High praise indeed! Thank you very much. I've 'known' you for almost 8 years and highly respect your opinion (even when I disagree with it !).
That's all that's required -- polite respect accorded to other people's opinions; anything more, and I might get conceited :) No, seriously... I don't expect people to agree with me all the time. I'd be disappointed if they did; it would show a mental laziness. Everyone needs to think for themselves.
Bugs Bunny and Porky are Looney Tunes characters.
Having raised a child in this country, I "know" who they are and even what they look like. What I'm unfamiliar with is "who" they are. Cartoons, out of necessity, reduce the personality of each character to a "few strokes caricature" or stereotype; one learns that "a is loud", "b is stupid", etc, and it continues through the series. I have never watched enough of them to determine what was typical for Bugs Bunny and for Porky. That's why I said they were "unfamiliar" to me; I don't feel I know them well enough to say how other people were *expected* to perceive them... It would, I think, influence the audience reaction to the playlet -- my reaction to the characters was, obviously, not something you'd have expected from a N. American audience, who was predisposed (programmed? <g>), from childhood, to recognise, on sight, certain features and to react accordingly...
I was raised with these cartoons and enjoyed them very much. They fell out of favour in the '80s for the violence (the coyote never catches the roadrunner, only gets himself hurt)
Actually, the "excess PC" is nothing new <g> Just compare the Grimm and the Perrault versions of Cinderella... The Perrault version "smoothed the edges", removed all the nightmarish elements of the story, replaced them with more "palatable" ones, and managed to make it meaningless and non-cathartic in the process (but that's the version Disney used for the film). It may be harmful for a child to see the coyote hurt himself (and re-appear in the next installment unharmed, reducing the horror), but it might also teach him that wickedness gets punished (at least in the ideal world of cartoons)...
----- Tamara P Duvall Lexington, Virginia, USA Formerly of Warsaw, Poland http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd/
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