My mother loved the Taco Bell Chihuahua, we had like a half dozen talking plushes of him saying different things.
Was it racist? kinda probably yeah a bit, but it wasn’t hateful.
Trafficking in stereotypes at most?
It may not do to assume. I mean, at one point everyone blithely assumed that Mexicans found Speedy Gonzales to be racist and there was a (completely white-led) little backlash against him until someone got around to actually asking some Mexicans about it and discovered that he was actually broadly popular with that demographic.
In general people really like seeing themselves on the TV and understand exaggerated stereotyping for comedic effect. Mama mia boopity bopy, as my ancestors would say.
yells in italian
…silently, by making threatening hand gestures
More examples, don’t get lost in the hole
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MexicansLoveSpeedyGonzales
He messed that cat up. Who’s going to be offended to be represent by speedyg? Nobody that’s who.
Speedy Gonzales is laudable only because he contrasts the other sterotypes such as the drunken mice that occasionally help or Slowpoke Rodriguez, who I always thought of as super chill and awesome. But if I to pick which would stereotype would represent my minority, I’d also choose the model minority stereotype.
I’ld be curious to see them revive Speedy with the less-than-flattering characters.
Every culture has a stereotype of a lazy/drunk/yokel, but there’s a proportion issue. A village of regular workin’ mice, one or two lazy slow or old mice and it’s no problem.
Apu wasn’t a problem at first, outside of him being voiced by a white dude doing Indian face, his orginal character was he was a hard working immigrant who had thinly veiled frustration for the lazy spoiled idiots he has to serve to make ends meet. Only to end it with the expected nice-ities expected of a clerk. As the series went on they leaned more into his Indian heritage, without there being any Indians on staff. They went out of their lane and the character suffered for it.
I’m not Indian though, and it’s been a while since I saw the early seasons. Grain of salt. Cutting him out of the show whole cloth sucked though, not a ton of Indian characters on TV.
Atleast Bob’s Burgers brought back Marshmallow when they decided to retool her a bit.
And to this day, people still won’t shut the fuck up about this fact in every comment section of every Speedy Gonzales video on YouTube.
“My name is Gecko, not to be confused with Geico. SO STOP CALLING ME!”
Although, Doritos has some great ones.
The Etrade baby was great too.
For all the X-ers out there, WAZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP
Im not clicking on any of those.
Because I remeber most of them :/
The Taco Neck Ssyndrome commercials were also great, but then whiny people with “tension neck syndrome” got all cry baby about it.
I still have the plush toy chihuahua in a box somewhere.
and then they beat it into the ground like every other popular commercial.
