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Resurrecting this thread in light of an interesting development—PPG Style, a re-branding of the Girls for the tween/young teen market. On the one hand it’s crassest commercialism—it’s a synergistic strategy with Delia’s and ElleGirl, among others—but by re-imagining the girls as teenagers, it makes them a focus for all sorts of issues of concern to teenaged girls: sexuality, body-image, fitness, self-esteem…
My thoughts on this are still unformed, but this is part of a trend that I find intriguing—that of age-accelerating icons of children’s media in an effort to remain relevant to the original demographic as it ages. I’m thinking of All Grown Up, Nickelodeon’s spin-off from its long-running series Rugrats, which imagines that show’s cast of infants as middle-school students. It’s the reverse of trend of the late 80s/early 90s, beginning (probably) with Muppet Babies, where characters enjoyed by adults and older kids were dumbed down—literally infantilized—to create “appropriate” entertainment for the very young.
Now we’ve got shows like Powerpuff Girls which are enjoyed by both young children and adults, but which older children might feel they’ve outgrown—while still lacking the necessary cultural referents to enjoy the homages and in-jokes as an adult viewer would.
Ordinarily, a tween viewer would move on to another show to which she can better relate, with another set of characters: but Nickelodeon’s innovation (copied, as with so many other things, by Cartoon Network—the way CN has been chasing Nick’s tail for the last couple years is a thread in itself) has been to tell kids, Hey, there’s no need to stop watching these characters you’ve grown to love—now there’s a Rugrats just for you.
It’s an interesting experiment. But the end product, so far, has been mediocre—overly-careful, overcalculated and second-guessed. The success of these enterprises is contingent upon the willingness of tween kids to be marketed to—to be patronized, really. I dunno—it's all pop, the artifice is part of the fun, yadda yadda: but when the adolescent hunger for "authenticity" hits full-blown, there's gonna be a backlash... |
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