5 Legitimate — or Legitimately Ridiculous — Controversies Around ‘Paw Patrol’
Paw Patrol, a wildly popular and lucrative animated series about dogs who repeatedly save a town with no human emergency services, has one original sin: It’s Canadian. Any issues beyond that can be fixed. And to their credit, the creators have addressed some of the controversies that have sprung up around their cash cow. Let’s see how they did..
A Cascade of Capitalist, Authoritarian Propaganda
This one sounded crazy to me at first, but there are a few uncomfortable realities baked into the show’s premise. First and foremost, the Paw Patrol is a privatized monopoly on just about every single emergency service. If your community had to rely on a Megazord of cops, firefighters, mountain rescue services and a DJ, who don’t answer to the government but are instead doing a series of favors for the mayor, you’d probably feel compelled to get involved in local politics.
Ultimately, the show is constantly reinforcing some authoritarian messages: Elected leaders are inept; only a corporation with unlimited resources and technology can be trusted; crime is committed mainly by interlopers from outside of your community, and those outsiders deserve captivity and hard labor; dogs can talk but cats can’t.
The Show Has a Real Problem With Gender
Of the seven OG dogs, only one is female. Having failed to learn the Power Rangers lesson — don’t color-code your heroes according to their gender and race — Skye is a cockapoo who loves to wear pink and drive pink vehicles. The Vulture article “Paw Patrol Is Contemptible Trash”, while breathlessly irate, makes a good point about Skye: she’s a “tiny, fluffy, self-deprecating, emotionally demonstrative member of a toy breed, who is consistently praised for her graciousness and excellent memorization skills.”
They could have easily solved this issue by leaning into an age-old truth: Dogs are boys, and cats are girls. They introduced a team of occasional sidekicks in Season Eight, the Cat Pack, but only made half of them girls. They have sprinkled in the occasional girl dogs, like Everest and the Mighty Twins, but for the most part, the dogs’ jobs are conspicuously split along classic, arbitrarily gendered lines.
It’s Not a Lot Better With Race
The most common defense against critiquing Paw Patrol the same way we critique every other cop show is: “Only one of the dogs is a cop!”
Yeah man, the main dog. The show’s logo is a cop’s badge!
The show felt compelled to weigh in during the George Floyd protests. Their official Twitter account posted a black card that said “Muted & Listening,” vowing not to tweet for a while in order to “give access for Black voices to be heard so we can continue to listen and further our learning.”
Did it solve racism? No. Was it a pretty novel and nuanced message for kids with a cop infatuation? I think so!
Inevitably, it sparked backlash from all directions. Some of it was very valid and deserved. But also inevitably, the loudest backlash was also the stupidest. White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany used the bully pulpit to decry cancel culture coming for Paw Patrol, one of the most successful and lucrative franchises in human history. Even liberal stalwart The New York Times freaked out, posting an article titled “The Protests Come for ‘Paw Patrol.’”
That crazed Vulture article, surprisingly, has the most measured take on Paw Patrol’s racial discomfort: “Come to think of it, even the adult female mayor relies on a 10-year-old white boy to solve all her problems. This show is utter filth.”
It’s Designed in a Lab to Hack Your Child’s Brain
This Instagram post breaks down the science behind the show’s addictive nature. Every pixel is brightly colored, every moment is an emergency. They studied the timing of the scene changes, and found that a jarring, attention-stealing cut occurs literally every two seconds.
Bright colors grab your kids’ attention and put their brains in a stranglehold, while rapid scene changes chuck their nervous system into something like fight-or-flight. It’s an echo chamber of overstimulation that leads to an inability to concentrate, thrive, learn or just relax.
It might keep their attention while you’re trying to boil up some Easy Mac, but it will also make them never learn math. Okay, it’s probably not that bad. But it’s not exactly a healthy media diet, either.
The Mobile Game Was Hilariously Manipulative
Okay, some of these entries got a little heavy. I want to leave you with something more cartoonishly evil. PAW Patrol: Air and Sea Adventures was a 2016 iOS game that featured flying and sea exploration — all the classic Paw Patrol stuff. But parents got pissed when they found that the characters would deliver a message of disappointment if you declined to make in-app purchases.
Can you imagine if the Power Rangers lived in your mom’s pocket, and they got sad when you didn’t give them enough money? This app is the zenith of capitalism.