The Introduction
Well...it’s a long story. I suppose the best place to begin is at the beginning: my major. I spent the last three years self-designing a major for the Whittier Scholars Program at Whittier College titled Writing for Multimedia.
The question that always follows this is, “What do you want to do with that degree?!”
My ultimate career aspiration is writing and showrunning for children's programming, either live action or - what I'm especially interested in - cartoons, and if you had the insight to ask my preferred employer, the answer would emphatically be Nickelodeon.
I was raised watching almost exclusively Nickelodeon programming. Some of my earliest memories involve watching SpongeBob and Rugrats and Fairly Odd Parents with my family. But as I've grown and worked through my education and learned more about the entertainment industry as a whole, and especially about gender and racial statistics for entertainment, I've found some unsurprising but still troubling things.
Take, for example three of the most successful individuals in Nickelodeon history and three of the people who I look up to the most:
Craig Bartlett, creator of Hey Arnold!
Butch Hartman, creator of Fairly OddParents, Danny Phantom, and TUFF Puppy, among others
Stephen Hillenburg, creator of SpongeBob SquarePants
What do these people have in common?
They're all white men.
And the problem that I see in the entertainment industry but especially in cartoon production is that cartoons are deeply gendered to appeal to men and boys.
This is a problem on more levels than I can possibly describe with brevity, so I'll allow Linda Simensky, the current head of children's programming at PBS and previously Cartoon Network’s director of programming, to summarize what's wrong for me.
“There is a slightly old and out of date theory that girls will watch shows about boys, but boys will not watch shows where the main characters are girls [...] This theory, along with the feeling that girls no longer watch cartoons after a certain age, and the need to sell toys, has led to many of the animated programs being made specifically for boys. And then the lack of interest in cartoons by women ultimately led to the lack of women in the industry.”
-Linda Simensky
So why does this matter? I'll attempt to explain.
The way that individual products are marketed to their intended audiences involve a subliminal message about what is appropriate for people of different genders to do if they want to correctly fulfill gender stereotypes.
For example, if you have two brands of deodorant, one obviously gendered male and one obviously gender female, and you have a young man who uses the product that's gendered female, the social reaction he's going to get for existing outside of that gender normative boundary is going to be negative. That's going to teach that young person that there are consequences for acting outside of one's intended gender norms. The likelihood that this person is going to continue to nonconform is low, and this person might even turn to gender policing others in return. (Alexander)
But why? Part of this has to do with the way the different products are visually represented. For that men's deodorant, the people who appear in the ad campaigns are large, strong rugby players of multiple races. The person selling the feminine coded product is a pretty generic white woman. Who is a young man going to want to emulate if he wants to be good at sports, attract girls, and be cool among all of his peers? Chances are, he’ll want to be like the rugby players. And while advertising can do this kind of gendering of behaviors and appearances and objects, cartoons can do the same.
The thesis of this project is as follows:
For Nickelodeon shows that premiered from 1991 to 2001, I am analyzing the amount and quality of gender representation, the amount and quality of representation of sexualities, analyzing the potential impact of negative and weak representations of these things, and presenting a better example of both of these kinds of representation.
For amount, I am simply considering numerically how many girls and how many boys, and how many straight people versus how many not straight people. For quality I'm analyzing if the representations are stereotypical or not.The five programs that I've selected are: Rugrats, which originally premiered in 1991; Hey Arnold!, which premiered in 1996; SpongeBob SquarePants, which premiered in 1999, As Told by Ginger, which premiered in 2000; and The Fairly OddParents, which premiered in 2001.
All of these programs fall within the first 10 years of Nickelodeon's existence as a network. This era of Nickelodeon is critical because these are the formative years of the network, during which the company’s branding was solidified. These shows are representative of the early efforts of Nickelodeon to find a solid style, and you'll notice even between these five programs that the art styles, plot focuses, and messages are extremely different. Rugrats is uncanny and a little bit messy and the characters aren't designed to look overly attractive, as compared to a program like The Fairly OddParents where the lines are smooth, the characters are relatively uniform, and the animation improves steadily with time.
These shows were selected according to four criteria: financial success, critical acclaim, fan following, and current network relevance.
Financial success refers to how much money the program is able to generate for Nickelodeon; for example, SpongeBob SquarePants has been licensed to so many different products that you can buy anything with SpongeBob's face on it, from breakfast cereal to underpants. Critical acclaim refers to any awards that the programs have won. For example, Fairly OddParents and SpongeBob SquarePants have both won daytime Emmys for writing, soundtrack, and animation. For fan following, I considered the amount of online and in-person fan activity these shows generate, including fan art, cosplay, fanfiction, and dedicated fan accounts; As Told by Ginger and Rugrats have unusually large fandoms considering how long they have been out of production. Current network relevance refers to programs that are still being aired on television. SpongeBob and Fairly OddParents are both still being produced and new episodes are airing, and Hey Arnold!, Rugrats, and As Told by Ginger all still air on Nickelodeon’s NickSplat block, which is dedicated airtime for 90s era cartoons to be re-aired. This block is designed to appeal to an adult audience that might have grown up watching these older cartoons. (Wiki Pages; Dickson)
Still with me? Awesome. Let's talk about some episodes.
