PSA Calling For the Peaceful Boycott of DreamWorks Products
We at Six Degrees believe that when something is wrong we are all responsible for using the power we have to make things right.
Please join us in our peaceful boycott of DreamWorks products until such a time as an official statement from the company is made regarding the hastily edited end product that resulted in multiple damaging messages in a story intended for children and families. Said statement should have been made before voice actors of the show appeared at SacAnime.
An in depth THREE HOUR three part follow up in which we break down what went wrong and why soon to follow this emergency broadcast.
I didn’t have an issue with it, you’re crazy.
Reblogging in honor of @celestial-littles-stuff calling abuse survivors crazy. Every time @celestial-littles-stuff and people like them attempt to shut us down, we will reblog and make another call. Have a nice day.
I appreciate your follow up. I can empathize with you as a fellow survivor within a romantic relationship, and I’m sorry you had to go through that.
Money talks, and not one of the company owners are hurting for it. Losing loyal customers is how a company knows they need to rectify a situation. Calling for a peaceful loss of consumership is not toxic; it is the way customers improve a product. If I cannot trust that a company takes me seriously when I say “your product causes harm” then I have no reason to pay for their future products, which they will also treat just as carelessly.
I teach the upper end of the target age group of the show. The kids I teach who watch the show were unanimously uncomfortable with the way Lance and Allura’s relationship was developed. That’s because he spent prior seasons badgering her after she clearly expressed she was not interested and never demonstrated a learning moment (the key when this type of arc is in play) that his harassing behavior is not okay, and his mother makes an excuse for his “talk” while Allura’s male figures give their approval of him. That’s toxic behavior I’ve had to deal with since I was my students’ age and a toxic message I don’t want my own children or my students receiving.
The imagery of the corpse of an abuse victim that was desecrated by one of his abusers has its place in adult gothic literature and grotesques. NOT a children’s coming of age story rated appropriate for 7 year olds. That does not belong under a Y7 banner.
The above issues are a scratch in the surface, but I feel they are the most salient.
While I would love for an age appropriate version of the season to be released, what we are asking for is simply a statement from the company addressing WHY these issues were allowed to occur within the show and an understanding that this product proliferates (I assume unintentional) harmful messages to its target audience. Thus far we have been ignored, which tells us the company does not care what kind of product they are making. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to let them know we intend to abandon their future products because we have lost faith in them.
Reblogging in honor of @the-not-so-dark-age , who just outed themself as a troll posing as an anonymous abuse survivor in my inbox. Thank you, @the-not-so-dark-age for letting the entire community know we should block and report you. Hope you enjoyed the very last drop of attention you managed to get.
When you wanna be an animator / story board artist but you realize the animation Industry is one of the most exploitative labour heavy fields out there and relies on exploiting workers and almost all the amazing studio works came at the cost of a huge amount of human suffering
Since DC’s SHAZAM! & Marvel’s Captain Marvel are out soon I wanna recommend that everyone go read the original Captain Marvel Family comics. Fun fact that DC doesn’t want you to know many of the original comics are in the public domain! So go to comicbookplus.com & Digital Comic Museum and read all of the pre-DC marvel family books!
Just for fun, there was one more forgotten Captain Marvel that came out after Billy and before Mar-Vell and he’s also public domain albeit less cool ;)
Milton Mouse & Mary Mouse vs. Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse. Soon after Milton and Mary (characters that were created before Mickey and Minnie were even on the scene) started looking similar to Disney’s popular Mickey and Minnie all hell broke loose. On March 31, 1931, Disney sued Pathe and Van Beuren. The Van Beuren Studios responded by stating that the Walt Disney Productions, were imitating “their” characters.
Amedee J. Van Beuren on April 3, 1931 issued the following statement:
“The only information we have thus far received that such action is pending is contained in articles in the papers. In my judgment the action is entirely without merit or foundation. Aesop’s Fables created the characters Milton and Mary Mouse at the inception of the company in 1921 and the company has been using them. If there has been any imitation, it would appear to be at the door of Walt Disney Productions, whose characters of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse are so similar to ours. As soon as we are served with papers we shall be prepared to defend the action.”
Walt Disney won and Milton and Mary were stopped by an injunction and were no longer allowed to appear in the Van Beuren Studios film shorts, even though the characters were predecessors to Disney’s Mickey Mouse, Countess and Waffles - characters who were also part of the Aesop’s Fables series were then paired together. They didn’t last very long, and were later replaced by Cubby Bear and Honey Bear.
Van Beuren forgot to mention that the characters had been recently re-designed by John Foster to significantly resemble the Disney characters. Milton had appeared a year before in The Polo Match (1929) but looked more like a small rat in that film.
Disney got a temporary court injunction against Van Beuren April 30, 1931 from Federal Judge Cosgrave and a formal decree was issued four months later prohibiting the studio from “employing or using or displaying the pictorial representation of ‘Mickey Mouse’ or any variation thereof so nearly similar as to be calculated to be mistaken for or confused with said pictorial representation of ‘Mickey Mouse’.”
Disney did not ask for any money even though the original suit clearly stated “The petitioner demands an accounting, damages and surrender of all profits made on the alleged imitations”.
In the 1960s, Roy O. Disney in an interview remembered: “We just stopped him. That’s all we were out to do. We didn’t ask any damages. We even let him finish marketing his pictures. We wanted to establish our right. That’s what we were after. To establish a copyright like that is a big thing and that’s an important thing to do.”
Countess Cat and Waffles Cat had always been part of the Aesop’s Fables gang, only they were not often paired together, only in the odd few shorts here and there. Waffles Cat who was much taller in size in earlier cartoons, was paired up with with a small Don Dog.
Relating to finding weird things online, I found these odd ‘not-Pokemon” on Wikimedia Commons in the public domain, by two userswho both seem to be the same person and who seem to have disappeared off the internet as far as I can tell around 2008, with no prescence anywhere else.
So, naturally, I decided to share them with you, with the names they’re given attached to the pics!
It’s an odd little “cache” to stumble upon, and I’m presuming the text-descriptions are meant to be under the same PD license as these, so feel free to elaborate and expand on them if you want to turn these weird little bootleg-Pokemon into something neat!
There’s also a few more less-interesting ones that I couldn’t fit in due to Tumblr’s limitations, so here’s those with names from beyond the break:
