30 Days of Television - Day Nine

Day 09 - Best scene ever

LOST 4x05 - "The Constant"
The Phonecall



Lost has a long history of jerking its fans around, especially in regards to the island itself. What can never be denied, however, is how poignant this show could be. It's not often that I get emotionally invested in a show, but I did with Lost.

I have an awful memory when it comes to the specifics of shows I watch. Usually when I finish it, a while later all I really have is a feeling regarding the show, never memories of certain scenes. But there are a few moments during the run of Lost that have just stuck with me, and I think will forever. The strongest of these is the phone call between Desmond and Penny during the fourth season episode, "The Constant".

Desmond and Penny (along with Sun and Jin) were some of the people I most cared about on the show. I loved their story and I just wanted them to be happy after all of the crap they had been through.

At the beginning of the fourth season Desmond is suffering some time-travel related trauma. His consciousness is kind of ping-ponging around his own timeline. He keeps waking up at different points in his life and it's causing some severe brain trauma. He learns that he needs something to tie his consciousness down in both the past and present or it'll just go spinning off into nothing. That something, that constant, has to be a powerful object. It needs to be something he cares for deeply or it won't work. It has to be Penny.

We'd seen the progression of their relationship, from the first meet-cute to the inevitable break-up because of her father and Desmond's own insecurities. Desmond has been stuck on the island, in the hatch, for eight years. All the audience wants at this point is for these people to find each other again. And when they do it is completely beautiful.

Embedding is disabled on Youtube, but you can watch it here.

( 30 Days of Television )

Oh Disney, no...

Subs are out for the first Nodame Cantabile movie and I'm pretty psyched to have Nodame and Chiaki back on my screen. This of course made me want to listen to Rhapsody in Blue, so I went over to Youtube to fulfill this desire. I reformatted my computer a while ago and have yet to put my music back on it. One of the clips available was from Fantasia 2000. I then decided to check out some clips from the original.

Now, I know Disney doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to racial sensitivity. Many of the problematic examples are representative of the time period in which they were created (Song of the South, the crows in Dumbo, etc) and sometimes they were just in really poor taste (lyrics from the opening song in Aladdin). What I wasn't aware of, was that there is a horrible example of stereotyping in Fantasia. Meet Sunflower, the centaurette:



I'm really pretty speechless. I watched Fantasia a lot when I was younger, and The Pastoral Symphony was one of my favorite parts. I loved horses when I was younger. Where other girls played with Barbies, it was my horses that had all the dramatic storylines. And The Pastoral Symphony had pegasus AND centaurs. Plus, I was a serious girly-girl and thought the centaur ladies were gorgeous. I loved the fluffy, pastel landscape, I loved how everything was just so delicate and perfect.

Now, watching it with a far more cynical eye these days it's hard not to find fault with the clip. And it becomes even more horrific with the knowledge that originally the perfect little centaur princesses were waited on hand and foot by such a blatant and insulting caricature. I just can't wrap my head around how such a character design was worked into the marshmallow landscape and to what purpose? She seems very much at odds with the two elegant and beautiful part-African part-zebra centaur ladies that attend (of course) Dionysus later on. The entire thing is just disgusting and very, very sad.

Of course, the 60's rolled around and the racial climate started to shift considerably. The clips that featured Sunflower were pan and zoomed in to crop her out. And according to a few sources I read, Disney tried to claim that she never existed. Well, she did, and you can see her in this Youtube clip starting at 1:01 - The Pastoral Symphony