I do follow-up on that with acknowledging my biases, hoep I didn;t offend. But Jar-Jar Binks? That was tough to accept after the beauty that is Chewbacca.

You lost me here. Good bye.

http://www.topjogosonline.com

I will read that asap, thanks for the tip. It’s funny you should talk about Jenkins in this context because I took a class on Animation in Grad School with Heather Hendershot which was a cultural history of animation in TV and Film.

One of the texts I picked up for my research paper was The Children’s Culture Reader which was edited by Henry Jenkins. It’s an awesome anthology of essays on the very issues you raise in your comment, marketing and Saturday morning cartoons during the 1980s. The questions of the child as consumer, selling toys and food to children, etc. It deals with much more than that, but I focused on these reading s because my paper for the class was on the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut (one of the funnest papaers I wrote in grad school).

This book has several essays that frame the darker side of child as author (as I think your suggesting), it is child as consumer. Or, as in my case, children as an indomitable force of brand recognition that will subvert all parenting strategies and lead you to dragging your kid out of Borders kicking and screaming! (personalize experience mind you.)

I’ve noticed this effect for a long time… sometimes in a way that tricks the consumer. When my children were 3 and 4 they were all about the Lion King. They talked about it as if it were a part of their living environment, not a movie they had never seen! “All” they had been exposed to was the marketing– particularly the cross-media items, from video games to happy meals to childrens’ books to clothing decals.

Actually, my daughter was even convinced she had seen the movie though I knew she hadn’t– I was very careful about what they could watch and she’d never even been to the theatre yet!

@Sue – Child as author & Brick films, brilliant and does a much better job of framing the intricacies of this new development much better then my ad hoc approach. I haven’t seen the brick film so this is a huge link, thanks for this.

@Jamie -commenting again I see- I love it! That is definitely the question. I bet my nephews and neighbor are like, “Movies, how two-dimensional can he be. I want something I can interact with and create with -I don’t want my narratives force fed.” And given how weak the narratives of episodes 1, 2, and 3 were, they may have an excellent point.

The Lego(TM) and Star Wars marriage attracts its audience on a parallel plane — but here I think its actually a case of industry belatedly appropriating a creative subculture all its own: Brickfilms.

http://www.brickfilms.com/films/332