Bad Cartoons Make Bad Citizens

Bad cartoons tend to make bad citizens. And my generation suffered from the worst cartoons of all. Pity the poor male children of Generation X: there we sat, on Saturday mornings in the '70s and early '80s, clutching our bowls of Count Chocula and enduring the soul-sucking monotony of ugly Filmation cartoons populated by heroes who fought without actually fighting. You could watch cartoons for hours and never see a superhero actually sock a supervillain in the gut, or a commando pump hot lead into a live non-robot terrorist, or a ranger thrust a pointy-sharp arrow into some dragon's malevolent guts. Preachy mini-sermons abounded, though; the Super Friends couldn't lay a gloved fist on Lex Luthor, but they could sure manhandle those sugary in-between-meals snacks. ("Super Friends," they called them, instead of the Justice League. The difference tells you everything you need to know about the seventies.)

Consequently, we Gen Xers grew up achingly bereft of simulated mayhem and destruction. We turned to cap guns, stick fights, and dodgeball to meet our aggressive needs, but it wasn't the same. We craved red meat, but our cartoons served up tofu.

I always assumed that the threat of litigation had driven violence from Saturday morning. After all, if you show Superman frying a supervillain with his heat vision on Saturday morning, then, sure enough, some idiot kid in Dubuque will fry his little brother with heat vision one fine Saturday afternoon, and then everyone loses except the lawyers. But I was wrong. Federal regulators, rather than nervous trial attorneys, wussified Saturday morning TV in the early seventies. Uncle Sam made our cartoons insipid, in the hope that a nice stiff dose of cultural chloroform would deaden our proto-male violent tendencies and transform us all into prissy poindexters who would eat our vegetables, sit still in our seats, and eventually vote for French-speaking politicians.

That same castrating impulse informs much of our society's approach to violence among teens. God help the poor kid who puts a butter knife in his lunchbox, if he attends a school with a zero tolerance weapons policy. If you squirm in class too often, mouth off too regularly, or act like a boy during mandatory androgyny intervals, expect Uncle Ritalin to move in for a permanent stay in the mischief-making corners of your mind, courtesy of America's peerless public school system. Guns? Behold the spectacle of Rosie O'Donnell at the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, exhorting kids to "never touch a gun," lest they get bullet cooties or something. And what about violent video games like Grand Theft Auto: Vice City? That game alone is surely responsible for the surge in motor-scooter car-jackings and golf-club assaults on prostitutes, committed by thugs who dress like Ralph Lauren and talk like Ray Liotta.

In each case, the real or proposed government "solution" is the same: outlaw the offending "violent" matter or regulate it to death. And in each case, the result is the same: violence, the forbidden fruit, is marginalized and thus glamorized, and young men start to suspect that civilized behavior is for girls. Thus the state ties itself in knots trying to fight human nature.

The fight against teen violence often degenerates into a proxy war against young men. Don your bureaucrat-colored glasses and behold teenage males: surly, under-socialized, and enamored of physical mayhem, they're a bad influence on the other genders, and probably ought to be outlawed. No one worries about hordes of marauding teenaged girls holding up 7-11s and shooting up high schools. The problem is boys, says the state; crush the social origins of their boyishness, and solve the problem.

Little boys are aggressive, not because their cartoons make them so, but because their Creator saturated them in testosterone. Is ham-fisted state-sponsored nannying the only way to make citizens out of the little hooligans?

One author has a better idea. In his superb and unfairly overlooked 2002 book, Killing Monsters, former comic book author Gerard Jones proposes that society needs an entirely different approach to the issue of violence in children's entertainment. He suggests that children respond strongly to violent entertainment because the violence mirrors their own feelings of aggression -- and those feelings of aggression are legitimate and worthy of expression. Rather than struggling hopelessly to eliminate childhood aggression, we should teach children to harness and employ aggressive feelings in socially useful ways.

Innumerable examples confirm Jones' point. Consider guns again. Each year, thousands of teenagers learn to employ deadly assault weapons for the explicit purpose of killing people in the most efficient way possible. It's called basic training -- and basic rifle marksmanship is part of basic training for every branch of the military. Does that training and exposure to weapons make teenagers criminals? Obviously not. The discipline attached to that training allows soldiers to use rifles in the patriotic defense of their nation and its values. If our society struggles with teen violence, perhaps the fault lies not with our guns but with the inadequate discipline and malnourished moral imaginations of the teens holding them.

Consider also violent video games. According to Jones, most children know perfectly well that video games aren't reality. Kids understand video games for what they are: caricatured representations of a mock-reality, not reality itself. It's true that some notorious teen monsters (like Klebold and Harris from the Columbine tragedy) enjoyed violent shooting games - but so do most teenaged boys. Most likely those savage young men turned to video games as an outlet for the chaotic impulses that they could not control. Perhaps we should be grateful for games that transform adolescent rage into harmless electronic depictions on a screen. Perhaps transformation can succeed where suppression fails.

Male teenage aggression is a fact, not a problem. And that fact is an embarrassing reminder that sex differences don't permit us to choose everything about ourselves, or about our children. If the aggression of boys is scandalous, then it's easy to see why society is tempted to pretend that teachers and bureaucrats can bind the boyish heart with rules and restrictions. But if we accept that sex differences are something to be celebrated, not denied, then we can get back to the age-old task of taming - but not breaking - the male spirit. If the government wants to help this process, it could start by butting out. Raising men is a job for men, not bureaucrats.

Despite our bad cartoons and the spineless regulators who required them, my generation is finding its way. We produced Pat Tillman. We produced the brave men and women keeping Iraq safe. And we produced Batman, Superman, and Justice League cartoons wherein heroes pound the snot out of bad guys, and damn the FCC. Our cartoons have learned to use violence to promote the greater good. Perhaps we've learned that lesson, too.

Again I've got "all" the Tom & Jerry cartoons on laserdisc. They released several boxed sets: all the Hanna Barbera shorts for MGM, Chuck Jones shorts for MGM. These came with clips from movies that also featured Tom & Jerry.

They did not release the Gene Deitch 1960s Tom & Jerrys.

What is on DVD? EVERYTHING? Any bonus footage? Any widescreen (they did release widescreen shorts to laserdisc). Do they break them up by director or mix them together?

I've got some of these things on laserdisc and while I could see getting them on DVD, I'd rather get things on DVD that I don't already have. DVD is not the "final" format (there will be higher definition formats with better compression). I know that some of this stuff will be reissued again.

I was able to get the Jetsons season one for $35 new (postage paid). List is something like $65.

Does anyone have the Flintstones DVD set? What sort of bonus materials does it have? Does it have the Winston cigarettes commercials? The laserdisc boxed set does but I haven't opened it (I may still sell it although I think it has some exclusive material). It's easier to sell it sealed (certainly I could get more money).

It is mind boggling some of the things that got officially released with the modern corporate mindset controlling things.

Don't blame THIS on Al Capp:

This is a more appropriate roll...

Shmoo (not Schmoo) Facts & Info

Cartoonist Al Capp was already world-famous and a millionaire in 1948 when he introduced an armless pear-shaped character called the Shmoo into his daily "Li'l Abner" strip. The unusual creature loved humans.
A Shmoo laid eggs and bottles of Grade A milk in an instant, and would gladly die and change itself into a sizzling steak if its owner merely looked at it hungrily. Its skin was fine leather, its eyes made perfect buttons and even its whiskers made excellent toothpicks. Shmoos multiplied much faster than rabbits, so owning a pair of Shmoos meant that any family was self-sufficient.
Of course the Shmoos proved too good for humanity's sake and therein was the basis for Capp's ultimate (and tragic) satire. But a remarkable phenomenon occurred during the telling of his tale.
Virtually overnight, -as a LIFE magazine headline put it- the "U.S. Becomes Shmoo-struck!" The character's remarkable success catapulted Capp to an all-new level of wealth and fame. It is difficult, fifty years later, to convey to new generations the profound impact the lovable Shmoo had on American culture. The following facts may help . . .
• Close to one hundred licensed Shmoo products from seventy-five different manufacturers were produced in less than a year, some of which sold five million units each. (Sources: Newsweek 9-5-49 and Editor & Publisher 7-16-49)
• The Shmoo was an unprecedented media and merchandise phenomenon (1948-52). America went Shmoo-crazy. There had never previously been anything like it. Comparisons to contemporary cultural phenomena are inevitable. But modern crazes are almost always due to massive marketing campaigns by large media corporations, and are generally aimed at the youth market. The Shmoo phenomenon arose immediately, spontaneously and solely from cartoonist Al Capp's daily comic strip (something that simply wouldn't happen today) and it appealed widely to Americans of all ages.
• Forty million people read the original 1948 Shmoo story (combined circulation of the 500+ daily newspapers carrying "Li'l Abner"). And Capp's already considerable readership roughly doubled following the overwhelming success of the Shmoo.
• Unprecedented serious attention. When Simon & Shuster published The Life & Times of The Shmoo in 1948, it was reviewed coast to coast alongside Dwight Eisenhower's Crusade in Europe (the other big book at that moment in time). The S&S Shmoo collection was the first cartoon book to achieve serious literary attention.
• Simon & Shuster sold 700,000 copies of its Life & Times of the Shmoo in the first year of publication alone, an undisputed best seller.
• Berlin Airlift. Shmoos were air-dropped to hungry Berliners by America's 17th Military Airport Squadron during the Soviet Union's tense blockade of West Berlin in 1948. "When the candy-chocked Shmoos were dropped a near-riot resulted." –Newsweek 9-5-49 (and 10-11-48).
• Time cover. The Shmoos and Capp made the cover of Time magazine (11-6-50). They also garnered nearly a full page (under "Economics") in the 8-13-48 International section of Time and Time's "The Press" section on 5-23-49. Similar major articles ran in Newsweek, Life, New Republic and countless other publications and newspapers.
• Shmoos invade the Presidential election. During the 1948 Presidential campaign, Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey accused incumbent Harry S. Truman of "promising everything including the Shmoo!" (Reported in Newsweek 9-5-48).
• A Shmoo Savings Bond was issued by the U.S. Treasury Department in 1949! The valid document was colorfully illustrated with Capp's character, and promoted by the U.S. Government with a $16 million dollar multimedia advertising budget. Al Capp accompanied President Truman at the bond's unveiling ceremony.
• During its first year Shmoo merchandise generated over $25,000,000 in sales (in 1948 dollars)!
The Shmoo continues to garner attention and prove collectible more than a half century after its debut. In the past two years alone a book from Overlook Press has been published in hard and softcover, Dark Horse Comics has produced a new Shmoo statue, button and collectible tin. Articles on the Shmoo have appeared in Pages (10-02), Toy Stories 2003 Annual, Salon.com, newsarama.com and elsewhere. Russian "nesting" Shmoos, a soft vinyl Shmoo, and a desktop CD featuring all-new Shmoo animation are in the works for the coming year.
-Denis Kitchen, © 2004

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