Hegemony in action
Orinoco is the central Womble character: he's feckless, greedy and lazy - lovable, but his proletarian antics are always punished, as we will be if we don't work hard. His boss is Great Uncle Bulgaria, a demanding autocrat constantly demanding copies of The Times (traditional paper of the élite) who almost always foils Orinoco's reasonable requirement for adequate food and rest. The boy needs a union!
The downtrodden proletariat
The heartless bourgeois exploiter of free labour
The books are great, the animations are heartwarming - that's how capitalism works, kids. Gramsci would recognise the evil genius that is The Wombles. I prefer these Wombles.
5 comments:
You have destroyed my youth.
Nah, i'm kidding. I never had a youth.
I replied to your comment over on eitherorbored, but then discovered you hadn't subscribed to the comment thread so decided to bring it here, cuz I really am curious about your views on Ed, Edd and Eddie:
to be honest, I only caught womble reruns in the 80s, and although I have a fondness for them I could never declare my love for them, for it would be a false love. Have you considered how ‘Ed, Edd and Eddie’ corelate vis a vis political theory? ;)
dammit, I forgot to subscribe myself! this'll sort it hopefully...
I'll have to research that - never heard of it/them! I led a TV-deprived existence as a child.
Sometimes I wish I had.
'Ed, Edd and Eddie' were actually after my childhood but I caught them on the cartoon network in my teens and early twenties. I have an unhealthy attachment to cartoons. To be honest, I always found the show quite annoying, but whilst watching an episode idly i was struck by how the three Ed's represented a model of capitalism. Living in perpetual summer holidays they run around the neighbourhood pursuing various schemes. You have Eddy, whose only concern is making money, ostensibly to buy jawbreakers but it always seemed to me this was merely something to hook the other two in. He acts as a kind of leader, pulling the other two into various money making antics. Then you have Edd, or double d, who is the brains - he comes up with the schemes, and points out the many flaws in Eddy's thoughts. He is anal retentive and neurotic in the extreme. Then you have Ed who is dumb as a post, talks in a ridiculous manners, and is disturbingly strong. He represents the working class.
Anyway, this is just a rough overview. I'd be extremely curious as to what someone with an academic background in political theory would make of this show.
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