It costs less money to take a stock image of a female character, and make them over to look like Rainbow Brite, rather than hire an animator, and take the time to make the character unique. It’s like organic vs processed food, it takes time to grow plants and harvest, instead of just throwing everything into a machine to be sorted out. So I think this is the processed version of Rainbow Brite, where the one in the 80′s was highly developed.

As far as their not being as many color kids, again they may just be testing the market and decided it’s less money to have less characters to produce. With Strawberry Shortcake, once they saw the series was popular they re-introduced more of the orginal characters like the berrykins. Perhaps if Rainbow Brite is successful, they’ll see it as a merchandise worth putting more money into, and there will be more color kids represented.

So it’s understandable if you look at the cost on testing a show that might not even go through, that they’re not bringing back every aspect from the 80′s show. For most of the remakes, it’s like they’re trying to squeeze out the last bit of money that can be made out of an old series.

I think the best we can hope from this, is that this show may encourage other companies to re-issue old Rainbow Brite shows on to DVD. I think the notion that Rainbow Brite is thinner, is something that didn’t even cross the producer’s mind. It’s simply easier to go with female type #8 then hire a animator, and set up a deal with them for a series that might not even go over.

I watched all the short videos on the new site. It seems to me they got rid of all the other characters so they could give Moonglow and Tickeled Pink their own horses (Sunriser who was originally “wild”, Skydancer got turned into Shimmer and was taken away from Stormy, wtf.) And they were all given a baton like some weird Sailormoon wannabe. What is wrong with the Colorbelt and the star sprinkles?

I am definately dissapointed and worried about Rainbows bodyimage… ugh.

Personally, I wanted to be She-Ra. I didn’t want to be the writers or artists. I was a kid. I didn’t understand that there were writers and artists. I also didn’t understand that there was no Santa Clause either. Kids aren’t really supposed to understand these things.

I also wanted to be many other -male- characters. But not because I actually wanted to be male, but because most of the awesome kick ass characters had penises. I felt the same way about real live action heroes like Indiana Jones.

As for her body shape, she looks like a caricature of an athletic kid, to me. There’s a lot of obesity in my family, and my nieces and younger cousins are all just skinny and gangly at this stage. I don’t think skinny necessarily equals pretty either, because it’s just a tough age to be telegenic. So I guess I’m reluctantly okay with it – she’s more like the kids I know 7-10, without the awkwardness (which you expect for television).

Yeah, I’d say regardless of how relevant the topic itself is in the wider world, it pretty much is an overreaction to say this is going to give young girls body image problems.

Yes, that would be an overreaction, but to add to Cara’s comments above, it’s so obviously an overreaction that no one says it quite that way unless they’re trying to make some straw-man argument that they’ll go on to knock down. Whether it’s age-progressed cartoon children, Bratz dolls, or waif-thin heroin-chic supermodels, none of that is going to “give” young girls “body image problems” like some sort of communicable disease. Psychologically healthy children are obviously going to be less affected by imagery that might make others feel inadequate or pressured.

But girls who already have body image problems or preexisting psychological problems may be more easily affected by media images of rail-thin, inappropriately sexualized girls and women. In particular, there’s times when pop culture seizes on images like that where a sort of domination of a particular image can take hold. Images like that needn’t explicitly say “you are less of a woman (or girl) if you don’t look like me” to pretty much consistently say “if you look and act like me, you’ll be more …” fill in the positive attribute: popular, smart, invulnerable to taunts, attractive to boys, etc. That’s what advertising is about, after all.

You can see the same thing in different ways in boys. Slacker culture isn’t going to motivate successful students to drop out of school any more than deviant humor like the MTV shows “Beavis and Butthead” and “Jackass” is likely to commonly inspire young people to commit arson or engage in painful, humiliating stunts, but there are numerous cases of young people into cultures and media imagery like that acting out in especially dysfunctional ways which the probably wouldn’t have engaged in if not for that media exposure, and creating a kind of microclimate that makes inspiring dysfunctional behavior in their peers more likely.

The threat of this is probably overstated, but some overstatement is inevitable when a large group of people tries to critique something they think might cause harm. It’s probably the case that a lot of fear over the movie “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” causing girls to act in self-destructive, suicidal ways, or to bond with abusive boys was overblown, at least that stories of girls actually inspired by the movie to hurt themselves with the depressive, self-destructive behavior that the character Bella engaged in have thankfully been rare to nearly nonexistent in the mainstream media, the same media that had numerous stories come out raising concerns of how the movie portrayed these issues.

On balance, the Twilight:New Moon movie might even have had a positive effect in that it gave the media, parents, and young people an opportunity to talk about these issues. Maybe that’s one of the better ways to make the most of the maturing images we see in cartoons like Rainbow Brite, whose namesake, after all, is often associated with happy endings.

Role-playing was never in your books, eh?

No one faults an multiple-gold medal winning olympic swimmer for being an being an unrealistic role model (I’m thinking of that german athlete is not just amazingly talented, but also extremely beautiful, her name escapes me). But yet, athletes, astronauts, and Supreme Court justices are probably less realistic than the women in magazines. Out of the people I’ve known, 4 have literally been the “negative” role models, while only one (a female astronaut) has been the “positive” role model. Kinda seems like the role models we condemn are actually more realistic. [This of course says nothing about the desirability of their traits, just what value we should put in having realistic role models.]

Not an adult role model. A human one. I don’t think it takes a certain level of maturity to look up to humans. When I watched cartoons or read picture books, I wanted to be the person who created them. I didn’t want to become Rainbow Brite or Madeline or Arthur the aardvark. I wanted to write the stories and draw the cartoons and maybe go to France. I had as many fantasies and as active of an imagination as anyone else when I was a little kid. But maybe that makes me crazy.

Yeah, I’d say regardless of how relevant the topic itself is in the wider world, it pretty much is an overreaction to say this is going to give young girls body image problems.

Good thing I didn’t say that. I’m not sure where those who are arguing against such a notion think that I did.

re: “role models.” You know, I’ve thought of lots and lots of snarky things to say, but I’m really just sad that the idea that children have fantasies which don’t align perfectly with the real world makes other people sad.