Revisionist HistoryPAW Patrol is in trouble. Like Ryder and the pups, Malcolm comes to the rescue.
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Pushkin. Hello, Hello, everyone, You're in for a treat today. I'm going to do battle on behalf of my three year old against some of the leading intellectuals of our day. My producer says this is her favorite revisionist history episode ever. As they say on the internet, big if true. If you missed it. We opened this many season with two episodes about the death of George Floyd, which I hope you listen to if you haven't already, and coming up soon. My colleague Benda daph Haffrey gives us the real story about well, I'm not going to tell you. All I'll say is when I listen to it, every single fact Ben relates in that episode was something I'd never heard of before. Oh and one last thing. I mentioned it last week. I'm doing my tour with No Small Endeavor and Drew Holcombe April ninth in Louisville, April tenth in Indianapolis, and April eleventh in Grand Rapids. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you live anywhere near those cities, you gotta go check it out at No Small Endeavor dot com. Okay, off we go. Enjoy everyone. Every night, after bath and just before bedtime. My three year old and I settled down in front of the television.
Pomcho.
Pomcho will be there on the double never there's a problem, rounded bench base.
If you're not a parent of a young child, it's entirely possible you have no idea what pap Patrol is. That's fine. Before I had children, I had never heard of it either, So let me explain. It's a multi billion dollar franchise centered around a band of puppies who are called upon in each episode to rescue someone in peril. There's a police dog named Chase, a fire dog named Marshall, a helicopter pilot named Sky, a roadworks puppy named Rubble. They stop when we trains, They fight fires, They repair the damaged flying saucers of adorable stranded aliens with enormous eyes. You get the picture. Among toddlers, pow Patrol is bigger than Elmo. It's bigger than Mickey Mouse. Just ask my daughter Pa Patrol.
We're on the double wherever it is. Alb Don invent today, rather is the female popule Gold and Fee Today. Marshall, Wobble, Jay's Lucky new a guy I like Luck, Foculous.
And yet for some reason, every parent I know, every student of children's television, every adult who has more than a passing interest in the intellectual and moral development of our young hates pop Patrol. Like the Reddit thread, Paw Patrol has ruined by child's brain quote. Everything about Paw Patrol is awful. The yelling and constant panic, the stereotypes, the terrible design, the tropes. I wish it would disappear from the face of the earth and take all of its merch with it. Go to TikTok. They hate the puppies.
There's some things that really piss me off when it comes to Popatrol. It's pretty simple. It sucks. My sun watches Paw Patrol. I hate it.
Everyone hates it except for me. And this episode is my attempt to convince you that I'm right and everyone else is wrong. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast where I like to argue on behalf of things that all common sense suggests are not true. The following defense of Power Patrol is squarely in that tradition. It is a search and rescue mission for a show about search and rescue missions in all my long years of doing revisionist history, I have never tackled a more forbidding task. I started by calling people, anyone who I thought could help, asking the same questions over and over again. First to a parent who had lived through what I'm living through right now, we are here to discuss poor Patrol, which looms large in my life at the moment.
Yeah, I'm sure.
Then again to an intellectual someone I admired. I don't understand that the amount of hatred the show gets. And again, this time to a sociologist, someone who has published in academic journals on the Pow Patrol phenomenon. I am calling you because I spend every night watching Paw Patrol.
And I'm sorry, sorry to hear that.
I spent so much time googling Pow Patrol. Google started feeding me Paw Patrol content, like the actress Kia Knightley on The Tonight Show explaining what it's like to be the mother of a three year old. Wait for it, baby's a toddler. Baby's not a baby.
It's not anymore.
Yeah, she's huge, three and a half, three and a half.
Are you into uh? Are you into Paw Patrol?
Oh?
I'm sorry, Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry. Everyone is sorry. Well, I'm into Paw Patrol and I'm not sorry. Paw Patrol takes place in two imaginary towns, Adventure Bay and Foggy Bottom. The group has as its headquarters what looks like a giant postmodern air traffic control center, complete with a really cool fire station poll that moves the members of the Paw Patrol from the briefing room to their waiting vehicles, vehicles which are all, by the way, available separately for purchase. In a typical Paw Patrol episode, and I say typical when I really mean every single Paw Patrol episode ever, someone in the greater Adventure Bay Foggy Bottom metropolitan area has a problem. They call Rider, who is a little boy in charge of the Paw Patrol operation. He summons the pups from whatever adorably cute leisure activity they are engaged in.
They come running, mighty pups too long, lookout, Rider needs us.
And without fail, the problem is solved.
No job is too big, no pump is too small.
For example, in season seven, episode thirteen, Pop Patrol pops save Election Day, a particular favorite in the Glabal household, Mayor Humdinger of Foggy Bottom has decided unexpectedly to run for are of Adventure City, precipitating a crisis. Humdinger is wreaking havoc on the campaign trail, causing all kinds of chaos downtown. This leads Alex, an adorable little boy who happens to find himself in the midst of the mayhem, to call for help.
It all happened because Mayor Hundinger's kidneys are launching the election stuff everywhere.
We'll be right there, Alex. There's a short briefing in the situation room. Writer gives that instructions.
So for this mission, I'll need Chase.
I need you to use your net to.
Stop mister porters out of control skateboard ride. Chase is on the case, and Marsha, I'll need you to use your lender to help get Danny Dun from that big billboard.
I'm ready for a rough, rough rescue.
And off the pops go. Hey guys, Hey, malcolme, how you doing.
How's it go ahead?
I called up Cal Brunker and Bob Barlin, the writers behind the Paw Patrol movies. I asked them why they thought kids loved the show so much.
The structures are so clear and consistent from episode to episode that it really it pulls them in and they're able to feel comfortable and confident in that world of storytelling.
Oh I forgot to mention that in addition to eleven seasons of Paw Patrol television shows, there have been two Paw Patrol movies, which to get a grossed three hundred and fifty million dollars.
The structure of the show is really quite smart in how they go about every every rescue that takes place. Writer tells the pops what they're gonna do, and then they show up and they do the same thing that.
He's just told the audience.
So I think the participation level from a child is able to be so much more because it's less surprising.
I did not grow up with the television, so this experience is all new to me. Maybe that's why I like Pop Patrol so much. Everyone else groans in silent agony over the thought of watching, say, Pop Patrol the movie for the fourth time. Me I'm like, what new fresh insights can I glean this time around about Chase the police dog, a German shepherd who struggles with feelings of inadequacy.
Chase has got a backstory, and I mean that at its highest level. Chase believes that being scared means he's not a hero, and so he should be part of it. And he learns that heroes get scared too, but keep going. That's what makes them hero.
Writer has that scene with him where they relive when he found Chase for the first time. Yes, I love I love to hear you saying that brings y on what is clearly University avenue. That's, by the way, remember that reference University avenue. What am I referring to? A small clue to my grand unified theory of power patrol, A clue which I'm guessing all the other parents missed because they run their phones checking Instagram. Now that so, because there is what's really interesting is it there? When my daughter was watching that, she the first we've seen it more than once, that movie, and the first time she saw it, I think she was genuinely affected by it. I mean it was clear it was a different kind of emotional experience and she'd been getting from the TV shows. In the second and third time. Gripping my hand tightly, this is exactly what the corporate benefactors of the Paw Patrol franchise desire a bonding moment between a dad and his daughter over a disconsolate puppy. Was my daughter wearing Paw Patrol pajamas as this was happening, Yes she was. And yet there are people, lots of people who look on that picture of family togetherness and cry foul? Can you explain this? On several occasions, in the course of almost a decade now of revisionist history, I have called on Angus Fletcher, neuroscientist turned narrative theorist genius in residence at Ohio State University. Remember, for example, back to our three part revision of the ending of Disney's The Little Mermaid, arguably the intellectual high watermark of the entire revision's history. Corpus Angus provided the intellectual firepower. And remember when we did a whole series on the greatest movie scripts that never got made? Angus had one, of course he did. Angus is much much smarter than I am. More important, Angus is not hopelessly sentimental like I am. He would not be derailed by the gentle pressure of a three year old stubby fingers. And when I remember that Angus also has kids. I called him up now a small thing before we go on. Normally, when we interview people, we edit the tape. I interject with commentary. The whole thing is compressed and annotated. We give you snippets, but snippets do not do justice to Professor Angus Fletcher. So you're going to get Angus unbound. I want to start you. You too went to a Paw Patrol period with your children? Is this correct?
I did?
Yeah, so my son likes Paw Patrol and I had an immediate horrifying flashback when you brought the subject up, because I went back and tried to watch a couple episodes just to remind myself and immediately had to shut them off, actually for for self preservation.
But there are many things to unpack here. First of all, how long did your son still actively watch Pow Patrol?
No? No, absolutely still alive.
So so we managed to we managed to save him in time.
You're so, you're and why you were watching it with your son? Why?
Why?
Why did this show not appeal to you? What is it about it that's like hitting you the wrong way?
It's designed to anesthetize your brain. I mean, I feel like I am mainlining Horse trenqu Wiser. It's a show that is studiously designed to interrupt active thought. I mean, that's like the purpose of the show, and it's it's engineered.
Brilliantly to do that.
It's like it's like the kind of like diabolical apotheosis of hundreds of years of figuring out how to how to make audiences more and more.
Pass What do you what do you mean? Okay, break that down, tell me exactly what you mean by that.
So it's the quintessence of this thing that we call narrative. We have a term for this in narrative theory.
It's called vacuous agon.
Vacuous agon, and basically what that needs is like when there's a conflict, but there's no stress, there's no anxiety in the viewer because you know that it's going to work out. And this is a I have to give credit to who coined this term. It's it's a brilliant member of my lab. His name is Mike Bevinissi. He coined the term after watching Phoeneas and Ferr, which is a Disney show, with his three children. And the point of vacuous agon is that you're constantly being presented with problems that are solved immediately.
At the moment that you are presented with the problem.
And I think it's probably obviously few having I'm sure watched several episodes of the show. How mechanically what the show does is it gives you a problem, and then immediately Rider shows up like a helicopter parent, like the ultimate helicopter parent, and tells everybody exactly what to do so the problem will go away, and then we just kind of watch as a problem goes away.
Yeah, that's exactly right. So and you think that's problematic, because.
It's not that I think it's problematic now, and it's that I know it's problematic.
So I don't know if you're aware of this, but there for the last thirty years, it's been.
This crisis in American schools.
American kids have been getting less creative, and because they've been getting less creative, they've been less able to solve their own problems. And because theyre less able to solve their own problems, they have these rises and anxiety and anger, you know, losses of stuff, and I'm gonna see resilience all these kinds of things and you know the major reason for this is that we are either.
Solving their problems for them.
Yeah, that we're coming in and solving their problems for them, or we're essentially suspending them in this state of giving them artificial problems. So an artificial problem is like a math problem or standardized test or something that doesn't exist in the real world, and you know, and you learn the formula, and which you learn the formula, you know how to solve it. And so kids are developing this ability to get better and better and better and better at.
School, and then they just keep failing at life.
And this TV show is a paradigmatic example of that entire process.
I mean, I mean it solves all the problems before you.
There's no ability you have to exercise any curiosity because the moment a problem happens, like literally, you're told these two dogs are going to go solve it in exactly this way, there's no opportunity for the brain to engage what we.
Call on counterfactual cause while thinking these processes that are currently encounter a problem. The whole reason for imaginative literature, the reason that things like Curious George and Winnie the Pooh were created or to stimulate these processes in young shoulder, because at the age of four is actually when they develop the capacity for irony, for.
Narrative irony, and all those.
Books and reading with your children for reasons we can discuss if you're interested, stimulates all those processes.
And when you watch this show, it nukes them.
So it's not bad in the sense that like giving your children ice cream isn't bad.
Right, they can have ice cream. But if all you give them is ice cream, what happens to them? Right? They become diabetic. And it's the same thing with this show.
And yeah, God, I feel bad now. You filled me with a kind of degree of self loathing and guilt over the damage I'm doing to my daughter's imagination, her ability to problem solve. This is what you do. I should point out how strange this is. A generation ago people love children's television. The invention of children's television was one of America's signature cultural Triumphs. Intellectuals wrote love songs to children's television. I remember once in the late nineteen nineties when I discovered Sesame Street for the first time. I was so entranced that I went to the Sesame Street studios and just hung out there for what seemed like days. I was there during the great Slimy episode. Maybe you remember this Slimy, the adorable Sesame Street worm becomes an astronaut, and so the Sesame Street staff brought in Tony Bennett, whose signature, son of course, was fly me to the Moon to sing.
Slimy to the moon.
And when this worm arrives, you'll find.
He'll take a leap that small for him but huge for all worm God.
I was there for that, standing this close to the legend himself, who acted like this was the greatest moment of his entire career. My point is, back in the day, the leading cultural figures of our time would happily make the pilgrimage to a random TV studio in Queen's to make light of their own work on behalf of Toddler's Everywhere. But now the cultural luminaries and the intellectuals have abandoned ship. By eleven minutes into his denunciation of Bob Patrol, Angus had mentioned Dickens, the A team, Plautus and Aristophanes. Now he'd moved on to explaining the phenomenon of new comedy and contrasting it with something he called old comedy.
And what happens in old comedy is you're presented with real problems. So an example of a real problem would be war or the breakdown of democracy. And then the comedy goes on and the problem gets worse, and it gets worse, and it gets worse and it gets worse.
And then eventually the comedy falls apart. It just ends. And basically the comedy is saying, that's a big problem. You guys in the audience, better figure out how to solve that.
So it forced people to think about hard things in a public place where they get kind of oppress, up with it and solve their own problems. Then what happened was the emergence of new comedy, which is essentially light entertainment. And what happens in light entertainment is a fake problem is posed, a fake problem is posed, and then just if you might be getting stressed about this fake problem, the comedy answers it for you by the end, so you can relax. So what's diabolical about paw Patrol is it takes real problems in terms something to imaginary problems. It's like it's like the end it's like the year of comedy, because I mean, there are real problems that it seems to embrace, you know, it don't seem to get in trouble and stuff like that, you know, but then it just reveals that they're all, you know, not a problem and you don't have to worry about them because you know, writer will just show up or there'll be some like weird gizmo gadget thing that will solve the problem for you. So, you know, just relaxed, preschooler, don't worry about this big bag world you're entering in because it's just fine.
Don't even use your brain. Why why were you even giving a brain? What's the point of a brain?
Right?
You need to solve problems. Everything's already solved like a perfect I.
Know, I promised you that I was going to play Angus at full length, Angus unbound. And if this was a Joe Rogan experience, and I bring up Joe Rogan for a reason, by the way, because revisionist history is coming back to Joe Rogan big time in the coming weeks. If this was a Joe Rogan experience, I'd have just run it all efit. Who among us does not have a spare three and a half hours to listen to a perfect stranger speak about the weightlifting routines. My assumption is that you, unlike the many millions of Roganites, have jobs. So from here on out, I'm just giving you the good parts. So what would happen if you showed an old comedy show to a child? What happens if in paw patrol they don't solve the problem? What does my daughter do?
Yeah? So this is great, So your child will become concerned.
Your child will become concerned, and then your child will probably turn to you as the authority figure in her life and be like, I'm kind of concerned. What's going to happen to that truck that's suspended over that cast and or whatever other paw patrol the problem there is, right? Yeah, And then you're gonna look very seriously at them and say, I don't know, what do you think is going to happen? And then they would have to pause, and then they would think, and then they would have to imagine themselves solving the problem.
And that's the value.
I'm a new parent, just over three years into the experience, and I have all the insecurities that come with being a rookie. I don't know what I'm doing. I put my daughters in bed at night and pray they fall asleep. I make them oatmeal in the morning and pray they eat it. I help build castles made of magnetiles and pray they don't destroy them. And all the while I ask myself, who are these mysterious creatures over whom I have recklessly been given dominion? And now Angus, who I admire like few others, was telling me I was doing it all wrong.
You're deleting their capacity to develop an awareness of other answers to problems. You're removing that source of natural creativity. You're also removing the pressure on them to try and find that perspective to solve those other problems. And so this entire part of their brain is just atrophying at the exact critical moment when as human beings were supposed to have it and it's supposed to come online.
This is devastated. This has been a devastating conversation.
Yeah, I'm sure.
When we come back my grand unified theory of pow patrol I said way back in the beginning that there was an important clue in my conversation with the creators of the Paw Patrol movies, something crucial to understanding my stubborn affection for the Paw Patrol franchise. Something about University Avenue. I remember that you might have wondered what University Avenue I was referring to. Well, it's the one in Toronto. University Avenue is one of the central boulevards that runs through downtown Toronto. It is the Broadway of Toronto. In the Pow Patrol movie, it appears as a little visual clue that tells you something crucially important about writer and his band of Mary Pops. Something I realized, as I prepared to rect bond to Angus's attacks, that even the mighty Angus had missed. Now but wait, now, I feel Angus, your arguments are so compelling and overwhelming.
I feel foolish.
In offering my defense of poor Patrol. But I should, I think, I feel I should do it anyway. The key to understanding Pow Patrol, so this is This is the alternate Po Patrol theory. And the key to the alternate Po Patrol theory is understanding that it is a Canadian show. Pow Patrol is conceived, made and distributed from my home country of Canada. It is as Canadian as maple syrup, as Canadian as a flock of geese streaking across the sky. And what pow Patrol is doing is enacting a fantasy of municipal competence, which is absolutely essential to understanding what understanding Canada. That's what Canada is, right, is a country which has which is formed. What is the you know, the essential credo of the United States is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, an individualist credo. What is the parallel credo of Canada that was embedded in the Canadian Articles of Confederation? It is peace, order and good government?
Right.
What is popetrol? Pow Patrol is an homage and it is it is the elaboration of the notion of peace, order and good government. And the key thing in the po Patrol song at the very beginning they go pop Patrol, Pa Patrol. Whenever you're in trouble, pot Patrol, Pop Patrol will be there on the double.
That's crucial.
It is that not only is every problem assessed, but every problem is is addressed in a timely manner, in an efficient, competent manner. So that what Papacho is all about is that this is, in Canadian terms, is what we want our state to do. Right, it is too and what is what is pap patrol itself? It is it's a It's an example of interagency cooperation, right, Chase the police dog, Marshall the firefighter, Sky the pilot, Rubble the contractor, all working together. Very Canadian notion that if only, if only we join hands and and cooperat across disciplines, we can more effectively address the social ills of plague us. Right, it's just Canada at all. So what my daughter is getting is essentially Canada.
Yeah, well, I mean I I've seen on the news how perfect things are in Canada.
Malcolm Sino has convinced me it's a. It's a it's a utopian land where everything works out, there's there's no there's no problems.
Better it's a comparative judgment. H this point about the central of public sector competence to the Canadian identity, it's worth a bit of a digression. It concerns the nineteen ninety one hit single from the band Crash Test Dummies. Perhaps you remember it. It was called Superman's Song, and it turns on a sociological comparison of Tarzan and Superman.
Tarzaan wasn't the leadies Man.
He just come along and scoop my bonder is arm like that, quick as a kid him the junngle.
Superman, the song argues, is Tarzan's antithesis. He's not some rapacious propheteer.
Superman of made anybody receiving the world from silom and grundy. And sometimes I've dispilled the global elbows.
You love the man.
This is how the lead singer for the Crash Test Dummies, Brad Roberts, explained his thinking to a college newspaper.
Quote.
Superman, as cast in Superman's Song is obviously a left wing political figure. His activity in the community is intrinsic to his being. Superman is being juxtaposed against Tarzan, who is kind of a lazy faire capitalist type who retreats to the forest and rejects the idea of the community. He wants to live in a so called animal state, and he doesn't want to be bothered with any kind of political realities. Unquote. First of all, how great is it that rock stars once talked like this second. On the basis of this argument, where do you think the crash test dummies are from? It's obvious Canada. Of course, this is a song that could only have been written by a Canadian. Only a Canadian would find something utterly reprehensible in Tarzan's naked displays of strength and brute force, and only a Canadian would look long and hard at Superman and conclude he's one of us.
Listen, Hey, Bob, Soup had a strange job. Even though he could of smashing any banking in the United States, he hadn't strength, but he would.
Not any bank in the United States. Meaning Superman is at a place below the border, where the expectation is he will use his gifts for his own selfish ends. The superhero who puts his community first stands for peace, order and good government.
Sometimes Soup was stopping crimes how bad he was tempted to just quit an time bad long Man joint Tarzi Forest.
The forest clearly referring to anything below the forty ninth parallel, but.
Stayed in the sanity.
Cap down, change.
In clothes in dirty old Fall. Boostelia's work was through the in earth and to dom.
But go home.
He stayed in the city working out of decrepit foam booths because he believed super strength and superpowers ought to be deployed on behalf of the public good. When I see Superman, I think he's a Paw Patrol character. Before we got hooked on Paw Patrol, my daughter and I watched Minie's Bowtoons, equally absurdly popular short cartoons about a small business run by a Mini Mouse and her best friend and maybe lover I'm unclear on that. Daisy Duck devoted to selling bows a boutique. And yes, the theme song is as good as you might imagine.
Coming time.
You always well.
Every episode of Bowtoons also begins with a problem, which the episode resolves through Minie's ingenuity and persistence that.
Gives me an idea.
But who is the beneficiary of Minnie's ingenuity. Minis Mini and her considerable business interests. There is no community in Minnie Mouse's Bowtoons, no civic obligations. There is only the profit that ensues to Mini and her shareholders.
There's no business, let business.
All of this made me think of the first lines of sol Bello's novel The Adventures of Augie March may be the most famous opening sentence in all of American literature. Quote, I am an American Chicago born Chicago, that somber city, and go at things as I have taught myself freestyle and will make the record in my own way. First to knock first admitted, sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent unquote. That's Minnie Mouse in a nutshell. Many is American Disney born Many is for many. Many is about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But do you know the dirty little secret about sal Bello? He was a Canadian, and I wouldn't be surprised if in an earlier version of Augie March, sal Bello admitted to the truth of his birthright. I am a Canadian Toronto born Toronto, that clean and tidy city, and we go at things as I have been taught by the civic institutions of my municipality, through cooperation and interagency task forces. First to respond, first to apologize, always an innocent knock. Angus Fletcher, genius in residence, made lots of very good points, but did he deal with the elephants in the room? Tarzan Minnie Mouse, Saal Bella. He did not. I'm simply saying that I'm understanding where this notion, the notion of the new comedy is so implicit in the Canadian national narrative. That's what it is. There are no real problems in Canada. Canada is this oasis. We're surrounded by countries with will problems, not Canada. We don't pick fights with people, we don't have racism, we welcome immigrants, we have national health care. It is the Kennedy is the embodiment of the of the promise of the new comedy. Every problem can be simply addressed through some interagency task force. Right, so my daughter is just getting a She's just getting a little bit of Canadian propaganda. That's how I would read it, Angus said. The Paw Patrol's problem was that it was vacuous agon. Paw Patrol's weakness was that it constantly presented its little viewers with a problem solved at the moment of its presentation. But when I look around me at the world, all I can say is, I don't know. I could use a little more vacuous agon in my life right now. A world where there is a puppy optimized for every kind of peril, where help arrives at the very moment it is summoned, where the hero's work not to benefit themselves but the community in which they live. Where the definition of a superman is someone who turns down the opportunity to rob every bank and instead toils on behalf of his countrymen as a fantasy, an aspiration to plant in my daughter's head here and now that doesn't sound too bad, sapajo, We are on the double.
Wherever this is album Joan and Venturday rather is the female possible Go and see today Marshall Wobble, James Lucky, do It Guy on the Way Love, A popular.
Provision's history is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan and Ben Addaph Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Fact checking by Sam Russick, Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, Mixing and mastering by Echo Mountain. Production support from Lupleman. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Special thanks Sarah Nix and l Hefe Greta Coom. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. My daughter made this whole episode possible
