Paul Dini Tells Kevin Smith about
Paul Dini Tells Kevin Smith about Hollywood's Fear of Girl Cooties
And to think just earlier this week you had the New York Times calling Hollywood about their long time claims about not being able to lead movies. And now you have a big name comic and animated creator telling us exactly what Hollywood thinks of girls when it comes to shows targeted at kids.
Paul Dini is interviewed on Kevin Smith’s Fatman on Batman podcast this week and during it he explains from personal experience how Hollywood devalues female viewers and female characters. Dini was, of course one of the creators on Batman: The Animated Series. He has also written and produced a number of other animated shows including Batman Beyond in addition to writing comics. The Emmy award-winning creator also had a live-action show targeted to younger viewers call Tower Prep.
In the interview, transcribed by Agelfeygelach Dini talks about the change in how Hollywood views the audience for animation (this starts around 41:00.- bold is mine)
But then, there’s been this weird—there’s been a, a sudden trend in animation, with super-heroes. Like, ‘it’s too old. It’s too old for our audience, and it has to be younger. It has to be funnier.’ And that’s when I watch the first couple of episodes of Teen Titans Go!, it’s like those are the wacky moments in the Teen Titans cartoon, without any of the more serious moments. ‘Let’s just do them all fighting over pizza, or running around crazy and everything, ’cause our audience—the audience we wanna go after, is not the Young Justice audience any more. We wanna go after little kids, who are into—boys who are into goofy humor, goofy random humor, like on Adventure Time or Regular Show. We wanna do that goofy, that sense of humor, that’s where we’re going for.’”
Okay, so they want younger kids. But wait, it gets worse.
Dini talks a bit about Young Justice and how it had a sophisticated mythology (he calls them “Buffy style stories) but now they have to be, based on his interactions and observations, funny and … NOT FOR GIRLS… (warning f bombs ahoy!)
Read the whole thing. Specifically interesting to me is the part where Dini says he had a show cancelled because the network executives told him too many girls were watching the show. As said during the interview, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The belief that superheroes are for boys, and girls don’t like them means that when girls DO like them, there must be something wrong with the show.
Also, maybe girls aren’t buying the action figures because a) the commercials about action figures usually show just boys playing with them and a male voice talking about them, b) toy sections are almost always separated into “boys” and “girls” sections and parents tend to take their children to buy toys at the “appropriate” section, c) most of the action figures made of a show are of the male characters, and those are the ones most often stocked in stores. The last point I’ve been noticing a lot for a while. I’ll go into a toy store to just look around, and I’ll notice that even for shows with female characters, all the action figures are of the male characters, and when I look at the back, I’ll often see they don’t even HAVE any figures out of the female ones in the line. So of course girls watching a show for the female characters fleshed out by Dini aren’t going to buy the action figures if those characters’ figures aren’t even made (or aren’t stocked if they are made).
(Since it’s DC Women Kicking Ass’ post, disqus comments are closed. There’s a discussion already going on their comments section and I don’t want to split it. :) )