Hey Arnold has always been "Woke"
Hey Football head Fans,
I've been seeing a lot of discussions about people not wanting Hey Arnold to ever be "woke" and since the rumor about a revival came out (which the voice actor of Harold has stated is just a rumor for now) I decided to throw my two cents on the subject.
Not sure if we watched the same show but I will break down some things:
★ Arnold grows up in a multicultural, boarding house, surrounded by immigrants and people from very different backgrounds and yet he treats them as family, not as “outsiders.”
★ Poverty and struggling are normalized in the show than having someone simply being lazy or deserving their situation.
★ Arnold is basically a humanitarian: empathetic, compassionate, and constantly trying to help people even when he gets nothing out of it. (Sure it's due to his abandonment issues and people pleasing tendencies but still it is what Arnold has become especially in the later seasons)
★ The show regularly tackled immigration, homelessness, bullying, LGBQ+, disability, family dysfunction, poverty, addiction without turning every episode into a lecture or shoveling things down your throat.
Examples:
Addiction:
Miriam's Smoothies / Chocolate boy
Disability:
Murray (Hey Arnold the movie)
Poverty:
Arnold lives in a run down boarding house, we constantly see what they eat, the repairs they have to do around the house. We see all the apartments and plumbing issues. In the episode "Rhonda goes broke" you can see the state of the boarding house. It's very run down and there are rats in the house.
I'm not going to list everything here but you get my point.
★ Arnold’s worldview is almost Buddhist in spirit: compassion, patience, forgiveness, nonviolence, and trying to understand why people behave the way they do.
★ Even characters who behave badly are often given context and humanity rather than being reduced to 1 dimensional bullies or villains (a quote from Harold in the jungle movie even proves this. "I use to be a 1 dimensional bully")
★ Hey Arnold has and will always be "woke" and again, maybe we weren't watching the same show. I saw a nine year old who was wise beyond his years do something most adults don't do. Understand people and their struggles despite who they are, where they come from. He helped them, give advice and listened to their problems.
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Rules before you comment: (because last few posts got too heated and we aren't here for drama. We are here because we like love the show and like discussing things)
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