10 Creepy Theories That Ruin Your Favourite Kids TV Shows
7. Peppa Pig Is An Orwellian Nightmare
Like many kids cartoons involving anthropomorphic animals, Peppa Pig has been subject to the second most prevalent Lazy Pub Bullsh*t Theory. You know the one - where it’s all really based in a post-apocalyptic world where the animals have mutated and taken over, aka I Saw Planet Of The Apes Once And Didn’t Really Understand It.
Out of all of them, Peppa Pig most fits that one-size-fits-all profile, because it actually seems to represent an entire society. Jef Rouner of the Houston Press has a theory about it - he’s noticed, like many of us, that all the anthropomorphic animals in the show are mammals… mammals who wear clothes, live in houses, drive cars and have normal birds, fish, insects and reptiles as pets.
From that, Rouner has extrapolated that Peppa Pig showcases a society in which all mammals have evolved (or mutated - whatever dude, I’m not a scientist) into a homogenous bipedal form able to utilise a common language base, and who subjugate other forms of animal life as livestock or pets.
Sure, this society seems to be an agrarian egalitarian oligarchy… but the only form of government appears to be the Queen: a real human being, not an upjumped mammal oppressor. The whole idyllic society seems to be built upon the slavery of other animal life to prevent them from reaching the mammals’ rarefied position, presided over by the last remnants of humanity - recast as the new royalty.
Most of the animals featured are herbivorous, so the majority of the characters are vegetarians (their picnics attended by bog standard ordinary ducks). Their favourite TV characters are Mr. Potato and his family: walking, talking fruit and vegetables, bland puppets of the state who reinforce the status quo.
Uneasy running gags are made about the few unrepentant carnivores in the show - as if the Wolf, Cat and Fox families are recidivist political throwbacks determined to spoil the illusion of harmony, the Peppaverse equivalent of communist hardliners after perestroika.
All of which is terribly upsetting, but somehow not nearly as much as the realisation that Peppa and her family resemble nothing so much as pink hairdryers on legs… or sets of large, amiable male genitalia. You will never, ever be able to unsee that now. You’re welcome.