Biased, pontificating blowhards successfully purged. I hope.

Six episodes of Dae Jang Geum, four episodes of Chuck and three episodes of Lark Rise to Candleford later, and I think I am sufficiently deprogrammed from 4 days of FOX News and children’s programming. Actually, I’m more worried about FOX News. I don’t think I’d ever like that station, but I likely wouldn’t mind it as much if it weren’t so blatantly biased while claiming to be unbiased.

Also, I got The Princess and the Frog on DVD on Tuesday, and Mom and Jackson both wanted to watch it. He told us I think seven times that he liked “the girl frog” (he hasn’t seen it enough to know the names yet) best and had narration like “When’s the frog going to show up? When the frog shows up she’s going to kiss him.” (He said “kiss” in the classic toddler conspiratorial whisper.) His parents like romantic movies, can you tell?

Three year olds are such fun. Especially when you can give them back after a few days.

Meanwhile, is it just me, or is a lot of the animation for children’s shows and movies now really bad? I mean, I don’t like most of the CGI movies, which is largely taste, but the animation for a lot of the shows just looked ugly to me. It may be because it’s what I grew up with, but the animation from the 90s and earlier, heavy lines, sometimes-blobby-backgrounds, and no-longer-stunning coloring and all, seems to be much better than the newer shows, which seem more hung up on having a distinctive style than anything else. The only shows I didn’t dislike (that weren’t reruns of older shows) purely in terms of animation were the Dora and Diego shows, which have more old-school styled animation. (Also, both shows annoyed me immensely, but seemed much better than the other cartoons, and were practically progressive in comparison. Which, actually, is on the depressing side.)

Moving on to animated shows I’d actually want to watch: does anyone know where I can get subtitled eps of Earl and Fairy and Mononoke? I’ve given up on either ever getting licensed (If I’m wrong, tell me!) but have only found E&F raw, and no Mononoke. (Of course, most anime I’d watch gets licensed, so I know few places to find them, rarely needing to.)

kdrama: Dae Jang Geum eps 46-54 (end)

( spoilers )

Non-spoilery: The beginning of this series was slow (I remember watching the first episode and being bored and wondering why it was all about the king from Goong running around and angsting, when I was told it was about palace cooking ladies and Korea’s first female royal physician. But it was important background information. Boring, but important.) and later slow-paced (in the good way) but the second half, with a few caveats, was pure awesome. Jang Geum herself can be a little too perfect at times (especially the first half) but I became very fond of her throughout the series. And if she doesn’t suit you, by the end, there’s a major female character of almost every character type (ok, no Warrior Women, but there are very few action scenes to start with), most of whom are uniformly awesome, and have their own plotlines and backstories. I think all but a few episodes also fail a reverse Bechdel test (that is, contained scenes in which [1] there are at least two men, [2] and no women, and [3] they do not discuss a woman). It also has what is possibly the best-written (if slow moving…it literally takes years and years, with convenient years-long separations) romance I’ve seen in a kdrama, and what is probably the best kdrama boyfriend ever.

Also, it pleases me that Korea had a woman-centric product in a genre that was male-dominated and, when it became a huge huge hit, went “Hmm…you know, women seem to like this, and we made tons more money this way. Maybe we should look into making more sageuks about women, and giving women in the series with male leads more prominent roles and plots.” Unlike Hollywood, who goes “This could not possibly have made money because it was popular with women. Obviously, a butterfly in Tibet flapped its wings which caused the Earth to temporarily tilt off the axis creating this total fluke and we should ignore it.” (This is the oldest sageuk I’ve seen, and so I can only go by rumor/internet reports as far as it’s influence goes, but it’s popularity alone thrills me.)