Dora, Thomas the Train and Spiderman - Page 2

[tzs]

i am also of the mindset that characters are annoying and a disturbing trend.

but this thread somehow jogged my memory of being a kid and being obsessed with pacman. i remember being allowed one pacman t-shirt and also putting on a pacman theatrical performance at school with puppets made from felt and popsicle sticks.

mind you this was almost 25-30 years ago and based on a video game that we didn't even own and i don't remember marketing being as intense. maybe it's just a natural tendency of kids to latch on to these things (which the toy companies etc.. play into.) i dunno.

for modern day anecdotes i have a super bright 20 month-old in my class. i doubt her parents are big into characters and she hadn't shown any interest until the other day when she saw an elmo on another kid's diaper that we were joking about during his diaper change (i personally hate elmo, he has no old-school cred...but the kid loves him so be it.) next day she is beside herself obsessed with elmo and it took all my teacher tricks to get her plain diaper on her while avoiding a full-blown elmo meltdown. and this is from one diaper. beats me.

[ChetMC]

Originally Posted by JudiAU

We don't do any characters, I don't care how inoffensive the origins. Anything that has an agressive marketing campaign to kids is out. I don't care if it comes from PBS or "a book" you try and sell over and over and over to kids and you aren't coming into my house. And which "book" anyway, the books that launched the media empire or 1,000 and crummy knock-offs in the "style of" or "illustrated like." It astonishes me that people pay money to let their kids advertise stuff.

And kids do sit around and talk "characters" all they time when they are exposed to them. Some kids pretty much only know characters and their play (stilted, unimaginative, locked into the script) shows that. There have been several exhaustive studies that link the two.

It really bothers me that I try so hard to protect my kids for these things and everything pretty much everywhere is trying to force it down their throats. Certainly force it down my throat.

I understand this to a point. My SIL once suggested that a particular TV station aimed at preschoolers was okay because it didn't have any ads. First of all, they have tonnes of "sponsorships" that get mentioned between the shows and they look suspiciously like ads to me, and second of all, the shows ARE THE COMMERCIALS.

Nevertheless, I can't cut out all characters. Our kids love the original Thomas stories from Rev. W. Awdry. We have the books with the original art. Trains and track are lovely toys, and I saw no reason to go out of my way to get BRIO trains when the kids like Thomas so much and Thomas products are readily available.

I've never seen kids exclusively lock into scripts from character series. I've only seen kids use it as a starting point, pulling together elements from all sorts of different things. We did this when I was little too. We played Care Bears and He-Man (and the Care Bears meet He-Man) and there was no shortage of imagination in the bizarre plots that we developed (which related only loosely to the original franchises).

If you read the original Madeline and it becomes a beloved story what's wrong with a Madeline doll? Or do you not read the original Madeline because it's been franchised and extended?

I think there is something natural about enjoying fictional characters. How else would the characters from Greek, Roman and Norse mythology survived in our culture for so long? I can't see cutting out anything with a product license simply because it has a product license. We still love Hungry Caterpillar even though Eric Carle seems to have sold his soul to the preschool product marketers. Hungary Caterpillar didn't stop being a good book when a zillion Eric Carle spinoff products hit the market.