It does so by deploying theorisations that distinguish between heroes and celebrities (North, Bland, and Ellis 2005), celebrities and stars (G. On the one hand, this paper argues that animated characters are indeed entitled to have a fame status. 4).īy drawing upon diverse scholarly works within the field of celebrity studies as well as undertaking an audience study with Eastern European-specifically Hungarian-tweens, the objective of this article is twofold. Instead of reading for the audiences and making assumptions about how they interpret fame from a media text, in this case Disney Princesses, it is therefore crucial to ask audience members themselves, as Sonia Livingstone observes, ‘it is established that audiences are plural in their decodings, that their cultural context matters, and that they often disagree with textual analyses’ (2008, p. Moreover, while there are several scholarly examinations of Disney Princess films, these studies mainly employ textual analysis (Escalada-Cordova 2018 Whelan 2014 Wilde 2014) rather than conducting empirical research. Although audience research has gained increasing recognition in recent years, this field’s attention has focused mainly on the ‘West’, neglecting Eastern European-including child-audiences. Most significantly, the frequency of educational terms and messages varied by channel and target audience, with channels targeted at girls significantly more likely to contain educational messages than channels targeted at boys.Įver since Disney Princesses were established as a marketing brand in 2000, they have become a famous ‘phenomenon’ that has been commercially successful, popular, and adored, but one that has also received much criticism from scholars and consumers alike. Educational terms were frequently found on children’s television, with some terms appearing in 20% of time blocks, and STEM terms appeared more frequently than Humanities terms. Transcripts of 8,624 hours of programming on the channels were examined for the frequency of 1) general educational terms, 2) STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) related terms, and 3) Humanities related terms using customized recording and searching software. This study begins to address this gap using a content analysis of six months of programming on Cartoon Network, Disney, Disney XD, and Nickelodeon. Although existing literature indicates a correlation between children’s television programming and attitudes, there is minimal research on how education is itself represented on children’s television.
The contents of cable channels targeted at children are an important and persistent source of images of education and yet they remain unaccounted for in the research on children, media, and education.