The perfect product for your little girl
Engrish Of The Day serves up this awesome toy from China:
Obviously, the thing that makes it super-awesome is the Disney font in the logo. Is there anything that captures the essence of what Disney has turned into better than blandness? And this is obviously a knockoff of Disney's slightly-controversial "Princess" line of toys for girls (a.k.a. "the product line that makes liberals like me glad we don't have daughters, or if we do have daughters causes us to wrench out our own hair and agonize over what it means to be a good parent"). As with so many cheap ripoffs of iconic brand-name products, the ripoff somehow manages to be more honest, albeit by accident (and also, possibly, by unfamiliarity with the English language).
It might be noted, just in passing, that there was a time when there was more to Disney than the crass blandness that typifies the brand today. It's easy, for instance, to forget that the animation studio responsible for innovations like the multiplane camera has ended up being responsible for... blandness girl. But there you go: proof that "evolution" should not be taken as synonymous with "progress."
Obviously, the thing that makes it super-awesome is the Disney font in the logo. Is there anything that captures the essence of what Disney has turned into better than blandness? And this is obviously a knockoff of Disney's slightly-controversial "Princess" line of toys for girls (a.k.a. "the product line that makes liberals like me glad we don't have daughters, or if we do have daughters causes us to wrench out our own hair and agonize over what it means to be a good parent"). As with so many cheap ripoffs of iconic brand-name products, the ripoff somehow manages to be more honest, albeit by accident (and also, possibly, by unfamiliarity with the English language).
It might be noted, just in passing, that there was a time when there was more to Disney than the crass blandness that typifies the brand today. It's easy, for instance, to forget that the animation studio responsible for innovations like the multiplane camera has ended up being responsible for... blandness girl. But there you go: proof that "evolution" should not be taken as synonymous with "progress."
Comments
It's not just liberals who despise this stuff. I'm somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun in my personal opinions (although I'm libertarian politically because I think that political systems should allow competing belief systems in order to be adaptable and evolutionary).
I hate, hate, hate the princess stuff. My grandparents were poor farmers and my mom worked her way out of that to get a college education, and I worked all the way up to the Ph.D. level. I've worked several blue collar jobs and I think it was good for me morally and poltically. My daughter is not going to be raised a princess. She is going to be a contributing member of society. I resent the idea that Disney thinks that "princess" is what she should aspire to. I'm fortunate in that she has a pathological hatred of dolls, and so despises all things princess and Barbie. But we just lucked out there.
The one movie Disney could have used to counteract that trend was Fa Mulan, and they screwed that one up royal. In the Tang Dynasty poem she is discovered as a female rather earlier on, but still manages to rise to the rank of general, marrying a fellow general before returning to the Fa household and founding a line of great warriors. That is a great story.
Instead we got Mushu and Crickee. Which, come to think of it, is in the long tradtion of Disney cutsefying its tales with animal companions. I think C.S. Lewis was right when he objected to Disney doing "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" when he said that Disney always inserts something of the vulgar into his tales.