Cinema likes the underdog beating the favorite; not so much the other way around. There’s really nothing more to it than that.
Several people have said this, but I think it’s oversimplified at best. In an underdog story, especially an unsubtle one aimed at kids, the underdog is going to be on the edge of defeat at least once, and then make some amazing comeback to squeak it out. Here, she left him in the dust from the first point, and just continually made him the Washington Generals to her Globetrotters.
Yes, I really liked it too.
SlackerInc, the cultural significance is that Disney finds that “boy dominates girl” doesn’t make for an entertaining story. Frankly, I’m inclined to agree.
What are you worried about? That girls are going to get their illusions about athletic dominance shattered? That happens to pretty much everyone at some point, male or female.
To the point where if you see an underdog movie in which they don’t win the championship it actually counts as subverting the trope.
…you say in the OP you were watching out of the corner of your eye until a certain scene came up. But this sounds like you are much more intimately aware of the entire details of the plot. What was the name of the movie?
Firstly iamthewalrus nailed it as being a sub-trope of the underdog always winning.
But also, it’s not necessarily fantasy. Yes, if we’re talking professional women competing against professional men in a physical sport then they have no chance: at a professional level every little thing counts, and the difference in muscle mass and bodyfat between the genders is not a little thing.
But if we’re talking pre-pubescent youths say, or just two random non-professional adults? Sure the girls might win.
I’m several years past being forced to watch Disney tween shows with my girls. Having a girl beat a boy in sports is about the most quaintly innocent thing they push on there. I had to make it clear that the attitudes and disrespect the characters showed towards their parents and all other adults wouldn’t fly in our house. They were in no danger of thinking they could take on a man one on one in basketball. Then again they are about the most unathletic individuals you will ever meet.
I do remember watching Liv and Maddie with the kids. I don’t remember if the star athlete of the show ever played against a boy. I do remember thinking Dove Cameron looked totally unathletic and they could have cast someone who actually looked like they play basketball. Or could even make a basket. But when they cast the tiny pretty blonde girl I don’t think that was their priority.
Question: were girls allowed to “play down”?
In hockey one dirty little secret of why girls do better is they can “play down”. Meaning a 10 year old girl can play on a 9 and under team. Which can be quite a difference at that age but isnt so important past age 14.
Yes, it helps if you have a family really into sports and that goes for both boys and girls. Back when my son was playing baseball there was this one all-girl team that also had a female coach. Very cute with the pink uniforms. Only problem was they were terrible and they quit about 2nd grade and switched to softball.
Funny story, or stories.
A couple of times I’ve asked why the girls want to play on boys teams and the common answer is the girls felt all girl teams didnt play hard enough. The girl who played boys baseball mentioned that.
We had a couple of girls switch from figure skating to hockey.
Finally I would like to add that girls usually switch back to girls teams or girls sports like softball because of scholarship issues. The chances of a girl getting a full ride scholarship in say softball, soccer, tennis or other sports is pretty good.
In tennis for example few colleges even have mens tennis teams.
It’s not any different than the trope of the nerdy, unattractive guy getting the beautiful girl, or people from widely different economic classes marrying. Those things don’t happen very often in real life either, but are common in American tv and cinema.
Cite?
And, has been stated, it’s just a version of the ‘underdog’ trope. And guess what, girls are, for the most part, perceived as the underdogs in athletics.
And the fact that you’re worried that Disney is setting up the poor women for future disappointment is a part of that.
Do you have a problem with all ‘underdog’ stories, or just the ones that show girls winning? Do we need to teach our young boys who may be weaker/less popular that despite what they see on (some random TV show) they in fact can’t overcome the stronger more dominant asshole and they should set their sights lower, or is it just our daughters who need to be reminded?
Goliath and David, not Goliath and Dianne!
Are you sure about this?
If I might jump in, I think thats a tough one because you often hear “You can be or do anything you want” or “Follow your dreams” when in truth thats not really good advice because it often sets you upon the wrong path. Plus it often means people get set up by persons or groups who just want there money.
OTOH I hate to stomp down a persons desires and drives to better themselves.
Yup.
Which is really annoying as Annie Oakley’s real life relationship with her husband is completely different. As they both knew who’s the star attraction. And he step back to manage/support her career.
I think it’s a reasonable thing to say when children are small, but as they get older, it’s probably good parenting to teach them to realistically assess their chances and the consequences attached to various things and let them draw their own conclusions.
That way, if little Billy decides that he wants to be a singer when he’s 5, you’re not crushing his dreams, but when he’s 15 and can’t make the school choir, hopefully you’ve taught him well enough that he’ll realize he’s not that good of a singer and hang it up, instead of being humiliated publicly on American Idol a few years later.
? - 251 of the 350 or so NCAA Division I schools have a men’s tennis program.
Did you mean men’s volleyball, where only 150 NCAA schools in all three divisions put together have the sport, as opposed to 1072 that have women’s volleyball?
There’s another reason girls don’t play on boys’ teams; in some states - California, for example - they’re not allowed to, if there’s a girls’ team in the same sport. (This wasn’t a rule in California until the early 1980s, I think. I assume it has something to do with Title IX; if you take away a boys’ opportunity to play because a spot on the “student” (i.e. boys) team is taken by a girl, but he would have made the girls’ team had be been a girl, then they are taking the boy’s opportunity to play away solely because he is a boy.) Note that the NCAA puts no such restriction on college teams.
I propose the “Truth in Hollywood” law (which will of course apply to all media) enforcing a strict adherence to statistics in movies and TV-shows. Any time an underdog is presented as winning the production company have to show that they are not skewing the impression a statistically aware viewer might get of the situation. For instance, if there is a only 1/10 chance of an event, they have to show their event doesn’t skew the statistics for all such events displayed in movies. If you want to show Stephen Hawking making a basketball penalty shot in 2008, and no one has shown him failing, you will have to release millions of other movies at the same time showing him failing to make the shot.
I got a real-life example of one: a friend’s daughter was playing on monkey bars at a playground (she was around 10) when a group of boys of similar age, who’d been watching her, challenged her to a pull-up contest. The smaller kids dropped out quickly, the biggest one got to about 12 before he couldn’t continue. The girl, who’s been taking gymnastics for years and was (and is) damn near elite, got to 28 before she stopped out of boredom.