"The Complainer Is Always Wrong" - Anyone else glad this is mostly gone?

I'm not a fan of "moral of the day" shows at all, but I suppose axing the one person who always disagrees is a step in the right direction. So yes.
 
Same, especially when that moral is "group think." I remember my father once watched an episode of the "Get Along Gang" when I did, I was four or five, I think, and well... he didn't want me watching it anymore because he said he wanted me to learn to think for myself.

Ever the iconoclast. And I don't think that's a bad thing.
 
See, in reality, sometimes dissent is correct and sometimes it's wrong. I'm fine with either being put into a cartoon or anything else. But when you had the stereotypical complainer that was ALWAYS wrong, it's just so pathetically predictable what's going to happen. So yeah, I won't shed tears at the demise.

Getting along with with others is surely important, but that sure doesn't mean conformity. I think the problem was that you had dissenters like Brainy Smurf that were arrogant and above all ANNOYING. Good writing would have honest disagreements and make a story out of the different points of view.

Two examples. In one episode of Gargoyles Goliath absolutely refuses to abandon the castle to Xanatos, and the clan is supposed to follow the wishes of the leader. But Elisa and Hudson eventually make him see reason, which started with Elisa convincing Hudson that the clan couldn't afford to just blindly obey Goliath on this one.

In X Men: TAS, Charles Xavier wanted to try rehabilitating Sabertooth at one point. Wolverine fiercely objected but was just dismissed as letting his grudges and anger get in the way--he does have a temper, after all. Nobody else really agreed with Logan, either. However it is eventually revealed that Sabertooth was never sincere, and Logan ends up getting hurt while putting a stop to his rampage within the X-Men's mansion. The point of the whole thing is that Xavier's intentions were noble but at the same time he was blowing off Logan's concerns as unimportant when they should have been taken seriously.
 
Nowadays they seem to have made the main characters of a lot of shows the complainer aka the jerkass, so I think they may have taken it a tad too far in the other direction as well.
 
I didn't consider Brainy Smurf to fit in that category. I always felt that his being kicked around was due to him flaunting his intelligence and belittling everyone around him, whereas say Eric had a good reason to be disagreeable.
 
And I was agreeing with you.

I still remember when GI Joe made fun of this trope. "Stay tuned for more pro-social programming with The Likeables."
 
Loved that episode. Ironically enough, one of the most popular characters on GI Joe was Shipwreck, who pretty much was the complainer of the Joe team.
 
Something I considered in relation to the group is always right mentality. Did parents or network execs ever consider the possibility that this moral could lead anywhere destructive?

I mean if the group was planning to rip off a liquor store or steal a video game, do you report them to the authorties or join in? Cause after all, the group is "always" right.

Same with smoking. Do you smoke a cigarette or a joint because the group tells you to?


I mean sure the people who enfored/believed in the group is right mentality might see those as exceptions, but did they consider the possibility that kids might not make the distinction?
 
IMO Bleh. Oh that'd be right. Social morals. Yeah those are so worthy. So worthy indeed. Not. I mean good heavens are these savage beasts so primitive that they still rely upon social morals? Bah. And if the 'group' is doing something illegal then the reporter to the authorities is technically the good character, and morals supporting crime are counterworthy. (Duh) Thus i daresay you'd be a unworthy fool to suggest Randall was the unworthy one. It is all peoples duty to report crimes, and if a moral supports a illegality in favor of some social group's survival it only goes to show how barbaric and countercivilized these elements are. I suggest punishment and extermination post haste.
 
Personally, I was more from the 'Don't give into peer pressure' era. Which included warning me that everything else in the world apparently wanted to kill me.
 
If it turned out the entire world wanted me dead, I would use my apparent 'evil powers' to prove to the world that I'm good and make the general public at least not want to kill me anymore... oh, you're talking about the vices of humankind. Whoops. I don't even drink or smoke myself and see no reason to. Of course, my genes aren't exactly slated in a good habitual lifestyle.

My father was so motified by my Gramp's drinking problems, he started looking at it as the ultimate evil (even smoking) and my Mom has the very addictive personality. I generally try not to care, but it hurts me to see my mother lighting a cigarette when she use to be so dead set against it.
:sad:
 
Of course nowadays peer pressure is almost recognized as a bad thing, but when they were preaching the group thinking mentality back in the 80s, did they consider the possibility of the group lighting up?
 
The kids of the 80's were well-indoctrinated to "Just Say No," so this hypothetical situation would have never come up! :p

I think you're looking for consistency and logic in the decisions of TV programming executives, and I don't think you're going to find it. If someone had brought this up at a meeting at the time, I'm sure you would have gotten a blank stare before someone managed to splutter out, "The group is never wrong, and doing drugs is wrong, so a group would never pressure anyone into doing drugs!" And they would have meant every word, too. Supposedly, one of the network execs who was working with Steve Gerber on Dungeons & Dragons asked, in all seriousness, "Does there need to be so much magic in the show?" This was also the era when they decided to cut out all the violent bits of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, which led to a very very short, incoherent version of "Duck! Rabbit! Duck!"

You have correctly identified a big, obvious flaw in a methodology that has big, obvious flaws, but the alternative was to have kids begin to do things like challenge authority figures and think for themselves. Heaven forbid!
 
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