Critique

Critique of

Kids, Cartoons, and Commercialism

By Javier Garcia

 

 Being as this essay was written about a subject that affected me as a child without my realization of it, this was a very interesting paper to read. The paper is an analysis of the influence of cartoons on television over the growing consumer group of children. Marketing in general is a fascinating subject with so many possibilities of attracting or detracting consumers. The sub-category of children’s marketing is even more compelling as is stated through the common theme found in the paper of children’s imagination. The evolution of marketing through cartoons that is revealed in this paper opens the door to questions about other types of children’s television shows. It was interesting, to the author’s credit, of keeping track of the amount of money spent on child consumer’s expenditures throughout the paper as time builds up to present day.

 I was pleased with the title as I knew exactly the subject of the essay that I would be reading. The introduction I also found very good as I learned about the focus of children’s marketing through imaginary television shows. The paper kept an excellent direction as it did not jump around, but followed the course of history and the growing of the industry. The paper also peaked my interest as it made me ask questions that may have or have not been within the focus of the paper. One of those questions was when the idea of education came to television that has led to existing shows today such as Blues Clues. Also, whether shows used propaganda other than consumerism such as being a good person as was briefly touched on page 6 in relation to The Transformers. 

 The paper was written well and it seems as though a good deal of proof-reading had been done. I came across only one instance where I was distracted momentarily by a typo which was on page 2, line 9. Also, a less obvious and undistracting misspelling of an authors name on page 8, line 18, that I most likely would not have noticed had I not been reading this on my computer, but on a actual paper. There was also one piece of information relating to present day consumer expenses on page 1 that is conflicting with the information on page 10, that I did not catch until later when I was looking over the paper a second time. After I finished the essay, there were only a couple of issues that I would have liked to have seen added to the paper. The first of these subjects being that I would have liked to learn of more examples of products that were placed on shelves, such as, stuffed animals, clothing, and room decorations. The second is the re-introduction of cartoons that were popular earlier on or spin-offs of cartoons, as the power rangers seem to have been. 

 Despite these trivial ideas, which I believe could have been added to the paper; it was an excellent read and was highly informative of the subject of television cartoons influence over consumerism. Judging by the wide variety of sources used it is apparent that a great deal of research has gone into the creation of this paper. If I were to assign a grade to this paper it would be in the range of a B+/A-.