The Four Color Media Monitor

Breitbart's announced the Arthur cartoon starring anthropomorphic aarvarks is being canceled after a quarter century, and a few years after it sank into wokeness:

PBS children’s show Arthur is officially no more. The longest running animated children’s series ever on television is canceled, with the public broadcaster confirming the final four episodes will be aired next month.

The end comes after Arthur increasingly promoted a series of woke left-wing positions, with the show announcing in spring 2019 that Mr. Ratburn, Arthur’s teacher, was homosexual and premiered an episode with a gay wedding.

Then came the so-called anti-racism ideology that aired in 2020.

As Breitbart News reported, Arthur featured an episode in which Arthur and his friend Buster appeared to discuss the video showing the death of George Floyd.

And that's how far politics got injected into the show. Undoubtably, this was all done from a far-left viewpoint, letting violent BLM/Antifa rioters off the hook for their horrific behavior. Interestingly enough, some of the leftist politics Arthur suffered from also affected a spinoff cartoon much earlier:

In 2005, its spin-off show, Postcards from Buster also featured a lesbian couple in the episode “Sugar Time.” The content was consequently condemned by then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, which prompted PBS to pull the episode.

So the difference is that, when the mid-2000s spinoff did it with lesbians, PBS backed away, but when they do it with homosexual men almost 15 years later in the original series, it goes broadcast unabridged, and this time PBS is fully behind it. How odd. They sure knew how to go from woke to broke, and now their heavy-handed politics led to the demise of a long-running cartoon ending on a sour note, exactly what the Simpsons will do with the way it's been going of recent, which includes a similar tale with Waylon Smithers, main assistant to stingy factory magnate Montgomery Burns. Which is actually rather peculiar, because I vaguely remember an early episode of the Simpsons featuring a pair of twin sisters who were students at Bart's school, and it was indicated Smithers was the father when he called hello to them at the power plant Burns runs. If my memories are correct, series creator Matt Groening and company sure abandoned that connection mighty fast, all for the sake of early wokeness.

And this isn't the only product involving LGBT propaganda that's been pushed by the wokeness PC crowd lately. It appears Gail Simone's Batgirl series, which featured quite a bit of that itself, is also being adapted as a movie screenplay, according to Warner Huston:

The upcoming Batgirl film has cast DC’s first transgender character with actor Ivory Aquino now set to play Batgirl’s best friend, Alysia Yeoh.

In the super-woke DC comic book series, Alysia Yeoh is the best friend of Barbara Gordon — Batgirl’s alter ego — and an out-and-proud, transgender bartender.

[...] Batgirl is set to debut on HBO Max, likely sometime late in 2022. Brendan Fraiser will be featured as the movie’s villain, the arsonist Firefly, and Michael Keaton is said to be reprising his 1989 role as Batman. The film will also feature J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Jim Gordon, Barbara’s policeman father.

[...] Thus far, the Yeoh character has never become a superhero herself. However, the character’s creator, Gail Simone, recently admitted that there was a brief plan to have Yeoh temporarily take over as Batgirl after Barbara Gordon became injured in a fight. That idea was scrapped, though, and to date the character has only been portrayed as a bartender and friend of Barbara Gordon.

So long as DC is run by the ideologues now in charge, as is also the case at Marvel, there's every chance they'll force such propaganda in sooner or later, common sense be damned. That veteran actor Keaton should reprise his own role as the Masked Manhunter in this woke-laden production could sour the memories of any sensible person who thought Tim Burton's 1989 movie was great, though I myself thought over the years after it was made that it was overrated. What's so great about the most recent takes on Babs Gordon that isn't so great about the original take back in the late 60s that the screenwriters thought to build on Simone's visions? This underlines how cheap screenwriting's become, when they adapt elements of modern leftists to the silver screen, but won't do any research into the earlier Silver/Bronze Age material, which could offer much better, simpler ideas that aren't heavy-handed.

Labels: animation, Batman, dc comics, golden calf of LGBT, moonbat writers, politics