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[edit] Blue's Clues

[edit] Steve Burns and Donovan Patton

Steve & Joe - references: [1]
“We saw Steve Burns' retirement from the show as a chance to put Blue's Clues on a new course,” Ms. Johnson says.

[2] [3]
[4]
Yet for Mr. Burns, there is nothing visual or tangible to work with. He performs his part in an empty blue room, so that his image can be superimposed on the computer-animated world of Blue and her friends later.

"He says it's like acting at the bottom of a swimming pool," said Ms. Santomero.

Fortunately for Blue's Clues and its young viewers, Mr. Burns has the imagination to pull it off.

[5] [6] [7] [8] [9]


"tenyears":
Steve: auditioned 1,000 people
- asked him to dress more conservatively

Steve: "Can you not look like you tomorrow morning?"

- tested with kids

"There was just something about this kid, who was fresh out of Pennsylvania, who just knew where to look in the camera to really talk to kids. He was just right." - Dr. Alice Wilder, Nick's Director of Research and Development.

- left after seven years and over 100 episodes to pursue musical career
- rumors: "The rumor mill surrounding me has always been really strange."

Rosie O'Donnell Show
I knew I wasn't gonna be doing children's television all my life, mostly because I refused to lose my hair on a kid's TV show, and it was happenin'--fast."

- worldwide search for new host

24-year old unknown actor, Donovan Patton
April 2002 - Steve "skidooed" to college

[edit] Steve Burns

Steve Burns (born Steven Michael Burns on October 9, 1973, in Boyertown, Pennsylvania) is an American entertainer.[1] He is best-known as the original host of the long-running children's television program Blue's Clues.

Steve Burns grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in a small town named Boyertown. He was a musician from an early age, playing in bands called Sudden Impact, Nine Pound Truck, and the Ivys (which he has called a "Morrissey rip-off band") while in high school and college.[2] He studied theatre Allentown College in Pennsylvania[3] under an acting scholarship, but quit school and moved to New York City to become a professional actor.[4] He lived in a basement apartment near Times Square, finding his first success as a voice-over artist for ads and making appearances on Homicide and Law and Order.[3] Burns, about his 1995 role in Law and Order, stated, "I was autistic and died."[4]

Also in 1995, Burns auditioned for Blue's Clues, thinking it was another voice-over role.[4] He showed up with long hair and an earring; "I was a bit of a skate rat." he said.[3] Initially, the Nickelodeon executives were not supportive of Burns hosting their new show, and was requested in subsequent auditions by the show's creators to dress more conservatively. (Burns reported that the creators, in a call-back phone conversation, asked him, "Could you not look like you tomorrow morning?")[5] It became apparent, however, that he was the favorite with preschool test audiences. Executive producer and co-creator Traci Paige Johnson reported that "of the 100 people we auditioned, he was, by far, the realest."[4] As Dr. Alice Wilder, Nickelodeon's Director of Research and Development, said, "There was just something about this kid, who was fresh out of Pennsylvania, who just knew where to look in the camera to really talk to kids. He was just right."[5]

From its premiere, Blue's Clues was an instant hit, due to Steve Burns as much as the show's format. Burns never wanted to make being the host of a children's show his career, but it became one, anyway. He became "a superstar" among his audience and their parents, but unknown to everyone else,[4] and enjoyed what he called "micro-celebrity, about as small a celebrity as you can be."[3] As the New York Times reported, he "developed an avid following among both preteen girls and mothers. The former send torrents of e-mail; the latter scrutinize the show with an intensity that might make even Elmo, the red Muppet, blush."[3]

[edit] The Tipping Point

[edit] Reception and influence

Sources: [10] [11] [12] [13] [14]

[edit] The Wiggles

[edit] Lead section

Rewriting as per GAN suggestion.

The Wiggles is a children's musical group formed in Sydney, Australia in 1991. It was founded by Anthony Field, Murray Cook, Greg Page, and Jeff Fatt. The group has achieved worldwide success with its children's albums, videos, television series and concert appearances. According to Business Review Weekly, The Wiggles were Australia's "richest entertainers" for the year 2005, earning more than AC/DC and Nicole Kidman combined.[6] In 2006, it was reported that they earned AUS$50 million.[7]

The Wiggles combine a rich knowledge of both music and child development in their videos, television programmes, and live shows. Anthony Field and Jeff Fatt were members of the Australian pub rock band The Cockroaches in the 1980s, and Murray Cook was a member of several bands before meeting Field and Greg Page at Macquarie University while studying to become pre-school teachers. A school project led to the recording of their first album and tour in 1991. Their basic act expanded to include other characters (Captain Feathersword, Dorothy the Dinosaur, Henry the Octopus, and Wags the Dog) and a troupe of dancers.

By 2002, The Wiggles became the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's most successful pre-school property. They had also began to franchise The Wiggles' concepts to other countries, developed Wiggles sections in amusement parks in both Australia and America, and won several APRA and ARIA awards. In 2006, founding member Greg Page was forced to retire from the group and was replaced by former dancer Sam Moran.

[edit] Gather Together in My Name

New article

Marguerite seems to have a lifetime of experiences and jobs in three short years. Her occupations include a bus girl in a cafeteria, a Creole cook, a waitress, a madame, a dancer, a fry cook, prostitute, Southern cook, and chauffeurette for a boxer.

One of the most dangerous and often humorous events in the book was the way Marguerite talked her way into becoming a "absentee manager" for two lesbian prostitutes. The experience and the fear of incarceration and losing her son drove her back to her grandmother's home in Stamps, Arkansas. Her grandmother sent her back to San Francisco, as she had done when Marguerite was a child, for her safety and "protection," after Marguerite had a potentially dangerous confrontation with two white women in a store.

She goes from relationship to relationship, hoping that "my charming prince was going to appear out of the blue". - p. 114

She resides in San Francisco, San Diego, Stamps, Arkansas, San Francisco again, and Stockton, California. The book ends with Rita back in San Francisco with her mother and brother.

She tried to enlist in the Army, only to be rejected on the eve of boot camp because she attended the California Labor School as a young teenager during the height of the Communist scare.

She discovered "the Russian writers," p. 65 marijuana, jazz,

One of the major events in young Rita's life was, in spite of "the strangest audition" p. 117, her short stint dancing and studying dance with her partner, R.L. Poole, who became her lover until he reunited with his previous partner.

"My fantasies were little different than any other girl of my age. He would come. He would. Just walk into my life, see me and fall everlastingly in love... I looked forward to a husband who would love me ethereally, spiritually, and on rare (but beautiful) occasions, physically." p. 141

Her disasterous affair with the Episcopalian preacher, L.D. Tolbrook, who introduced Rita to "the life" of prostitution. He seduced her, and then used her affections to drive her into her new profession. The death of her brother Bailey's wife drove Rita back to her mother's home back in San Francisco. She left her young son with a caretaker, Big Mary. When she returned for "the baby," she found that Big Mary had disappeared with Guy. She tried to elicit help from L.D., who put her in her place as his mistress when she tried to get help from him at his home with his wife. She finally realized that he had been taking advantage of her. She traced Big Mary and Guy to Bakersfield, California, and had an emotional reuntion with her son.

"In the plowed farmyard near Bakersfield, I began to understand that uniqueness of the person. He was three and I was nineteen, and never again would I think of him as a beautiful appendage of myself." p. 192

The end of the book finds Rita defeated by life: "For the first time I sat down defenseless to await life's next assault" (p.206). The book ends with an encounter with a drug addict who cared enough for her to show her the effects of his drug habit and galvanized her to make something of her life for her and her son.

[edit] Reception

Gather Together in My Name was not as critically acclaimed as Angelou's first autobiographical volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. As feminist scholar Mary Jane Lupton states, "the tight structure" of Caged Bird seemed to "crumble" in this book, and that Angelou's "childhood experiences were replaced by episodes which a number of critics consider disjointed or bizarre." Lupton's explanation for this was that Angelou's later works consisted of episodes, or "fragments", that are "reflections of the kind of chaos found in actual living." Lupton continues, "In altering the narrative structure, Angelou shifts the emphasis from herself as an isolated consciousness to herself as a black woman participating in diverse experiences among a diverse class of peoples." In her autobiographies, motherhood is a "prevailing theme," and this emphasis begins in Gather Together in My Name.[8]

Angelou's autobiographies have been used in narrative and multicultural approaches in teacher education. Dr. Jocelyn A. Glazier, a professor at George Washington University, has used Caged Bird and Gather Together in My Name to train teachers how to "talk about race" in their classrooms. Due to Angelou's use of understatement, self-mockery, humor, and irony, readers of Gather Together in My Name and the rest of Angelou's autobiographies wonder what she "left out" and were unsure about how to respond to the events Angelou describes. Angelou's depictions of her experiences of racism force white readers to explore their feelings about race and their own "privileged status". Glazier found that although critics have focused on where Angelou fits within the genre of African American autobiography and on her literary techniques, readers react to her storytelling with "surprise, particularly when [they] enter the text with certain expectations about the genre of autobiography."[9]


http://books.google.com/books?id=xK_Pv0fc2L8C&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=%22gather+together+in+my+name%22&source=web&ots=JIsfrLZNEY&sig=oEBWCXsio_tx6ZaVqW8jUT--1qw#PPA121,M1
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199510/ai_n8723217/pg_1 1

[edit] Maya Angelou

Notes from African American Lives 2:
Part 2: A Way Out of No Way
Grandmother's mother, when becoming free, renamed herself to "Kentucky Shannon" because she liked how it sounded. She prohibited anyone from knowing about her background. Grandmother Baxter: "nearly white" (Caged Bird)

Her mother, Mary Lee, was the slave of John Savin, and moved with him after emancipation from Maryland to Illinois and worked as a servant for his family.
Savin: "a prominent and upstanding citizen."--Justice of the Peace, elected town supervisor.
At 17, Mary Lee became pregnant out of wedlock, and Savin forced Mary to sign a false statement accusing another man of being the father. A grand jury indicted Savin for forcing Mary to commit perjury, and stated that Savin was the father. The jury found Savin not guilty, and Mary Lee was sent to the Clinton Co. poor house with her child, Angelou's grandmother Baxter.
Angelou: "That poor little black girl, physically and psychologically bruised."

[edit] Writing Style

Angelou has used the same "writing ritual"[10] for many years. She gets up at five in the morning and checks into a hotel room, where the staff has been instructed to remove any pictures from the walls. She writes on legal pads while lying on the bed, with only a bottle of sherry, a deck of cards to play solitaire, Roget's Thesaurus, and the Bible, and leaves by the early afternoon. She averages 10-12 pages of material a day, which she edits down to three or four pages in the evening.[11]

[edit] Themes in Angelou's autobiographies

Angelou's best-known works, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the five volumes that follow it, have been categorized as autobiography, but as feminist scholar Maria Lauret stated, Angelou has placed herself in this genre while critiquing it. Lauret believes that autobiographies written by women in the 1970s can be described as "feminist first-person narratives"[12] and that Angelou and other feminist writers have used the autobiography to restructure the ways to write about women's lives in a male-dominated society. Lauret sees a connection between the autobiographies Angelou has written and fictional first-person narratives, calling them "fictions of subjectivity"[13] because they both employ the narrator as protagonist and "rely upon the illusion of presence in their mode of signification".[14]

Lauret states that "the formation of female cultural identity" is woven into Angelou's narratives, setting her up as "a role model for Black women".[15] According to Lauret, Angelou reconstructs the Black woman's image throughout her autobiographies, and that Angelou uses her many roles, incarnations, and identities in her books to "signify multiple layers of oppression and personal history".[16] Lauret sees Angelou's themes of the individual's strength and ability to overcome throughout Angelou's autobiographies as well.[17] French writer Valérie Baisnée puts Caged Bird in the midst of literature written during and about the American Civil Rights movement.[18] Critic Mary Lane Lupton also puts Angelou's autobiographies in the "black narrative tradition";[19] i.e., the prison autobiography, the success narrative, the literary autobiography, the travel narrative, the slave narrative, and the spiritual.[20]

Lupton maintains that Angelou's use of common fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language often cause critics to label her books as autobiographical fiction instead of as autobiographical. Angelou characterizes them as autobiographies, not as fiction, [21] while recognizing that there are fictional aspects to them. Lupton states that Angelou tends to "diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth", [22] which parallels the conventions of much of African American autobiography written during the abolitionist period of US history, when the truth was censored out of the need for self-protection.[23][24]

Angelou's autobiographies, while distinct in style and narration, are unified in their themes and "stretch over time and place"[25], from Arkansas to Africa and back to the US, occurring in time from the beginnings of World War II to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr..[26] One of the most important themes in Angelou's autobiographies are "kinship concerns",[27] from the character-defining experience of her parents' abandonment at the beginning of Caged Bird to her relationships with her son, husbands, and lovers throughout all of her books.[28] African American literature scholar Dolly McPherson believes that Angelou's concept of family throughout her books must be understood in the light of the way in which she and her older brother were displaced by their parents.[29] Motherhood is a "prevailing theme"[30] in all of Angelou's autobiograhies, specifically her experiences as a single mother, daughter, and granddaughter.[30] Lupton believes that Angelou might have modelled her plot construction and character development influenced by this mother/child motif from Harlem Renaissance poet Jessie Fauset.[31]

Angelou is also concerned with themes of oppression and racism. She uses the metaphor of a bird struggling to escape its cage described in Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem as a "central image" throughout her series of autobiographies.[32][33] Like elements within the prison narrative, the caged bird represents Angelou's imprisonment from the racism inherent in Stamps, Arkansas, and her continuing experiences of other forms of imprisonment, like racial discrimination, drugs, marriage, and the economic system.[34] This metaphor also invokes the "supposed contradiction of the bird singing in the midst of its struggle".[33]

[edit] More Blue's Clues

Based on research of theorists such as Daniel Anderson of the University of Massachusetts (who served as a consultant for Blue's Clues), the producers set out to develop a show that took advantage of children being intellectually and behaviorally active when watching television.[35] They based the production of Blue's Clues upon research that showed that television could be a "powerful educational agent" because for most American children, it is an accessible medium and a "powerful cultural artifact". Since television programs tell stories through pictures, the potential for episodic learning is high. Television, using film techniques, is able to present information from multiple perspectives, in a variety of "real world" contexts (i.e., situations within the daily experiences of young children), and that television could be an effective method of scientific education for young children. The creators wanted to provide their viewers with more "authentic learning opportunties" by placing problem-solving tasks in the context of storytelling techniques, by slowly increasing the difficulty of these tasks, and by inviting their direct involvement.

Research since Sesame Street changed how attention span in young children was perceived. Sesame Street was developed with the understanding that children have short attention spans, so the show was designed in a magazine-like format.[35]

[edit] The Wiggles

  • Mick Conway and Paul Field: [15]
  • Kathleen Warren [16]

[edit] Main characters in Caged Bird

[edit] Marguerite Anderson ("Maya")

[edit] Annie Henderson ("Momma")

[edit] Bailey Anderson, Jr.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Biography for Steve Burns. IMDb.com. Retrieved on 2007-12-18.
  2. ^ D'Angelo, Joe. "Ex-'Blue's Clues' host Steve Burns an indie rocker at heart", MTV.com, 2002-04-30. Retrieved on 2007-12-18. 
  3. ^ a b c d e Iovine, Julie V.. "At home with--Steven Burns; A few clues in Brooklyn", The New York Times, 1999-11-18. Retrieved on 2007-12-11. 
  4. ^ a b c d e Norris, Chris. "Me and you and a dog named Blue", Spin Magazine, 2004-02-09. Retrieved on 2007-12-18. 
  5. ^ a b Jim Forbes (narrator). Behind the clues: 10 years of Blue [Short documentary]. Nickelodeon.
  6. ^ "Kids' favourites Wiggle to the top of wealth list", ABC News, 2006-04-06. Retrieved on 2007-01-22. 
  7. ^ Blake, Elissa. "Unusual suspects", Daily Telegraph, 2007-09-02. Retrieved on 2007-09-03. 
  8. ^ Maya Angelou (1928- ). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-02-16.
  9. ^ Glazier, Jocelyn A. (Winter 2003). "Moving closer to speaking the unspeakable: White teachers talking about race". Teacher Education Quarterly 30 (1): 73-94. California Council on Teacher Education. 
  10. ^ Lupton, p.15
  11. ^ Sarler, Carol (1989), “A life in the day of Maya Angelou”, in Elliot, Jeffrey M., Conversations with Maya Angelou, Jackson, MI: University Press, ISBN 0-8780-5362-X 
  12. ^ Lauret, p. 98
  13. ^ Lauret, p. 98
  14. ^ Lauret, p. 98
  15. ^ Lauret, p. 97
  16. ^ Lauret, p. 97
  17. ^ Lauret, p. 97
  18. ^ Baisnée, p.62
  19. ^ Lupton, p. 36
  20. ^ See Lupton, chapter 2, p. 29-50.
  21. ^ Lupton, p. 29-30
  22. ^ Lupton, p. 34
  23. ^ Lupton, p. 34
  24. ^ Sartwell, p. 26
  25. ^ Lupton, p. 1
  26. ^ Lupton, p. 1
  27. ^ Lupton, p. 11
  28. ^ Lupton, p. 11
  29. ^ McPherson, p. 14
  30. ^ a b Maya Angelou (1928- ). Poetry Foundation. Retrieved on 2007-10-25.
  31. ^ Lupton, p. 49
  32. ^ Lupton, p. 38
  33. ^ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named difference
  34. ^ Lupton, p. 38-39
  35. ^ a b Jaffe, Eric (December 2005). "Watch and learn". APS Observer 18 (12).