Bluff's Castle Corner

  Recently, an animated adaptation of the comic strip Phoebe and Her Unicorn   was cancelled by Nickelodeon, who claimed that boys won't watch cartoons with female protagonists. This incident shows how out of touch TV executives are with the audiences of their shows. Contrary to popular belief, gender doesn't matter. A good show is a good show, and if it's good, then anyone, including boys, can watch it, and history has proven that time and time again. Here are just a few examples: Winsome Witch is a series of Hanna-Barbera shorts that aired during The Secret Squirrel Show . Even in the 1960s, Hanna-Barbera knew that boys can watch shows with female leads. Winsome Witch  is about a witch named Winnie, and the magical mishaps she gets into. She's just as clumsy and hilarious as any other male H-B character, and she doesn't have a sidekick. While she is obscure nowadays, that's just because the various backup segments in Hanna-Barbera shows aren't very well-k...

  We'll have a gay old time, indeed. Hanna-Barbera has been an obsession of mine for almost a year now. Their cartoons are still pretty fun to watch, but they obviously run the risk of being outdated in today's society. Here, I will be speaking on Hanna-Barbera's relationship to a group I'm a part of -- the LGBT community. Obviously, due to censorship and homophobia, there couldn't be any LGBT characters on TV or in film back in the day, much less positive ones. If a gay or at least ambiguously gay character did appear, they were an unflattering stereotype (lisps, limp wrists etc). Despite this, H-B unintentionally created one of the gayest cartoon characters ever - Snagglepuss. Heavens to Murgatroyd! He's pink, is into theatre, and talks like this , even. Ever since the first Snagglepuss cartoon aired, there have been rumors and jokes that he was gay. In order to stop the rumors that the character was gay, they added a female love interest for him named Lila Li...