Please put Noddy and Big Ears in context for the thick American.

Cafe Society
21

I think that is a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, there is some casual racism, but nothing untoward for the time. As far as I can recall, it rarely comes up, because non-white characters (with the exception of Gypsies) are rarely encountered; and that was no more than an accurate portrayal of how things were in England in that era. (Well, again, except for the implausible overabundance of Gypsies, but IIRC [perhaps I don’t], the Gypsies are by no means uniformly negatively portrayed.)

Of course there is the Golliwog in the Noddy books, but although golliwogs were no doubt racist in their original conception (whenever that was), I rather think that in 1950s England that had been largely forgotten, and they were just considered to be traditional children’s toys, like teddy bears (which have surely never made any kid think about Theodore Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party). My parents were firmly anti-racist, somewhat politically correct ahead of their time, but I had a cuddly golliwog toy, and can remember my mother helping me to collect jam jar labels to get little golliwog badges (the jam company had a golliwog as its trademark). It never even entered my head that that golliwogs were meant to be representations (let alone offensive representations) of black people. Blyton, as an adult, may have been aware of the fact, but i doubt that it was in the forefront of her mind in creating the Golliwog character: Noddy lived in Toyland, a land where all sorts of vaguely anthropomorphic toys were alive, and could talk, and cuddly golliwogs were standard - probably almost universal - inhabitants of a 1950s British child’s toy cupboard.

It occurs to me that younger people, these days, may not even know what a golliwog looks like. Here is a picture; oh, and here is one of those badges, from the jam company, that I was talking about. [Warning: Politically incorrect links!]

22

Actually, I agree with you njtt. I meant that by today’s standards it would be politically incorrect.

I wasn’t actually thinking of the Golliwog in Noddy and her other stories for very small children. If I remember correctly, her Adventure series (The Island of Adventure, The Mountain of Adventure, etc) was the worst offender in that regard: the protagonists were constantly travelling the world with their aunt, and everything was terribly exotic and non-British!

23

Yeah, those were notable offenders, mainly because the kids had access to foreign travel. On the other hand, I remember them being genuinely exciting, with actual real danger for the children. Isn’t the Mountain of Adventure set in Wales, with the locals portrayed as terribly exotic and non-British? :wink:

24

Yup. Paddington Bear too (though the references to Blue Peter puzzled me for years until we got this Internet thingy).

We have a few old Enid Blytons floating around the house, but they’re pretty rare in the US.

I had never heard of a golliwog before today…

25

And why hasn’t Storm Saxon made it across the pond, for that matter?

26

The school stories were prone to casual stereotyping of all kinds. Irrc the inevitable gypsy girl was romanticised but there was a French girl who didn’t understand the British sense of honour and a simply horrible portrayal of a girl with a nouveau riche cockney father whose ignorance of middles class mores was very cruelly portrayed. She turned to stealing to make friends and was expelled.

27

To cutesy/twee for most British kids I suspect - but remember they were written in the 40s/50s for a very young audience.

The Famous Five were a different kettle of fish- ideal for kids starting to read on their own. Simple words and structure but great adventures with the children (and Timmie the dog) beating the criminals all on their own. Adults as only minor walk on parts!

A different world back then. One dog and four kids aged - IIRC - 13, 12, 11, and 10 (I don’t remember them getting older) on cycling and camping holidays on their own - umm! From a modern perspective they were totally non-pc and they were brilliantly sent up in the Comic Strip presents Five Go Mad in Dorset (can’t find the whole thing but there is a clip here).

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Interesting and informative replies, all!

NDP has a good point about Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew, but those series were fairly politically incorrect early on, too. The thing is about Stratemeyer mysteries is that they were constantly being reworked. Which meant that besides being made more PC and more modern, whatever modern was at the time, they were also simplified and watered down. Nowadays you’d hardly recognize the 1930s versions if you were only familiar with 1990s and beyond. You guys have mentioned small changes here and there, but with Stratemeyer, sometimes entire stories were reworked. Did that ever happen with Blyton’s school stories?

Beyond that, who can say what becomes popular and what doesn’t? I’m American, but I’m not a huge fan of Dr. Seuss (::ducks flying objects:: ). If his books are popular outside of the US, I can’t explain that either. Why is A.A. Milne’s stuff beloved by Yanks and Blyton’s is not? Dunno. Maybe Milne’s publisher pushed harder for an international audience. And as far as anything being twee or cutesy, Pooh Bear is the one who made “Tonstant Weader fwow(ed) up.” But us Yanks love him anyway, and the rest of his pals, even before Mousewitz absorbed them.

Why Pooh Bear but not Rupert the Bear? Who knows. But I don’t think anything is ever “too British” for Americans, when you think how much we saturate the rest of the world with our media. It should work both ways, and it often does. American kids rarely have nannies, but that didn’t stop Mary Poppins from finding an audience here. If something didn’t make it in the US, it was probably for a reason other than xenophobia.

As for kids going anywhere they wanted without adults breathing down their necks…well, it used to be like that in American kid-lit too. :frowning:

29

It is, and if you say “non-English” then yes - one of the locals is Trefor, a Welsh-speaking shepherd, but then, if you figure him as a simple rustic who doesn’t speak English because he has never had to then that would seem exotic to a lot of kids of those times.

IIRC George was the same age as Dick, a year younger than Julian, and a year older than Anne. I think they did age as the series went on, though not by much.

30

[QUOTE=Rilchiam]
But I don’t think anything is ever “too British” for Americans, when you think how much we saturate the rest of the world with our media. It should work both ways, and it often does. American kids rarely have nannies, but that didn’t stop Mary Poppins from finding an audience here. If something didn’t make it in the US, it was probably for a reason other than xenophobia.
[/QUOTE]

Don’t forget that like Winnie the Pooh, the Mary Poppins series got a huge boost in popularity stateside when the Disney movie came out. This is not to say it wouldn’t gotten any attention in the U.S. if there had been no movie but it likely would not have been as well known.

Not just in kid-lit but real life as well. The stuff my parents were allowed to do kids in the 1940s (hell, some of the stuff I was allowed to do as a kid in the 1970s) would at least warrant a visit by CPS if not outright loss of parental custody today. And yet, we all turned out okay. [Pops handful of Zoloft and Xanax]

31

I’m currently in the process of (re)reading the Famous Five, just finished the 18th book yesterday, only 3 more to go.

The kids certainly do age through the course of the books, about 4 years over the course of the 21 books. Which is unrealistic, but not particularly.

The prejudices of the day are there, in that foreigners are generally considered suspicious and are quite often Up To No Good. But there are also sympathetic non-British characters, too. The antagonists are usually working class and are occasionally described as “common”, but there are also plenty of salt-of-the-earth workers who are portrayed very sympathetically. There are also middle-class or upper-class antagonists, too, though they’re a lot rarer.

“Gypsies” and travelling carnies and the like are villains in a few of the books, but the children thereof are portrayed positively and one of them, Jo, is a recurring character and a sort of honorary FF member.

So that’s the bad stuff. The good stuff: Blyton is a much better writer than her critics give her credit for. Yes, the books all follow a formula, but within that formula and over the course of many books she manages to keep the interest level pretty high, and even if you know exactly what’s coming (and as an adult I do, but the target audience might not) getting there is still exciting and interesting.

Blyton doesn’t write down to her audience, either. She is sympathetic to the children she writes about (and the children she writes for), and their struggles with the adult world. Obviously the Five are examples of “good kids” and intended to be emulated, but they are also flawed. One thing Blyton does very well is depict the casual nastiness of children - and I think that’s one of the main reasons she’s considered un-PC nowadays.

However - and this is a mark of good writing - as the stories unfold it often becomes apparent that the nastiness is wrong. And Blyton doesn’t telegraph it, she manages to get the point across in a subtle way. I find that highly admirable in a children’s author. She doesn’t treat her readers as stupid; she expects them to be able to work it out for themselves.

What a lot of parents nowadays want for their children is “safe” entertainment that requires no thought, analysis, or discussion. Plonk your kids in front of the TV or fob them off with a book that keeps 'em quiet. Well, there’s a bit too much to discuss when it comes to Blyton. The sexism is an issue. Poor Anne is expected to serve her brothers, and accepts her womanly work happily. But then we have George, the girl who refuses to act like a girl and to accept that biology=destiny.

That sort of thing gets a child thinking. And that’s a good opportunity for a parent to interact with a child.

Don’t write off Blyton, there’s a lot of value to be found in her books. They’re artefacts of another age, for sure, but that makes them more valuable, not less.

32

Really, there’s a girl named George in Blyton books too? You know Nancy Drew has a “boyish” girl named George, right? She’s the one who knows judo. What a funny coincidence. I wonder which came first.

My 11yo has enjoyed the Blyton books she’s read and I would be happy for her to read more of them if they were around, but they aren’t.

I’m not sure that there’s a lot that’s “too British” for American kids, though probably marketers assume as much (see Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). Some stuff just doesn’t get exported though–and I suppose that’s true of American stuff as well sometimes.

33

I did not know that. I’m Australian; Blyton was (and is) popular in the Commonwealth, but Nancy Drew didn’t make a big impression here.

…the Nancy Drew series started in 1930, George Fayne’s first appearance was in 1931. The first Famous Five book, featuring George Kirrin, was published in 1942. So Nancy Drew came first. I’m inclined to think it’s a coincidence, though. “George” is an obvious name for a boyish girl in that era, when George was a popular male name and female versions of it were fairly common.

Some things catch on everywhere, other things don’t. The thing about US culture is that since TV became ubiquitous, everybody in the world hears about American stuff, even if they don’t experience it. I heard of Nancy Drew and knew what it was about even though I didn’t see any of the books when I was a kid myself, because of references from US TV shows. So even the US stuff that doesn’t catch on overseas is still likely to be known about in a general way. We get the cultural references even when we don’t get the cultural artefacts themselves.

34

For what it’s worth, I had only heard of Noddy because I collect modern works written or translated into Latin, which tend to be mostly children’s stories. The Latin Noddy is called Nuticulus Satyrique which is supposed to be Noddy and the Goblins. It was published in 1993, with illustrations that look like screen captures from Rankin Bass claymation Christmas specials. But since I now knew the franchise, a copy of a board book called A Day Out in Toyland stood out to me at a local (Dallas-area) thrift store. This one is from 2004, published by a UK division of Harper Collins with a price listed only in pounds. It is illustrated in what looks like computer generated images.

I didn’t look into it any further, but I wouldn’t have guessed that it was a generations-old franchise across the pond. But I did call Immigration to inform them that they need to build a fence along the east coast because foreigners were clearly getting in that way, too. Unless they came down from Kanukistan. Hmmm…

35

Noddy and Paddington were both available on the Sprout cable network in the US for quite a while. I loved Paddington (still do; the sprog has a collection of stories somewhere on his bookshelf), but Noddy sets my teeth on edge.

36

Part of the reason for the twee-ness is that Noddy is a philosophical innocent (at least in the modern animated adaptations - I wasn’t raised on the original books, so I can’s be sure about those).

Many of the stories are morality tales where Noddy innocently falls (or is duped) into some sort of dire moral trouble - and along the way, he discovers, for the first time in his life, that [something or other] is bad or wrong.

For a single story, that’s great, but considered in bulk, it comes across as sappy and syrupy-sweet.

37

Not at all - in fact, they become very good friends with a girl named Jo (although IIRC she was more carny than Gypsy, but apparently there is a large overlap between those groups anyway)

38

The reason for the disparity is that there have been 3 memorable phases of Noddy series: the '60s-'70s Further Adventures of Noddy stop motion shorts (by a pre-Cosgrove-Hall Cosgrove and Hall), the (with, IMO, the best theme tune, BTW) '90s stop motion Noddy’s Toyland Adventures by Cosgrove-Hall proper, that also got bundled in with some live-action framing stories (initially for the US & Canada redub), and the modern CGI of Make Way For Noddy by Chorion. Apparently there was an even earlier puppet version (which is why they’re the further adventures) - like, B&W '50s TV, but I haven’t seen it.

But in any case, nowadays Noddy books are illustrated with screen captures rather than illustrations, and it’s been that way since at least the '90s

39

The Fraggles??

40

:confused: No, Portland Bill.