“I’m proud to be an American.” How many times have I heard this phrase growing up? Probably at least enough to have paid for college, especially thanks to that song from Desert Storm that should now be playing in your head. That it is now playing in your head is an indication of successful propaganda, but that’s not what I’m here to write about today. “I’m proud to be an American” means… Continue reading
Archive for the ‘ Culture Thinking ’ Category
An Exercise in Branding Identity
Author: PriscillaAug 13
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Filed under: Culture Thinking | Tagged as: consumerism
The Dark Knight of the Soul
Author: PriscillaJul 22
The weekend was a Batman buzz, torn between celebrating the release of The Dark Knight Rises and mourning the events of the Aurora, CO movie theater shooting. Throughout the discussion included comments about the killer’s mental health and questions about whether it’s time for the country to revisit gun control. One Facebook friend made the following… Continue reading
A new type of hero?
Author: PriscillaJul 11
To begin, we saw Brave a couple of weekends ago.
While having a discussion about boy heroes versus girl heroes and gender appropriateness, I made the comment, “Up is the boy version of Brave…. Only that it’s about an old man and a boy scout instead of a mother and daughter.”
The Hubs stared at me blankly.
So I continued: “both films are about a generational relationship… Continue reading
The Rise of Dark Fairy Tales
Author: PriscillaJun 7
It is probably no surprise to the passive reader of this blog (all two of you) that I am a fairy tale enthusiast. It’s a topic I keep returning to time and time again, and it’s a topic that provides hours of academic muddling for this mythologist. That’s what scholars such as the Jungians find so fascinating about fairy tales. In their simplicity, they speak archetypally, deeply, meaningfully… They can become… Continue reading
Filed under: American Myth, Culture Thinking, Disney, Fairy Tales, Literature, Popular Culture, Theme Parks | Tagged as: Disney, fairy tales, Kingdom Keepers, shadow
Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Better Late than Never.
Author: PriscillaApr 25
My friend, Nikki Faith, asked in response to my last post what I thought about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. Only then did I remember that I started writing an essay about this film in spring 2010, but never finished. My original intent was to get it published somewhere (I was thinking Spring Journal), but since we’re so far removed from the original release, I’ll just
Alice is in Wonderland…or is she?
Author: PriscillaApr 24
It’s time to get writing again. I have a defense date scheduled (May 14th), and my final draft went in the mail today to begin the editing process. This means that Grad Student Limbo is coming to a close, but this also means that it’s time for me to really start defining what I want to be when I grow up… Continue reading
The Artist, Hollywood and Change
Author: PriscillaJan 25
There are two themes I’ve been returning to in my research these days: Disney and myth-in-transition. The Disney research is paying off; my chair has given his seal of approval on the completed draft. The myth-in-transition question arose as I was writing the dissertation. 2012 is a year full of potential change, and after researching the Cold War for my dissertation… Continue reading
Copyrighting our Dreams
Author: PriscillaJan 11
Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman among other wonderful stories that make Jungians giddy with excitement, posted a link to this blog post yesterday that considers the significance of some elements in The Kindly Ones from the Sandman. The author, Matthew Cheney, concludes his post with this observation:
People have made the case that television and movies and comic books are our contemporary myths, that popular mass… Continue reading
Current Events and Fairy Tales
Author: PriscillaDec 12
I have been decidedly quiet about current events lately. One reason is that I don’t actually read/listen to the news, and I try not to make opinions based on headlines. And the other reason is that I don’t often make it a habit to discuss current events in print. That said, there has been a lot over the last couple months that are worth considering, especially considering the idea that… Continue reading
Filed under: Culture Thinking, Fairy Tales, Popular Culture | Tagged as: Current Events, fairy tales, Old vs. New