[QUOTE=alphaboi867]
Make Samantha Jewish or black instead of a witch and the show would be incredibely racist even by 60s standards.
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And incredibly low rating.
That’s interesting. Make Jack Tripper a Jew who had to pretend to be a Christian and some groups would have gone ballistic!
Does anyone wonder what happens to characters that suddenly dissapear with no explanation? I’ m referring to the little sister in Family Matters. Did she die or something? Also Mrs. Baxter (Raven and Cory’s mom) inThat’s So Raven. I must have missed the episode where she walks out on them.
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
That’s interesting. Make Jack Tripper a Jew who had to pretend to be a Christian and some groups would have gone ballistic!
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…is it wrong that I kind of love this idea? Oh, the wackiness as Jack tries to pass his yarmulke off as a hip new fad! The hilarious use of Silly Putty at the nude beach!
[QUOTE=Schuyler]
(I’ve watched a lot of Pepe/Fifi videos recently, as one daughter thinks they are the funniest - call me silly, but I don’t consider them inappropriate for kids [maybe the rape/bondage subtext is masked by the slapstick].)
[/QUOTE]
Gee, I completely missed all the bondage subtext in those cartoons. When did the cats get tied up?
[QUOTE=Lucky 13]
Does anyone wonder what happens to characters that suddenly dissapear with no explanation?
[/QUOTE]
It’s called the Chuck Cunningham Syndrome.
[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
Married with Children always creeped me right out. I mean, they were so cruel to each other–not in a mildly bickering but making up later kind of way, but in a deeply, darkly hateful sort of way. And there was one episode I’ll never forget, I was like 10 maybe when I saw it, when that sleazy bastard Bud was played for a fool by some girl he went to school with. His revenge was to tie her gagged and naked to a wall on display in front of the whole school. How is that not fucked up beyond all belief?
[/QUOTE]
Not only is it not fucked up, it is just the way I would like to see that kind of story (even without Mehitabel’s corrections) end a whole lot more often. In real life, I mean.
YMMV.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Gee, I completely missed all the bondage subtext in those cartoons. When did the cats get tied up?
[/QUOTE]
I never saw it. Pepe was a hopeless goof who never got it and that was what was so funny. I still love his enthralled ‘le pant, le sigh’ and think of it when I see a particularly fine fellow 
Do you know there’s a Looney Tunes site that has episode guides and games?
[QUOTE=Lucky 13]
Does anyone wonder what happens to characters that suddenly dissapear with no explanation? I’ m referring to the little sister in Family Matters. Did she die or something? Also Mrs. Baxter (Raven and Cory’s mom) inThat’s So Raven. I must have missed the episode where she walks out on them.
[/QUOTE]
That particulaly disturbed me on Roseanne, I guess because I started out really liking that show. But they did away with all of their freinds. OK. But then they did away with their grandmother, and with…oh what’s her name? The woman who married Dan’s father and had a couple of his half-siblings. How do you forget that?
In the anti-Chuck Cunninham catagory, there’s the oldest daughter on the Cosby show. Which started with an episode withe the line “Why do we have four children?” “Because we didn’t want five”. And a few episodes later they had five.
Lord I’m sorry I know these things.
[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
I never saw it. Pepe was a hopeless goof who never got it and that was what was so funny. I still love his enthralled ‘le pant, le sigh’ and think of it when I see a particularly fine fellow
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:dubious: I’m not saying he was without charm. But he was forcing his attentions on kitty cats (you’d think at some point he could find another skunk firchristsake) who clearly didn’t want it which makes him a creep.
[QUOTE=betenoir]
:dubious: I’m not saying he was without charm. But he was forcing his attentions on kitty cats (you’d think at some point he could find another skunk firchristsake) who clearly didn’t want it which makes him a creep.
[/QUOTE]
The whole premise was that Pepe was oblivious – oblivious to the distinction between skunk and cat, oblivious to his affections being unrequited, and oblivious to his own smell.
[QUOTE=betenoir]
That particulaly disturbed me on Roseanne, I guess because I started out really liking that show. But they did away with all of their freinds. OK. But then they did away with their grandmother, and with…oh what’s her name? The woman who married Dan’s father and had a couple of his half-siblings. How do you forget that?
[/QUOTE]
Crystal. She also had a 12 year old son Lonnie who disappeared. Roseanne & Jackie worked in a factory the first year, where their boss Booker was played by George Clooney. He disappeared too.
[QUOTE=betenoir]
:dubious: I’m not saying he was without charm. But he was forcing his attentions on kitty cats (you’d think at some point he could find another skunk firchristsake)
[/QUOTE]
But where would the humour be? Really, you can’t analyze cartoons that much or you’ll burst something.
[QUOTE=betenoir]
(you’d think at some point he could find another skunk firchristsake)
[/QUOTE]
That was the point of the cartoons: The black cat would get a white stripe on her (occasionally his) back, so Pepe thought he *had *found another skunk. On the occasion(s) when he was chasing a male cat, he nonetheless thought he was chasing a female skunk; the gender switch was just another layer of his lack of understanding.
Personally, I always loved Pepe Le Pew. The cocksure swagger with which he carried himself, the unshakeable certainty that the world loved him, and the complete ignorance of that fact that he was, in fact, a freaking skunk: one of the most unpleasant, most hated and feared animals on the planet. Hell, he couldn’t help being a skunk; he was just born that way. But his handicap never slowed him down for a second; he just kept right on trucking, and never mind the world’s reaction.
The show that always creeps me out is Scrubs. The sudden switches from goofy, cartoonish slapstick to heavy drama (a main character having a miscarriage or some such) just don’t work for me at all. Also I started hating Zach Braff’s sensitive pout about halfway through Garden State.
[QUOTE=Annie-Xmas]
Crystal. She also had a 12 year old son Lonnie who disappeared. Roseanne & Jackie worked in a factory the first year, where their boss Booker was played by George Clooney. He disappeared too.
[/QUOTE]
The boss disappearing at least made sense, since Roseanne quit working at the factory.
[QUOTE=Lucky 13]
Does anyone wonder what happens to characters that suddenly dissapear with no explanation? I’ m referring to the little sister in Family Matters. Did she die or something? Also Mrs. Baxter (Raven and Cory’s mom) inThat’s So Raven. I must have missed the episode where she walks out on them.
[/QUOTE]
Is there a name for when characters are suddenly played by a different actor? The instance I’m referring to is when they changed actors for Vivian in Fresh Prince.
[QUOTE=Schuyler]
The guy/gal who posted this Pepe le Pew video on youtube claims it’s the first-ever episode (1945) - the male cat is the main character, and Pepe chases him back to his “alley cat” life. The rest of the episodes that I’ve seen are girl-cats.
[/QUOTE]
Indeed, 1945’s Odor-able Kitty is Pepe’s (although he’s called “Henry” in this one) first appearance, and the only time he chased after a male cat. According to Beck and Freidwald’s Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, he’d only chase after female cats from that point on- except 1947’s Scent-imental Over You, in which a female dog wearing a skunk-fur coat is the object of his affection. If it looks like a skunk, acts like a skunk, and talks like a skunk, Pepe Le Pew will attempt to woo it.
I’m not easily creeped out, but a R-rated “comedy” called Knock Outs did that for me. A group of college girls are training for a foxy boxing match (long, pointless story) and some friends of theirs, the putative good guys of the movie, secretly plant a videocam in their dressing room so they can sell the the tape as a porn movie.
I’ve seen movies before where guys secretly videotape women, but it’s clearly understood that they’re doing something wrong. Even japanese hentai, perhaps the most morality-free porn on the planet, always have the BAD guys doing the secret videotaping.
But in Knock Outs, it’s the good guys. The guys we are supposed to like, and identify with. The ones the girls who were secretly being videotaped liked.
Man, that was creepy.
[QUOTE=Jess]
Or even later. My husband grew up in a very small (population <800) town in central Wisconsin. He never met a single black person until 1976, when he went to boot camp.
[/QUOTE]
I graduated from high school in 1984 - no black families in our district - our graduating class was over 200. Minneapolis Northern suburbs. We did have one Hmong girl in our graduating class - that was it for diversity in my class. My best friend was Iranian, but she didn’t graduate with us.
[QUOTE=Quiddity Glomfuster]
I did like Mad About You, though. It seemed more realistic; both had their good moments and their bad moments. Sometimes he was being the twit and other times it was she; overall I liked that they worked out their differences and didn’t let problems get in their way. Well, until the end at least.
[/QUOTE]
What happened at the end? What did I miss?
-FrL-