GIRL SUPERHEROES FIGHT AS MUCH AS BOYS, SAYS TOP PRODUCER
A new wave of girl cartoon superheroes take no nonsense from anyone and revel in a good fight as much as the boys, a top Hollywood producer says.
“Too many shows for girls are less about entertaining them or reflecting them and come across as lectures on how we expect girls to behave,” said Lauren Faust, the executive producer of the new hit series, DC Super Hero Girls.
It is not just boys who want to watch their superheroes level up to each other, she told MIPJunior in Cannes, the world’s biggest gathering of makers of children’s entertainment which ends on Sunday.
Faust admitted that “some of the fights get extreme” in her Cartoon Network show, a rebooted version of a DC superhero series now on Netflix.
“Girls have been short-changed in the cool stakes” for years by traditional television, said Faust, an Emmy winner who previously worked on My Little Pony and Super Best Friends Forever.
“Girls are portrayed as perfect angels all the time,” she said.
“That is why (their shows) end up being very soft and very nice and everyone is very concerned about everybody else’s feelings all the time,” the producer added.
But that is not what young teenage girls want from their superheroes, Faust insisted.
“It is important to a degree but not really exciting to watch, and is that something that is going to follow you growing up in your life?”
Instead Faust said Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl and the vegan environmental superhero Green Lantern have to overcome their own flaws and weaknesses as well as their daily teenage struggles before they take on evil.
“Our superheroes also have teenage supervillains and we do not hold back,” she said. “We have episodes when they (the baddies) are trying to kill people.
“In the pilot when Wonder Woman and Supergirl meet for the first time they get in a fight and Wonder Woman literally pounds Supergirl’s face into the floor.”
In another Supergirl is “knocked across the floor and has a huge shiner for the rest of the episode and she looks very pained. She really got hit”.
Faust said her female-dominated creative team was turning the stereotype of cartoon action on its head to draw in just as many boys as girls.
The female superheroes team up and often tussle over who is boss with a boy group called the “Invinci-Bros”, although Faust is adamant that they will “stay away from romance. I think on girls’ shows this becomes too much of a focus”.
In the past, she said, female cartoon characters tended to be reduced to “liking shopping, make-up and talking a lot on the phone”.
She said that she hoped that DC Super Hero Girls might help rectify the superhero gender imbalance and shed gender stereotypes.
“If I was 16 it would really make me mad” to see Superman being so famous while hardly anybody knows who Supergirl is, she said.