Like Captain Planet, but instead of saving the Earth they encourage children to eat fast food
Oh my god kid vid was edge man
What’s the problem with “Wheels” exactly? At the time that was also a hip way to refer to a vehicle. It was probably the coolest name they could have given him in that cultural context. Should we have tip toed around the topic and never acknowledged his condition or what? People are so fucking strange and self righteous sometimes
I think it’s the fact that it’s making his whole identity about having a disability. But it’s an ad aimed at selling children fast food so I don’t know what people expect.
Or, it’s selling his “weakness” instead as “coolness”. I don’t think it’s disrespectful at all, especially when you consider that ad was made probably around 1989.
I can’t speak for people with disabilities as I don’t have that experience myself. I just know that when we had to take sensitivity training at work there was a big part about being careful with your language when you refer to people disabilities so that you aren’t identifying them solely as that. Like saying a person with a handicap vs. handicapped. This would be kind of the same thing. I don’t have an opinion on it personally and like you said it was the 90s, but I think that’s why the person in the Twitter was complaining about it.
Disclaimer: In no way do I endorse walking up to people and calling them things. ASK how they want to be addressed first, FFS.
I’ve had friends with ironic nicknames, including disabled folks. Sometimes, the situation just sucks and they seek dark humor in many things, including watching people squirm with a cringe inducing nickname.
I certainly don’t. Honestly, it’s so deliciously underhanded and creative. It’s rare to witness and I love it.
To avoid doxing myself, let me concoct an example. Imagine meeting a blind person who introduces themselves as X-ray (or Cyclops, or Odin). Yikes. You dance around it at first, but they just smell blood in the water: “why are you avoiding my name?” I mean, you have to laugh, but that just gets you in more “trouble.”
they look like a weird cross between magic school bus, recess, and archie
i loved recess in middle school. it felt smart at the time. i wonder if it holds up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UtUuT8AJjQ
Censorship warning: they redacted the word midget for some reason
Do people have a problem with that now? That’s the coolest name he could have gotten
Why not complain about the nerd?
That’s the coolest name he could have gotten
Excuse me, there are many far cooler names:
- Mephistopheles
- Merlin
- Megatron
- Michael
They call him wheels because of all the bitches
No one named Merlin is getting bitches
Everyone is upset about using a name to highlight an attempt to be inclusive of a person with different abilities.
No one is calling out the kid literally named after the concept developed by a racist eugenicist to demonstrate that blacks and indigenous peoples were mentally inferior to the English.
Yep, checks out.
Well the IQ test concept was invented by the French to test whether children with learning disabilities needed to be separated from the general class population
My comrade in crisis, you are either misinformed or intentionally misinforming others.
Setting aside the fact the character is called “I.Q.” and not “I.Q. Test,” the concept of IQ, and the first test, was invented by the English statistician Francis Galton. Galton believed in eugenics and was a racist, and his research was in the pursuit of proving his racist beliefs.
Alfred Binet and two other french colleagues made their own IQ test almost 50 years later, and they eventually abandoned it because they felt IQ was better studied qualitatively.
You didn’t mention it, but for the sake of dispelling another common piece of misinformation you might have, Lewis Terman brought the abandoned Binet test to the US and popularised what we now typically refer to as “I.Q. Test.” Why did he do it? Eugenics!
TL;DR: IQ as a concept and IQ testing was born from eugenics, and the popularised concept in the west today was based on a later test developed by the French and adapted to suit American eugenics by a racist. To their credit, the French abandoned standardized testing because it was a bad way to look at intelligence.
