This week, we offer an episode which starts with The Baby-Sitters Club, ends with The Fast and the Furious, and in between, explores issues of documentary filmmaking, emerging media, and Asian-American identity. The episode features Sue Ding…
We begin our discussion of Ding’s recent film, The Claudia Kishi Club, by exploring how and why the character of Claudia from The Babysitters Club franchise spoke to a generation of Asian-American youth and inspired many to enter the arts, helping to pave the way for more recent representations of Asian-American characters in YA media and beyond. We consider what it means that a new generation of youth are coming of age in a world of more diverse and inclusive representations. Ding tells us about efforts by BIPOC documentary artists to form networks for mutual support and collaboration that are responding to their historic exclusion. Discussing her role programming emerging media for the Los Angeles Asian-Pacific Film Festival, Ding describes how Covid-19 and Zoom are changing what we mean by emerging media as well as why augmented reality, mixed reality, and other emerging forms offer potential to tell new kinds of stories. We close with some of her reflections on the importance of The Fast and the Furious franchise and its evolving representations of race and gender.
Baby Sitter’s Club phenomenon
Claudia Kishi
Claudia and Asian American women
Which Baby-Sitters Club character are you?
Velvet Underground
The Claudia Kishi Club includes interviews with:
- Naia Cucukov
- Gale Galligan
- Sarah Kuhn
- CB Lee
- Yumi Sakugawa
- Phil Yu
They Call Us Bruce episode on Claudia Kishi
Baby-Sitters Club author Ann Martin
The Baby-Sitters Club on Netflix
Some other current YA TV we mentioned:
Pen15
Sex Education
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Never Have I Ever
Asian characters in YA fiction
Bechdel Test
Manzanar National Historic Site
Sue’s sound installation for Manzanar
Grandmother Mimi
Mulan controversy
IndieWire – Documentary films have a race problem
Brown Girls Doc Mafia
Asian American Documentary Network
Emerging Media Program – Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival
Film festivals go virtual
VR for a mass audience:
The Void
Star Wars VR
VR porn
For more discussion on VR, check out Episode 10: Nonny De La Peña on Ready Player One and the ethics and aesthetics of virtual reality
The Fast and the Furious:
Box office success
Global fan base
Wesley Morris on Race in The Fast and the Furious franchise
The Rock – Samoan background in Hobbes and Shaw
Vin Diesel as racially ambiguous
Sue’s episode of KCET’s Artbound: Light & Space
George Takei:
The Terror
They Called Us Enemy
Stacy Smith Annenberg Inclusion Initiative research
Share your thoughts via Twitter with Henry, Colin and the How Do You Like It So Far? account! You can also email us at howdoyoulikeitsofarpodcast@gmail.com!
Music:
“In Time” by Dylan Emmett and “Spaceship” by Lesion X.
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In Time (Instrumental) by Dylan Emmet https://soundcloud.com/dylanemmet
Spaceship by Lesion X https://soundcloud.com/lesionxbeats
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/in-time-instrumental
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/lesion-x-spaceship
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/AzYoVrMLa1Q
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