Barbie in Pakistan: The Toy, the Movie, and the Cultural Ambiguities

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Barbie in Pakistan: The Toy, the Movie, and the Cultural Ambiguities

In Pakistan, Barbie the movie transcended its form as mere cinematic spectacle and metamorphosed into a tool through which the complex, unspoken, and ambiguous scales of morality can be analyzed. Farooqui's recent research on the reception of this globally successful movie examines the responses of its Pakistani viewers to show the complex national landscape of reactions that went far beyond simple movie criticism.

This post is part of a themed series on toys that asked contributors to think about a toy/toys/toy company and explore how various cultures, groups, audiences, or companies find and make meaning (or money) through such play.

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Curbeth Thou Enthusiasm: Is Larry David a 21st Century Shakespearean Fool?

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Curbeth Thou Enthusiasm: Is Larry David a 21st Century Shakespearean Fool?

This post is part of a series of critical responses to the shows nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. This piece frames Larry David's role in Curb Your Enthusiasm to that of the Shakespearean fool, and ponders his ability to remain positive in the court of public opinion despite his irreverent scripts.

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Frederik Cryns Interviewed by Henry Jenkins on ‘Shogun’

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Frederik Cryns Interviewed by Henry Jenkins on ‘Shogun’

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. Here, Henry Jenkins interviews Frederik Cryns, historical consultant for Shogun and a professor of Japanese History at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Fit for a Queen: The Final Season of 'The Crown' and Its Royal Fans

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EMMYS WATCH 2024 – Fit for a Queen: The Final Season of 'The Crown' and Its Royal Fans

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the series nominated for Outstanding Drama Series and Outstanding Comedy Series at the 76th Emmy Awards. The final season of the Netflix series The Crown concludes a series spanning sixty years in the lives of the British royal family, the Windsors. From the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, to Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee, this season repeatedly engages with stories about how fans impact the lives of the royal family, for good or for bad. The series itself blurs the lines between history and fan fiction. Though considered prestige television, often nominated for awards and celebrated by critics, The Crown is at heart a culturally sanctioned form of royal fandom that contributes to the ongoing fascination with the British monarchy.

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Visitors are Coming: Fan Tourism in Northern Ireland

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Visitors are Coming: Fan Tourism in Northern Ireland

In the first of a series of blog posts on screen tourism, Bethan Jones reflects on the impact fan tourism has had in Northern Ireland thanks to Game of Thrones – not only for fans or the tourism industry, but for film and television production and perceptions of the country itself.

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part Three)

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part Three)

This is the third of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part explores the blurring of reality and fiction that drives pro wrestling storytelling and the role it played in the lead up to WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part Two)

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part Two)

This is the second of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part introduces the story of Cody Rhodes and reflects on long form serialized storytelling in WWE leading into WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part One)

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WrestleMania XL: The Greatest Story Ever Told (Part One)

This is the first of three parts on the recent WrestleMania XL and the current revival of WWE. It reviews the interconnected and multistrand storytelling that unfolded over two years leading into the recent event and highlights opportunities for further appraisal. This part establishes the important role of audience and character in pro wrestling, and overviews key moments for Roman Reigns leading into WrestleMania XL. Readers who might be interested in this piece include those new to pro wrestling within the context of popular culture and entertainment studies and those curious about WWE’s revival.

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Moving Between World(views) with Database Narratives

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Moving Between World(views) with Database Narratives

This post is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more. In this post, Zoyander Street discusses their chapter “Cis Penance: Transmedia Database Narratives,” which explores their own interactive documentary work about transgender people in terms of concepts that come from Japanese media studies scholarship: database narratives and sekaikan (worldview).

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It’s All Transmedia Now

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It’s All Transmedia Now

This post is part of a series written by contributors to Imagining Transmedia, a new book of essays published by the MIT Press. The book explores how transmedia techniques are being used in a wide range of settings, from entertainment and education to health care, journalism, politics, urban planning, and more.

How do we think about stories and what it means to imagine a world together when the pathways for telling, sharing, and reacting to those stories are constantly shifting and bleeding into one another? When that shared narrative universe is massively distributed, debated, and collectively infused with the energy and attention of thousands or millions of people? These are the questions at the heart of our new book Imagining Transmedia, the culmination of over a decade of intensive mucking about in transmedia storytelling at the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. I’d like to tell you a story about how we got here.

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“Girl Crush” K-pop Idols: A Conversation between Korean, Chinese, and US Aca-fans Part II

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“Girl Crush” K-pop Idols: A Conversation between Korean, Chinese, and US Aca-fans Part II

Beyond K-pop, female talents’ careers and “strong,” “independent” women personae are becoming more recognized and celebrated in the broader South Korean media industry. Kim Sook, has gained nicknames like “Sook-crush (drawing on “Girl Crush”),” “Furiosook (parody of Mad Max’s Furiosa)” and “Matriarch-sook” from her famous gender role-flipped humor and non-subservient image that she built over ~25 years of her career, became the second woman to ever win Korea’s national broadcasting station’s (KBS) Grand Prize in Entertainment in 2020 since Lee Young-ja’s first win in 2018. Female street dancer crew reality competition series Street Women Fighter (Mnet; 2021-2023) and many of the featured dancers have become sensational hits. As the series’ name suggests, the “Girl Crush” dancers boasted “strong” physiques, personalities, and styles but with comradery and professionalism that matched their (formerly underrecognized) diverse and impressive career backgrounds, rather than one-dimensional “catty” competitiveness.

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“Girl Crush” K-pop Idols: A Conversation between Korean, Chinese, and US Aca-fans: Part I

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“Girl Crush” K-pop Idols: A Conversation between Korean, Chinese, and US Aca-fans: Part I

Beyond K-pop, female talents’ careers and “strong,” “independent” women personae are becoming more recognized and celebrated in the broader South Korean media industry. Kim Sook, has gained nicknames like “Sook-crush (drawing on “Girl Crush”),” “Furiosook (parody of Mad Max’s Furiosa)” and “Matriarch-sook” from her famous gender role-flipped humor and non-subservient image that she built over ~25 years of her career, became the second woman to ever win Korea’s national broadcasting station’s (KBS) Grand Prize in Entertainment in 2020 since Lee Young-ja’s first win in 2018. Female street dancer crew reality competition series Street Women Fighter (Mnet; 2021-2023) and many of the featured dancers have become sensational hits. As the series’ name suggests, the “Girl Crush” dancers boasted “strong” physiques, personalities, and styles but with comradery and professionalism that matched their (formerly underrecognized) diverse and impressive career backgrounds, rather than one-dimensional “catty” competitiveness.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Video Essay Reflections on Character in ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. This post features two video essays responding to Oppenheimer, one by Kai after Kai and one by Ella Wright. Both focus in on the film's depiction of character, asking how we are meant to understand them in moral terms. I encourage you to pay particular attention to the sound in each piece, the careful dichotomies between loudness and silence in “Fission, Fusion, and Character in Oppeneheimer” and the menacing yet also space age-y melodies of Kai after Kai’s original music in “The Guilt of Oppenheimer.” Both essays use sound to reinforce their critical points, rather than simply to ground their audiovisual timelines--an example of the sophisticated analysis going on in the world of video essays and videographic criticism.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — Feminist Frankensteins

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. In this dialogic post, Henry Jenkins and Kris Longfield dissect three recent feminist re-tellings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Lisa Frankenstein, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, and Poor Things. By centering women in traditionally male roles, these newer Frankenstein films ask different kinds of questions, renewing the story by mapping alternative meanings onto its core figures.They're continually asking “what are we taking from the past and what are we taking from the present?” so their leading ladies can solve problems.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”: Adaptation, Franchising, and 'Barbie' (2023)

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”: Adaptation, Franchising, and 'Barbie' (2023)

This piece is part of a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. Barbie is nominated in eight categories in the 2024 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. This critical response has been provoked by the discourse surrounding its eligibility in the Adapted Screenplay category, rather than Original Screenplay, and explores questions of adaptation and franchising in Barbie. The Barbie doll’s perceived lack of story or character suggests that Barbie is an original screenplay, but it is still based on a pre-existing intellectual property and an opening title card recognizes that Barbie is “Based on ‘Barbie’ by Mattel”. As an adaptation and a franchise Barbie draws from a material, industrial and historical story that works in concert with the polysemic, ambiguous and open nature of Barbie as a toy. Barbie is therefore shaped by the creative interpretation of Barbie as a culturally iconic toy and ‘Barbie’ as a franchise property owned by Mattel.

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'The Holdovers': A Crash Course on Using Vintage Sensibilities the Right Way

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OSCAR WATCH 2024 — 'The Holdovers': A Crash Course on Using Vintage Sensibilities the Right Way

This is the latest in a series of critical responses to the films nominated for Best Picture at the 96th Academy Awards. It is unbelievably easy for a film to come across as corny when attempting to put on the vintage aesthetic—also known in some fan circles as nostalgiacore. The term “nostalgia bait” has even been coined in recent years to signify works of new media that maraud retro sensibilities for the sheer sake of suckering audiences into a hollow experience. As frustrating and soulless as instances of nostalgia bait are, films that pull off the vintage look with purpose have the potential to be something quite special. Alexander Payne’s new witty coming-of-age drama, The Holdovers (2023), serves as a crash course in how to answer the crucial question every nostalgically aestheticized film must be asked: what’s the point?

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