Great - some illustrators idea of humour is now going to cost that studio thousands to find and edit, along with that infinitesimal chance it somehow goes viral and ends with the studio in bankruptcy.
If the illustrator was 12, I’d just roll my eyes. But that sort of juvenile behaviour on someone else’s dime?
Not cool.
Or - instead of overreacting, they could just leave it there and carry on with their lives. Cave drawings featured penises for many thousands of years - apparently without any harm resulting. So, let the mom be disgusted, it’s her problem. It’s not realistic to change the rendering of a whole scene in a show because one viewer doesn’t like it.
You don’t run a business, do you?
Telling yourself people are over-reacting as sales to TV stations and video stores drop like a rock and you close your business isn’t much consolation. After all of your customers want to be in the cross hairs of some outraged parent who now knows that the station/store deliberately chose to expose children to images like this.
Hell, the “Hot Coffee” thing in GTA caused it to be dropped from distribution at it was already a mature title.
Over-reaction is what the original complainer did. Removing is not over-reaction. It’s simply the minimal rational response of the series owner.
[Edited for clarity]
The Romans had no such qualms. This is a sign at an ancient bakery in Pompeii.
(Translation: Here lives happiness)
Take that, outraged mom!
So what you are saying, is that everybody else capitulates to one person’s disgust, it is no longer overreacting? That makes it worse! It is overreacting on a large scale over something which they can’t demonstrate is a problem - beyond the fact that they don’t like it. So I would go so far as to say that it would be unethical for any parties concerned to capitulate to this one viewer, because doing so is harmful to the viewers as well as society at large. As a layperson, they simply aren’t qualified to dictate the content for others, certainly short of some especially compelling reason. It doesn’t matter if they insist that the penis should be a hand, or a moon, or the plants should be blue - the onus is upon them, and there is no obligation to change the show for one viewer based simply upon their personal emotional reaction to some creative decision which had nothing to do with them.
Otherwise, you set the precedent that you can be extorted by any viewer, for any fickle reasoning.
Boy, is that lady ever gonna be pissed if she watches the Little Mermaid…
"People think our baguette with two lunch rolls looks like what?
Let’s get real. There are probably more people who would be offended by that graffiti than be offended by graffiti that I would find offensive (and they’d probably be louder).
Especially if I’m a business owner, deliberately choosing to expose any significant part of your base to something that upsets them is pretty bloody stupid. Which in general is not a bad thing. After all, I’d say it’s progressive causes that are the larger users of upset in order to get merchants to modify their product or behaviour, and they’ve been reasonably successful.
I agree. My kid (female) is of Maya the bee watching age, and I have to say that if we had spotted it. We probably would have paused it and giggled for quite some time “Heh. Look. Some bee drew a weiner!”.
I’m guessing that this may be a bit of a Christian Values/sex shame/hide those naughty bits bit of mentality, which luckily doesn’t apply to our heathen/atheist household (I’m the heathen, the wife’s the atheist).
But then again, the messages in our house often involve things like trying to explain to a very young girl why she has to wear panties with a dress, yes, even when it’s hot. Yeah, I get that it’s more comfortable. Just trust me on this one. Ok?
Wait until she sees what we went to Mars for.
Why should we be surprised that in a cartoon show about a bee we find a picture of a real son of a bee?
Not like the old days, when you could just go outside and… Oh, forget it.
When I was the age to be watching cartoons like that, I drew dicks everywhere.
Technically, the bits of those mushrooms that can be seen, in other words the bits that are above the ground, are the genitals of the actual mushroom that is in the ground.
Somebody should tell her…
Yes and technically mushrooms also have more than two genders, and if she cares that much about barely-visible drawings of dicks…
As did ancient pottery, Greek statues, etc., etc. The US is obscenely puritanical when it comes to anything having to do with sex (as if that needs to be stated). If we could get over it, and teach kids at what’s going on gradually (not all at once) maybe we’d have fewer idiots screaming “I saw a penis! Oh, GAWD!”, not to mention fewer people feeling the need to make such jokes in children’s cartoons. The jokester’s prank was purely a result of such outrage IMHO, not the cause of it.
I think the caveman would go WTF?? at our attitude. As does much of the western world.
It’s especially telling when the “offending organ” is not engaged in sexual activity at the time. Not wanting your kids to see sex happening is a completely different level of prudery than not wanting them to know that people have penises. Or complaining about breast-feeding of infants “reminding them” of sex.
And you end up with the mindless pap that was on TV during the Three Networks Only period. Fortunately now we have many more choices (not to say that a lot of it isn’t more mindless pap), some of which actually caters to adults.
Disney animators probably should have stopped doing stuff like that in the era of home video.
