Sponge-Bob Money Pants
This article in today's Star Trib talks about the potential new partner for the theme park at the Mall of America, the cable channel Nickelodeon. I'm not sure that I'm crazy about this. Camp Snoopy was certainly a brand name, but there was something somehow innocuous about it. The Charles Schulz media empire was never really that big. Here, we have a major children's television network involved. The amount of attention paid to brand identity here, and the potential consumer tie-ins, really struck me. When kids' programming is commoditized in this way, made simply into a vehicle to sell programming, toys, and the like, it seems dangerous. All kids' stories have some kind of alterior social purpose, but it seems to me that for much of history that purpose was largely cultural and moral, not commerical. It was about socializing kids into the values and roles of their environment--which had its own up and downsides. Here, the people developing these tales are certainly concerned with education. I've read some good things about Dora in particular. But at the same time, they're also out to make money, and my child is a rather vulnerable victim to such tactics.
On a related note, I've found myself encouraging Micah's recent dinosaur phase. Some of it is my own memory of dinosaur mania as a child. But dinosaurs are also largely not commercialized--we're not talking the Thomas the Train empire or even his more recent Bob the Builder phase. There's not the same branding process.