I'm breaking my scilence here because I ran across this interview with the creator of the show, Word Girl. It's popular in my house. You may remember me mentioning it before, Justin has told me he saw Word Girl fly through our house, and Timothy is often "the butcher" when he's being a bad guy (that's one of the villians on Word Girl because he butchers the English Language!). Gotta love a show whose writers are from The Onion, Saturday Night Live, Mad TV, and Family Guy. I love the show's intent. From increasing vocabulary to helping minority and low income kids, to making the superhero a girl, to her being ethnically ambigous so everyone can relate to her, and helping boys see girls as being capable of being a superhero......there are just many great things about this show.
Some quotes from the interviewer & creator that I agree with:
I also love the fact that the show is smart without being smart-assed. I hate it when my kid watches some show with snotty kids and the next day she's saying some snotty catch phase
I also love how well-rounded the characters are. I love the fact that Becky can kick major robot ass and has an awesome vocabulary but gets all girly over ponies and sucks at art. It seems like so many cartoon characters — especially girls — wind up being flat and one-dimensional, the girly princess or the jock girl or the snob.
Re: influences:
The ones that informed Word Girl were Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bugs Bunny and The Electric Company. They didn't distinguish between adult humor and kid humor — it was just funny. There has been a trend recently to strip away adult humor and in my opinion that has dumbed down television and underestimated what kids are capable of.
1 comment:
It's claire, and i wish i had stuff like that to watch when i was a kid! I can just imagine the butcher talking in half-sentences and putting em-phas-is on the wrong sy-lab-bles.
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