Nicely said, Mr. Marshmallow! With your point about characters "suffering for their art", you've really put your finger on something that I've thought about for a long time.
When I was a kid, I was a proper little misogynist when it came to watching cartoons; that is to say, I used to really dislike female characters, and find them really boring in comparison to their male counterparts. Looking back, part of that could be attributed to a good, healthy juvenile phobia of the opposite sex (girls?? Ewww, GROSS!!!
), but in other ways, I actually still stand by what I thought then, because female characters, particularly in older cartoons, are frequently one-dimensional, tokenistic and utterly bland Little Miss Perfects, included solely to add a bit of glamour and girl appeal and usually completely unwilling to get their hands dirty for the sake of humour. Penelope Pitstop, Daphne from Scooby-Doo, most Disney heroines...their role is never to be the one doing the pratfall, taking the anvil on the head, heck, even cracking a
joke; they're always just
there, being oh-so-pretty and oh-so-dignified, always coming out on top, whilst the less "delicate" male characters are the ones off carrying 100% of the comedy burden.
The most pronounced example of this that springs to mind is Lola Bunny from Space Jam. Surrounded by the crazy, idiosyncratic Looney Tunes gang , each of whom is a flawed, lovable loser in their own way, she swans through the film being smugly perfect and untouchable, with a teaspoon of "sass" and "sex appeal" (both of which are totally wasted on a young audience) apparently supposed to compensate for the fact that, in a cartoon comedy film, she does nothing funny at any point. Look at the basketball game; the rest of her Looney Tunes teammates get smashed about six ways from Sunday, often in very funny slapstick ways. Does Lola "take one for the team", even once? No - the one time she's in any danger, Bugs pushes her out of the way and takes the hit himself, completely cementing her role in the film, like so many toon gals, as comedic deadweight.
I've often praised Frankie for her "flexibilty"; when I say that, I primarily mean her ability to muck in and get down to the dirty business of making us laugh. Sure, she can do the glam thing, the sassy self-assured bit - but she can also be a hysterical fall guy, come out with some ridiculous gag, do something totally crazy and even engage in some good old-fashioned comedy violence. One of the things I respect most about Craig McCracken is that he's both willing and able to create universal comedy with girls at the centre, so even though it can go wrong (horribly, horribly wrong), I am willing to let rare botches like "Imposter's Home..." slide, because without episodes like "Bloooo", "Store Wars", "Cookie Dough" and "World Wide Wabbit" that allow Frankie to partcipate in the comedy just as much as her more extrovert male counterparts, she would be a much poorer character whom I doubt we would love half as much.
(Oh, man, this is
so off-topic it's untrue...I'm sorry! Is that OK?
)