1986: The Role of Language and Gender in The Transformers
Joan E. Aitken tackles a complex issue in October of 1986 with her paper titled The Role of Language and Gender in The Transformers: An Analysis of Messages in Cartoons for Children Now this isn’t light and entertaining reading, but for anyone interested in how a segment of the adult population viewed the Transformers cartoons back in the eighties this is definitely a paper you must read.
“Although Transformer toys have given children a creative and modern puzzle form, the extension of “The Transformers” into a television series has negative associations for children.”
Aitken’s paper is 36-pages and available in its entirety at archive.org in a variety of formats, including both text (which was poorly scanned and loaded with errors) and a downloadable PDF.
I’m still reading this over, and likely will need multiple readings before I completely absorb the information, but before I forget that this exists I want to leave this post at battlegrip.com where we can easily find the info in the future.
Related articles
- Saturday Morning Cartoon Fix – M.A.S.K. Intro (haveageekasm.com)
- Spiral Zone was a cartoon ahead of its time (observationdeck.io9.com)
- Transformers: Robots in Disguise Chop Shop Combiner (battlegrip.com)
2 thoughts on “1986: The Role of Language and Gender in The Transformers”
Comments are closed.