Ideological Effect
Please engage at least one of this week’s authors (Christopher Anderson and Michael Kackman) and both of the week’s screenings (Hopalong Cassidy, “The Feud” and Disneyland, “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter”) to craft an organized and coherent 300-400 word response to the week’s material. You may choose to address any one or multiple of the below prompts and/or pose your own questions, critiques, and assessments. Please address specific and relevant aesthetic/thematic/narrative details about the episode(s), though, and use direct quotes or substantive paraphrases of the readings. You may start with some summary but synopsis should not comprise the bulk of your post. Some questions you might choose to consider (you do not need to answer all of them): How do Disneyland and Hopalong Cassidy reinforce or challenge American postwar ideals/values for children/young audiences? What appear to be the selected episodes’ main goals/purposes in terms of address and messaging? Where to you see the episodes as incorporating advertisements and other transmedia properties into their narratives, aesthetics, characters, or formats? How do the programs speak to kids as “citizen consumers”? How are these programs constructed as “educational” texts for young people and to what social/ideological effect(s)? What might they “teach” children about U.S. race and gender dynamics? How do “The Feud” and “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter” compare/contrast in terms of their visual styles and genre orientations? How do these similarities and/or differences speak to Walt Disney’s and William Boyd’s modes of authorial branding? In what ways do these children’s episodes diverge from or align with other 1950s television genres/programs? How might we distinguish TV’s approach to teen/adolescent marketing from advertising directed towards kids? Do these programs seem “adaptable” to numerous markets/audiences or relatively “niche” in their appeal? How and why so? Screen link:
