Is this like “Only Nixon could go to China”?
My kids know what swear words are. They hear them every day from their father. My 3 year old says “fuck” when she drops something and then my wife glares daggers at me. I’m going to have to get her to stop that before she starts pre-school.
As to the OP, my kids watch Franklin and I think the episode you’re talking about is pretty atypical. Usually its’s total fluff. Baking cookies, playing baseball, stuff like that.
I have no idea what that is, but that’s not Frankin. Franklin is 100% turtle. My 8 year old doesn’t know of a turbit show either, and she knows all the cartoons. What channel were you watching? That sounds really odd.
Not sure if I’m being whooshed, but I saw Goo as just being an over the top, short attention span, overly imaginative type kid. She happens to be African American but I never really saw that as being terribly relevant.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that I actually think of Goo as a welfare queen, only to suggest that someone with the right frame of mind wouldn’t have much trouble making that extremely wrong-thinking connection.
There’s something said in that episode to the effect of how Goo wantonly creates new friends (wrong-thinking mind = “has all these children”), dumps them on Foster’s to care for them (wrong-thinking mind = “welfare”), and goes on her merry way. Something about that and the fact that on-screen African-Americans are relatively rare on Foster’s made me wonder, as I said above, “How much mail did they get over this?”
Ah, okay. Yeah, I can see how someone might think that. Considering that in an anthology on rape, I once read a feminist analysis of how George from “Seinfeld” having sex with his cleaning lady and giving her the cashmere sweater with a dot on it was some kind of colonial power exchange…yeah, I can see how someone out there would see Goo as a welfare queen.
It was a book based on a TV show. Aimed at the same demographic as Franklin. The turbit was a one-off character, only brought in to illustrate that Bigotry Is Bad (but will get you a really neat tree hut). We never saw the beastie on the TV and he never showed up in other books. This is all years (5-7) ago, the kid who loved it so much is 9 and a half now and thinks Spongebob is ‘too immature’.
It was exactly the same set-up as Franklin, even to having the lead animal’s name as the title of the show and on the books. Oversimplified anthropomorhic morality represented by cute preteen animals. Eat your veggies to grow strong and because mother loves you. Do not lie or Daddy will be unhappy. - etc etc. I’ve seen so many of them they’ve all blurred and I can’t remember what the main animal was. “Critters” springs to mind, ‘The other critters wouldn’t play with him’, kind of thing.
Damn your eyes. While I was watching it I banged my knee on my desk. That must be why I was tearing up. Must be.
Daniel
Yeah I turned it off when I started tearing up. Don’t need to cry at work.
I noticed that too, wondered if anybody else did.
Only a bit embarrassed? What is the world coming to?
My kids (4 and 5) don’t know swear words. They’ll learn them soon enough, I’m sure, but I don’t see the need to teach them such things.
Geez, you think that was bad? I guess you didn’t see the one where Bear was breaking into the other animal’s homes to steal stuff to support his meth habit. Or the one where Mrs. Beaver was turning tricks down at the pond to support their family after Mr. Beaver got let go from the logging company. Or the one where Mr. Owl gets arrested for innappropriate text messages sent to a student at the school.
Call the Sexual Harassment Panda!
My grandpa died yesterday. He was only about 60. He had cancer. Some times having things said to you ,in a way you’d say to a little child, is just what you need to hear.
Thank you for the link.
Does it make me a bad person that I’m more freaked out by a turbit than by a little turtle losing her father and mother in a heinous fire?
I couldn’t even watch past the moment where Big Bird says “Oh, he’s in the store…” and starts to go off. Had to close the browser window.
I just googled “Franklin episode fire grandmother” and this is the first thing that popped up. I see that you posted YEARS ago, but my kids saw this episode last night and were all very upset so I wanted to see what they were talking about.
My husband and I were at a Superbowl Party where the adults were in the basement watching the game and the younger kids were upstairs playing/watching tv (Noggin - and I admit, guiltily…we were using the tv in this situation as “a babysitter!” - I’m not the only one who has ever done this, right?). My kids are 8, 6, and 3. My daughter came downstairs and said, “the show is too scary” - so my husband went up and checked to make sure that the station hadn’t been accidentally changed - saw it was on Franklin (Noggin…don’t they call it preschool on tv…!!!) and said she could play instead of watching tv if it was too scary. When I brought the kids home at 1/2 time, it was all they could talk about was this scary show they watched…fire, burying a “box”, grandmother dying…I was like…what? Franklin? We have Franklin books and they love them…! I was confused at what they might have seen. Last night, all 3 of them ended up in our bed…scary dreams. My 3 year old is chattering away this morning about fires and burying a treasure and grandmothers dying. So, I googled it to see if there was something about this episode. And here, I found it. So, I can’t say I saw this episode…and I feel bad about putting the tv on for my kids and not seeing what they saw (especially after my daughter came down and said it was scary). I’m feeling guilty. And it sounds like other adults who have seen it agree that it may not be appropriate for kids!
I’ve never seen this show, but this episode totally sounds like a Robot Chicken parody of a kid’s show. Maybe the writer was venting some old personal trauma, and never expected that script to get picked up.
Welcome to the SDMB, GinaB. There’s no problem with your reviving an old thread, though some of the people who posted in it three years ago are no longer around.
I am, however, going to move it to our forum for arts and entertainment, Cafe Society.
Again, welcome!
twickster, MPSIMS moderator
When I worked for a PBS TV station, we had a promo with a black screen that would show the words “Death… War… Divorce… Poverty… Loss…” with a voiceover coming in saying “One man tackles all these issues as he has for years: Mr. Rogers Neighborhood.”
It’s true though. The man had a knack for taking big life issues and distilling them down in a way that a child could, if not 100% understand, at least not be scared shitless by.