Comment on This used to be peak commercial humor
Wetstew@lemmy.world 4 days ago
My mother loved the Taco Bell Chihuahua, we had like a half dozen talking plushes of him saying different things.
Was it racist? kinda probably yeah a bit, but it wasn’t hateful.
Trafficking in stereotypes at most?
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I mean, at one point everyone blithely assumed that Mexicans found Speedy Gonzales to be racist and there was a (completely white-led) little backlash against him until someone got around to actually asking some Mexicans about it and discovered that he was actually broadly popular with that demographic.
anarchrist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
In general people really like seeing themselves on the TV and understand exaggerated stereotyping for comedic effect. Mama mia boopity bopy, as my ancestors would say.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
yells in italian
…silently, by making threatening hand gestures
pedroparamo@lemm.ee [bot] 4 days ago
He messed that cat up. Who’s going to be offended to be represent by speedyg? Nobody that’s who.
TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Speedy Gonzales is laudable only because he contrasts the other sterotypes such as the drunken mice that occasionally help or Slowpoke Rodriguez, who I always thought of as super chill and awesome. But if I to pick which would stereotype would represent my minority, I’d also choose the model minority stereotype.
EvacuateSoul@lemmy.world 4 days ago
More examples, don’t get lost in the hole
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/…/MexicansLoveSpeedyGonzales
Psythik@lemm.ee 4 days ago
And to this day, people still won’t shut the fuck up about this fact in every comment section of every Speedy Gonzales video on YouTube.
Wetstew@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’ld be curious to see them revive Speedy with the less-than-flattering characters.
Every culture has a stereotype of a lazy/drunk/yokel, but there’s a proportion issue. A village of regular workin’ mice, one or two lazy slow or old mice and it’s no problem.
Apu wasn’t a problem at first, outside of him being voiced by a white dude doing Indian face, his orginal character was he was a hard working immigrant who had thinly veiled frustration for the lazy spoiled idiots he has to serve to make ends meet. Only to end it with the expected nice-ities expected of a clerk.
I’m not Indian though, and it’s been a while since I saw the early seasons. Grain of salt. Cutting him out of the show whole cloth sucked though, not a ton of Indian characters on TV.
Atleast Bob’s Burgers brought back Marshmallow when they decided to retool her a bit.