Reflection on Week 5's readings and my 2 hrs of TV

When I was a pre-teen, I babysat a 4-year-old girl who loved Power Rangers. Every day she wanted us to reenact entire episodes of Power Rangers. I was amazed at how wonderfully logical she was at condensing 20 minutes of video into a 5 minutes of playtime. In terms of word-based language (like vocabulary or grammar) she wasn’t at all advanced, but in her version of Power Rangers the narrative structure was completely retained: The teenagers are just hanging out when suddenly they are forced to fight some bad guys, they report to Zordon, transform into the Power Rangers, and then combine their robots in order to beat the big monster at the end. Even if she didn’t understand all the spoken words, she was literate enough to connect the visual dots and comprehend much of the important parts, like the fact that the heroes go from a real place like school or the mall and transport themselves to imaginary locations like Zordon’s room. Like repeatedly playing a simple video game or reading a picture book over and over, the action-oriented tv show must have been part of a wonderful comfort zone for her where images came at her in a pattern and flowed at the speed she required in order to begin understanding the context behind them.

Looking back, I would have loved to do exercises with kids about Power Rangers. I’m reminded of an article I read about Pokemon called “Localizing Pokemon through Narrative Play”, where the researcher handed a box of Pokemon toys to very young children and asked them to use their knowledge of the tv show to act out their own stories with the toys. Some utilized their knowledge to write highly detailed tales where the Pokemon used their powers to win battles while others elaborated beyond the confines of the tv show’s narrative style to come up with their own plot lines. Meanwhile, kids who had not participated in the Pokemon craze didn’t know the “rules” of the show and could not play effectively with other children. They were left out because they were not aware of the norms, values, or narrative style of the television program that so many others had familiarized themselves with.

With these anecdotes, I’m reminded of the line in the British Film Institute article on the “cultural centrality of moving texts.” Power Rangers was everything at the time for kids of a certain age. The child I babysat for was a girl, but she was as fully absorbed in the show as much as any boy. I knew white kids, Asian American kids, and Hispanic kids from the ages of 4 to 12 that loved the Power Rangers. And what did these young people learn from the Power Rangers? There is a lot about that show to deconstruct, and so looking back it seems like a waste kids were not talked to about their impressions of the social dynamics of the rangers. As the BFI article states, “Watching programmes and films made and set in different cultures can help develop an awareness of sameness and difference that is essential to cultural understanding.” Kids would probably have been shocked to find out that Power Rangers was an originally Japanese television show. They might have been interested to talk about what difference it makes that the Americanized version incorporates white, black, Asian American, and Hispanic teenagers in their cast of heroes.

Moving to the present, the show I watched for 2 hours this week was Winx Club. It’s a cartoon from Italy that has been dubbed into English and shown on cable tv. To summarize, the show is about Bratz-esque modern fairy teenagers who are good friends and fight alongside their boyfriends (whom they save sometimes) against evil witches, at least when they’re not shopping or going to clubs.

If I were to use some of the teaching techniques with young people to talk about Winx Club, I’d probably ask them what they think about ambiguity of ethnicity in the Winx Club world. The girls have varying skin tones, but no mention is made of what race any of the girls are. Particularly questionable would be the black-haired girl, who could easily be Asian or Caucasian. I’d also show a clip of the magical transformation sequence where the girls go into fairy battle mode and ask them how the pop music affects the sequence or whether the translucent, possibly naked silhouette is sexualized or what it might represent. It’s an abstract sequence, so I’d be curious to know how much time the students think is passing while the girls are undergoing their transformations. Another exercise would be to ask students to write the transformation sequence as a piece of text and compare how different students translated the scene into writing, also asking if the text or image is more effective at illustrating the concept. To bring morality into the mix, I’d very much want to ask what they think about the fact that good deeds bring a character stronger magic and more stylish outfits.

In the Messaris chapter, there’s a passage that states one of the functions of editing film is to “enable the viewer to derive a sense of coherent space-time continuum from a series of fragmentary images” and asks “What principles do viewers follow in performing this interpretational process? Is there a set of medium-specific conventions, a ‘grammar,’ that editors and viewers have to follow?” I read this and immediately began to think of textual grammar vs. visual grammar and couldn’t help but think that visual grammar would have to be far more effective at expressing the progression of real-time human thought processes. I’m not sure how to explain this other than to seemingly digress into an anecdote. The passage I just quoted reminds me strongly of an article I read about the Pirahã, a tribe in South America that appears to defy Chomsky’s idea of universal grammar in their language’s unusual patterns. For example, no recursion in sentences and no fixed words for colors. It is notoriously difficult to begin or hold conversations with the tribe due to grammatical and cultural dissonances. But when members of the tribe are shown a DVD of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, “Jackson’s movie left no question about the universality of Hollywood film grammar.” The people could easily understand the action sequences and even understood the unspoken romantic relationship between Kong and Naomi Watt’s character. Scientists have trouble explaining (or explaining away) the linguistic differences of the Pirahã tribe and struggle to come up with workable tests with which to study their language. Meanwhile, the smoothness of visual grammar makes sense to the tribe in the form of an entertaining film without having to summon a single word. The visceral reaction of the Pirahã to the movie makes me think the cliché about “a picture speaks a thousand words” is worth studying. I’d like to see what kinds of films somebody raises by the Pirahã would make and whether or not their editing would make sense to us, though judging by the frustrations of the scientists it would be immensely difficult to do that kind of advanced work with them.