I wasn’t planning on this being a two-part article, but when you go past 3000 words you kind of have to stop for the good of the readers. Luckily I noticed the word count at a good break count.
In part one of this look at the leaked pitch for Recess: Next Bell, a “next generation” sequel to the Saturday morning favorite Recess, which spawned a movie and at least one video game, we looked at that next generation of kids trying to make recess fun. The only red flags really came from what Disney does these days, with forced stereotype “representation” and “mary sue girlbosses” being the norm. For the most part, though, it’s only that history that made made the red flags stand out. The new kids had potential to reach a new audience as well as the old audience who followed the adventures of their forbearers, with only minor bit of the “modern audience” nonsense.
That changes this half of the pitch.
In that first part’s intro, I mentioned that ” everything wrong with modern Disney kids shows and writing in general even among acquired properties like Star Wars and Marvel is on display in this pitch” but the only hints were the mean girls getting mean boys and mean non-binaries as part of their group and mentions of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the modern LGBT+ activists being influences on the stories they planned to tell. How #MeToo works into a show for kids about a bunch of fourth graders at recess I probably don’t want to know, but the other two have been on display in other Disney works. It’s the treatment of the original cast that confuses me.
In this next section we’ll see a fallen hero, because they love doing that, two comings out, and a dead body. Remember, Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere have their names on this pitch, so this is what they planned to do to characters they created, fans loved as kids, and you have to wonder if this show would have been all that well received by those parents they wanted to introduce their kids to this show.
Continue reading →
Tell others about the Spotlight:
