Core Post 2 - Week 4

So, I’m really into memory and how it informs our imaginations. When reading Lipsitz, I thought it was particularly interesting to consider his discussions of memories as it applies to our current televisual landscape, especially with streaming. George Lipsitz particularly positions the collective postwar memories that working-class urban families sought within the format of television. The presentation of ethnic families in working-class urban neighborhoods on television, “showed them struggling for material satisfaction and advancement under conditions far removed the embourgeoisement of the working class celebrated in popular literature about the postwar era,” (Lipsitz, 356). This complicated the assessment of television historically because this cemented commercial network television as an avenue for a hegemonic ideology of happiness, nostalgia, family and identity. This led to the crafting of an everlasting feature to the medium that finds itself currently in the values of worthy television consumption.
To compare this more formally to our current landscape, the streaming wars can be described as the fight for nostalgia. As the televisual landscape is shifting into new mediums outside of a television set, it is imperative to note that the exploitation of nostalgia and memory of working-class urban families in the postwar era popularized the medium of television as a platform that could capitalism off of what the public will consume to form their ideologies around family, nationalism, identity and the “American dream,” never to return to the devastation of World War II or the Great Depression. “From the evocations of the depression era that permeated the world of The Honeymooners, to the re- cycled minstrel show stereotypes of Amos ' n Andy, from the textured layers of immigrant experience underpinning the drama and charm of The Goldberg’s and Mama, to the reenactment of immigration in contemporaneous circumstances in Life of Riley, Life with Luigi ,and Hey Jeannie, the medium of the infinitely re-newable present turned to past traditions and practices in order to explain and legitimate fundamentally new social relations in the present,” (Lipsitz, 362). The layers between family, nationalism and identity have become an enduring feature in the landscape of television even through the radical changes of the medium.
So, with that foregrounding, I particularly noticed this enduring feature as it applies to the owning the publishing rights for cartoons. The acquiring of children’s programming from Disney, Nickelodeon & Cartoon Network is at the center of the streaming wars as companies realized that they could cash out on memories. Disney+ has acquired their own programming, which was no surprise. Netflix has acquired Nickelodeon & HBOMax has acquired Cartoon Network. These deals were huge and proves that the nostalgia and memory of adult consumers is an enduring feature of television that Lipsitz outlined.