BodyImage!Fail in the Busterverse

[omorka]

The "bonus features" disc of the Firehouse Set has the Season 1 and Season 3 Writers' Bibles in PDF form. There's also a more generic writer's guide for the syndicated season (Season 2).

Having now read all three, I see why JMS felt he needed to pack up his stuff and split for a while. The Season 3 one pisses me off, as do the notes on the character redesigns for Janine and Ray. Oh, so a woman who has a bit of sass and brass and likes her earrings dangly and her skirts short can't be a heroine? If a guy's a hero, he can't be plump or soft?

I am reminded of a panel I rather like from the manga-esque TokyoPop comic:

Egon: We are Homo Sapiens!

Ray: We come in many shapes, sizes, and colors.

Winston: And we are all beautiful, no matter what we wear.

Peter: So don't ever drag your patent-leather hide into our city again. Light 'em up, boys!

Yeah, way to be sensitive to body issues there, DIC. I also disagree with part of their description of Peter, and agree with the fanon on the point; Peter does deliberately surround himself with people who are smarter than he is, and it is partly because he's lazy and wants someone else to do the mental heavy lifting, but consisder who they are! If it takes Drs. Spengler and Stantz to beat you to a conclusion and save you the effort, what does that say about Venkman's native abilities? He's not dumb; he's just playing dumb because he thinks it's funny, and because it's easier to get them to explain things to him in small words than it would be for him to translate for Winston and Janine.

Comments

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this issue of body image often came from above on TV shows. The show runner would get huge piles of 'notes' from test groups and producers asking why a hero character was so weak looking, why a woman wasn't hotter, etc. At the end of the day it was easier to win the little battles and let that kind of crap ooze into the final product.

As to Peter, it is so clear that he's the best social engineer ever that one wonders if the rest of the gang could even function as friends and coworkers without him. Not only is he not dumb, but he knows how to confidently play to the motivations of each other member of his staff. What he lacks in 'knowledge' he makes up for in a kind of anti-authoritarian leadership style.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

There's a strong suggestion from JMS in one of the commentary tracks that the "Janine's not pretty enough" idea came from one particular focus group, and probably the same one that made them think giving Slimer his own segments was a good idea. I am of the opinion that focus groups involving children, especially ones young enough to be Slimer fans, tend to give back the opinions of the person running the group more often than not. (By the time we get back to Season 5, where JMS is writing for them again, the characters have almost come full circle - Slimer has lost his tail again, Janine's got shorter hair and a different pair of triangular glasses, and Ray is, while not back to his original plumpness, clearly stouter than the others.)

While I suspect Ray and Egon would still be working together without Peter (assuming that he's not the one who introduced them), they'd be buried at the back of an old annex of the library at some tiny liberal arts college, doing hourly lecturing in engineering and physics and running their paraphysics experiments on the side when no one else needed the lab, if it weren't for him. He is the team leader, no doubt about it; he puts the "I" in "team" where the 'Busters are concerned. And the fact that the Season 3 bible implies that he's not very smart bugs the fool out of me.