a few observations on this topic, that recently have come up a lot.

Sorry if it's gonna be a bit long.

First of all, a bit of context.

Maybe people forgot what the 80s where like, especially late 80s, especially in USA, maybe they forgot what being kids was like, maybe they were not even born when these things aired.

At the times trends for people were not dictated by young girls half naked on tik tok, but by "the American dream" that in the 80s was to be a yuppie, that the "manual" said were like this

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71D2rGrfMBL.jpg

but they were actually like this in reality

https://e.snmc.io/i/300/w/18fff75069e5b3ecfc6d558e0c59acd0/5...

"Lunch is for wimps."

As you can see, yuppies were successful people who played tennis, yuppie women were blonde, of course, usually they stayed home anyway, because their husbands made a ton of money, thanks to cocaine.

That was the culture US projected back then, that's why people of my generation reject the idea that USA are culturally relevant, except for punk, that was the last really interesting subculture that the US produced, but that's another story for another time.

If you don't believe it, here it is "Das Yuppie handbuch", German edition.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71cli3Z17VL.jpg

Secondly, the shows were not for kids, the shows audience were kids parents, in this case their dads or older brothers, who represented almost entirely the demographic of people who knew what Zelda was and who she was and that no, Zelda's not the guy on the covert art of the videogame box.

So it reflected an US centric male culture, like the fact that Mario is Italian because Japanese are (and were even more at the time) kinda obsessed with Italy, but in USA, being an Italian plumber, they made him sound like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eutK6k9D-Yk

He starts saying "Hey paesano" which is an idiomatic phrase mainly used in the South of Italy, that nobody uses anymore since a long time ago and those who did where simply mocking very old ways. I haven't heard it since I was a kid, in the late 70s. Of course Mario being Italian with black moustache must be from Naples, right? and he obviously knows how to make a pizza, right? every Italian know how, even if they are plumbers.

This basically to say that in USA those products were a reflection of the culture people were living in, men were assholes, Italians were Italo-Americans not real Italians, Chinese lived in Chinatowns and Japanese took pictures of everything.

The good news is, kids don't get the references.

As an example, my nephew she's 4 years old and she watches Masha and the Bear, which is a Russian product BTW. There's an episode where Bear encounters a female bear and wants to know her. He takes some flowers and a box of chocolates and goes to introduce himself. While he's going Masha realizes that Bear has chocolates and wants to eat them so she tries every trick on the book and in the end she eats them all and Bear is left with no more chocolates to bring to his romantic interest.

Long story short: what my nephew got is that you don't ever eat all the chocolates, because before eating the last one you should ask if someone else wants it, because it's good manners.

She did not understand that it's a metaphor of the difficulty of having a romantic life for parents with kids, especially single parents.

That's something we get, because we are adult and have already gone through it or witnessed it in other's people lives.