Oh, my brain...

Home sick again today.  Better than yesterday, but I figured that staying home and continuing to rest was the better part of valor, and indeed I am going back to bed soon.  However, I wanted tea first, and having discovered yesterday that one of the cartoon series that I enjoyed watching as a kid, Voltron, was up on Hulu, I picked an episode at random and watched it as I drank my tea.

Wow.  Talk about gender stereotyping and massive inefficiency, not to mention bad science.

In the episode that I picked, "The Lion Has New Claws," all five of the lions are piloted by guys.  (Admittedly, one of them is some random kid, but still.)  The Galactic Council is all white males.  The good guys and bad guys appear to have one token interesting female each - the princess on the good-guy side (who will, in fairness, end up piloting one of the lions) and the witch on the bad-guy side.  (And the princess has an Older White Male to advise her, of course.)  There are other women on the good-guy side, but they're all effectively peasants and mothers, no figures of power.  Because the bad guys are aliens (and this particular episode showed very few of them) it's hard to tell whether there are any non-powerful women at all.

Inefficiency: Why do the pilots (1) have a drop-tube down to their individual transit vehicles, which (2) then take them to the lions?  Wouldn't it be more convenient to park the lions on the palace grounds?  (3) Why do they go through announcing the procedure of forming Voltron every time?  Why not just do it?  Everyone knows which part they're supposed to be.  Oh... It's so the writers have to come up with that many fewer seconds of actual plot!

Bad science: Yeah, it's sci-fi/adventure, I know.  But nonetheless, you have to laugh in disbelief when the witch tells her monster-of-the-day "It's only ten million light years to Planet Ares.  We'll be there in a matter of moments."

I think my brain just lost a few IQ points.  Now, will I risk further damage by picking up what will no doubt end up being further horrendously stereotyped episodes of those gotta-buy-them-all cartoons, He-Man and She-Ra, also currently up on Hulu?

More bad TV

I gave in to temptation and watched an episode each of He-Man and She-Ra.  (It makes a pleasant distraction from looking at websites for retirement homes in the Boston area, 'k?)

He-Man: Seems to exist on a world with a startling number of supers on it.  Skeletor has powerful allies, but so does He-Man.  In the relatively early episode that I watched, each side had - again - one token powerful female (Teela, the captain of the palace guard who bears such a strong resemblance to She-Ra that I expect the makers simply reused the character template, on the good side and Evil-Lyn on the bad).  The dialog seemed somewhat less bad than Voltron, perhaps because it was a native English series, and He-Man gets a lot of mildly amusing lines.  He-Man also had the requisite 'lesson' at the end of each show, which I'd totally forgotten about.  ("In today's episode, Skeletor was trying to use a shortcut to gain the power and riches he craved.  You should never take shortcuts, or listen to the people who offer them."  So... if Skeletor had taken a more arduous path in his takeover attempt, that would have been okay?)

She-Ra: Again, chose an early episode, and am glad I did.  There's a great deal more back story to She-Ra.. kind of along the lines of Cecil in Final Fantasy 4, starting out by serving the bad guys but then seeing that they're not the right side.  And there's the whole brother-sister thing.  I suspect the series later devolves into the standard "Rebels attack/are attacked by the Horde, and She-Ra saves them" storyline.  Funny... She-Ra had better dialog, better voice acting, and (I think) an entirely different voice actor in her normal personality, Force Captain Adora.  From the opening sequence to the show, it looks like there are actually a fair number of female supers as part of the Rebellion, though all the rebel prisoners held by the Horde in the episode were clearly peasant-level guys.  Makes sense, as the show was targeted more to girls than guys.  (More evidence that the show is girl-targeted: OMG flying unicorns with rainbow wingz!!!)