Pepper Ann: Today's Cartoon

By Allison Kaplan

Television producer Sue Rose asked a group of little girls, ages 9 to 11, to create their own TV shows. Set in outer space or on a school playground, the made-up programs had one common theme: strong female characters.

"Some of them didn't even have boys in the cast," Rose recalled. "When I pointed it out, they were like, yeah, so?"

Right on, says Rose, creator and executive producer of Walt Disney's Saturday morning cartoon "Pepper Ann," which centers on a gawky, 12-year-old red head caught between climbing trees and wearing a training bra.

The goal, Rose said, is to provide a role model for girls on the emotional roller-coaster ride between adolescence and teens. A realistic one, at that. "She's very enthusiastic. She wants to stand out without standing out, to be cool," Rose explains. "She has very few boundaries. She's very outspoken - sometimes, to the point of being annoying."

Rose said it, we didn't.

Pepper Ann, in her third season on ABC, is winning over girls 8 and up - but perhaps more noteworthy, their brothers are watching too. "Pepper Ann" has been leading its time slot as part of "Disney's One Saturday Morning" programming (8:30 to 10:30 a.m. Eastern time/7:30 to 9:30 a.m. Pacific). Disney estimates the audience breakdown at 60/40 girls to boys - pretty impressive for a show about a young girl and her single, working mother. Especially a show that takes viewers on feminist retreats and does not shy away from a ceremonial girdle burning.

Right after the youngsters return from asking their moms what a girdle is, they'll be in for an important lesson about the women's movement.

In a special episode airing March 20, in honor of Women's Awareness Month, Pepper Ann gets dragged by her mom and aunt to the annual "Adamant Eve" weekend where she reluctantly learns about the women who struggled before her. Women who, unlike modern-day Pepper Ann, didn't grow up thinking they could be president if they wanted to.

"I think it's particularly timely," Rose said of the episode entitled "The Sisterhood" which explores issues from women's suffrage to going Dutch on a date. These debates are foreign territory for Pepper Ann, who just assumes girls are equal in all ways. "It really does show that the younger generation has gained so much ground."

Apparently cartoons have gained ground too - for Pepper Ann is not only one of the first not-so-perfect, not-so-gorgeous female lead characters to stumble through growing up on Saturday morning television. She is also likely the first to grapple with religion.

Actually, at the moment, Rose and her staff of writers are the ones dealing with Pepper Ann's religion. The issue won't hit the airwaves until Hanukkah time.

"Pepper Ann," which Rose created in the early 1990s as a comic strip for YM magazine, is loosely based on the 44-year-old's own adolescence, growing up in a Jewish family in upstate New York.

A few elements of her life shine through on the television show, like Pepper Ann's grandparents - named for Rose's own grandparents Lillian and Leo - who speak with a distinctly Yiddish accent.

Pepper Ann is supposed to come from an interfaith family, her mother is Jewish, her absent father is not. (This is where the story line departs from Rose's own parents - happily married, and "very Jewish," she emphasizes.) But so far, the subject has been largely ignored on the show.

In December, Rose forecasts, Pepper Ann will confront her religious roots. "We're figuring it out," Rose said. "I made a conscious decision that "Pepper Ann" would be about a mother/daughter relationship in a single parent family. The religion thing just came along, working with other people. It makes sense that (religion) is the direction we're moving toward - I want the show to be modern, relatable."

And, of course, the emphasis is on realism. In one episode, Pepper Ann dreads a classroom assignment that has her volunteering at a nursing home, because she thinks old people are "out of touch." But when Pepper Ann gets treated like a baby, she has an epiphany: You should get to know people for who they are, not how old they are.

In another episode, Pepper Ann puts popularity above friendship in her desire to "infiltrate the inner circle of ultra hipness." Then she realizes her friend Nicky's happiness dating a seventh grade nerd is more important than being cool. Pepper Ann launches into a values speech at an elite eighth grade party to announce her breakthrough.

Eventually, the hip, red-lipped, eighth-grade party giver cuts off Pepper Ann's speech with: "Whatever, Soap Box."

Rose says the show, which is counted among ABC's required educational programs according to Federal Communications Commission guidelines, is not preachy.

"The message is there, but we're not banging it over the head in a preaching way, rather, in a learning way," Rose said. "Pepper Ann doesn't always do the right thing. It makes her stronger."

Allison Kaplan is a columnist for the Chicago Jewish Star whose mother only lets her date Jewish men.