Thursday, May 19, 2011

Racing, Rapping Hamsters

I think those rapping hamsters from last year's KIA car ad deserve their own TV series.  I like them more than those Geico cavemen. 

Some media studies class somewhere must be analyzing the ad as an example of how ethnic markers can exist in the absence of any human skin tone.  Is anyone upset about the hamsters?  Not that they should be.  I hope the world's moving toward admitting there are ethnic differences without seeing every difference as cause for conflict (or even a big deal, compared to individuals' differences). 

But I wonder: are campuses still p.c. enough these days, in the early-90s fashion I so often witnessed at Brown, that, for instance, some students flip out when they learn in pre-med classes that not all ethnic groups respond to all medications in precisely the same way, etc.?  Nothing scandalous or wrong with that, of course, nor with me hankering for Italian food instead of Chinese (which you may have noticed have taken somewhat divergent historical paths).  

Whether to, say, rerelease Song of the South, though, is something Disney still debates internally, according to a report mere months ago. 

But tomorrow: footage of a very tiny horse gone berserk. 

1 comment:

Eric Hanneken said...

I took this candid photo of a Kia hamster at the Columbus Auto Show, and for some reason it's become popular on Flickr.