It's not TV per se

I started to leave a comment over in Budd's post, but then realized that a) it's a bit of a tangent and b) it could be rather long, so I'm just going to make it a post of my own.  Go read his first if you want to know what spawned this germ of a thought.

Cartoons - we all watched them when we were young.  My tv viewing was all about Looney Tunes and all of the classic Hanna Barbera cartoons.  There were silly characters, with distinct personalities and traits, and set relationships that always drove the story. You always knew the Roadrunner and Speedy Gonzalez would win just like you always knew that Scooby and Shaggy would bungle into saving the day, even if you didn't always know it while you were watching the episode.  There was very little nuance to the personalities, as well, very little subtlety.  The characters played a role, usually at the good guy or bad guy end of the spectrum, with very little in between.  Tweety was always the little helpless innocent who somehow found a way to save his skin from Sylvester, and Yosemite Sam always played the rootin' tootin' hombre who was always just a half-step behind in his plans to catch Bugs Bunny.  You always knew who to root for, and the good guys always out smarted the bad guys. 

There was tension and drama, conflict and even violence - anvils dropping on heads, chases involving hitting each other with large mallets, even characters with guns*.  I remember laughing at the prat falls, laughing when the Coyote's legs were still in the air while his body was being pulled into the canyon (only to have the legs follow quickly after), laughing when Bugs would put a carrot in Elmer's gun barrel and it would explode, or when Daffy's bill would be on the other side of his head after getting shot at.  For all that, it was cartoon violence, it was silly, it wasn't real even if I didn't know that the characters were just cartoons.  They'd always get back up and the chase was back on.  I don't ever remember trying to shoot a friend, or hit them with a hammer, or light them of fire because I watched it on a cartoon.

So fast forward 31 years to being a parent of a 4 year old.  What's different?  My perspective, certainly.  As a parent, I want to make sure that things are age appropriate.  I don't want the stories, language, drama or action (violence) to be beyond her understanding. I want her to be stimulated, understand there's a story unfolding, that bad things might happen or there might be conflict to work through, but I don't want her to be scared or upset at images she might not understand in her 4 year old reality.  I like watching her think through what she's watching.  Things like Dora and Blues Clues have her solving problems and piecing things together.  The repetition and fun songs work in these shows to really reinforce the theme.  Others, like Kipper (a personal favorite of ours), Pinky Dinky Do, and Little Bill (a new favorite), are wonderful at showing relationships, story telling, imagination (the Kipper with the 'magic ball' is fun and .. interesting to say the least), and adventure.  Another favorite, The Backyardigans, has a lot of music and dancing and imagination throughout the story, and though they can sometimes be slow and paced poorly, other times M really gets into the dancing and characters. They aren't as whacky or outrageous or kenetic or violent (for lack of a better word) as the cartoons I grew up with, but as a parent that's ok.  She still seems to enjoy them.

So yeah, she still watches cartoons, we make sure they're as age appropriate as possible, and she does a good job herself policing what she watches and knowing (and telling us) when something is "too big" for her or too scary. And while we limit the amount she watches (and this generally isn't a huge deal unless she's just being truly lazy or is tired, because she just can't sit still long enough to watch TV), what we really find is that it's less about how much she watches as making sure it's just not plain crap.  I've already highlighted many of the shows she enjoys watching (forgot to mention Caillou the other day (yes, this has been written over the course of days, I can't be the only person who does this) and the Berenstain Bears and other PBS Kids cartoons), but Rae and I are simply amazed at the sheer amount of crap that is produced for kids today.  Maybe there isn't any more crap now than there was when we were growing up, and maybe there isn't as much quality stuff either, and maybe it's just the shee volume of stuff that's out there now; but it sure seems to us that the crap takes up a greater percentage than it used to, and certainly than it should. 

I won't link any of the crap, we all know it when we see it (and perhaps we'll disagree on what's crap and what's not), but I will briefly mention the sorts of things that make the crap, well, crappy.  For one, their LOUD, with a constant blaring of noise and sound, such that there seems to be little to no down time in them what so ever.  Also, they rely on the crude to be funny, or to carry the characters.  Warner Bros. had pies in the face, Vaudville prat falls, physical humor that we all laughed at (and kids still laugh at today, M loves Tom and Jerry when she watches it at Grandpa Bert's), but the crap today relies on fart jokes, snot, belching.  Look, I'm not a prude, I find that stuff funny too sometimes, and maybe it is just me being a parent, I don't know, but when a cartoon is filled with nothing but that stuff, it just ceases to be entertaining.  And hell, as I write this and re-read it, maybe it's not filled with it but there's enough of it that I don't see past it, so it might as well be all there is to it.

Or maybe it IS just me being a parent?  Maybe that's what being a parent  means, that your perspective changes and you see things differently such that it really is no different than what I watched growing up, but now I'm not a kid any more.  I don't know.   I do know, as a parent who watched Saturday morning and after school cartoons when I was a kid, is that there is just a lot of crap out there, and for me it's not so much "whoa, don't let your kids watch television" but "wow, is there anything worth watching?"  And there is, you just have to find something you can ALL agree on.  I guess that's my point.  Since there is good stuff out there, why even bother with the crap at all?

But then again, this is also coming from someone who watches practically zero commercial/network television, so maybe that has something to do with it too.

Well, this has taken way too long to write, and I'm sure I've lost my main point completely and hopefully there are a few stray points sprinkled in so that this wasn't completely random and worthless.  If you've got any thoughts, I'd like to hear them, maybe it'll help me clarify what I was trying to say.

* My favorite being Slowpoke Rodriguez, who I'm sad to learn from the wikipedia article has had his best line edited out of updated versions of the episode.