No more villains
My school-aged self was intrigued by the Purple Pie Man. He was the villain of the 1980s Strawberry Shortcake franchise. Tall, sporting a purple hat and a thin mustache, the Pie Man was a constant if vague menace to Strawberry and her various sweetly named friends.
In the years since I thrilled to the Pie Man’s threat, television has spun off in two opposite directions: increasingly violent images for boys and threatless universes for girls.
Even as we rightly worry about the violent media images that bombard children, villains like the Purple Pie Man have been stripped from girls’ programming. Even Dora the Explorer, heroine of the quintessential program for preschoolers, has greater threats to face than does the updated version of Strawberry Shortcake. The message seems to be: even toddlers can stand up to evil better than elementary school-aged girls.
