After completing a mixture of quantitative and qualitative analysis of twenty-six trailers, I found many substantial patterns. This helped me come up with three main themes of; Disability as the Main Focus, From Laughing at to Laughing With: Changes in the use of Humor, and Empowering vs Demeaning.
First, it is important to note some general themes I found through my quantitative data. The films I looked at had an overwhelming majority of white characters with disabilities for both ‘before 1990’ and ‘after 1990’ films. For the ‘before 1990’ films, there were 12 white people, with one asian person. In ‘after 1990’ films, there were a total of 13 white people. In addition, there were barely any females present. For ‘before 1990’ films there was only 1 female, and for ‘after 1990’ films there were 2 females. Most of the trailers I looked at included people with intellectual disabilities, with few being physical disabilities. For both ‘before 1990’ and ‘after 1990’ films, there were 10 intellectual disabilities and 3 physical disabilities. This made the “born with” a disability higher, since most intellectual disabilities are not attained, only physical ones. Lastly, there was a majority of adult characters included rather than children. For ‘before 1990’ films there were 11 adults and 2 children, while for ‘after 1990’ films there were 8 adults and 5 children.