Kids & Media: Under Siege On All Sides

We live in a time when kids aren’t allowed to have nice things. Not even a childhood.

I became a storytelling fan because of the stories I read and watched as a kid. (Video games as storytelling didn’t start until near my late teens/early adult period. Stories were just a blurb on the arcade cabinet or a page in a manual to explain why you were running from left to right shooting and hammering things or making a starship go pew pew.) TV, movies, comics, and novels were my go-tos at the time, and I enjoyed each of them for the different ways they could tell a story and ease of convenience. Back then your TV wasn’t fitting in your pocket. Not a real one, anyway. I would later be introduced to serials and audio dramas, partly through book & records and later just audio presentations. I’d watch cartoons and live-action material. And of course I was an avid reader, novels when I had time and comics when I didn’t. It was a wonderful time for someone who was just drawn to the power of storytelling.

Meanwhile today’s kids are getting the shaft. Stuff is still out there, but you have to track down and hope it will actually be good and not some psychologist/activist (you can be both and sadly there are too many) butcher job or written by someone who clearly doesn’t care about what they’re doing under the falsehood that kids will accept anything with bright colors and a song. Either they were never children or forgot their own childhoods.

Meanwhile, things I enjoyed as a kid are no longer kid-friendly, an attempt to show how mature the creators allegedly are. If I had been able to have a family the only way I could share the stuff I enjoyed as a kid with my kids would be show them the old stuff and hope they got into it, because the majority of not-stalgia and aged up properties by people using an old brand to push their new and unconnected crap is sadly also the majority of what’s coming out. The big problem is there isn’t just one group showing their hatred of kids and childhood. There are a bunch of groups to yell at for the declining state of kids media.

“Parent” groups and child therapists

This has been a threat almost as long as there has been kids media. I’m sure some group complained that The Prince & The Pauper taught kids how to lie or something. Fredrick Wertham, fueled by media snobbery, went after comics believing they were the cause of kids causing trouble and not the fact that their fathers died in a war as the country was just coming out of the worse economy still in our history. Jack Thomson tried the same thing with “violent video games”, and there’s no shortage of politicians happily capitalizing on these fears and fear mongers to get re-elected.

One of the most famous examples of adults coming to “save our children”, and the scariest phrase in politics in the 21st Century is “for the children”, is The Real Ghostbusters. ABC was doing well but they listened to a so-called marketing group specializing in “saving our children”. They told ABC that it would be better for Slimer and Peter to get along, that Slimer was popular enough for his own segments (I liked them but still…), and that Jeanine’s whole personality, faithfully translated to the cartoon, should be replaced with a more “motherly” instinct and even getting rid of her “scary” pointed glasses. The show failed almost as fast as those changes were made and today they’re the subject of ridicule even among the show’s staff. (There’s also Lorenzo Music being tossed out in favor of Dave Coulier, who was working on ABC’s Full House at the time, but that was Bill Murry’s fault. You can guess Garfield fan reaction when Murry voiced Music’s most popular character in live-action movies.)

The problem is, while shows should be monitored to make sure it’s safe for kids (save that for later), you also have to factor age groups and the fact that some kids can handle things others can’t at the same age. It’s the parents’ job to see what kids are watching and how it affects them, while kids show writers should be aware of potential issues. Instead you have these so-called “experts” (I wonder how many of them even have kids) coming in to clean up action shows, which may be why there are so few action shows for kids. And as I’ve discussed many times, just being drawings or animation doesn’t make it a kids product by nature. Fritz The Cat would both traumatize and bore kids at the same time. Watership Down contains rather graphic violence both to and by cute little bunny rabbits because nature is dangerous. The Looney Tunes aren’t exclusively for kids, and yet they edited that down and keep trying to cancel Speedy Gonzales and Pepe Le Pew.

Wetham and Thompson (and the various politicians and groups of their time) went after comics and video games respectively that were never intended for younger readers, not realizing (or caring) that adults also watch and play those things. This allowed one publisher to create the Comics Code to hurt a competitor who made not-for-kids horror comics. This also led to going after video games so bad the only reason they were played was to give Thompson the middle finger. Wertham just wanted to get rid of the new media type he thought was a “threat” to books while Thompson was just grandstanding for his own ego, like Anita Sarkissian after him, and Collective Shout today, who is just pushing their own militant feminist agenda. This leads to the next problem.

The Culture War

I try to avoid the activist nonsense whenever I can but it gets harder and harder. While we see evidence of pushing back, we still have Disney’s “not-so-secret gay agenda” where every tomboy is a lesbian and there has to be at least one or more gay couples whether it works for the story or not. The Proud Family went to agenda-driven stories versus the previous series where Penny had to learn a lesson for making a mistake and then making it worse. Now we get…well, heck, I can’t show you the clip on its own because the only copy I found doesn’t allow embedding. You can find plenty of videos debunking the “slaves built this country” nonsense, even by other black people.

Now I’m not here to discuss the culture war itself. That’s not what this site is about. How the culture war is affecting storytelling I can totally talk about, and it’s ruining stories. Or rather it’s ruining how we tell stories. Maybe you’re perfectly happy with the non-binary trans drag queen from da hood and think it’s good representation instead of a collection of one-note stereotypes pushed by lazy people so they can be as cool as Malcom X or some crap. Again, not the site for this discussion. The problem is when they think just having that character is enough. They don’t have to be interesting. The only struggle is convincing everyone else how awesome they already are rather than trying to become awesome. Their characters are boring, and that’s worse in kids TV than in adult TV. Adults can handle boring if you bring something else to the table. Kids cannot stand being bored, and you will lose them if your characters are boring in boring situations. Kids shows are not adult shows…but try telling that to the next bunch.

The Adultification Of Kids TV

I don’t mean subversive cartoons like you see on Comedy Central. Those are made for grown-ups (allegedly). I just got through saying earlier that something isn’t immediately for kids simply because it’s done with drawings or some form of animation. Anyone showing their kids Team America: World Police, Avenue Q, or The Happytime Murders, dark parodies of kids TV, is clearly a terrible parent. Maybe in their late teens, which is no longer a “kid”.

I mean taking a kids property or aspects of a kids show and making them for adults while claiming it’s still for kids. Kids don’t care about your fetishes (unless you can hide it well enough, as is claimed about the Totally Spies franchise), the people you hate (a crime Teen Titans Go! makes a lot by going after their critics), or your politics (see above). They only care about fun stories with characters they can root for or against. High Guardian Spice has been accused of being more for adults, using safe kids tropes but including storylines and scenes that only adults enjoy, sort of the polar opposite of Bluey or Rugrats, shows that have things for adults but were made for kids. (Not counting current Rugrats where they de-aged Suzie, got rid of Chuckie’s Asian stepsister, and made the feminist mom gay because “every tomboy’s a lesbian” doesn’t just extend to tomboys alone but anyone with enough tomboy traits.) The everything for meeeeeeeeeee crowd are happy to ruin something for kids because they hate working on them and want their resumes to look more grown-up. I’ll come back to that.

First I want to talk about the formerly kids properties that are now for adults. When Michael Bay’s Transformers first came out, I mentioned in passing during a conversation about it that I was disappointed the movie wasn’t kid friendly. Besides sexualizing Mikala Banes (not through dialog but simply by how the cinematography framed Megan Fox–compare the movie to a comic or novel adaptation that didn’t have the footage to work with, just the latest script draft), the robot designs were boring for adults, nevermind kids, while the humor would go over kids heads and bore them even further. The cursing didn’t help. Someone in the conversation responded “kids have too much stuff already”, and I knew this guy wasn’t worth talking to so I dropped it. He just hates kids.

Every Space Ghost adventure created in cartoons or comics up to the 2000s were made with kids in mind. It was a Saturday Morning show, and outside of Space Ghost: Coast To Coast and Cartoon Planet, which you can make the case are parodies for longtime fans and the former was never a kids show (Thundercats Roar failed in part because the parody was made for kids but used elements only familiar to fans of the original 1980s cartoon and not the 2011 reboot they might have seen, thus ticking off fans and losing kids) the media reflected that. Outside of appearances in Batman: The Brave & The Bold or Scooby-Doo Team-Up, proper all-ages fares, every 2000s Space Ghost story in comics was decidedly adult. Space Ghost finally gets an origin that involves his unborn child being ripped out of his dead wife while Jan and Jayce’s parents are eaten by Zorak’s people. Did it need to be that dark? No. Did the Scooby-Doo movie need evil Scrappy and references to drug use and Velma’s alleged lesbianism removed from the final movie? They shouldn’t have been there and they kept evil Scrappy.

I avoid fanfic where the writer just had to make something more mature, before we even get to the porn. They’re afraid to be seen working on a kids property, so they have to adultify it up. Snarky Jay on YouTube recently posted a video about how playing to that crowd hurt My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. I’ll let you watch that at your leisure. The fact that some of the more perverted and violent story styles have corrupted childhood favorites, and then get hit with some kind of self-insert stand-in (I hear the new Thundercats comic did both of those things AND joined the ranks of media killing or ruining the season two new characters) has led to things I’m not comfortable showing to a kid today, so those properties will not continue with the new generation. Don’t get me started on how New Doctor Who was never for kids, unlike the classic series that adults only followed out of nostalgia and having good enough stories that they sat with their kids. Can’t have that in today’s entertainment. Separating them means we don’t have to put effort because we “all” know…

“Kids will watch/read/play anything”

Kids are stupid. Just jangle some keys and they’re entertained, right? These “storytellers” don’t believe they need to put any effort into their stories, and with the parent groups from earlier breathing down their necks to sanitize everything, thus making it boring, they have less incentive. Kids are smarter than you think. They know when they’re being talked down to, but they can ignore your show if they want, even if the parents are making them watch it. It’s just an excuse to be lazy, or gets used in current internet arguments. “This is a terrible product.” “It’s for kids. It doesn’t have to be good.” When you hate kids, you don’t have to care about giving them anything worthwhile. I guess they never did when they were kids and want to pass the suffering to the next generation, which they already hate for existing.

And that brings us full circle with the last problem, a culmination of all the previous problems:

The Corporate Mindset

As more and more media studios get bought out and consolidated the quality of the work goes down. Disney and Warner Brothers don’t care about the comics, because they aren’t the media that matter. One of the things that killed Saturday morning were the networks being tired of dealing with parent groups and the other “for the children” groups, outsourcing their SatAM line-ups to other networks but still airing on their platform until even that was too much because the local channels wanted more time for infomercials and the networks wanted more weekend sports and newsmagazine shows. Now the only kids shows on regular television are forced there by the E/I (Entertainment/Information) “edutainment” shows forced on them by the FCC, a rule that might as well go away because most kids aren’t even watching them anymore. They went places where kids entertainment is still entertaining.

All the “corpos” care about is profit and marketing. They listen to charts over the audience when it comes to grown-ups and they like grown-ups(‘ money). Kids only have money when the parents give them some, so they don’t care about kids. Adults want this property for them? Why not? We’ll make more money off of them and make some half-assed attempt at a kids show or game or toyline or comic and pretend we still care about them. It won’t have any effort because the activists, the lazy, and the “I don’t want this kiddie crap on my resume” types among the creators are only doing it for the paycheck, and they don’t have nearly the budget the adult shows are getting. Unless it comes from Nintendo directly, how many kids video games do you know of, and are they any good to kids? Most of what’s out there is either targeting hard corp gamers or a victim of the culture war. Name me a kids comic that doesn’t suck. Name me a kids comic at all, even when the property was based on a former kids property. All-ages work? Can’t have kids and adults like the same thing because the current culture (not even the sociopolitical culture war) looks down on that kind of media and doesn’t believe a mature adult should want to see it. Ignoring the very grown-up jobs they have to afford all of that.

So nobody is holding kids media to a high standard. Nobody wants to make kids media, at least not for kids. “They play video games now.” What video games? Minecraft maybe but even Roblox has games that aren’t for kids…and that’s ignoring the current controversy involving child predators on the service. Existing kids properties are kept for the adults as “nostalgia” and modern stuff based on those properties are made for the kids who grew up with it. As I’ve said before, Transformers isn’t a property for 80s kids exclusively. It was made in the 1980s for kids. Anything new is bland, boring, or secretly made for adults who can’t handle their feelings being hurt but want to push social messages behind the back of the parents who aren’t paying attention to what their kids watch. If something does relaunch for kids it’s a shadow of its former self to be lazy and “inoffensive”.

Except you’re offending kids’ intelligence. No wonder they aren’t watching. Kids like to be treated like their smart, too. They just don’t know the world yet. And with what’s coming out for them now, they may not want to.