Disney Tokenism...

During the SuperBowl while watching some Disney Channel with my little cousins i saw an add for Snow Buddies a new movie about a bunch of golden retriever puppies making a snow sled and racing it in Alaska and this is a sequel off of Air Buddies which is the same concept but the puppies play basketball and one of the charecters is called "B-Dawg" and he wears a "bling" chain around his kneck and has sunglasses. And i think that this obviously is making a charecter to be parralel with the omni-presenet "ghetto" society in our culture today. And i think this kind of parralels to the N word we have been discussing with Huckleberry fin and when i went on the website you can read each charecters profile and the terms used i think are really kind of crude and mocking and i think this gives kids a connotation of wanting to seem gangsta today which could lead them to bad things in their future and i believe it also gives kind of a secret message to the fact that it almost adds to an ongoing stero-type which i believe sumbitting this to a target audience of young impressionable kids is a really bad thing. For Example in B-Dawgs profile it lists his likes as "Basketball, bling, and rap" and in his snow buddies profile it says "B-Dawg is a hip-hop home pup, don't let it go around or it could ruin his street cred! and Yo, thats whats crack-a-lackin! (which apparently is his key phrase) BUt i just think this gives bad credit to black people in general when there being sterotyped as being only gangsta.

i tried to put the links in to these profiles

http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/animatedfilms/airbuddies/index.html (Air Buddies)

http://adisney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/snowbuddies/ (Snow Buddies)