So I’m watching Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon, as I’m apt to do, and I noticed a commercial for the upcoming movie The Rocker.
The ad, which was clearly being directed at children (again, this was during a cartoon on Nickelodeon), carried the message that you do not need your parents’ permission to rock but you do need their permission to sneeze on your friend’s face, wear only your underwear, and so on.
The evident stupidity of the movie aside, what bothered me was the rating of the movie — PG-13 — and the reasons given for it: “drug and sexual references, nudity, and language.”
Seriously, that’s the kind of movie marketed to kids nowadays?
Or do the marketers behind The Rocker know that the movie will flop if the marketing is kept to simply the teen & young adult crowds?
Although I’m also a bit bugged that Spongebob is able to absorb the contents of a lagoon when drank through a straw but absorbs none of it when physically dropped into the lagoon; other episodes have established that when lying in a pool of his own tears, he absorbs them back into his person, and the opening credits of every episode display him absorbing the bubbly contents of a bathtub. Thus, we know he’s externally porous (“Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!”). Oh, and that there is a water lagoon at the bottom of the ocean is rather remarkable as well.
It is easier to suspend disbelief for a show as inscrutable as Spongebob Squarepants than it is to deny the depravity of man exhibited in consumer marketing.
Just one question: What on earth are you doing watching Spongebob Squarepants!? – Sheeesh!
Jeff Starr: It keeps me youthful. :P (Well, that, and I’ve always loved cartoons, and Spongebob has some hilarious moments.
As a woman I work with & I have discovered, there is a Spongebob quote for every occasion!
Jeff Starr: I add them manually. If I remember correctly, the code comes from the Tripoli reset suite I read about on your blog. Tripoli comes has a tiny file of typographical additions, which contained an
altclass for styling ampersands. I changed that toampto make more sense and have been using it here for a while.Heck, I even implemented an
[amp]&[/amp]BBCode on my message board to achieve a similar result.Fancy ampersands rock. :P
Yeah, I really have no room to talk.. I just finished watching several episodes of the classic Superfriends/Legion of Doom cartoons.. (tons of classic quotes in there as well :)
Btw, what’s going on with those fancy ampersands of yours? I see the character encoding in the markup, and the spanned character in the subscribed comment, but I am not seeing how the conversion happens..
Jeff Starr: For whatever reason, CommentLuv seems very sporadic; I can only assume that it times out fairly quickly — even on other sites that are CommentLuv-enabled, sometimes my link will show up in comments, other times it won’t.
When I write posts, I type in
<span class="amp">&</span>to achieve the result. It’s a bit cumbersome, but it’s better than adding JavaScript to do what I can do myself. :) I’d like a dynamic, server-side solution, but it’d take some fancy regex to account for already marked up ampersands, *not* marking up ampersands within any markup or code samples and so on. So for the time being, I settle on manual insertion.So when you write an ampersand in a post, you use a spanned class and the character encoding (
&), correct? I mean, as opposed to only the character encoding itself..At first I was assuming that you were using JavaScript to add the spanned class on the fly..
(Btw, I can’t seem to get the CommentLuv feature to work..)
Sorry, the character encoding I was referring to was converted — should have been #038; (with an ampersand in front).
Rick
I had a problem with the lagoon thing as well up until I saw one on tv.
believe it or not – it looks like a lake or pond in the deep sea. I saw an episode of “Earth” or something like that and it was about the weird and wonderful creations that man could never see had it not been for technology. It just shows how God created just for His glory!!!!
It had something to do with the density of the water or the creatures that congregated around it but it looks like water inside of water.
I love to waqtch Spongebob – The creator of the show actually studied marine biology
What about fire – How can they have fire underwater???
Latest from Clint Rodgers: Thought for Today – A Ministry of John Palatucci
Rick, how do you react to the assertion that Spongebob is gay?
Walt Dickinson: SpongeBob is neither hetero- or homosexual; he is asexual, as any self-respecting sponge would be.
Knowledge is power. :)