Disney Finds a Cure for the Common Stereotype With ‘Doc McStuffins’

[weber_dubois22]

Disney has worked overtime in recent years to leave that past behind, and a surprising groundswell of support from black viewers for a new TV cartoon called “Doc McStuffins” is the latest indication that its efforts may be paying off.

Aimed at preschoolers, “Doc McStuffins” centers on its title character, a 6-year-old African-American girl. Her mother is a doctor (Dad stays home and tends the garden), and the girl emulates her by opening a clinic for dolls and stuffed animals. “I haven’t lost a toy yet,” she says sweetly to a sick dinosaur in one episode.

“It truly warmed my heart and almost brought tears to my eyes when my 8-year-old, Mikaela, saw ‘Doc McStuffins’ for the first time and said, ‘Wow, mommy — she’s brown,’ ” Kia Morgan Smith, an Atlanta mother of five, wrote on her blogCincomom.com. Myiesha Taylor, a Dallas doctor who blogs at CoilyEmbrace.com, took her praise a step further, writing, “This program featuring a little African-American girl and her family is crucial to changing the future of this nation.”

Despite a surge in multicultural cartoons, like Nickelodeon’s “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan,” designed to introduce Mandarin vocabulary words to preschoolers, and 40 years after Bill Cosby’s “Fat Albert,” black cartoon characters in leading roles are still rare. It’s considered an on-screen risk to make your main character a member of a minority, even in this post-“Dora the Explorer” age. Networks want to attract the broadest possible audience, but the real peril is in the toy aisle. From a business perspective, Disney and its rivals ultimately make most of these shows in the hope that they spawn mass-appeal toy lines. White dolls are the proven formula.

Chris Nee, who created “Doc McStuffins,” said, “Disney, to its complete credit, looked at my pitch and suggested that we make the characters African-American.” Her original Doc McStuffins was a little white girl.

Gary Marsh, the president and chief creative officer of Disney Channels Worldwide, said “Doc McStuffins” reflects a type of hypersensitivity to the power of television on young viewers. “What we put on TV can change how kids see the world, and that is a responsibility that I take very seriously,” he said. “By showcasing different role models and different kinds of families we can positively influence sociological dynamics for the next 20 years.” The series has attracted a surprisingly large following among boys — and related merchandise is already selling briskly. [SOURCE]

131 African American Women Physicians From Around The World Join Together To Express Thanks And Support For Disney’s Groundbreaking Children’s TV Show Doc McStuffins.

Since the Cosby show went off the air in 1992, we have not seen as many positive African American images on T.V. as we had hoped. This was especially true for our small children. Outside of Sesame Street, it seemed that children’s TV was still lacking the representation of diversity that made up the United States. But that has all changed with one new children’s program.

We have written a couple of entries in our blog about why we love Disney’s Doc McStuffins. We have discussed how we believe that this program featuring a little African American girl and her family is crucial to changing the future of this nation.

We also started a campaign to express our thanks to Disney and Brown Bag Films for creating, producing and airing Doc McStuffins. What started out as a simple collage of a few African American women physicians expressing thanks to Disney and Brown Bag Films has now taken on a life of its own. When we first started the collage we never thought we would get anywhere close to the current number of physicians who have agreed to lend their image to this project. But here we stand today with what we believe may be one of the most moving visual images of African American women in some time. [SOURCE]