Suicide Squirrel: Sony and Ofcom
First, have a look at these snippets.
Skydiver
Egg Mexican
Ofcom has decided that this is not suitable for viewing before 9pm on Television:
Sony Television came forward to us voluntarily and independently of the complaint
with a full disclosure of the incidents and admitted these scheduling errors. As Sony
Television recognised immediately when the compliance issues with this series were
pointed out, the subject matter of this animation was not suitable for broadcast before the watershed. Although the character shown was a cartoon squirrel, the content was darkly comic and adult in tone with a sharp contrast between the macabre and violent death scenes and the light-hearted music which accompanied them. The series was a cartoon and therefore more likely to attract children. Despite the fact that this channel is targeted at an adult audience, it was broadcast on an unencrypted service during the day, and children could have come across the series unawares.
What do you think?
I think they are hilarious.
Via.
ugh, horrible. Ofcom are right. But that means that they’ll have to say the same thing about the Simpsons whenever it shows the Itchy and Scratchy show. Drat, if only the Simpsons was rubbish it wouldn’t be a problem.
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I don’t agree on that one, David.
There’s not really that much difference from Disney (e.g., bugs bunny) in my opinion here as far as I can see.
Perhaps the voluntary euthanasia people should sponsor them.
I find the Sony apology and limiting the broadcasts an interesting contrast to their lack of action of the Manchester Cathedral episode.
There’s probably not much difference in terms of what happens - bugs bunny would probably have the ‘anvil for a parachute’ thing, except a) there’d be no blood b) nobody would die c) it wouldn’t be called ’suicide squirrel’, which is somewhere on the spectrum between tasteless and sick. Somehow Bugs Bunny etc. is far enough into unrealistic territory for the cartoon violence to seem tolerable. I guess the key question is how much blood, gore, etc. is a cartoon allowed to depict before the ‘it’s only a cartoon’ defence stops applying? Would it still be funny if the squirrel landed on a cartoon baby and crushed it? Or if it flew into a tower block in an airplane?
South Park would have been post watershed for content, even without all the swearing.
I’ll stop now, Liverpool have just scored to make it 3-2
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Good questions.
I wonder if the real difference is that Disney tells a story, rather than cartoons an incident. There are I think occasions of suicidal cartoon characters (Tom the Cat walking in front of a car).
OTOH - and returning to a traditional theme - fairy tales *do* involve people getting “killed” and “eaten by wolves”, and one of their roles was (iirc) is a way of coping with danger by talking about it obliquely. Why should this be different?
The thing that I found most difficult to watch recently was the “killing the population” scenes in “28 Weeks Later” set in London - but that is exactly the type of violence that goes on all the time elsewhere transposed into a very familiar landscape.
How would you react to the current spate of “in yer face” “public information” adverts (example, or the Amnesty Waterboarding Video“, or even the current TV Licensing campaign that uses Database State imagery to scare people into paying up (seems to me to be calculated to lose our support for the License Fee).