Thats right fuckers!
Sexy Meridia is Da Bizzomb!
I actually watched a Disney film with my kid today. It was a good one - the Empire Strikes Back.
Well, I’m sure there’s already abundant Rule 34/DeviantArt posts with unauthorized sexed-up versions of Merida in fanart. But that’s why the Good Lord let us invent the Internet.
No
Jon Stewart nailed this.
My daughter’s fifth birthday party next month will be princess-themed by request. She loves Disney princesses, Merida included. She’s 100th percentile height and weight for her age, bigger, chubbier, stronger and taller than all the others in her class, including those almost a full year older than her. Her favourite colour’s pink. She liked Brave, but not as much as The Frog Princess.
She’s almost ready to move up to her red belt in karate, and throws all the boys in her class on the floor on a weekly basis before skipping around crowing that she’s the champion. She’s the only girl in the class. She currently wants to be either an astronaut, a scientist, an engineer or a “fashioner” (fashion designer). She likes spooky movies best of all, mostly vaguely kid-friendly ones like Hellboy. She loves bugs and has trained her friends not to scream and flap their arms if a bee or a spider comes near them, as they’re “our friends”. Her favourite toys include a princess-inhabited dolls’ house, a spooky mansion for her Monster High dolls (monster-themed dolls that make Barbie look positively zaftig), a remote controlled T-rex, and a DIY robotic combined tool kit/construction deck. She’s one of the better readers in her class despite being the second youngest. She’s currently excited about being in her first dance production soon, where she’s going to play a yellow lollipop in a candyland dance. She loves Katy Perry, LMFAO and Marilyn Manson.
It’s possible to expose your daughters to Disney Princesses, and even encourage it, without losing all hope for their future. She’s proud of being tall, strong, smart, active and brave, things I praise her for often. I prefer Merida in her stouter incarnation and would like franchises such as the Princesses to be as diverse as possible, but doubt my daughter would much notice the difference between the two, apart from preferring the new dress because she really likes sparkles. Almost as much as she likes her “stompy kicking boots for doing tricky stunts in.”
Sorry for the hijack, but I just wanted to say that I had the same problem! I loved Sgt. Calhoun. I too was looking for an action figure and was disappointed to see the only one available was a “collector” doll who looked more like Barbie with short hair than Jane Lynch.
As for Merida: I like her the way she is, and was quite annoyed at the “sexed-up” version. I’m pretty sick of the sexualization of young girls in the first place, but dammit, at least don’t tack it on after the fact to one of the few characters who isn’t sexualized these days!
What would be the rationale at Disney for changing Merida, though? She was billed as being a strong young female character who was active, athletic, and not interested in a romantic relationship. Yet Disney simply assumes that they must change her into a hyper-feminine clone of all the other Disney princesses or else she won’t sell well in the princess line? Presumably people who were fans of the movie liked Merida the way she was presented there, so why the kneejerk change on Disney’s part?
Having just watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella with my two and a half year-old daughter, one thing which really struck me* was how innocent the original Princesses are by today’s standards. I mean look at this still from Cinderella - the girl’s got actual calves like a real person!
*The first thing that really struck me was just how *good *these old Disney movies are. I’d never watched them before and was astonished at just how brilliant the animation and writing is. Hell even the songs are pretty great. I’ve decided that we’re going to watch the classic Disney films in rough chronological order from now on - We’ve already seen *Fantasia *as well - Brooke didn’t like the man talking all the time. I’ll let you all know how things go when I find a copy of Victory Through Air Power.
The “Princess Line” that Disney puts out is predicated on the interchangeablility of the princesses. You look at the graphics with all of them together and half or more look exactly the same, just with different hair and dresses*. All the art style and general look of them all are designed so that they all come from the same univserse, so they can swap one princess for another on a shirt and it looks the same. So to add a 3D Pixar princess, they had to incorporate her into the existing style, but the went overboard with taking a tomboy character and glamming her up, removing most of Merida’s personality.
*: the actors who play the princesses at the parks often will be many different princesses and other face characters, just using different wigs and dresses.
Mulan isn’t terribly sexed up for the line up. Granted, she isn’t in her gi (or the Chinese equivalent thereof), but thank god they didn’t try and give her cleavage. No reason for Merida to get come thither eyes. (Mulan has always been far and away my favorite Disney princess).
My best friend’s sister “Tina” is a Disney World performer, and while she does play two princesses (Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty), according to my friend there are certain physical requirements for the various princess roles. Not just things like skin color, height, and bust/waist/hips measurements*, either – my friend told me that Tina’s face was measured with calipers and compared to some sort of chart to determine the roles for which she would be considered acceptable.
*According to my friend, Tina was told that actresses playing Snow White can have a slightly larger waist than the actresses playing other princess characters. I don’t know why, although looking at some of the Disney Princess art online it looks like she is often depicted as being a little less tiny in the middle than the others.
Heh. I used to read the original Grimms to my daughter - and that Cinderella had people chopping of pieces of their foot. She turned out okay so far.
We don’t do Disney in my house. I find their modern product so devoid of any depth at all, that its the only thing I took a hard line on. She liked Tinky Winky and Polly Pocket and Barbie, and she got all those. But no Disney bullshit for us. Not because of the terrible role modeling, but because of how they raped their story sources of anything interesting - we preferred she learned what a Story is, not marketing bullshit. Fairy tales are great, as is the idea that she will find a handsome prince and live happily ever after. But the princess stuff was just awful, like filling her brain with McDonald’s instead of vegetables.
Cite? I don’t think this is true at all.
As GaryGnu stated, most likely consistency across the product line. You don’t want a lineup of them across a backpack or folder with one sticking out as far outside the spectrum.
Well, then, they fail horribly, particularly with Pocahontas. She doesn’t even look human.
This is a picture of the lineup with the “new not improved” Merida in it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DisneyPrincessLineup2013.jpg
Pocahontas there at the end, she sure looks like Belle
Rapunzel looks a lot more like her Pixar character than Merida does.
Several of them have been tarted up - Ariel is far more of a Bratz doll in this incarnation than she was previously. But it isn’t a universal tarting of the princesses.
There’s probably a reason she’s in the far back on the right hand side.
So, do you think they strategically placed Snow White near the end so it wouldn’t be quite as blatantly obvious that the more “ethnic” princesses were being pushed off to the sides?
It looks to me that its ranked by sales of princess outfits at WDW and DL…if your princess outfit sells, you get a front row seat. If it doesn’t - you are to the back. Snow White and Jasmine aren’t hot sellers (Mulan and Pocahontas are not either). New Princesses get a spotlight until their merchandising fades.
(And I suspect sales to have to do with ethnicity - white girls are less likely to want to be Titania than Black girls will want to be Ariel - and Disney’s fans are pretty pale as a general rule.)