At one point it was normalized to constantly poke fun at Britney Spears’ troubles but she’s a human like everyone else so why didn’t they treat her like one?
Characters based on Britney
One of the first shows that made a character based on Britney Spears was “The Fairly Odd Parents.” Who doesn’t remember teen pop sensation “Britney Britney” and during the episode Truth or Cosmoquences, Cosmo hypnotizes her and Britney is smiling the whole night and doesn’t know what’s going on, she says random things like “I like soy milk”, “I like puppies” and the word “kumquat.” It seems a little unnecessary to be making fun of Britney Spears on a kids show with her basically being a puppet.
Another show on Nick that had a character based on Britney Spears was “iCarly,” this character was flat out making fun of Britney Spears. The episode is titled “iFix a Pop Star,” and if you don’t remember, her name was Ginger Fox, she stabbed Freddie with a fork and this pop star seemed to have fallen out of the spotlight that she was in once. A summary of the article calls her a “washed-up former teen pop star” and even says that Ginger Fox is based on Britney Spears.
Rick and Morty have a character named Planetina who isn’t based on Britney but the character Planetina is so similar to Britney Spears. Even though the scene is probably less than 15 seconds total Planetina has very little control over her life, she’s forced to wear clothing with political messages because she’s going on TV and she’s only seen as a business to the people running her life. Similarly to Britney who’s conservatorship was placed in 2008, she was seen as a business instead of a person under control of her father during her conservatorship which ended in 2021 after 13 years.
Jokes About Britney Spears
Britney Spears was also the butt of the joke on a couple episodes of “Family Guy” where Peter tells Lois that she looks like Britney Spears but she’s “not a fat guy.” “Family Guy” makes so many jokes about Britney Spears throughout the mid-2000s when she started to have her breakdown (that was so publicized) it kinda made my stomach hurt.
In 2021 the BBC, the British Broadcasting Center (the news) made a JOKE about Britney shaving her head… They posted on Twitter and Facebook “Breaking news. Ed Sheeran has gone full Britney.” With Photoshopped Ed Sheeran mimicking Britney and her Fila hoodie that February night at a Tarzana hair salon. The tweet has since been deleted but for the BBC to be making fun of her mental breakdown is a low that I never thought any news outlet would reach. The BBC told the Daily Mail “BBC Three has a history of supporting mental health issues and the tweet was not intended as a reference to mental health or designed to cause any offense. We have therefore removed it from our twitter feed.”
Britney’s new memoir The Woman in Me comes out today, even though we’ve seen a whole Free Britney movement and clips of this memoir have been released (like her relationship with Justin Timberlake) I feel like we’ll see the way she was TRULY treated by her celebrity colleagues, how exploited she was by the pop industry and people that were supposed to protect her. She deserves to live her life as much as she wants, the way that she wants moving forward because if you think about it, she didn’t get a childhood through her adulthood because of her career starting at an early age and her conservatorship being placed during her early adult life. So if that means she gets to buy a horse and live her best life then let the woman live her life, it’s the least she can do after 13 years!