Society today seems to have a penchant for makeovers. Here are three makeovers into today’s news that seem to be quite telling about our society:
- From the “Sunny day. Everything’s A-OK.” Department: It’s the 40th birthday of Sesame Street, and everyone, including the NY Times and CNN, have articles on it. Both comment on how the street has changed, but the CNN article captures it best. It notes how the original brownstone was dirty and grungy, how Cookie Monster was fanatical about his cookies… and smoked, how Oscar the Grouch is just plain nasty, children are seen riding their bikes without helmets, and Gordon, the loving adult man, can be seen approaching a little girl on the street, taking her by the hand and bringing her into his house for milk and cookies. Nowadays, the street is clean, no one smokes, Oscar is lovable, and Cookie Monster has cookies in moderation. We’ve cleaned it up to prevent the bad ideas (better, I guess, that children get them from real life).
- From the “M-I-C-K-E-Y T-H-U-G-E” Department: Going the other direction, Disney is giving lovable, innocent Mickey Mouse a makeover. Concerned that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a beloved character for recent generations of young people, Disney is taking the risky step of re-imagining him: a new video game, Epic Mickey, changes the formerly squeaky clean mouse into a cantankerous and cunning character, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland. Mickey can be naughty and nasty (and, as the article notes, this returns him to his mischeivious roots). Again: Is this a reflection of society? Is clean out and nasty in?
- From the “A Portal on Life” Department: Our last makeover comes courtesy of Microsoft, which is remaking the MSN home page and the butterfly logo. With its new look, the MSN home page has been simplified, with about half as many links as the previous incarnation, focusing instead on a few categories, such as video, news, shopping, and search. Could this reflect the changes in society, which has moved to the short-attention-span era, as reflected in the move from long blogs to Facebook status to 140-character max tweets (a move satirized quite well in this week’s Pearls Before Swine).
