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Posts tagged ‘Childhood’

Feb 27

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

The Mystery Inc. Gang, Babble.com, SUNNYCHANEL

When I was a child I would watch Scooby-Doo religiously. Every Saturday I would sit down with my brother and sister and we would watch them. This happened for years. Scooby Doo is a children’s cartoon show that stars a group of friends: Freddy, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy, and their dog Scooby Doo. These friends would get together and solve mysteries in their town. The group called themselves the Mystery Inc and would always find out who the mysterious criminal was behind all of the “supernatural” crimes.

The show originally started in 1969 as Scooby Doo, Where Are You! for Hanna-Barbera Productions. It would come on Saturday mornings and had the same cast as it does today. Hanna-Barbera’s successor, Warner Bros, continued the show until 1976. In 1976 the show moved over to ABC and aired until they cancelled it in 1986. They show has had many spin offs since then as well, such as A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo’s Great Mysteries, etc. The show currently running on air is Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which premiered on cartoon network in July 2010. The show has won many awards and has been made into movies and comic books.

However, the success of the show has much to do with the viewers (children). In class we have talked a lot about children’s television shows and negative adult reactions towards them. The creation of Scooby Doo was actually a side effect of the parent-run organization Action for Children’s Television. This organization was complaining about there being too much violence in the Saturday morning cartoons and pressured Hanna-Barbera to create a new show that was more appropriate. And, through lots of hard work and ideas, Scooby Doo, Where Are You! was finally aired in 1969.

Parents have a large effect over the children’s television and movie industries. Without the parents support, these industries would fail because their target audience does not have the capabilities to go see movies, pay for tickets, pay for cable, etc… without their parents help. Therefore these some of the people in these industries, the successful people, sell to the parents just as much as they sell to the children.

Feb 27

Lou Vs. the Lorax

Lou Dobbs Attacks Dr. Suess For ‘Indoctrinating’ Children
 


In this recent installment of the popular Fox News segment “The Unmentionables”, pundit Lou Dobbs attempts to convince viewers that Hollywood-produced children’s movies of recent times, specifically The Secret World of Arietty (based on the British, mid-century children’s novel The Borrowers by Mary Norton)and The Lorax (based on the picture book by Dr. Seuss), are rife with “liberal media bias”. Dobbs makes the argument that The Secret World of Arietty, whose story revolves around a miniature family scavenging the leftovers of full-sized “human beans” to create and sustain a secret world within our world, implicitly supports a sort of communistic mentality of involuntary wealth redistribution. He even draws a direct correlation between the animated film and the Occupy Wall Street movement, which he seems to view as an insidious coalition, though the protests associated with Occupy have largely pushed broader contemporary issues of governmental corruption in lieu of any well-defined agenda. Dobbs goes on to criticize the second children’s film, The Lorax, for extolling the virtues of environmental awareness in the attitude that this message is anti-business and thus counter-conservative.
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Feb 27

The Oscars

The Academy Awards were last night and the results were nothing short of exciting.  For the first time since 1929 a silent film won best picture.  The Artist took the film world by a storm this year, and rightfully so.   For those of you who have never seen a silent film, this is a perfect place to start.  The Artist takes us back to the beginning of Hollywood and the transition from silent films to talkies.  Sure sometimes we just want to watch robots beat the hell out of each other, but The Artist brings us back to why we fell in love with movies in the first place.  It is truly a work of art that has sadly been forsaken by the society that we live in today.  Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo also deals with this time period.   Taking a break from his traditional gangster films, Marty took us on a journey to Paris.  Hugo is a film about George Milies, who was a wonderful director, filmmaker, and visionary.   It was through this wonderful film that Marty reignited “movie magic” which has been lost for sometime now.    These two films made a huge, and significant, impact on the film industry this year.  The Artist left an impact on the Academy Awards winning three of the top awards which were best picture, best leading male actor, and best director.  Michel Hazanavicius, the director of The Artist, actually beat Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen for this award.  So hopefully the film industry will stop remaking movies from the 80’s and start making genuine films.

Feb 27

Silence that Idiot Box!

In Jeff Jacoby’s article on the harmful effects of watching television on children, called Silence that idiot box!,  he argues that letting children watch extended periods of television on a daily basis is no different than giving them a drug that produces zombie like effects. He cites several other articles, including scientific publications from both the 1960’s and today, in his rant against what he also refers to as the “boob tube.” He points out that children who watch one or more hours a day of television are more likely to have poor assignment completion rates and negative attitudes towards school. Jacoby sums up a 2005 study published by the American Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine with these words: “Increased time spent watching television during childhood and adolescence was associated with a lower level of educational attainment by early adulthood.” He also points out studies which show correlation between children watching television and being more likely to smoke, be overweight, or suffer from sleep difficulties and high cholesterol.

Daily views of television in different countries from Boston.com

It is clear that that Jacoby is rabidly against the high volume of television watching that goes on in the world of children, but it might help to understand his point of view if we better understand his background. Jeff Jacoby works for the Boston Herald, is a nationally recognized conservative voice, he briefly practiced law, and has been a commentator for WBUR.

Jacoby points out children watching an extended period of television, and this relates to Bradbury’s story of The Veldt because of the fact that the children in the story Peter and Wendy have been corrupted by the nursery. The facts that the children would much rather have the nursery than have their parents are an extreme of the theory that children can be corrupted by television. In the story, The Veldt, the children are so dependent with the technology that natural activities seem like a chore to them. The fact that the children questioned and complained when their father wanted to move to a different house because the technology has been corrupting them shows that the authority of the household was not the parents but the technology. At the end, the children killed their parents with the help of technology controlling their overall thoughts. This story shows a fictional consequence of how technology can affect and corrupt children.

Feb 27

What Kids, or People, Should NOT Be Watching

With all the parents organizations and committees telling other parents what is appropriate for their kids to watch, the kids are stuck watching some really dumb shows.  According to the Parents Television Council the number one show that kids should be allowed to watch is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  Parents are always concerned with the content of shows, but this show, I believe has absolutely no educational value and barely any entertaining content, unless you think a grown man [Ty Pennington] crying and acting like a fool every five seconds is entertainment.  The show focuses on the carpenter Ty Pennington, who builds houses for the less fortunate.  The premise of the show seems as if it would be teaching kids good moral values such as giving to those who are less fortunate which is good and all but many of those people end up losing the house within the year because they cannot afford the house payments and the cost to maintain the houses are extremely high.  The dialogue of the show is also poorly written, if at all, and it comes out sounding very cheesy.  I believe shows like this cause people to become less intelligent and I would rather have my kids watch The Simpsons or Family Guy especially if I had to watch the shows with them.

The show deemed worst for kids to watch was Family Guy.  I do believe that some of the content of the show is somewhat inappropriate, but a lot of it goes over the kid’s heads anyway, and the dialogue is actually entertaining.  The show might make fun of pop culture in a sometimes vulgar way but they usually do it cleverly.  Family Guy can be pretty witty at times compared to Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.  The writers for Family Guy at least seem intelligent and I would rather have my kids watch a show written well.  I watched this show when I was younger with my brother and I know that I was never affected negatively by what I was seeing and hearing.

Spigel states in Welcome to the Dreamhouse that “mass media have been seen as a threatening force that circulates forbidden secrets to children,” but parents cannot shield their kids from everything they consider to be inappropriate all the time, they will learn these “secrets” eventually and when they do it does not mean that the kids will becomes delinquents, chances are most kids will turn out completely fine.  I do not advocate passive parenting, but with all the shows that are seen as inappropriate by overprotective parents, kids will eventually have nothing to watch.

Family Guy from google images

Feb 27

Modern Family goes too Far?

Cast of Modern Family

Huffington Post writer Ann Brenoff states that she is a big fan of “Modern Family” and that she loves the shows, “smart humor and characters”.  But in this article she rips the show and the Writers Guild of America, for letting a particular episode of “Modern Family” air.  The episode as she describes it is titled, “Virgin Territory” and deals with the sex life of the high school senior Haley who apparently has been sexually active for a while now with her boyfriend.  Then the father, Phil, says that he is the cool dad and should be more ok with his daughter being sexually active.  Brenoff takes offense to this statement and the rest of her article writes about how kids aren’t having sex as much as they used to be and that this show shouldn’t be showing lies to the youth of the country.  Brenoff then states that she knows that teens aren’t ready to be having sex by stating, “Seventeen-year-olds may be physically ready to have intercourse, but emotionally they are far from being able to handle it.”  Then she ends her article by stating that the writers of “Modern Family” should have had Haley hold out from sex with her boyfriend and that she has to wait until college.  Brenoff has a clear stance on what children/teens should see on T.V, and that is that T.V. is way to inappropriate for minds of our youth.

 

This article defienetly relates to fear in parenting that Chudacoff talks about in “The Commercialization and Co-optation of Children’s Play”.  Chudacoff commonly talked about the idea that T.V and videogames shaped the minds of young and inspired them in some way.  He states, “Oppurtunities for fantasy play mushroomed, but at the same time character and story lines shaped children’s amusements in a way that, at least in some fashion, overrode independent imagination” (pg. 185).  To me, this quote means that the imagination of a children’s mind is corrupted by some of what they see on T.V and that their imagination is based on some of the plots and characters they see.  So, a child instead of dreaming about powder-puff girls and cupcakes are now dreaming about the sex life of Haley on “Modern Family”.

 

Another relation to a reading from class, is the idea of who is the filter between the kid and what they see on T.V.  Spigel and her piece titled “Welcome to the Dreamhouse” argue that the parents, more specifically the mother, are the filter to their child’s T.V schedule.  Brenoff from the Huffington Post says something different in that, “The most-powerful lobbying group in America is the Writers guild of America.”  She then goes on and rips the writers of “Modern Family” and the guild for letting this air, but according to Spigel she has no business doing so and that is because this should be the mothers job not to let her child see it.  So overall, the ideas Brenoff talks about n her article and what we have been dealing with in class are very similar.  Why are parents scared of T.V?  Well according to Brenoff it is because of shows like this.  But with what we have discussed, there is still no way to tell how a teen or child would take in this information about sex, but somebody must relegate it, but we have to figure out How and who must relegate the television?

Feb 27

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Grease Lightnin’

As a child, Grease was one of my most watched movie, mostly because it was one my grandma’s favorites, so I’d see it every time I went over to her house.   The film was produced by Paramount Pictures and released in 1978.  A PG13 film due to sexual content and references, teen smoking, and drinking, Grease exemplified many of the fears that were present in the delinquency and rebellion of the generation of adolescents. The film, although released in the late 70s is set in 50s America, traces the lives of a couple rebellious high school seniors, the T-Bird boys and the Pink Lady girls.  Throughout the movie, the T-Bird boys are seen pushing their masculine and rebellious role, spending their time working in the school auto shop, chasing girls, and causing trouble along the way. The Pink Lady girls, on the other hand, are shying away from some of the more typically female characteristics, within the realm of maintaining their womanhood.

In the back, Sandra D sits in the pink skirt, before her rebellion; in the front, smoking, is the new Sandra D after the influences of modern pop culture have influenced her. Created by a Grease fan at fanpop.com

Most notably, Rizzo spends her time trying to act like one of the guys; chasing guys instead of letting them chase her, and promoting the “sexualization” of the teenager through her actions and dress.  By the end, Rizzo has not only exemplified a change in the meaning of womanhood, but she has also transformed good-girl Sandra D into a rebellious girl like herself.  The growing movement of female gender roles expresses the clear change that was occurring in the 50s.  Parents were no longer able to restrict the pop culture of the generation’s adolescents.  In addition to the importance of changing gender roles, the film expresses some clear moral panics of the ages through the story.  The rebellious girls are able to take in Sandra D and transform her from a feminine ideal girl to a rebellious, sex-driven teenager, which exemplifies the fears of the previous generation of parents.  Even the most feminine and traditional of girls could lose their way in modern pop culture. The film clearly shows the moral panics of the previous generation of parents and the ever changing gender roles of the newer generation in the 1950s.

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