Cultivation Theory

No Cultivation Theory in Degrassi





             I watched an episode of Degrassi season 8. There are a lot of characters in it, but this episode was mainly about Mia. She's a junior in high school. In this episode she is offered a chance to model. This brings her new friends and boys that she didn't have before. Mia thinks the only way to get to the top is to sleep with one of the guys who is having tryouts for his product campaigns. She thought her new friends would go away if she didn't land a modeling job soon so, she goes through with it. Some of them lose respect for her once they find out how she got the job.

Mia wasn't really in power here, she wanted it but not in the right way. She's about 17; I'm guessing she's suppossed to be Italian. This episode doesn’t really support Gerbner’s theory. Gerbner stated “men outnumber women in prime time television two to one, young people are underrepresented, older people are one-fifth of their actual proportion of the population, and poor people are virtually absent.” Degrassi is all about young people from high school to college. Mia could be considered somewhat poor because she needs the modeling job to help support her mother and her daughter (she is a teen mom).

Mia

This show sort of proved the Cultivation Theory wrong. Although, Mia wasn't a strong role here, she is getting a strong career as a model. In other episodes she is a very strong female role and so are others, just not in this particular episode. There was a male black boy in it. He played Mia's love interest until he found out what she did. There was an Asian girl that was Mia's friend too until she found out. The rest were basically white. There aren't really any signs of the Cultivation Theory in this episode of Degrassi.

What Makes A Movie Franchise Successful

Although, Red Tails was not a successful franchise, it had the potential to be. The only reason it wasn't is because they had basically no marketing; nobody had heard of the movie when it came out to theaters. That was their only downfall.

The plot of the movie was good because it was all based on a true event. There was plenty of star power from Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard to Method Man and Ne-Yo. Red Tails should have had a lot of fans of these men coming to see the film but that's not what happened. George Lucas, the man who is responsible for creating Star Wars, is the executive producer of Red Tails; the movie should have been a big hit like the Star Wars series. Lucas said in an interview on the Daily Show with host Jon Stewart that it was so hard to get the movie green lit was because the movie is an all-black cast. Just because he didn't stick to a safe plot the film was not a successful franchise. According to the documentary The Monster That Ate Hollywood, you need to spend a lot on marketing. That was not the case here. I don't know anybody who heard of the movie from a marketing campaign. They had used a budget of $58 million. The movie still has not even broke even with a total of $49,643,578 and it came out monthes ago on January 20th. Jon Ogg from 24/7 Wall St. says in his article "the current threshold to be a top-ten movie franchise is effectively about $2.5 billion in global box office ticket sales". Red Tails is not even close to that! As a franchise this movie failed terribly, which is sad because it's about true war heroes, the Tuskegee Airmen.

This movie should have been a big success with sequels to follow, unfortunately, that's not how it turned out.