It must have been a bumper time to be an evangelical Christian in the 80s, what with all the occultic cartoons tearing young children violently from the Bible and corrupting their innocent brains. With things like He-Man.
While I admit He-Man and She-Ra are horrid examples of reinforcing traditional gender roles in kids, and mediocre Hannah Barbara animation to boot, they certainly aren’t responsible for tearing me away from Jesus. No, I give full credit to a tag-team combination of Voltron and Mega Man.
I can’t help but wonder what these evangelical goobers would have thought about this fan-made video, that’s been floating about the intertubes pretty much since internet video became feasible. They might have assumed He-Man was gay recruitment propaganda or something.
*dances along*
I can’t decide which video is scarier…
I watched She-ra as a kid and I don’t think it was “horrid” as traditional gender roles go. At that time, there were almost no shows for girls that weren’t about romance and dress-up, and if you wanted an action/adventure show you’d have to watch a boy-centered show and hope the token woman character was at least appealing and not treated as a damsel in distress constantly. In She-ra however, almost all the principal good characters were women, and She-ra is explicitly the most powerful character (and exactly as powerful as He-man in physical strength). Plus the back-story of the show is that She-ra’s planet is under the rule of an evil empire and She-ra leads the rebellion against them. For a kid at that time, it was a pretty compelling concept, since in most adventure shows the heros were defending a peaceful status quo from attacking villains rather than the heros trying to overturn a harmful status quo.
She-ra did something right that I think is similar to today’s version of My Little Pony. It took “feminine” visuals (lots of pastel colors, flowers, sparkles and rainbows), but didn’t try to force in many proscriptive gendered behaviors. She-ra may fly in on a Lisa Frank unicorn with rainbow wings but then she punches tanks in half and very seriously leads a war against the oppressors.
Wait a dang minute. Maybe these cartoons can explain the recent survey results showing that Millennials are less likely to believe in God. These cartoons (plus Scooby Doo and the Smurfs) tricked our youth into becoming skeptics. It’s was all part of their plan!
Well, Scooby Doo does mention in nearly every episode that there’s no such thing as ghosts. Where does that leave the Holy Ghost?
The original run of Scooby Doo did. Then the producers got bored with that and started to have the gang face “real” monsters, ghosts etc. The latest series, Mystery Incorporated, has gone back to its roots, with the kids exposing fake monsters et al in their home town.