Buffy ,'Showtime'
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Here's what I don't get:
It may therefore be the case that the accents spoken in this region are deemed the most "neutral" by Americans.
That and the accentless thing--does someone from Kentucky think someone who talks differently from them has no accent? Do they both have no accent, or does the Kentucky chick think she's the one with the accent?
I don't know... Interesting question though. But maybe it's because nobody could ever hear me talk and think "Phoenix?"
Stephen Colbert decided at an early age (in his pre-teens, IIRC) to replace his South Carolina accent with a General Standard one just because he was aware of the stereotype of Southern = Stupid.
Wow...he did amazingly at it. Except for hearing him say "I'm from SC"I never would have thought so. I hope I don't sound like he had facial surgery for a cleft palate or something.
Huh. (Word of the day) I was just reading an interview with Henry Selick (from 2005) and they were considering doing the Coraline movie as CG instead of stop-motion. I hate that!
But apparently even a crapass CG movie will make much more money than a very good (Were Rabbit, Corpse Bride) stop-motion.
Based on my raising in the South, we knew we had Southern accents. At least, we knew that the standard TV accent was Not Ours, and that we were considered the "different" ones.
My personal accent was always quite "neutral" in comparison to my peers, so I was a bit surprised to discover that I actually did drawl quite a bit, something I really only figured out when I went to Boston for a summer and my friends called me Bill Clinton. Now, however, I am very rarely pegged as a Southerner - four years in California and two in NYC smoked it out completely.
Going to college in the midwest made my mother's Cincy accent come out of lurkdom and take over my entire vocabulary, and I could definitely hear the difference. Moving back East has mostly gotten rid of it.
But apparently even a crapass CG movie will make much more money than a very good (Were Rabbit, Corpse Bride) stop-motion.
Crapass CG movies tend to be "hipper" than stop-motion animated ones, and so will attract a larger audience of kids and teens. Stop-motion animation looks like art and rarely features the kind of lame pop culture references masquerading as jokes (yes, Shrek, I'm looking sternly at you) that today's young people seem to like. Stoopid young people.
Particularly when CG movies are trying harder and hard to look convincingly 3D, which of course the stop-motion ones have in spades.
Particularly when CG movies are trying harder and hard to look convincingly 3D, which of course the stop-motion ones have in spades.
Flushed Away (which Emmett and I enjoyed) was a CG movie done by Aardman to look like a Wallace and Gromit-ish movie.
When I go visit Alabama, I come back sounding pretty country, but generally I have a mild drawl at best. Since many of the newscasters where I grew up didn't have the Newscaster Accent, it still sounds like an accent rather than normalized English to me.