More on Bad Ideas

And a guinea pig in a trench coat

If you are acquainted with any people in the three- to seven-year-old age range, you probably have a passing familiarity with Paw Patrol. Even if you, like me, are a curmudgeon who assiduously avoids contemporary children’s programming, and who provided your offspring with elegant wooden Montessori baby toys (which he ignored) and nostalgic Fisher Price little people from your own 1970s childhood (which he loved), you have probably encountered Paw Patrol. It’s cartoon series about crime fighting dogs who each are associated with a particular kind of vehicle. Girafflet’s favorite of these characters is Marshall, who is - as you probably guessed - a dalmatian associated with fire trucks. Or a fire truck themed plane? I don’t actually know.

If, in addition to being a curmudgeon associated with a small child who loves Paw Patrol, you are also - like me - a culture worker, you may find yourself analyzing exactly what it is about this exhausting, derivative text that is so appealing to children. The answer is obvious. Someone somewhere in the Canadian animation studio responsible for the existence of a Marshall toy in an airplane on my desk at this very moment had the insight to recognize that little kids love trucks. They also recognized that little kids love puppies.

(Does this plane look like a fire engine to you?)

Puppies + trucks + kid characters + crime fighting action + infinite merchandizing = caaaaaash money. The creator of Paw Patrol - his name, bless his heart, is Keith Chapman, and he also is responsible for Bob the Builder - had a really killer idea. Puppies plus trucks. Presto.

Typically, when we try differentiate what is a good idea from what is a bad idea, the temptation is to look for originality. We assume that goodness is interchangeable with novelty, because novelty requires creativity and insight. But Paw Patrol puts the lie to that assumption. Could there be anything less original than children’s media full of puppies? The Poky Little Puppy is only the first example that comes to mind, a Little Golden Book from the 1940s. Dick and Jane had a dog, Spot, in children’s readers beginning in 1930. What about big vehicles? The earliest version of The Little Engine that Could, a story about working hard that also renders big, loud, scary instruments of industrialization as friendly, and therefore under children’s control, dates from around 1902.

What is striking about Paw Patrol is its novel reframing of its essentially unoriginal premise. Paw Patrol is at its core a meta-textual enterprise, a text in dialogue with all the foregoing children’s media on which it is built. If our metric for success is predicated on cultural penetration, on audience response, or even on money made, Paw Patrol certainly qualifies as a good idea. Maybe even a great one.

Critic Linda Hutcheon has argued that the postmodern novel is by definition an exercise in historiographic metafiction. That’s a fancy way of saying that by writing A True Account I was necessarily engaging with, even commenting upon, all the pirate fiction that has come before it. A True Account performs this self-awareness with its explicit and implicit references to Treasure Island, but also through its structure - the book within a book that gives the novel its title. A True Account is, in effect, a novel about writing pirate novels. Its novelty lies not in its originality, but in its self-awareness of, and commentary on, its very unoriginality.

Not all that different from Paw Patrol. (Maybe with fewer marketing opportunities.)

So what’s next?

“What’s that got to do with a guinea pig in a trench coat?” you might be asking if you read the subtitle of today’s newsletter. Nothing much on the surface. Only that our household critical analysis of Paw Patrol led my husband to an amusing side project, which I will share in due course. After all, there are cute animals other than puppies. There are cultural texts that can be engaged with in a postmodern metafictional way that don’t involve trucks. And maybe Girafflet will like them?

More on that presently. For now, it’s back to the New York Public Library Art and Architecture digital archive for me, as I continue to weigh what it is that makes a novel idea good. Or not.