Culture
Clips —
September 12, 2006
NBC Slices and Dices Veggie
Tales
Maybe you're familiar with the computer-animated
cartoon "Veggie Tales," a video series targeted at children
ages 2 to 8, and which features moral and religious tales hosted
by Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber. Beginning in 1993, the
series was distributed on VHS tapes, telling biblical stories
like the Battle of Jericho, David and Goliath and the tale of
the Good Samaritan. Each show ended with a Bible verse.
And it's been a marketing phenomenon.
Without any broadcasting or syndication on television, "Veggie
Tales" has sold more than 50 million "Veggie Tales"
DVDs and videotapes — primarily, but quietly, through big chain
stores like Target, Wal-Mart and Family Christian Stores. As their
popularity spread, so did "Veggie Tales" T-shirts, plush
toys and other products.
Eventually, someone in Tinseltown
saw the commercial possibilities. Now, the news breaks that NBC
(as well as NBC-owned Telemundo) will begin showing "Veggie
Tales" cartoons on Saturday mornings for the new fall season.
Maybe this isn't Earth-shattering news. In a world of 24-7 cartoon
programming on cable and satellite, Saturday morning at the Big
Three networks is a forgotten land, and the days where children
would get up and watch test patterns on Saturdays in anticipation
of cartoons has long passed.
But here is what should be news.
The early word from producers is that NBC has grown increasingly
fierce about editing something out of "Veggie Tales"
— those apparently unacceptable, insensitive references to God
and the Bible.
So NBC has taken the very essence
of "Veggie Tales" — and ripped it out. It's like "Gunsmoke"
without the guns, or "Monday Night Football" without
the football.
Think about this corporate mindset.
NBC is the network that hired a squad of lawyers to argue that
dropping the F-bomb on the Golden Globe Awards isn't indecent
for children, but invoking God is wholly unacceptable. Or, as
one e-mailing friend marveled: "So, saying 'F--- you' is
protected First Amendment speech on NBC but not 'God bless you.'"
Brent Bozell
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/BrentBozellIII/
2006/09/08/nbc_slices_and_dices_veggie_tales
--
Not a “Live and Let Live”
Culture Anymore
Many people of libertarian inclinations,
of whom I am one, have sympathy for a particular style of gay
rights movement. Let and let live, we always say. If it isn’t
hurting any one else, it is no business of the government’s.
Those days are over. The gay caucus
of the California State Assembly is not interested in live and
let live. This is an aggressive, intrusive movement that brooks
no disagreement. Consider the following recent developments.
The CA State Assembly passed legislation
banning discrimination in state operated or funded programs on
the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender
identity. The bill, SB 1441, makes no provision for religious
exceptions. Religious universities and schools will be required
to take no notice of same sex conduct, or risk losing any student
financial assistance from the state. This legislation was sponsored
by Democratic state senator, Sheila Kuehl.
This bill curtails the ability of
Christian schools to maintain their religious identity. Even now,
a California Lutheran high school is being sued because it suspended
two female students who were having a sexual relationship, in
violation of the school’s code of conduct. There is no place for
religious disapproval of same sex sexual conduct in the topsy-turvy
ideological universe of the LBGT caucus. Evidently, we have to
tolerate “gender non-conformity,” but we don’t have to tolerate
diversity of religious standards of sexual behavior.
Jennifer Roback Morse
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/JenniferRobackMorse/
2006/09/04/not_a_live_and_let_live_movement_any_more
--
Docudramas Untrue Path
Five years after 9/11, it's easy
to find partisan divisions. But here's an issue we should be able
to agree on: Docudramas — the portrayal of real events and people
by actors — are a poor way to teach children and adults history.
It's especially iffy to take dramatic license in telling the story
of events in which many of the principal players are still living,
such as 9/11 or President Reagan's administration.
Just ask ABC. Last night, it aired
the first part of a six-hour miniseries, "The Path to 9/11."
Sandy Berger, who served as President Clinton's national security
adviser, bitterly complained about a fictional scene in which
he stopped CIA agents who were about to kill Osama bin Laden.
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had similar complaints.
Both persuaded ABC to alter the scenes involving them. It's not
known if the network also altered scenes in tonight's installment
that portray Bush administration officials such as Condoleezza
Rice in a negative light.
The makers of docudramas always have
smooth explanations for why they need to adjust history for the
purposes of storytelling. Cy Nowrasteh, the screenwriter for "The
Path to 9/11," told National Review: "The Berger scene
is a fusing and melding of at least a dozen capture opportunities.
The sequence is true, but it's a conflation. This is a docudrama.
We collapse, condense, and create composite characters. But within
the rules of docudrama, we're well documented."
That's the problem with docudramas.
Their rules simply aren't good enough when dealing with events
that are still fresh in the minds of so many. At worst, they can
be used by ideological gunslingers like director Oliver Stone,
who smeared the reputations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
in paranoid fantasy films.
John Fund
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110008925
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