Were Robert DeNiro and Donald Duck separated at birth?
In my day, children’s shows were simple: the producers had crappy toys to hawk, and we were an ideal audience. The affluence of the Reagan era will long be debated in terms of disposable wealth, economic pirates riding roughshod over the nation’s finances and Michael Douglas chewing scenery in “Wall Street.” But for me, the symbol of crass commercialism in America was the amount of various Transformers, G.I. Joe/Cobra, and He-Man toys available on the market. And I had to have them all.
Now that I’m (relatively) grown-up, I can look back on such materialism in my younger days as an unfortunate byproduct of what was otherwise a golden time for children’s programming. Yeah, Disney had the market cornered on crappy “feel good” cartoons, but Donald Duck was the Robert DeNiro of the Mickey Mouse set. His counterpart in the Warner Brothers universe, Daffy, was tame by comparison. But the Warner Brothers cartoons had Disney beat in terms of capturing the very real nature of life. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone running off a cliff, and continue to do so until I realize I’m running on air. The medical bills alone are proof of that. Charlie Brown prepared us for the existential hell that is adolescence, and “The Muppet Show” revealed the dark underbelly of the entertainment world. (My introduction to the concept of sketch comedy is thanks to Kermit and pals.)
But then something happened. Namely, I grew up. Also, when I deigned to notice the latest, greatest and newest in children’s programming since I had hit puberty, I wondered what the hell was going on. Barney is not my friend, he is my enemy.
Let me explain: my family has a lot of infants running around now (we breed like rabbits), and they require some sort of narcotic TV experience to keep them entertained when bashing my head in with a surprisingly painful plastic toy gets old. And that usually means cartoons or kiddie shows that don’t even seem to try to be clever or “subversive.” Maybe it’s leftover malaise from the Clinton years (which gave us a talking dinosaur who liked to entertain kids, but enough about Michael Jackson). Or maybe it’s just a lack of spirit on the part of the network heads. Whatever the reason, the fact is that kids’ shows today prepare our kids for…well, starring on “The Hills” or something equally obnoxious because they feel like they’re entitled to it. We kids of the “Animaniacs” set know that the world doesn’t owe us anything. We gotta work for it, damn it. Kids today are being handed a veritable cornucopia of “you can do anything” without the foreknowledge that their options might be limited over time.
But I concede that I might be a grumpy old man, at all of 27. Maybe I have no business watching the dumbed-down shows of today’s set. Hopefully I won’t turn up on “To Catch a Predator.” But I know what life is really about, thanks to the kids’ shows I grew up on. I fear that the next generation will not be that savvy.
Comments
Jenn Anderson
/ Jenna83 submitted this comment on October 11, 2007 at 9:59 a.m.
Barney, Teletubbies, or any of that other mind-numbing, happy-go-lucky crap is - and always will be - banned from my house. Cable TV networks such as Disney and Nick Jr., offer slightly more wholesome, educational programming, but apparently having intelligent and emotionally accurate crap for your kids to veg out in front of is a right reserved only by the upper middle. It would be great if more parents switched off the damn TV and tossed a damn book at their children. Would solve an immense amount of problems with today's reproductive droppings.
