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Goodbye, Kitty
The interwebs are all abuzz today with the news that Hello Kitty is not, in fact, feline. As Alexandra Petri writes,
Sanrio, Kitty’s manufacturer, corrected the curator of an LA exhibit on this ubiquitous icon when she tried to label Hello Kitty a cat, according to the LA Times. Curator and Hello Kitty expert Christine Yano said the company informed her that “Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty.”
Hello Kitty is, in fact, according to Yano, a “perpetual third-grader.” She has a twin. “She lives outside of London. I could go on.”
My first reaction was that this is another example of the war on childhood imagination. Can’t Bert and Ernie just be 10-year-old roommates, fercryinoutloud? Can’t we live with the same inconsistencies that give us a bipedal Porky Pig who wears no pants, a bipedal Mickey Mouse, and whatever species Goofy belongs to? Mollie Hemingway tweets that her children are taking the news particularly hard, and it’s not surprising. I have two girls of my own, who were both Hello Kitty fans back in the day.
But then I noticed the truly bizarre aspect to this story. Hello Kitty lives outside London?! She doesn’t in fact come from the land of anime, samurai, green tea ice cream, and bizarre game shows? She eats fish ‘n’ chips, rather than sushi? Now that’s just wrong.
Published in General
Why was it necessary for the company to put this out there? Have their sales gone down for some reason and they need the publicity?
This changes everything.
I’m taking the poster down from my bedroom wall.
Hello, Kitty has feet of *play*? I’m shocked, shocked!
Any indication what her gender choice is, because as we all know that is what is really important.
How can she eat fish ‘n chips when she has no mouth?
Hello Kitty?
More like……..(wait for it )……..
Goodbye- Kitty!
Maedel says that Ms. Yano is wrong.
See, I was confused by this, too, because I always thought that the founding myth was that there really was a kitten, born without a mouth, who died after just a few days. The guy who owned her and her mom memorialized the kitten as the cartoon.
Also, she has whiskers and cat ears. That’s a kitty.
by way of Pakistan…
This cat probably eats fish-‘n’-chips too.
where does this end? Japan has a bullet train called the Shinkansen. And Sanrio has a character who’s alittle smiling bullet train named Shinkansen. Is that not a bullet train at all but a fifty-year-old claims adjuster from Winnetka who likes to steal peoples’ tuna sandwiches from the fridge at work?
#twilightoftheidols
Perhaps the concept of anthropomorphism is lost on Yano (maybe on the Japanese). It sure would seem this way since she was perfectly content to call Hello Kitty both a cartoon character, and a perpetually stuck 3rd grade girl, but could not make the connection to the character as a cat. Or course she’s a cat, but of course she is also a girl, as Goofy is as much a cartoon dog as an adult man.
I will be interested to see how this revelation impacts the understanding of the darling little girl cat character and the resultant change in sales and marketing. It seems to me that this Sanrio representative may not understand all of the implications of this revelation.
Oh nos! Meh wurld iz endeded!
Oh. She’s not a cat? She’s a little girl with forward facing ears on the top of her head, and whiskers?
That makes a lot of sense.
I’m inconsolable. Where do I turn in my Hello Kitty Visa Rewards Card?
Someone, somewhere, sometime, is going to pay, bigtime, for that photo.
Perhaps to Eva Airlines?
Do they have Hello Kitty barf bags?
You know, that’s a really good question.
How about Hello Kitty Hell?
Two possible responses:
Finally, this is proof that we are living in a simulation.
Or:
Fine, fine. I can let go of Hello Kitty gracefully. But I’m putting my foot down. Keroppi really is a frog.
We never went through the Hello Kitty phase. Although my grandson went a little crazy as a Musketeer on Halloween with a plastic sword. I asked my son, why would you give a sword to a kid who is part Japanese, Scots, and Norwegian? He appears to be the paragon of innocence in this photo, don’t let that mislead you.
I could go on.
Good heavens. What else could be behind the kitty curtain that she “could go on” about?
I don’t know slugger. Looks more than just a poster problem.
I mentioned this story to my daughter, who had an intense HK phase at the apt age for such things, and she regarded the news with incomprehension, as if someone had told me when I was 14 that Tom Swift was a Venusian Llama. Wait, what? No.
It’s a bizarre story. It’s like someone from Disney producing documents that show Walt thought Mickey was a fifth-grader who lived in Toronto – which they would never do, even if it was so, because they understand what it would mean going forward. Everything would be questioned, and nothing would be settled, and the confusion would hang over the entire cosmology.
There was an old goat who drove the bus in some Hello Kitty cartoons. Was he not a goat? Was he a 62-year old man who happened to have prominent horns and cloven hooves?
Sometimes I wish creators of beloved things would just keep quiet and leave their creations to the people who enjoy them. Seems like more than a few creators undermine their creations with post-facto revelations which only make them worse. Perhaps we can call this tendency to undermine your own creations the George Lucas Syndrome.
Strictly speaking, Hello Kitty is a drawing. Or a man sweating under a costume. Or a piece of plastic. So, yeah, not it’s not a cat.
In other news, Santa Clause is not a man, and the tooth fairy is not a fairy.