right, but they were kind of stuck because the character design had already been established, and MTV wanted to use it so they could have the connection to Beavis and Butt-head. In any case, I’ve never seen anyone complain that the character was too skinny to be relatable. Her attitude was what drew people to the character.
I think most audiences are wise to that disconnect. They don’t expect the characters to resemble them physically, nor do they see the characters as a demand for the audience to resemble them. I’ll grant that Sailor Moon and whatsername from Totally Spies! are unnecessarily sexualized, especially given who their target demo is supposed to be. But I think that’s a separate issue.
In terms of body image, Sailor Moon’s head is wider than the rest of her body. She has really, really long legs, but she’s only like 14 or something, so is she just really tall or really skinny, or is it just the art style? I think part of the advantage to these kinds of ridiculous proportions is that you can look at the character and translate them into any sort of proportions you want. So a reader can look at Sailor Moon and kind of see a little of themselves in the design. Not all, but enough to connect with the character. Ultimatley, though, it’s what the character says and does that matters. The skirts and poses are just part of the motif to present that, and I think her audience understands.
I could be way off about all this. It just seems to me that if our society has a self-image problem, then it’s probably because of our society, and not the art that it produces. If anything, characters like He-Man and Sailor Moon are just symptoms of the problem, and the message is “Hey, we have a really powerful message but this was the only way to get anyone to pay attention to it.” Kids don’t feel bad about how they look because TV tells them to. They feel bad because real people they meet in real life make fun of them or criticize their appearance. Or they see other kids getting more attention and they wish they looked or acted more like them. You can turn off the TV, throw away all the books and magazines, but you can’t hide kids from buffer, skinnier kids. You can’t hide kids from buff, skinny adults, who have unrealistic bodies simply because they’ve had more time to work on them.
I don’t know how you solve that problem, but you don’t get there by taking the easy road of blaming art. You’re better off looking for ways to use art to address the problem. For example, what always struck me as ironic about Gohan is that he’s very smart and incredibly ripped and presumably good-looking, but he still struggles with self-confidence issues just like anyone else. The unspoken moral is that he’s no better off than the rest of us, in spite of winning the genetic lottery. That’s something a lot of kids need to hear. You can put a more realistic-bodied Gohan on TV, but I think it’s more constructive to work with the one we have, the one who show kids that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.
But Project Know isn’t going to figure that out anytime soon, seeing how they’re under the mistaken impression that Gohan’s “true age numbers into the hundreds”. I don’t know how they came up with that idea, but it illustrates that whoever wrote this article has no idea what they’re talking about.
