20 years would be culturally terrible. That would make it so just around the time your kids are old enough for you to introduce them to the great comics, cartoons, movies, music, and books of your childhood it would enter the public domain and become widely used in advertising and low budget productions. You are not going to be able to share the magic of, say, Calvin & Hobbes, with your kids if your kids have already been saturated by those characters as TV pitchmen for toys and junk food.
My kid was complaining that while some of the cultural touchstones I introduced them to were interesting and enjoyable, I gave them a very unrealistic impression of how often they would find people who understood the references.
I'm hoping that changes when they go to college and meet more alpha nerds. But I became a Monty Python fan, for instance, when it was in its second life, and at the time it felt inevitable that it would have a third. It has aged less well than I thought. The early 70's and early 90's are much closer together philosophically and chronologically than the early 90's and the 20's. Now you're lucky if they have seen the Holy Grail, and nobody gets Parrot Sketch or Lumberjack references. And even switching from Cheese Shop to Wallace And Grommit references is out of date.
Archie, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Asterix, Tintin... Old comics, from the 1980's or earlier are pretty safe. These days the audience is 15+ guys. Soft porn and hardcore violence. Why would he take his 7 year old daughter and 5 year old son to look at that?
For kids that young seeing is believing. My nephew at 6 watched Star Wars over Christmas. You explain that it isn't real, they are actors in a play, playing characters - he's been in several plays himself - and then later on he says 'but it must be real, because how could they make a whole planet?'.
Yup, I still feel bad that the one thing I asked my parents for when they visited the US when I was a kid was for a Calvin and Hobbes t-shirt. I knew nothing about Bill Waterson's stance on licensing at the time and my poor parents spent hours in NYC looking for a t-shirt till they finally found a bootlegged t-shirt.
I can't wait to share my entire set with my kids but I'm waiting for them to mature a bit more before getting them into it since a lot of the humor is lost in very young kids.
I imagine this greatly depends on the age of the kids and their immediate friend groups. A very young child generally isn't going to care or even understand some movie or show is old or not, everything in life is new to them.
and i'm sure the generation before us bemoans the destruction of culture in the face of youtube and tiktok and instagram and whatnot. my baby sister grew up on teletubbies, which i regarded as vile trash inferior to my sesame street. she turned out more than fine - its quite safe to say she's better socially adjusted than I am.
i think humanity will always have some shared myths and legends that we'll all like to share and i'm certainly hoping that lives on. but there's a lot of room for net new. and you just need to see the delight in a kids' face once - when you incorporate a suggestion by them into a story, or a drawing, or literally whatever - to want to give that joy to them again and again.
theres room for net new, and room for shared history. not zero sum here.
Until you try watching an episode as an adult and realize it was complete and utter shlock.
That's not to say good kids' stuff doesn't exist, but I see nothing wrong with just murdering the whole model of Media-Driven Consumption, from food to toys to fashion, in its sleep. With a knife.
It's bad, and society should feel bad for allowing it.
When she gets older, if you let her watch Cartoon Network, there's quite a bit of content with zero educational or moral value. In fact, the latest incarnation of Teen Titans seems to be written by people my age (40) _for_ people my age. With tons of references to 80s culture that the kids would never get.
I disagree here. Modern kids shows are much more sophisticated than the rubbish we watched in the 80's and 90's. Take something with a remake like voltron or thundercats to eliminate the nostalgia factor and watch them back to back, the difference is vast.
I guess I should've been clearer about the age/context here. There's a period when they'll watch some show on repeat a hundred times. Or a generic cartoon - it doesn't matter when it was produced.
Sure, it will start shifting once they want to watch something their peers watch. But at the time parents choose the media, how would they even know it's not the latest production, or some mix of old/new?
Peppa pig started in 2004. At the time kids are interested in it, if you show them ep 2, will they say "this is not from series 6 from 2019"?
I don't care for new TV shows, but I sometimes wonder about cutting kids off from a source of pop-culture for their generation. It may not seem like it to us, but for them, the crap that's on now will be the stuff they watch on Cartoon Network in 20 years and laugh about or turn into surreal parodies.
And how many animated series grow to a comfortable “mom and pop” level and last longer than 25 years? Your comparison between the two is frankly baffling to me.
The world has changed so much since then. I am only 22 so I think we are pretty much the same age. Kids don't even watch cartoon now. They play games on ipad and make vine videos...
I wonder what the author would say if he would view now a couple of the cartoons he saw as a child. When I stumbled upon an old cartoon I was seeing I was kind of amazed/put-off by how stupid it felt and how many "bad messages" (according to my standard now) I would see.
I do not have much experience with the topic but my impression is that toddlers/kids experience things quite differently (ex: liking to see the same cartoon N times, with N rather large) so we should be careful when trying to draw conclusions about good and bad.
I feel like this is going to result in a generation of adults with absolutely awful taste. Imagine if your favourite childhood show was, like, a poorly animated spiderman-driving-a-car video on YouTube.
That’s the point, though. It would be more famous except that there’s a seemingly endless amount of money promoting corporate-owned media. Things might be different if the media kids take in is more organic and they might be more encouraged to contribute to writing and art if the things they grew up on weren’t encumbered by copyright.
Another thing to note also is that kids had stories long before Disney was making VHS tapes and before we had Scholastic pumping out picture books. It’s not like we as humans are incapable of creating without a monetary incentive.
I'd be curious to read any studies on child psychology with respect to how children would respond to something like Fred Rogers today. As in, would a child today be disinterested in the slow pace of that format and want to consume other media?
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