AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
On beyond zebra banned1/10/2024 ![]() ![]() Yet we should not casually mix this up with the fact that business-as-usual has always been a cancel culture - in which strategic attempts to manipulate the public through virtue-signaling, public relations, clean branding and “staying on message” have always been the excuse for self-serving corporate & governmental bureaucrats to fire, marginalize, demonize or suppress speech that might conflict with their agenda. We ought to be rightly (even angrily) suspicious about the suppressive agitation of moralistic mobs. There is something troubling here - something connected to the overall trends of society - but it is not yet a radical act. So let’s begin by approaching this matter in a sanguine and temperate manner. They were not pressured by public mobs and it is also still pretty easy to get your hands on these “banned” books. It is the kind of banal decision that corporations make every year for all kinds of ostensible reasons. This was an in-house corporate decision to simply not renew the publication of a few volumes in their massive collection. The term cancellation, of course, is exaggerated. Join 1,080 other subscribers Follow MASKED LIBRARY on WordPress.I was asked to comment on the “cancellation” of Dr. What is offensive about these images? What can be changed? Should they be changed? How can we use this moment to try better next time? Meanwhile, sales of Cat in the Hat and the other popular Seuss titles increase and still no one cares about the books that were pulled partially because no one cared about them to begin with. Without any attention on the pages in question, there was also no discussion. The vast majority of articles had no mention of the images in question in any of the books, let alone all six. ![]() The general public who did not read or listen to the entire story acted like it was the entire Dr Seuss catalog that would no longer be published. Dr Seuss books were selling like crazy, but none of them were these six. By discontinuing six books at once, the focus shifted to all of the Dr Seuss books. Pulling one book for a good reason singles out that one book and may have brought more attention to isolated images. Then, spinning that financial concern into pulling all of the books for inappropriate drawings. Now that I have read all six of these books I think the decision to pull them was half valid concern over images and half saving money as a publisher. No one would notice if Spazzim is missing, nor the new letter he represents, the letter Spazz. If anything, he looks proud and respectable riding atop his Spazzim.Īlso, as mentioned before, nothing about the image or text here is essential to the book. There’s no portrayal of anything from Arab culture in inappropriate ways. Unlike the Asian stereotypes that have been discussed before, Nazzim isn’t shown in any negative way. Really it looks more like a reindeer with a hump than a camel with antlers. “A beast who belongs to the Nazzim of Bazzim.” A vaguely Middle Eastern looking man riding a Spazzim which I guess because of the hump resembles a camel. The best guess for On Beyond Zebra is the Spazzim. When these books were pulled the Dr Seuss estate did not explain the reasons for each book. There’s also lots of tongue twister sentences to trip up parents while they read to their children. If you enjoyed If I Ran the Zoo or Scrambled Eggs Super, here are more crazy new designs for all sorts of animals. ![]() ![]() Seuss designs new letters and uses them to name more fantastical creatures from his imagination. On Beyond Zebra (1955) stars a young boy in school telling an even younger student about all of the letters that come after Z. This is the last of the six pulled Dr Seuss books that I will discuss on the site. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |