The Television Abduction
I warn you in advance, as is normally the case with these kinds of articles; this has nothing to do with video games. It has not even to do with the kind of culture one associates with video gamers, such as comic books, movies about comic books or television shows about comic books, though it does have to do with television. It has to do with the seemingly endless glut of children's programming which my son demands be projected in a tidal stream of electrons across my television screen and into my consciousness where my social security number used to be. While the literature on freedoms lost when one chooses to meld one's DNA with a fertile female and create an offspring which doesn't understand how to feed itself properly for half a decade, but manages to excrete vile fluids only hours after grasping the concept of respiration, is voluminous, one of the least well documented results is what happens to the family TV.
Ours may be the first generation to truly suffer a distinct loss of parental televised control, as children realize quickly and at singled digit ages of youth that there is twenty-four hours of animated glory available across multiple channels. What my son will probably never fully understand without taking a course in social anthropology, is that there was a day, let's say twenty-five years ago, when one would have no recourse but to simply wait until a Saturday morning to enjoy cartoons. One did not TiVo such programs to enjoy at one's convenience. If you missed even a moment of this wall-to-wall children's programming to, say, the demands of an immature bladder or the damnable sleep that made the earliest shows seem completely unreachable, then you would have to simply live without. It was an educational experience! There was no pausing of live television, no rewinding to catch the complete lyrics to Conjunction Junction, no slo-mo option to replay the coyote's faceplant into a painted cliffside, and no fastforwarding through Muppet Babies to get to Dungeons and Dragons that much quicker.
For my generation, now considering gas prices in van buying decisions and pretending not to have gained much weights since turning thirty, there was an art to cartoon watching It was a sacred event every week, nestled in this strange kid-time before college football abducted the airwaves. It never stayed on quite long enough, and the rest of the week we would have to get by on an hour of GI Joe and Transformers after school to sustain us until the Sabbath feast returned. I hate to sound like an old man, set in my ways wearing rose colored generational glasses, but I miss the glory of Saturday morning cartoons, and I regret in some small measure that my own son won't enjoy quite the same thing.
He can simply turn on the television and watch whatever show he likes, whenever he likes, a la carte broadcasting. There's something fundamentally wrong with that, and I defy any parent who lived through the Saturday Morning heyday to argue otherwise.
I don't mean to imply that I criticize the technology, because, after all, it is I who ponied up numerous pieces of hard-cash currency, which I am fond of and do not part with easily. I adore TiVo and would write ballads of its greatness were I a songwriter and in a ballad writing mood. And, I suppose I only have myself to blame for indulging my son in his Noggin and Nick Jr. fetish, but still these are channels on which I never let my receiver settle only a few years ago, and now they comprise the vast majority of my television's time.
It wouldn't be so bad, except that they are insufferably distracting and demand one's attention even if one would much rather be watching, say, the local news or Antiques Roadshow, which is at its best when snooty people find out their antique New England card-table was actually made in New Orleans about twenty years ago and isn't worth the a hundredth of the fifty-grand for which it is insured. I digress.
The problem are the songs. The interminable, catchy, infectious songs! Evil, thy name is Laurie Berkner.
I offer, for those of you with children who watch cable cartoon networks a glimpse of how deeply ingrained these songs have become for you in quiz form. How many of these lyrics are familiar to you?
- come on, vamanos, everybody lets go
- Stephanie is new in town, and soon she and Ziggy are friends
- Here he comes with all his friend, they've got stories got time to spend, with you
- What's gonna work? Teamwork!
- They're two, they're four, they're six, they're eight
- We've got the whole wide world in our yard to explore
- Sit down in our thinkin' chair and think. Think. Think.
- Comin' to the rescue is a very special child
- Look everybody is my dog, Mel
To many of you, those lyrics look utterly ridiculous. To others, some part of the brain is sparked by the phrases, and you are probably plotting furious murder against me for lodging the theme to Lazy Town in your head for the rest of the day. Just be glad I didn't write out the lyrics for You Are A Pirate.
Only one show of late has been bearable, if not rather enjoyable; Noggin's latest effort The Upside Down show. A surprisingly clever piece of non-drivel, that is almost as fun for me to watch as my son who absolutely adores it. Not unlike Looney Tunes which had references that would appeal to adults completely outside of what makes the show enjoyable for children, the show take sympathy on the adults who suffer through hours of kid-tv. Allow me to illustrate by example.
In the first episode Shane and Dave are searching everywhere for a cowbell to make their band better – certainly a nod to More Cowbell – and after repeated failures to find a cowbell we get the following nugget of dialogue.
"Looks like you win the prize."
"What prize?"
"The No-Bell prize"
Excited, "Really, where is it?"
"Sweden."
Comedic pause, then cheesy laughter. It's not Monty Python, but following great waves of shows where adorable characters do adorable things to the point of inducing diabetes, it's a welcome piece of wit.
If only more of these shows remembered that adults are probably watching too.
- Elysium
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Brings a tear to my eye.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Saturday morning cartoons back in the day had a quality lineup. X-Men, Transformers, the classic versions of most things on Cartoon Network, etc. Although I was curious one Saturday morning and flipped through the basic channels... now it's like watching adware.
It's gonna feel like you took a tray full of cookies and BAKED THEM UP IN YOUR ASS!!!
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Dungeons and Dragons was the biggest continual letdown EVER. Every week seemed like a re-run, the disappointment still hurts. I wanted... so much more!
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I'd just like to add that I tormented my wife last night while she's away on business by helping to get a Backyardigans song stuck in her head for the 5th time this week. She left her MP3 player at home, too, so there's no getting it out now.
Would I rather be feared or loved? Easy - both. I want people to be afraid of how much they love me.
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Agggghhhhh!!! GET IT OUT OF MY HEAD!!
Now I want be able to program anything today, except maybe a graph traversal algorithm.
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Even when I was a kid I hated the stranglehold that TV scheduling had on one's life. Therefore, I welcome our new robot Tivo overlords. The trick is to somehow keep the real source of the material in the Tivo a secret from the little one for as along as possible.
Because of this, so far, I only know the first song in the quiz.
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Oh, if I had been granted the power to do this, it would have been glorious!
There is much truth in this statement. My kids adore her; I cringe when she comes on.
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"I might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for a damningly tenacious clinger." - Crouton on a childhood excrement escapade
Alamo Drafthouse loves you.
We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all.
Remarkably within the past year my kids did a big course change in the Tivo watching and "discovered" Scooby-Doo. They went from watching all the Nick & Disney kids stuff to mostly watching all the reruns of Scooby on Boomerang. Then they discovered the joy of how Corporate America milks a franchise and found Scooby lives on in updated animated movie forms.
It's really eerie watching your kids watch shows you watched as a kid. And it makes me feel old seeing how they're all on the "nostalgia" cartoon channels.
The really sad part is when I broke down and decided the kids needed their own Tivo. Man, talk about lame. There goes my bid for Dad of year.
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Good article - Your main point kinda has an "in my day..." feel to it but I can at least agree that every generation has more fun with less work than the latter. Really, its kinda hard not to be bitter towards TiVo kids, I had to wake up at 6:30 am to watch James Bond Jr.....Both ways! In the snow!
"In general forums are forum's for the mentally challenged."
We don't have a Tivo, but I've thought about getting one *because* of the Upside Down show. The boy is allowed about 1 hour of TV time a day. He can pick from PBS or Noggin, and I get veto power. For example, there's some show with baby animals with speech impediments. That one is right out. In fact, any show where lisping, mincing, or other idiotic staged "cuteness" is shown as a behavior to be adopted, modeled or tolerated is out.
Most children's television really annoys me. Even Sesame Street has jumped the shark and become little more than the Elmo Hour. (An annoying creature with bad speech and grammar.) Seriously, in most cases, I would rather let the boy play Burnout3 than let him watch most of the saccharine, poorly designed, 22 minute long toy commercials that pass for "educational" programming these days.
The Upside Down Show is absolutely the best programming I've seen for children in the 4 years I've been paying attention to kid's programming. It's brilliantly well done, it's sneakily educational, the guys are adorable and funny, and now my 3 year old knows and can correctly use words like "stupendous" and "horizontal" and "humongous". (You know I adore a good vocabulary.)
Other shows that I think deserve mention are "It's a Big Big World." Fantastic amounts of science, conservation, and critical thinking wrapped around an adorable set of animals who live in The World Tree in a rainforest. It's brilliant. The target audience, I'd guess is 3-6ish. It's the only show that I've ever heard say in regards to animals "And you're an animal too.", which spawned a really interesting discussion with the Boy.
I like Clifford the Big Red Dog because of the really gentle lessons in social interaction. It's very subtle memetic programming, but it's quite effective.
And I like Curious George, just cause it's fun.
Oh, and for the record; I think we own all of Laurie Berkner's CDs, and I probably know all of them by heart. I love her. (Perhaps because she sings in the same range as I do, so I can sing them to The Boy when he wants a song and I don't feel like singing show tunes. Hee.)
*Legion* wrote:
I don't like you. And I don't even have kids. I have a niece and a nephew. Anything recorded for myself is quickly watched and immediately deleted to make room for the growing library of WonderPets and Little Einsteins.
I got nauseous at Target when I heard the theme from Little Einsteins coming from an ad. This show can make one hate classical music that one onced love. It picks a piece of classical work but only plays one phrase over and over for 22 minutes.
JUST PUZZLED YOUR ASS UP, SON! -Mr Crinkle
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"Noggin and Nick Jr. fetish, but still these are channels on which I never let my receiver settle only a few years ago, and now they comprise the vast majority of my television's time"
And lets not forget the vast amount of hard drive space I now don't have for my shows... I ended up getting a second DVR and more or less dedicating it just to PBS and Noggin
. My daughter is two and half.
"I want to watch something"
"Umm how about a book?"
"No"
"play outside with Dad?" Big Smile
".... *sigh* I want to watch something!"
"*Sigh*, ok one show then we go outside, ok?"
"YEAH! Dora!"
"Inarticulate noise" while dad looks for the remote and plans his escape to the office.
Here is the thing, somehow, SOMEHOW, the no more then 2 hours of TV a day we said she can watch has blossomed into a fire storm. The little brat cheats, she gets up so early that Dad can't function at all pass giving her juice, snack, and putting on whatever the hell she wants so I can close my eyes for another 20 minutes.
The bright side for the geek is I turn her fetish into a practical excuse to blow money on fun toys, MCE box for movie playback (with the my movie plug in she can pick from the pictures, which she really likes). NAT for um storing said movies and uh other dad stuff...Oh and all that cat 5 cable I had to drag around for the 360 and so on...
I hate TV. I own a couple of nice one's though. I guess I hate cable and broadcast stuff, I should just watch netflicks... but I don't. Hmmm Monkey see monkey do? Crap, the wife is right it must be my fault... course she watches more TV then me when the kid is awake so maybe not
.
I really like the Backyardigins, I'm not sure what that says about me. I probable just need to watch more anima.
-Griffon
"White is the new black"
Oh, I hear you! This is my big weakness and when I'm taken most advantage of.
- Elysium
I loved Saturday mornings. For 1/7th of the time, for a few wonderful years, I was a morning person. There was something epic (now that I think about it) about getting up at 5:30 in the morning on a Saturday, grabbing a bowl, a spoon, a 2L container of milk and a fresh box of Captain Crunch and watching cartoons until 1pm (when the Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show ended). I remember suffering through the bad cartoons just because there was nothing better on in that time slot (6:30am-7am, I'm looking at you... stupid My Little Ponies...). There was a lot of good cartoonage, though, and most of the good stuff seems to have disappeared. Every now and then I ended up looking for Saturday morning cartoons, and they seem to be largely a thing of the past.
In related news: does anyone else remember Inhumanoids? It was never its own show, that I know of. It was part of those 3-cartoons-in-half-an-hour, along with Bigfoot and something else (maybe Jem and the Holograms?). That was such a cool show, but no one seems to remember it but me...
Don't you understand, Cliff? We put a chainsaw on a machine gun! That's it! It doesn't get more awesome than that! We've peaked, man! We've peaked! - ctrl-alt-del on Gears of War 2
My personal solution is to ditch the TiVo and the Cable. We only have over the air here, so my wife can watch Football. For TV series I want to watch I simply get the DVD.
"I love deadlines; I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by" - Douglas Adams
The Cake Is A Lie
Hey all this talk about the weekly Saturday morning cartoon extravaganza reminded me of a little ritual my siblings and I enjoyed every year. Does anyone else remember for a few years in the late 70's/early 80's when the networks would air a 1 hour "Fall Preview" program for their upcoming Sat. morning cartoons? I remember this as a BIG kid event in my house. It was like watching the Oscars for kids or something. Of course most of what looked cool in the preview program turned out to be absolute junk. But is was alot of fun watching that show then "planning" the Saturday morning watching schedule - some negotiating involved to make sure we each got to see our favorite shows (remember - these were the days when 1 TV households were the norm so everyone watched the same thing).
Oh - and anyone else have a kid that prefers watching ESPN SportsCenter first thing in the AM versus any cartoons? The kid's 6. I can't believe it. Upside is he always fills me in on scores for games that I missed.
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Guilty here as well. Thomas is usually known as my extra 23 minutes of sleep in the morning. Evenings are usually one show of Clifford, Arthur, or Kim Possible. Yeah, I'm guilty of getting that last choice on the list.
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I can see it now:
"Darn it little Billy, I told you no spoilers. Go to your room, you're grounded!"
Semper Delectatio
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I have found there is a visible line one crosses when traditional cartoons have become a thing of the past for that person. It's when you stop getting up early to watch saturday morning cartoons and you start getting up early to watch Sunday Morning the show.
I am a little embarassed now, though, since I recognize a lot of the shows you all are talking about, yet, have no children. That's right. A man contemplating house purchases and worrying about building credit with a gold band on his left hand that knows who the Backyardigans are.
In my defense I also like Antiques Roadshow.
Letters to the Internet
My wife keeps trying to tell me "They don't really WANT to watch TV when you go down with them at 7AM on Saturday morning! It's their best time of day! Just tell them no, and in 5 minutes they'll be jumping off the back of the couch into the Lego box and all will be right with the world."
Yet, delerious, sleep deprived, and hung over, for some reason Clifford and Little Einsteins seem like the easier solution.
Or "Escape to Witch Mountain" for the 320th time.
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"Think of it as 'grinding SO rep in the Kitchen instance.' " - Montalban
Just do what Bill Cosby did and give them all chocolate cake. May not be pretty, but he got back to sleep.
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come on down to Rat Boy's nest!
light up a stogie, and soon you'll see
how rock can be commercial-free!
'I'd hit it!'" - HP Lovesauce
I saw that when I was a kid. Creepy harmonica.
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I don't have any kids yet, but I will say that I love Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends on Cartoon Network. That show just cracks me up for some reason.
I thought I was the only "Nazi" around. (not my word - a couple neighbor kids)
We turned ours off for anything but videogames and DVD's in 1998.
I damned skippy sure wasn't going to PAY for them to watch that crap. And doubly not paying for my younger son to practice cracking codes so he could do it for his friends for $25 a pop. If you're just using the 4 character code from the cable company it is susceptible to a determined dictionary attack. I would have had to change it every single day to keep ahead of him (it takes him about a day and a half of solid effort). BTW - also works on the PS2 Parental Controls. He hasn't had much luck with the Xbox because it's harder to keep track of the various buttons or something.
At least this way they watch better crap and what crap they watch is seriously limited. We probably don't have the actual machine on any less than anyone else, but it doesn't run our life. Our life revolves around whose turn it is to play a game and there's enough of them that they only get about an hour total a day on a weekend. By the time you do two laps around the batting order you've shot the day.
Not sure it's better or worse in terms of being healthy, but I do know there's a lot less Erkle and gyrating MTV butts and that's ALL good.
Now that I don't have to worry about my younger son's cryptographic talents cracking the parental lock code (just because he's turning 18 in two months) I just have no need for it. Anything I want to watch is on DVD with no commercials and I can watch it any time I wish. Besides, movies cut into gaming time something fierce.
Duoae wrote:
Same here. My kids will have to build their own TiVo if they want one. I'm going to be one of those dads in the dark ages. But they'll be allowed all the PS4, Xbox 720, and Nintendo Gonads time they could possibly want.
In Ultima Online I used to poison hams and leave them on the ground in cities for people to pick up and eat. I can't believe how many people thought street ham was a good thing to eat. -Elliottx
"I hate to sound like an old man, set in my ways wearing rose colored generational glasses, but I miss the glory of Saturday morning cartoons, and I regret in some small measure that my own son won't enjoy quite the same thing."
Old man?! I'm only 25 and i remember all those things. There's no way i'm old so i don't see how you can be!
I find that when i have a child that i'll be restricting "its" TV habits. I'll be the remote control Nazi and the child will absolutely hate me for it i'm sure. But i'll be doing it for its own good. It can play football instead.
Of course, i'll probably end up like most dads on the planet - a soft touch....
Quote:
"Inhumanoids, Inhumanoids,..the evil that liiiies within..."
Dude! I haven't thought about thast show since I was a kid. But as soon as I read it the theme tune came rushing into my ears. I loved that show as a kid. I can still remember all the weird-ass creatures
Love thyself (just not in public)
Love thy neighbour (remember to ask first)
Certis wrote:
Thread Arise!
For those of us tortured with Dora, this SNL parody was by far the most amusing thing I saw all weekend.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Sb7eLgaddI4
I love how Dora ask questions of the viewers, then affirms the viewers implied response without saying what the right answer actually is.
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Omigod. That was the funniest youtubation I've had all week.
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"Think of it as 'grinding SO rep in the Kitchen instance.' " - Montalban