Abstract
Entertainment has often taken recuse to being mere entertainment, when it triggers debate on its appropriateness in the reflection of certain aspects of society. Be it slapstick comedy night TV shows or a film, entertainment, in the visual or/and digital medium, has imitated life, just as the popular adage goes: Art imitates life and life imitates art. In this paper, we investigate whether entertainment is “mere” entertainment, or if it tells something about us as a society through the lens of kid’s TV shows. This also leads to the longstanding debate on what is considered as child-friendly TV content and what is not. In this research project, conducted in the digital ethnographic paradigm, we closely examined the representation of antagonistic figures in cartoons and unpacked certain patterns of representation through colour, disfiguration, disability, and obesity that are prevalent across all the shows that we watched. A recurring pattern is the representation of villains as either deformed, dark creatures with specific physical marks, distinguishing them from the hero and commoners. In some cases, they are manifest in their very names. The nomenclature used to characterize them such as ‘Rita Repulsa’ (Repulsa as shorthand/modification of repulsive) deserves this focused analysis through ethnographic study conducted in three different parts of Southern India.
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Children's Media; Ideology
Digital Media
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