Wolf Gnards

I was watching some Angry Video Game Nerd and stewing about how much more famous James Rolfe is than myself (as I am often wont to do), and I was really taken by this Turtle Tunes video. I had out grown Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by the time they picked up musical instruments, so I’m not overly familiar with the whole singing turtle concept.

This is when a franchise truly goes bad, though. Kidz Bop type songs squeezed the last possible dollar out of the Ninja Turtles. It’s like a concept gets so watered down that its appeal goes from teens to kids to finally toddlers, and getting those final toddler dollars is about the last stop. But giving Ninja Turtles instruments isn’t that weird, at least, no weirder than giving a turtle nunchucks to begin with. The thing I thought was strange was would you really want actual Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to take care of your children? Would you entrust your child to four teenagers in masks singing about pizza? Scratch out the whole mutant turtle part, even scratch out the ninja part, just four regular teenage boys. There’s a reason why girls rule the babysitting biz, it’s because no one trusts teenage boys.

Take any children’s show though, take Barney for example. Would you feel safe leaving your kids in the care of a purple T-Rex? A T-Rex of any color? What if it said it loved you and demanded your love in return? Probably not. Or Oscar the Grouch? Would you leave children to learn life lessons from a hobo who lives in a garbage can? And not only that but a self professed “grouchy” hobo who lives in a garbage can? Why do we trust them?

Because there is a certain fakeness to them, a certain cartoon quality or plush animal appeal. There seems to be an unspoken trust connected to that which is of the Muppet.

Follow up:

A Reverse Uncanny Valley

This is a reverse Uncanny Valley. If you’re familiar with the theory of an uncanny valley then you know that it refers to a concept in robotics or computer animation that look too human. If a replica looks almost but not quite human it causes a sort of revulsion. It goes like this we like things that are very much not real, we like things that are real, but we hate things that are not real but that look sort of real. Examples include Polar Express, Beowulf, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Graphs never seem to take into account though what I call the Too Canny Hill. This is where a lot of Muppets stand and you can think of it as the flip side of the Uncanny Valley, it’s when something real looks more and more fake. It seems to be the more Muppet like something is the more trust we’re willing to give it. The more cartoon something real looks then the more we love it. What the typical Uncanny Valley graph doesn’t take into place is that while, yes, we hate animated cartoons that look too human, we love real humans that look like animated cartoons more than regular humans. Anything that’s like a puppet that has a concrete physical presence falls into this category.

Take myself for example. I don’t spread this around much, but I am part Muppet on father’s side. Which has the effect of people putting vast amounts of trust in me for very little reason at all. I’m seldom friendly and I’m rarely helpful, yet I’m stuck giving lost people so many directions and answering so many questions to strangers because they seek me out. In their mind they probably go, “Hey, I can ask if this train goes to Diversey to that random non-Muppet guy over there (and possibly get shot), or I can ask this very Muppet looking guy hiding in the back because, maybe, he’ll break into song about the train schedule.”

But this Muppet don’t sing.