A 4½-Year-Old’s Honest Review of the Sesame Street Vaccine Town Hall

“Is all of this show going to be like this, with the persons talking like this?” J., age 4½, asks, gesturing toward the screen.

On our television, Sanjay Gupta and Erica Hill are hanging out in Zoom-style boxes, interviewing a rotating series of guests for their Sesame Street/CNN town hall on COVID vaccines for kids. J. started out jazzed up and laughing, happy that I was allowing her to watch Sesame Street, a show she loves, at an unusual time of day. We get some Street regulars like Elmo, Bert, and Ernie; some real-life kids who submitted taped questions for the panel; and some scientists and doctors, like Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and the researcher who helped design the Moderna COVID vaccine, Kizzmekia Corbett.* But 10 minutes into the half-hour show, J. wants to fast-forward and see if things would stay Zoom-y for the duration. Denied this petition (“Remember? I have to watch this for work?”), she goes to the floor and, scattering crumbs from a piece of toast, attends to her train set, glancing at the screen whenever it’s a puppet’s turn to talk.

This town hall, which aired on CNN over the weekend, prompted a rote, exhausted culture-war skirmish. People like Ted Cruz got really mad that Big Bird was “pushing” vaccines on kids. “What’s the treatment for myocarditis in birds?” snarked Mike Cernovich, while everyone on the other side valiantly, yet uselessly, replied with: information about the safety of children’s COVID vaccines; images from past vaccine campaigns that had enlisted popular children’s media to “sell” the polio and MMR vaccines (and the very idea of germs); and links to articles about Sesame Street’s roots as a radical experiment aimed at Black kids. This argument is going to happen, and happen, and happen, until we are tweeting links about Dr. Seuss’ actual IRL politics in between manually pollinating soybeans for 12-hour shifts in exchange for rations of water, and it doesn’t seem much worthy of comment.

Besides, anyone tweeting about the town hall was not in its target audience. But I had one of those actual preschool humans in my own home, and I wanted to know: Would this special actually do anything for her? Rather than fighting over whether it’s just propaganda, my question was: Would it be effective propaganda? I’m always wary of educational media for kids, always wondering whether the show, museum exhibit, or book is actually for the children, or instead for the adults, who feel better after watching the kid reluctantly consume something so virtuous. Curious, I decided to conduct my own focus group of one.

All that’s missing is “Mommy why did the worst President ever personally murder all those COVID-19 patients?”

I’d call it lazy, but it’s somehow more trite and earnest than that.

The anime clip that GOP Rep. Paul Gosar edited to show himself slaying AOC has even darker undertones than you may have thought

While the furor over Rep. Paul Gosar tweeting a violent anime clip of himself slaying New York lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and President Joe Biden continues to rage, many people are missing the fascist subtext of the clip Gosar posted.

Written as a cautionary tale about the ills of war, “Attack on Titan” was first released in manga form in 2009. Its premise involves a teenager, Eren Yeager, who joins a division of the military called the Survey Corps. Venturing beyond concentric walls within which they believe themselves to be imprisoned, Yeager and the Survey Corps slay titans – monstrous beings that eat humans.

The anime’s dark undertones of Nazism and allusions to the Holocaust become apparent in later arcs when it’s revealed that the subhuman “mindless titans” – the monsters on which AOC’s and Biden’s faces were superimposed – were originally humans, too.

Gasp. Maybe investigate the Fart Heard All Around The Camilla than this non-story.

Adapting The Wheel of Time for TV Is an Epic All Its Own

io9: The fundamental premise of the Wheel of Time is based so much on binary genders, with the all-female Aes Sedai, the male Dragons, the gendered sides of the One Power. How are you updating that for 2021, when gender identity and gender equity are so important?

Judkins: I think what’s exciting about [the Wheel of Time TV series] and what was exciting about [the books] in the ‘90s is that they opened up a conversation about gender and how gender is represented in all of these different cultures within the world of Wheel of Time. Because it’s not just one way you see a lot of different representations of gender, you see things that are more binary and less binary. I think that we have to lean into that in the show and continue to explore what gender means for these characters in as fresh of a context today as Robert Jordan was working in in the ‘90s. He was pushing the envelope a lot for the genre at the time and I think we need to do the same today.

io9: What are some ways that you’ll be doing that on the show?

Judkins: I think—well, I can’t tell you all of them, but in the books, there’s an idea that if you’re born as a man in one life, you’d be born as a man in the next life in the show. We’re not doing that. We’re approaching it as you are a soul and you move through different bodies through whatever life that you’re in. So that’s one. It’s a very fundamental change actually to make to the book series, and it has a lot of ripple effects, and we’ll continue to do things like that I think are more reflective of what hopefully Robert Jordan would be writing if he was writing today.

Make the show appeal to the people that probably won’t watch it anyway. Yay.

I don’t want any more of the books I like to be adapted. Leave them alone. By the dark gods, imagine how badly these idiots could fuck up Snow Crash or Neal Asher?

 

One of the many samples from the song is taken from 1971’s The Ruling Class, a delightful oddity where Peter O’Toole is convinced that he is Jesus, and the rest of his family plots to institutionalize him and steal his inheritance. In one of the various plots, they bring in an asylum inmate who also believes he is Jesus in order for them to battle for who is the real Son of God. The new Jesus proclaims “I AM THE HIGH-VOLTAGE MESSIAH!” and starts throwing imaginary lightning bolts.