This was the show that tripped me up. Well, thanks to some negotiation with one of my advisors, I managed to find a good example for our show. It's time for another time the management stepped in and said "No Girls Allowed!"
I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with it, but if you were a little girl, you might've been raised on "The Paper Bag Princess" once or twice. It's a fun little story about Girl Power, on how a little girl princess with a fancy dress, finds her castle under attack from a fire-breathing dragon. The princess loses everything, including her outfit, so she fashions one out of a paper bag. She then challenges the dragon to a series of tasks that ultimately tire him out, meaning the princess ended up beating the dragon after all! And the prince she used to admire makes a snarky remark over her outfit and how she's "not much of a princess", so she just declares she doesn't need him and rides off into the sunset. Girls Rule!
So what if I told you that the feminism was incomplete? Or at least kinda hypocritical?
Now, the final page was changed multiple times. The first time, the princess socked the prince, which I can understand why it was changed. Funny, but not acceptable to first graders, you know, violence and all that. The second change to the final page was that originally, the princess was gonna show her new freedom by taking off that paper bag, showing off her bare bottom.
There's a few reasons why I think it got changed, or at least any possible rationalization behind it. Don't exactly want little girls stripping in public and they don't have situational awareness to know the full details... but then, there was a page just earlier where she got shown naked, and her (featureless) chest was in view, so there are only two reasons I can think of why that stays and the butt goes. Maybe it's because at the end the girl takes off her clothes, whereas the beginning she simply lost them. And of course, kids books can't portray bad behavior unless it's supposed to be shown to be bad, like how the explorers in that one book can die because they're stupid, or how anatomy books can be made for kids because they don't have much other than just situation-less pictures.
So while it would be natural to assume cowardice was involved, there's a lot of other factors to assume. Unless boys in kids books can strip and not be criticized by the narrative, cowardice wasn't completely involved. The age-range for picture books is lower; older kids tend to go for comics or chapter books instead. While I'm all for raising kids right, I realize there are certain times for funny nudity, and this may not necessarily be one of those times.
Make your own call. I got nothin'.