Hi! It's nice to meet you all! I'm known as "Giggles" "Gigs" & "Angst Au Queen"/"Angst Goddess " I'm a girl who likes random stuff. I love to write, draw, read, and play videos games. Instagram art account: PrmsArts
character playlists aren’t for songs a character would listen to they are for songs that remind me of the character
“x wouldn’t listen to this” yeah no shit this is for when i want to listen to my shitty songs and think about my favorite little characters
Speak for yourself. I think Rouge the Bat would love my Rouge playlist. Every time I found a smooth jazz, acid jazz, nu jazz, or jazz house song that fit her style, I thought “damn Rouge would love this,” and added them to a playlist, specifically for her to listen to.
Okay. Well Rouge the Bat isn’t real. So I don’t think she’s gonna listen to that.
i honestly dont think I’ve willingly used a chatbot since….. cleverbot in 2012. i genuinely dont know why so many people care about this ai bullshit. sorry im with the boomers on this one. i need human creation, emotion, and thought to be interested, pal
Plus since ChatGPT is sanitized you could never get interactions like these
In 1968, before there was PBS Kids proper, there was Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. While it came several decades before the children’s block, it laid the foundation for the themes and values present in every facet of the network’s history.
Mr. Roger famously hated children’s programming at the time. To him, it all was droll and useless. But he didn’t dissuade the medium entirely— he saw potential. Potential that led to a few smaller television jobs, and eventually the creation of Mr. Roger’s neighborhood.
Rogers didn’t invent educational TV for children, but he did perfect it. He poured real heart and soul into probably the most sincere, heartfelt program in history.
Honestly, he could have his own essay. The more things you learn about the real man of Mr. Rogers, the more you’ll like him.
Anyway, the biggest thing that makes PBS different is the fact that it earns money through grants, fundraisers, and private donors— not through sponsorships and merchandise sales. This way, PBS Kids can push programming that it feels is important, rather than programming that merely sells well.
This also means PBS is less afraid of pushing social boundaries. Money doesn’t go away when their shows become subjects of debate— and Mr. Rogers took full advantage of this.
For context, this was 1969. The Jim Crow era had just barely, barely ended. Pool segregation was still very much legal.
Mr. Rogers sharing a pool and a towel with the Black Mr. Clemmons was a pretty big deal at the time— especially on a show made for children.
Rogers was far from the untouchable sacred cow of today. When he was alive, he had a large number of detractors. Let’s just say that scene didn’t fly nicely by everyone.
Just one year after the debut of Mr. Roger’s came Sesame Street.
While Mr. Roger’s was made for all children, Sesame Street had the explicit goal of supplementing the education of underserved communities— especially inner-city Black (and later Latino) children.
While it was made to be accessible to children of all races and income levels, they definitely went the extra mile to make it something special for inner-city Black and Brown kids. (Why do you think it it’s “Sesame Street” and not “Sesame Cul-de-Sac”?)
At the time, a wholesome, sweet show set in a brownstone street was practically unheard of.
Jon Stone, the casting director, deliberately sought to make the cast as rich with color as he possibly could, bringing on a huge amount of Black talent such as Loretta Long, Matt Robinson, and Kevin Clash, as well as featuring Black celebrities as guest stars. Later, the show would expand its horizons, bringing on actors from Latino, Asian, Native American, and many more backgrounds.
White actors were and still are a minority on show.
In addition to letters and numbers, the purpose of Sesame Street is clear: make kids of color know that they’re smart, beautiful, and loved.
It doesn’t get more explicit than this.
I want to point out this comment because it’s funny
You’re telling me this bitch isn’t Hispanic???
Anyway, these two were followed up by Reading Rainbow in 1983. And guess what?
That’s right. Non-white focus.
These three shows, (along with other, lesser-known programs like Lamb-Chops Play Along, Newton’s Apple, and Shining Times Station (who featured Ringo Starr himself?? seriously how did that happen and why does no one talk about it) and some other nostalgic favorites like Bill Nye the Science guy, The Magic Schoolbus, Arthur, and Thomas the Tank Engine) aired on the new PTV block, which evolved into PBS Kids in 1999, bringing along Between the Lions, Dragon Tales, and many more.
Arthur is another stand-out that I’d like to talk about— it doesn’t have the same racial focus of Sesame Street, but it does focus on different income levels. The characters have various housing situations, from apartments to mansions to no home at all.
It also takes cues from Sesame Street and Mr. Roger’s in regards to talking about tough topics, though as Arthur has a slightly older target audience, it discusses things through stories rather than talking directly to the audience.
Cancer, religion, workplace discrimination, along with current (at the time) events such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina are all discussed on the show.
Another big focus on Arthur is disability. For once, they don’t stick a character in a wheelchair and then pretend he’s not in a wheelchair. A striking number of major characters either develop or get diagnosed with physical disabilities and/or neurodivergences, such as asthma, severe food allergies, and dyslexia, and they deal with them in very realistic ways.
A handful of minor characters have more obvious disabilities, and THANK GOD they go beyond the trite messaging of “disabled people can do everything abled people can do! everyone clap now!”
One episode in particular has the awesome message of “holy shit stop trying to help me all the time— it’s patronizing as fuck. I can get around just fine without you stepping on eggshells and trying to be the hero all the fucking time”
There are sooo many other shows I could talk about, but I can’t write about them all. I’m definitely gonna point out some more standout ones, though.
Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat
Created by Chinese-American woman Amy Tang
Dragonfly TV
Features a multitude of female and non-white scientists to foster an interest in science with kids in those groups
Maya & Miguel
One of the network’s first Hispanic-led shows
SciGirls
I shouldn’t have to explain what the goal of this one was.
Molly of Denali
When was the last time you saw a show that treated Native Americans as people? Much less a children’s show? 90% of the cast is Athabascan, and the show revolves around Athabascan culture, not shying away from topics like boarding schools and modern-day racism. Most of the writers are also Athabascan, and the show even has an official Gwich’in dub!
It’s this commitment to real, authentic social justice that makes PBS Kids so much different from its predecessors. Could you imagine the Paw Patrol dog looking at the camera and earnestly discussing what happened to George Floyd? I don’t think so— but Arthur talked specifically about it, Sesame Street did an hour long special about race in general, and the network itself made a 30 minute special.
Disney Jr. could never. (Other than trying to teach colorblindness, of course.)
I’m gonna have to cut this into two parts, since I just hit the image limit
Oh, and here a few modern standouts. (Imagine how special Jelly, Ben, & Pogo must be to a Filipino kid? Filipinos never get anything. Or a Latina kid in The Bronx seeing Alma’s Way and going “holy shit that’s actually where I live”)
And PBS Kids isn’t just made up of its shows— that’s the main part of it, sure, but it’s also home to an extensive amount of parental recourses. Many of which, again, deal with race and activism.
And the real cherry on top is that a good portion of those recourses are specifically for nonwhite families!
(Yes, I, a grown-ass white man, am excited for a show made for Black preschoolers. It looks like this one is gonna focus more heavily on the modern-day impact of American chattel slavery, and it’s gonna be very candid and explicit with it while also being completely kid-friendly. Why the hell am I pumped for this.)
Sesame Street also has a few parent-site-exclusive episodes that deal with topics too specific and too heavy to be aired on TV or made available on their child-focused site. Things like having a parent with a drug addiction, having a parent in jail, being homeless, death of a close family member, and so on.
Honestly, you could spend hours browsing sesameworkshop.org and pbskids.org/parents. There’s just an incredible amount of left-leaning articles— it’s not a side of PBS Kids that gets discussed much, but it definitely makes their values much clearer.
So yeah. You could say I’m a fan of PBS Kids.
Just wanted to add, I watched a documentary about Mr. Rogers a while back, and one thing that struck me was after his death, (while relatively few in number), there were protestors at/near his service, who thought he qmwas a horrible man. I didn’t see Mr Rogers Neighborhood when it came out (I’m not that old), but I watched it when it was a kid, and I remember thinking when I learned about those protestors “how could anyone have hated him?”
(the documentaries were “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” from 2018, and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” from 2019)
Yep! Rogers was way more divisive at the time than people who weren’t there could imagine— he was still mostly beloved, of course, but plenty absolutely seethed at the idea of this man teaching white children to be genuinely kind to black kids.
conservatives really know how to make things sound awesome, don’t they?
Disney is going to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays in Australia and to think of what this means for accessibility, residuals, quality, public libraries here etc and the precedent this will set for other studios and distributors around the world oh it’s never been more over
