I love cartoons...and I often buy some of my cartoon favorites on DVD and watch them with my kids on our home theater system. Don't laugh - that's pretty fun to do! Anyway, there's been a lot of talk about children's favorites growing up - particularly Dora the Explorer, best known as the tomboyish travelling bilingual little girl. I've been searching for positive feedback about the supposed grown up image of Dora that Mattel developed. I saw the image and didn't think there was any problem with the new Dora. Besides, it's not like the young Dora is going away. She'll still be around, teaching our youngsters a little Spanish and English as she travels around different places.
Here's the original Dora the Explorer that we've come to know all these years:
Originally, many parents were afraid that the new Dora was going to become a streetwalker or be start going the way of Barbie who I hear is getting tattooed. But here's the image that was released of the new Tween Dora:
Here are a few related articles I found explaining the new image and the reason behind the change.
Added 04/06/09: So PastExpiryCartoons posted a link to this in my comments (don't know if you read comments on blogs). I thought I'd add this because you really have to have an open mind to appreciate the humor behind this. Or you can look at it and understand why parents get into such a hubbub about change to their children's beloved characters.
Yay! My favorite holiday is coming soon - Halloween!!! The reason why I love Halloween is not just because it's so much fun to dress up in costumes, but because there's always so much chocolate candy around - LOL! Many mothers I work with often bring the "extra" candy that their kids get from Trick-or-Treating to work because they don't want their kids consuming so much candy at home. So we get to have candy all day long at the office.
Anyway, I thought that I would share a few fun and interesting Halloween videos I found on YouTube. I didn't pick any gorey, horror videos - you can have your fill of those from the video stores and television. I just picked out a few that I thought my readers might have a little pre-Halloween fun with.
The first one is a song from one of my favorite MySpace friends, Creature Feature. They know how to make all year long feel as fun as Halloween. I met them while they were still a lesser-known indie band and got their CD autographed for my son who enjoys the same kind of music I do. The band was soon signed on by Sumerian Records and now have their CDs available at many great places like Best Buy and Amazon Music. Here's Creature Feature:
And since I love rock music, I thought this was a great Halloween rock video. This is Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas featuring the song "This is Halloween" by Marilyn Manson:
If you've followed my blogs, you'll know I also love cartoon animations. This one is a Halloween video featuring the Happy Tree Friends. It's called "Out of Sight, Out of Mime". It's only about two and a half minutes long, and while it has some animated violence in it, it's only a cartoon!
Finally here's another interesting one, called "Do They Know It's Halloween?" featuring the music of Arcade Fire from Montreal, Canada. I thought it was a really creatively done piece.
Hope everyone has a safe and happy Halloween celebration this year!!!
