. . Aint no Skirt on RaceBannon!!
Posted on 05/27/2004 7:25:15 AM PDT by qam1
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.
The head of ACT was made to sit down and watch some of these castrated cartoons from the 70s. She (I believe it was a woman) commented that they weren't very entertaining but at least they weren't offensive to her.
Same with the gun grabbers. It may not make violent crime go away but they feel safer knowing that people won't be taking the law into their own hands. Of course, that "law" is Constitutionally protected in your hands.
. . Aint no Skirt on RaceBannon!!
My oldest son was raised with the "contraversial violence" of Power Rangers in the early 90's - as a teen now, he's better adjusted than some other kids I know. (and growing into a fine Republican)
My toddler is now being raised with Justice League (minus Aquaman). I wish I had a digital camera to catch him running around the house yesterday in his Spiderman undies, swimming goggles, and a red cape professing to be Batman. Y'all here woulda loved it....Boys need their SUPERHEROES!
There's my two-cents.:-)
. . I got your June Cleaver right here, Baby!!
Then again Mike Vraney got his start by bootlegging everything (including the catalog) that Sinister Cinema released.
theyre the same guy.
Any of those old archival things that got redone in the 70s and 80s got redone wimpy... Actually I should probably drop that back to the 60s because of Batman, he was a mean nasty person before the TV show which then turned around and ruined the comic books, that's why real Batman fans love Frank Miller, he brought back the terror of the night.
The H&B's are some of the best animation EVER. The Chuck Jones (where he actually directed) are some of my favorites, though.
They did not release the Gene Deitch 1960s Tom & Jerrys.
Oh, the horror, the horror.......some of the WORST cartoons of all time.
The H&B's are some of the best animation EVER. The Chuck Jones (where he actually directed) are some of my favorites, though.
They did not release the Gene Deitch 1960s Tom & Jerrys.
Oh, the horror, the horror.......some of the WORST cartoons of all time.
No doubt......
But perhaps YOU can answer this question....Why did Johnny look a lot more like Race than Dr. Quest? What's the story behind THAT? :-)
The first set of Rocky & Bullwinkles is excellent. The stories ran for many episodes. When Disney released these in the 1990s, they truncated the stories down. This is the full run.
My quibbles with the set are that they don't use the original titles (there is some computer substitution in the title) and a few other things. Better than any "second" option (none).
Eventually I will own all of the old tv shows and shorts that I want to see.
Another thing is collecting up cds of old time radio (I've got CDs of public domain shows where people loaded them up with a hundred episodes recorded as mp3s).
Half the time I have the tv on, it's background noise anyway and I am not watching what is on (just listening). Some say this is why Police Squad worked in the movies but not on tv (you had to be watching to see all the visual gags).
LOL!!! Did you see that MTV2 has been showing Beavis and Butthead again? I was channel-surfing recently, and I saw it on. It brought back some old memories of when I was an early teenager. I finally got to see my favorite episode when Beavis becomes Cornholio in a coffee bar.
Gene Deitch was an Eastern European cartoonist. His drawings graced the cover of American jazz magazines. His Tom & Jerry shorts may not be to your taste but they are far better than the "let's be friends" 1970s tv Tom & Jerry cartoons with the "Oh-no!" nasal narration.
Oh, come on...We had 'Ultraman' and 'Johnny Sokko,' and they made the same criticisms, and I don't think I'm quite scarred for the experience...
Do they show the music video clips or just the cartoons? Half the show was them trashing what MTV claimed was "hip" and the other half was showing cool videos that MTV would never air otherwise (the Cramps, Dick Dale, Lou Reed...) with more comments from Beavis and Butthead.
I'd give credit to Neal Adams, personally.
Okay, true. Nothing is worse than H&B '70s TV animation.
Dark Knight Returns is generally credited in geek circles with the rebirth of the probably not sane Batman. Certainly Neal deserves credit for bringing back a gritty art style for Batman, but as an illustrator and not a writer what Adams could do to the Batman character was limited (the illustrator can't have Batman admit he should have killed the Joker years ago for instance). Like all things in collabertaive media (which comics generally are) credit should be shared though, good catch.
They show the whole thing, with the music video clip! "Breaking the law, breaking the law!" ;-)
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