When Updates Go Bad

[Marketing] Apparently, orthopedic shoes, bonnets and bloomers are considered sooo 1980s.

Yes, I'm serious. Now, I remember the '80s as being high-tech, progressive (at least in my own little world, if not on a national front) and with a visual sensibility that was almost futuristic in its geometry.

But no. We were such clodhoppers back then; ridin' Bessie the ol' mule each morning to our one-room schoolhouses, careful not to spill the pint of buttermilk we carried in our lunch pails. Why else would a marketing concept like Strawberry Shortcake resonate so much with the young girls of the time? Obviously, they identified with her countrified ways. (The fact that the 1980s also introduced the modern concept of baldfaced, content-free marketing to children was just another sign of our golly-gee yokel gullibility, I guess.)

Those girls were so hopeless compared to today's sophisticated 8-year-olds. That's why Strawberry Shortcake needs an updated look.

Now, I don't really care enough about Strawberry Shortcake to mourn its redesign. It was a cartoon so obviously designed by committee from its inception as a marketing engine that I hated it instantly. I just find it distasteful that every cartoon now has to be done in exactly the same, bland style--one influenced by the worst aspects of both Japanese animation and Disney.

(Interestingly, it turns out that Holly Hobby--who, to my knowledge, lived in an entirely different universe than Strawberry Shortcake--moved off the prairie and became a hippie chick.)

Fortunately, parents loathed Warner Bros.' horrifying re-imagination of the beloved Loony Toons characters, and the so-called "Loonatics" have been relegated to the dustbin of humanity.

Just looking at that last one hurt. WB deserved to be slapped over Space Jam way back when, but at least that was just one ill-conceived movie. But, if they ever again attempt to defile Bugs Bunny & Pals with something so terrible as "Loonatics," its executives should be imprisoned.

They do not own those characters; Mel Blanc, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and the other artists who created them do. We who grew up with them own that legacy in the sense.

Damn you, kids, get off my lawn! (Brandon Burt)