Last edited Sat Jul 25, 2020, 05:47 AM - Edit history (1)
Since people on here seem to have the memory of a goldfish...this was a big story in early June.
CRITICS NOTEBOOK
The Protests Come for Paw Patrol
A backlash is mounting against depictions of good cops, on television and in the street.
By Amanda Hess
June 10, 2020
Leer en español
It was only a matter of time before the protests came for Paw Patrol.
Paw Patrol is a childrens cartoon about a squad of canine helpers. It is basically a pretense for placing household pets in a variety of cool trucks. The team includes Marshall, a firefighting Dalmatian; Rubble, a bulldog construction worker; and Chase, a German shepherd who is also a cop. In the world of Paw Patrol, Chase is drawn to be a very good boy who barks stuff like Chase is on the case! and All in a police pups day! as he rescues kittens in his tricked-out S.U.V.
But last week, when the shows official Twitter account put out a bland call for Black voices to be heard, commenters came after Chase. Euthanize the police dog, they said. Defund the paw patrol. All dogs go to heaven, except the class traitors in the Paw Patrol.
Its a joke, but its also not. As the protests against racist police violence enter their third week, the charges are mounting against fictional cops, too. Even big-hearted cartoon police dogs or maybe especially big-hearted cartoon police dogs are on notice. The effort to publicize police brutality also means banishing the good-cop archetype, which reigns on both television and in viral videos of the protests themselves. Paw Patrol seems harmless enough, and thats the point: The movement rests on understanding that cops do plenty of harm.
The protests arrived in the midst of a pandemic that has alienated Americans from their social ties, family lives and workplaces. New and intense relationships with content have filled the gap, and now our quarantine consumptions are being reviewed with an urgently political eye. The reckoning has come for newspapers, food magazines, Bravo reality shows and police procedurals.
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