No More Mr. Nice Guy

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I kind of have this suspicion that all old-timey cartoons were written by frustrated Nice Guys.

Think about it. You have our cute little hero and his girl, and then along comes the Big Bad Jerk to be his romantic rival. Sure, some of the cartoons have the Big Bad Jerk grabbing the lady outright, but a lot of the time she turns her nose up at our hero, for NO GOOD REASON, and goes with the Big Bad Jerk. Then it's up to the hero to kick the Big Bad Jerk's ass with the cunning use of slapstick, and only after that does the girl come back to him because he's Demonstrated Higher Value or whatever the pickup artists say.

So yeah, it's pretty the world according to the Nice Guy's lament that "Girls always go for the brawny jerk and never recognize what a great thing they've got with nice guys like me!" And even though they get their wish-fulfillment at the end, it's never implied that their insulting view of women--that they automatically go for the big dumb ass-kicker--may be incorrect: the girl still only goes back to the Nice Guy when he literally decides "No more Mr. Nice Guy."

Plus, like I said, she leaves Our Hero for NO GOOD REASON--like maybe he spilled something on her or laughed at a completely harmless thing. It's almost like the writers themselves kept getting spurned and COULDN'T IMAGINE what they were doing, and so just assumed that women were all fickle and shallow.

Somehow that particular gender dynamic in the old cartoons weirds me out more than the straight-up molesty ones.

All that said, however, I still love them old cartoons. Gotta go watch more of 'em.

Comments

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

I've mostly seen this dynamic in Popeye cartoons, where it was a basic dynamic between the three characters. I didn't think it was typical of other cartoons of the time. The only similar one I can think of is the Mario games, but Peach is hypothetically an unwilling captive.

[redbird]

On the other hand, my immediate images of old cartoons are the Bugs Bunny ones, where I don't remember any female-coded characters or that shape of interaction, and the Coyote/Roadrunner ones, which again weren't anywhere near that dynamic. "Brawny hunter isn't as clever as he thinks" and maybe "good sense is better than bought technology," with no implication that even the coyote believed the roadrunner wanted, or should want, the coyote to catch him.