December 15th - Today's the Day... Concluded

After an intense wait, and not hearing from our group mate Tish until just a few minutes before the official start of our exam period, we finally got the relief of seeing our magazine for the first time that morning. It was well past 1 o'clock at this point, and all other presentations were coming to a close with everyone seemingly anxious to see us present so they could start their vacation. It was an unbelievable morning for me to say the least, and while I quite literally can’t recall myself ever being caught in such a clench of a situation during the whole of my academic career, things worked out quite ok at the end. 

Our classmates did a great job presenting the material associated with their magazine, and it was obvious that all of us were familiar with our end product and content to an extent that required almost no notes or cues. It really was nice to see everyone maintaining such a high level of eye contact and commitment to their presentations. While some last minute realizations on the missing of some of my content in the final magazine led us to make some quick improvisations on our presentation, we managed to coordinate the use of pc and projection stand effectively. I have to say though that when I realized my creative element was nowhere to be found in the magazine, I did start to panic, which left me feeling quite guilty as Ms Newsam had to remind us to remain quiet and attentive during the presentations of others.  After all of us had gone on to present, I felt that the class concluded on a very positive note, which probably had much to do with Ms Newsam’s joyful announcement that she was indeed pregnant. I for one had not considered that to possibly be the reason for her absences at all , but we all know us men can be very oblivious to these types of things, as many of my classmates had been expecting this for some time it seemed. 

I’m glad to see how things turned out, happy with my progress though out this class, and definitely happy for Ms Newsam. With the fifteenth of December, our English 102 class has ended, and I can honestly say that while it was my hardest class this semester, it was also one of my most enlightening, a combination that often goes together in life.

December 15th - Today's the Day

Today marks the day of our final magazine presentation, and our complete magazine is due and to be handed in today at noon. The way this day was supposed to go was that I and my two team members, Amber and Tish where to meet up and review our project one last time, possibly discussing our presentation and making sure everything is in order. All of this was supposed to start this morning at 9:30, yet I find myself sitting here with Amber, at 11:20am, waiting for Tish who has our project. She however has not responded to any phone calls, messages, emails and face book comments at all today. Amber and I are in a situation of absolute disbelief, we're sitting here literally without option, we have no project to hand in or present, we have nothing without Tish showing up, and that is driving me insane just thinking about the idea that I will surely fail this course without completing this project. I don’t want to make any assumptions on where Tish might be, I really hope she has some kind of valid excuse for not answering any of our calls or messages. To leave your team members hanging for a final project of this weight, and leaving them without any hint as to where you might be, or what might have happened that you cannot respond is something I could never in my life do. I have honestly never been faced with a situation like this in my entire educational career, and right now it seems as though I will not see a happy end in this dilemma, all the work for this could have been for nothing...

December 13th - Magazine in its Final Stages

With meeting in the library until late into the night, and working countless hours at home creating, shaping and finalizing texts and images it seems that we are finally concluding the work on our magazine project. We had gone though many different versions and considerations while creating this project, and it seems that we have such a volume of visual and textual media that we could create a few different versions of this magazine at the moment. While the bulk of our text has been finalized to a point where we have narrowed it down to its best so to speak, we find ourselves with 2 extremely nice cover pages as well as table of content designs, along with several extra creative elements and ideas. 

The only problem with such a nice accumulation of media is that a team can be differing in their opinions on which to use, and so while I would have liked to change a few of the designs we used, I do realize that in a team effort there have to be sacrifices in the compiling of information to a final product. After all the hard work on this project however, I am quite proud of our finished magazine, and I look forward to presenting it soon. My team mates Amber and Tish have definitely been helpful, and both of them have been very committed to the project. Me and Amber especially were able to correlate a lot on our work, and often ended up emailing each other back and forth, drafting away at things like our creative elements to generate something we would all agree was worthy of being in our magazine.

While we still need to think about the presenting of our material, I feel as though with a finished magazine we should have no problem finding 15 minutes worth of presentation in our content. With that our project has been finalized, and we have just the final exam period on the 15th to worry about, which will hopefully go as smooth as most of the progress on this magazine.

With that, i will leave with a sneak peak at one of our alternative designs for a table of contents, created by yours truly.

English 102 so far...

Class has been busy, and with the completing of our last major presentation assignment, and just before the beginning of our magazine project, it seemed like a good point to look back and see how this class has shaped up so far.

English 102 started out as a class of decent size, it soon started shrinking, and after our first essay assignment, past October 9th which was our last day to drop, the class had equalized its self with only a core of upper class men remaining. Being a freshmen, I cannot deny that this was quite intimidating for me, I was often left feeling like I’m not ready to handle such a speaking and presentation oriented course at this point of my education. Although I've always enjoyed debate, and consider myself somebody that is very much in touch with today’s global issues, the individual part to this course, like preparing effective high level presentations had me struggling. My first essay left me very disappointed, as even though I worked considerably long on writing it, it still never came together and felt incoherent to me. This was also very apparent in my confidence when presenting my LRRH comparison. After this project, I was confused and frustrated to an extent, as I felt that I just was not able to produce quality work on this topic even though I worked much longer on this presentation than usual. This left me motivated to do better next time on one hand, but also intimidated, as the overall quality of presentations given in class was very high from what I could tell, and presenters like Joseph, Gwyn and Matt left me questioning myself in whether I would ever be able to produce something with that level of quality and thoughtfulness. Luckily I was not facing this trouble in my participation in group discussion, the generally high level of education and understanding that our whole class often displayed during our discussions was impressive and had me very eager to join in on any topic at hand. This was my favorite part to this class, the fact that we would be able to reach a very high level of analytical and interpretational understanding of any given discussion, and always left us short for time in our detailed perspectives of the topic. My greatest achievements so far would have to be my gaining in confidence when it comes to presentation skills, I feel that although I am far from perfect, I managed to improve and now feel as though I can connect with an audience better than before. I also feel that our rigorous attempts to uncover what lies beneath any given subtlety has allowed me to be generally much more analytical when it comes to televised and other forms of media, I constantly find myself interpreting even the most undertone commercials and clips, something I really didn’t do before taking this course.

With that said, although the course has not ended, and my grade is probably far from what I would like it to be, I still feel a good sense of accomplishment, and it’s easy for me to say that English 102 was by no means a waste of my time, teaching me many new analytical and presentation concepts.

Presentations in Summary

After our last day of presentations on tuesday, november 24, we were all done presenting our topics and a few trends were recognizable. Alot of us chose to work with the topic on gender shaping in young children, and this included myself.

Although the other topics seemed thoughtful and possible to research, it seems that the many discussions on disney movies and their role throughout the years in shaping young childrens imaginations led most of us to work with this topic. Although disney has changed their image alot over the last decade and has shown through movies like "Enchanted" that they are well aware of the stereotypes their movies used to make, the childrens movies we grew up with, such as cinderella, beauty and the beast and snow white all appear more and more controversial when we look at the imagery and plot today. Its clear that society has grown not just alot more tolerant towards all races and genders, but we have also uncovered and dealt with alot of stereotypes that have been around for a long time and have previously remained untouched. Through our accepting and dealing with these issues, it is obvious that our perceptions of racial and gender equality have not been so clear and recognized in the past, and have led previous generations to overlook these controversial aspects of disney movies, deeming them as appropriate for children. Would this be the same case today? Although these movies would most probably still make it through a ratings review without much of a problem, I would imagine that issues like unrealistic portrayal of female characters in movies such as Cinderella would be a topic that would be mentioned in a review or critique of the film.

Thus although we may not have become more dismissing and restrictive in what we watch, and choose to let children watch today, It seems that we have just grown to accept these stereotypes in entertainment media of the past, and have learned to appreciate these materials the way the were supposed to be appreciated at the time of their release, and not through the eyes of current media standarts regarding what we deem as good or bad. If this wasnt the case, many great works of art, like the classical disney movies would be discarded simply because of their inability to stay current with societies values as they shape and adjust in constant flux.

Ambers Presentation on Gender Roles:

I thought Amber’s presentation on gender roles was interesting, and it was nice to see a different topic being presented as well. I thought her presentation was well researched and I liked the use of a handout to get our attention using a cartoon on an interesting gender role stereotype. While her argument was well organized and the presentation went by smoothly and with good support by the presenter, I felt that her thoughts on the male role in gender relations today seemed a bit off. I don’t personally feel as though men are negatively influenced by the prince charming ideal, today more than ever. While I’m not arguing that today’s men aren’t kind and respecting of women, it seems the idea that men are noticeably influenced in a negative way by fairy tale ideals in their every day lives and how they treat women seems far fetched to me. To me, the idea of incorporating a prince charming attitude into the way I treat and behave around women seems like a good idea, and is something I currently do. While its true that men should not be led to believe that they need to aid their woman in every step she takes to the point that she is left without much influence on her own life. I still think its good to have ones own interpretation of these values so that we can help our better half as much as we can in dealing with today’s stressful society. It’s about finding and interpreting the moral that the often vague prince charming character makes, lessons on a natural sort of kindness that men should have towards women, being generally helpful when we can, and understanding that we should put our woman first in our decision making. 

Gwenn and her Comparison:

I found Gwenn’s presentation very well researched and executed. She seemed very confident in her information and timing, and it was easily noticed how much effort went into her work. I especially liked her thoughtful ending, and the examples she gave on our modern-day prince charming. When we look at the powerful figures she presented us with, such as Donald trump and Hugh Heffner, its apparent just how powerful money is in today’s world. These men have such might in their respective industries that it seems quite normal to see them in the company of such polarizing and attractive company as Ivana or Melania Knauss-Trump. Is this only valid for men of such power though? It would seem that this is true for people with money and might in general, no matter what their gender may be. With that said I have to say that Gwenn seems exemplary in her presentation skills, I hope that I will gain that kind of dedication throughout my college experience.

My presentation on Gender Shaping:

I presented my research topic on Thursday, the 19th of November, and although a few people had already done my topic as well, I felt that I managed to add a few interesting facts as well. I started my presentation with a long and thorough introduction, so that I would have the rest of my time to present the various images of toys, costumes and decorations available for each gender. In doing so I managed to save a good bit of time to really cover my pictures and see what the class thought. It was nice to see that my presentation went a lot smoother than my LRRH comparison, that had me stuck in my notes and feeling very unprepared. Although I sacrificed eye contact this time, which is something I need to work on, I managed to organize my thoughts more efficiently and with the help of my 7 note cards was able to present a much more organized topic that left me feeling confident in my analysis. Although I wasn’t sure if the layout of my presentation would really work as I intended, with such a large chunk of information in the beginning. 

 After completing my first draft however, it looked as though it would suit the given time slot of 10-15 minutes well when I reviewed it, and so I took a bit of a risk and went with the format. I really wanted to mention my thoughts on the idea that so many of the toys, costumes, decoration and other merchandise is available simply due to advances in globalized production and the increased efficiency in large scale manufacturing, such as injection-molding and things like hydro forming for the plastic and metal industry respectively. This in my mind is largely the reason we see such intricate and complex toys and costumes as we saw in the presentations being sold for tolerable prices. This in no way means to say that this merchandise is cheap, I find it quite over-priced still actually… but I’m sure that these same toys and costumes would have been much more expensive to produce not too long ago. Although I skipped this thought in the concluding thoughts, I felt it would still make a fair addition to my journal. 

With that i have our next presentation day to relax and watch the remainder of the class present on what I hope will be a day as interesting as the first few days have been. Over all I have to say that these presentations seemed generally better than the last ones we had, its nice to see all of us grow throughout the class, and hopefully it will leave us well prepared for our next assignment.

Racism and The World of Disney:

With watching “Mickey Mouse Monopoly,” it became very clear to me just how many people have been negatively influenced by the racist portrayals many Disney movies seem to make. Tales like Peter Pan seem quite obvious in these notions, portraying the Native Americans extremely stereotypically as the “red man,” where as other movies like Tarzan have a more subtle message, that, while the viewer might not recognize as easily, is still quite obvious when analyzed in further detail and one notices that the white Tarzan seems to know the jungle better than its inhabitant dark natives. Indeed, one finds many stereotypes on Blacks, Latinos and Asians in characters from the Hainas in the Lion King to the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp. 

While these characteristics stand out once one analyzes the supposed racist undertone some of these movies have, one has to wonder if we as viewers are just over-analyzing this media, and how we can basically find these undertones in almost anything we watch on TV or DVD these days. When one looks at this picture from a flipped perspective, one can find many stereotypes on the white race in these movies too, like the lost boys in Peter Pan appearing as overweight, rather helpless and possibly even genetically incapable, hinting at the overweight American youth. It may seem then, that no matter how Disney portrays race, we will find something racist or stereotypical in it, no matter what the tale might be.

In this area, Disney movies will always seem controversial, and its up to the viewer to decide whether some of these movies are indeed suppose to portray a racist or stereotypical image at the time they were made, or if some of these Disney films were simply created at a time when what we perceive as offensive in them today was not seen as biased or judgmental back then. At the core of this question one has to wonder If the Disney Institution is as visionary and revolutionary in their portrayal of race and culture as in their animation and ability to entertain young and old alike.

Disney Comics, Where are they Popular?

Throughout our class and dealing with many Disney stories and aspects of the corporation, I kept having to think back to what I used to read as a child, one thing that always had me filled with anticipation as a child growing up in Germany was the magazine “Mickey Mouse,” this was a fun filled little magazine that came out every week and included a few stories with popular characters like Mickey mouse, Pluto and Donald duck, but also had a little explorer section and came with a little toy every week, sometimes relying on a few previous issues to complete a more complex toy. There was also a comic book that came out every month or so, with about a hundred pages of fresh Mickey Mouse and related character material. 

While these were things I grew up with, I never really saw ether of these here in the US. Now that we have dealt with Disney so much throughout our course, and the many influences it has on American society, it left me curious as to how Disney represents its self differently in other countries. Through doing some research on the topic and wanting to find out who is responsible for the comics and magazines I had as a child in Europe I found a few publishers and media companies that are independent from the Disney we know in the US, and are primarily working to publish material In certain European countries. The Danish publisher “Egmont” is responsible for one of the largest Disney comic productions in the world. This company publishes magazines every week in many Nordic Countries, and exports much of its material to other countries as well. These independent publications first started appearing during the 1960’s, and clearly shows how Scandinavian countries actually much prefer Donald Duck over Mickey Mouse, with many tales centering around Donald as protagonist, and Mickey only making an appearance once in a while. In Germany, Mickey Mouse has been popular since the 1920’s, and although during WWII and while the Nazi government was in charge there were no comic books being published, after WWII this changed. Now a subsidiary company of the Danish publisher Egmont started producing the magazine I mentioned, Mickey Mouse. This magazine is still published today and is thus Germany’s longest running comic magazine. Ironically, although the magazine is called Mickey Mouse, it follows the same format of Danish magazines, as Like in Scandinavian countries, Donald Duck Is much more popular than Mickey Mouse in Germany, and most stories are based around his adventures. 

In Conclusion, it is interesting to see how comic magazines and books based on Disney characters managed to flourish and become so popular in Europe, while the Nazi government imposed a great handicap to the German comic industry, it still did not keep Mickey Mouse from becoming Germany’s longest lasting comic publication.