In an age of electronic banking the number of cheques that are written has dwindled to the point of a mere trickle. As someone who works in an accounting firm, which has a slightly older clientele than the general population, I see more cheques than the average person. Depositing those cheques at a bank branch which employs less staff than ever before, has meant that queueing times are now an order of magnitude larger than in the past. While queueing, we are subject to whatever the bank branch's staff have put on the television to pacify their patrons; which is either Sky News Australia, or ABC Kids.
While queueing in the bank, I have seen more episodes of Dora The Explorer, Credlin, Agenda and Paw Patrol, than is necessary. I think that there is a certain assumption on the part of a lot of producers of television, that the audience wants to be entertained but does not want to think. In this respect, Sky News Australia and Paw Patrol are eerily similar. I have seen both against my will.
To recap: The premise of Paw Patrol appears to be that a small boy called Ryder, who for some reason lives in a tower by himself in a place called Adventure Bay, is unilaterally in charge of the only set of municipal services in town; which are run by puppies.
In any given episode of Paw Patrol, some minor complication breaks out which can only be saved by the deployment of Ryder and his unholy army of puppies which all have stereotypical skills and machinery. There is a firefighter, policeman, air rescue, aquatic rescue, and a builder for some reason.
The deployment of Ryder's puppies and their special skill, returns the town of Adventure Bay back to its idyllic normalcy until the next minor problem which can be solved within eleven minutes by Ryder's puppies.
The more times that I have seen this show, the less I understand. Paw Patrol's internal continuity raises more questions than is sensible for a 43 year old man to be asking. For a start, exactly why are there literally no other municipal services of any kind whatsoever? How did Ryder acquire the puppies? How did Ryder acquire a tower from which to deploy said puppies with an omniscient set of camera and tracking devices? Does this suggest that Ryder is the son of some Orwellian type dictator and that this place is the training ground for the child of an Inner Party member in a surveillance state? Big Brother is watching you.
Who is actually funding Paw Patrol and why are they investing millions of dollars in seemingly insane equipment for puppies to operate, instead of funding municipal council services? What exactly is the function of the Mayor of the town, considering that she has contracted the entirety of the municipal council services to one small boy and his army of puppies? How does someone as clearly incompetent as the Mayor continually get elected? Where exactly is the rest of the citizenry of the town? Has something really awful like a nuclear war happened and are we living in a post-apocalyptic nightmare scenario like The Bed-Sitting Room (1968)? How exactly have the puppies gained the power of speech?
Perhaps there is an entire other set of scenarios which might explain this. It could in fact be that Ryder has suffered some kind of massive head injury and that what he are actually watching are the dreams of a small boy in a coma in intensive care. The 'it was all a dream' device is the actual explanation for Dorothy's adventures in The Wizard Of Oz (1939).
Why is Zuma named after the former (and quite manically mad) President of South Africa? Is Marshall the firefighter something similar to Montag in Fahrenheit 451 and secretly wants to burn people's stuff and their houses? If there are no churches, or religious buildings of any kind in Adventure Bay then why is there an ancient religion that turns people into giant monkeys?
Perhaps Ryder is experiencing extreme grief of some kind and in reality, the puppies are in fact dead. What we could be witnessing is the dreams of a small boy who has lost someone very dear to him and what Paw Patrol actually is, is his brain's attempt at establishing some kind of control over the world. If Ryder is experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, then what we are watching on screen is actually something quite sad and the producers have made sport of pathos. Does that explain where his parents went?
I have heard a suggestion that instead of either physical or emotional trauma, that Ryder might have schizophrenia and that the puppies are in fact visual hallucinations. In following up this line of enquiry, I have found out that this is indeed possible and that in some instances of schizophrenia, the existence of other voices and visual representations of those voices manifest, can be a symptom of the disorder. Again, this is a very sad scenario and hardly the sort of thing which we should consider to be entertainment. Where exactly are Ryder's parents and how come
One of the deep problems about possessing a brain which is fed stimuli from the various senses of the nervous system, is that this leads to the philosophical conclusion that some or all of the world might not actually be real. How can one truly prove the existence of anything when even the existence of the observer might be brought into question. In the most solipsistic explanation of the universe, literally everything beyond the scope of the mind can not be truly be guaranteed to exist; so watching Paw Patrol while standing in the queue at the bank, I am often left to wonder what exactly is going on.
If this is a show produced for an audience that wants to be entertained but does not want to think, then it is a job well done. Think too deeply about the show for more than about five minutes and you will regret it.
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