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Sesame Street DVD Deemed Adult-Only Entertainment
theodp writes "The earliest episodes of Sesame Street are being made available on DVD, but the NYT notes Volumes 1 and 2 carry a rather strange warning: 'These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child.' So why are they unsuitable for toddlers in 2007? Well, in the parody 'Monsterpiece Theater,' Alistair Cookie — played by Cookie Monster — used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. 'That modeled the wrong behavior,' explained a Sesame Street executive producer, adding that 'we might not be able to create a character like Oscar [the Grouch] now.'"
I...um.....*ahem*.......well......ACK!
I honestly do not even know where to begin. My God! This is absolute madness.... political correctness run amok and almost even worse than the religious right's labeling of Bert and Ernie as homosexuals. As one who leans left particularly after the last six years, this sort of thing is a shock back to more centrist practicality and honesty. Shame on the current producers for corrupting the original vision of Sesame Street and creating revisionist history. Oscar the Grouch was *grouchy*, as advertised. So what? Cookie Monster ate the pipe.... so what? It is as it was a vision of the time and a reflection on the changing times of a decade from the 60's to the 70's.
I don't have a problem with things changing, rather I revel in it. However, it makes me sad to see people label what made us who we are unacceptable to todays youth. Parents are far too restrictive with what their kids do, afraid to let them get dirty by playing outside, indoctrinating them with germaphobia from the earliest age, relabeling childrens characters as dangerous pedophiles or attempting to smear them with homosexual labels. The things we used to do as kids would likely get us arrested these days (12 year olds playing with homemade fireworks, carrying shotguns down the street and out to the field to go hunting, swinging from ropes into swimming holes infested with all manner of dangerous wildlife and more).
I don't know what that says of our society but kids watching Sesame Street was just part of the culture and are we now going to be afraid of who we are?
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They should label _all_ DVDs as adult-only, as the Cookie Monster always was an anxious overeater, and that's also a bad role model, I suppose.
Besides, most monsters were naked, if I remember it correctly. And even if you can forgive that in a furry monster, what about a frog?
I guess we have to look again to Sesame Street, seeing the videos backwards if needed. Probably we'll find much evil lurking there, that probably could go a long way to explain why we are so fucked up as grown-ups. Hmmm... perhaps there is material there for a good lawsuit.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Values have changed. Cartoons from the 1930's to the 1960's are hard to find in their original incarnations because of violence and racial insensitivity.
It's only a matter of time before the Cookie Monster becomes the Carrot Stick and Broccoli Floret Monster, Big Bird becomes Avian American of Special Stature, and Oscar the Grouch becomes Differently Tempered Oscar with Alternate Housing Preferences. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
And the pussification of America continues.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Yes
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
Accidents happen. With 300 million people in America, a 1 in 1 million chance hits 300 people a year. Each year a few children tragically drown in pools, so we've scared parents about pools, and criminalized pools (in terms of liability) without fences and fences around fences. Every child's death is a tragedy, but locking up parents that make decisions that we don't like has done far more damage than good.
Parents told that a small spanking is child abuse. Children with working single mothers going home to an empty house is an unfortunately economic reality, but if some accident happens, we arrest the parent for child endangerment.
Bad things can happen, but the modern small family size combined with an overzealous judiciary and Departments of Child Services has resulted where we want to criminalize anything going wrong.
Instead of blaming parents, look at a legal culture that expects nothing bad to happen to a child and determines a person's entire worth on the success of their children. When families with children had 4-5 children, you expected most to come out alright but occasionally something bad happens. In families of 1-2 children, anything bad is a catastrophe.
Far more harm is being done to children by overprotection than the risks of life. But its hard to blame parents when if they get hit with the 1 in a million accident (that affects dozens of children a year), they can go to jail and have their other children taken away from them.
Let's see, woman that don't breastfeed are told that they endanger their children. Women that do may be criminally charged if they don't follow the social standard in the US... A poor woman was jailed because she couldn't see a Doctor and didn't realize that the child was malnourished from breast-feeding (mathematically rare, but real and if you criminalize 2% of all women)... The breast-feeding ones make the headlines, but the push towards criminalizing parents if kids do anything wrong, including pranks and petty vandalism add up. It's hard to be a parent, because your child is a natural explorer and risk taker, and you normally just have to make sure no unreasonable danger is present. However, if a child falls and hurts himself, you can be sure that child services will show up and decide that anything you failed to do to "child-proof" your home (as if children aren't a natural part of the home) is criminal neglect, it's hard to put the fault entirely on parents.
Being a parent in today's age is really tough, because in the back of your mind IS busybodies that will decide that you are a negligent parent for letting your child see something that is a natural part of life. Parents have been condemned/charged if the child sees them engage in sexual acts, while co-sleeping is a natural if unpopular approach to parenting. These choices are all reasonable, whether I would make them for my child or not, but the criminalization of anything outside the norm for parenting takes some of the fun out of it.
It's not the parents... it's the system of do-gooders that make life hell on parents.
Right now the winners are the PC nanny-staters
"PC nanny staters" is usually a codeword used by the American right to complain about the American left.
But this isn't a left-vs-right issue. The right wing in the US has its very own "political correctness" (namely, conformance with Christian ideals) and its very own "nanny state" policies (ranging from school prayer to extrajudicial renditions).
So, if you want to contribute to this debate, why don't you start by avoiding slogans created by one party to smear the other one? Both the Democrats and the Republicans are to blame for this bullshit.
His speech on political correctness, delivered 16 February 1999, Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall, Harvard University Law School:
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/charltonhestonculturalwar.htm
*I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. "My Daddy," he said, "pretends to be people." There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling re-painted I'll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I'm never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I'm the guy.
As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: if my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty, your own freedom of thought, your own compass for what is right.*
Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure."
Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what lives in your heart. I'm sure you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you, the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.
Let me back up a little. About a year or two ago, I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms of American citizens. I ran for office. I was elected, and now I serve. I serve as a moving target for the media who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a "brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know, I'm pretty old, but I sure Lord ain't senile.
As I've stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are -- are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain accepted thoughts and speech are mandated.
For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr. King in 1963 -- and long before Hollywood found it acceptable, I may say. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist.
I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life -- throughout my whole career. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe.
I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out the innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite.
Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution I'm talking about, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.
From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind like that. You are using language not authorized for public consumption."
But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys -- subjects bound to the British crown.
In his book, "The End of Sanity," Martin Gross writes that
"blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly twisted on us --
You could quote the paragraph in question and put it in italics.
The kids were all heroic -- all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric. Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn't like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do. Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in. He was the one thing I really didn't like about the show.
So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there? Answer: I had to.
As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens' television. We call them "parents groups," although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents. Study them and you'll find a wide array of agendum at work...and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.
Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield. Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain "pro-social" morals in our shows. At the time, the dominant "pro-social" moral was as follows: The group is always right...the complainer is always wrong.
This was the message of way too many eighties' cartoon shows. If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them. There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle. Each week, whichever member of the gang didn't get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.
We were forced to insert this "lesson" in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, "I don't want to do that" and paying for his social recalcitrance. I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson. I don't believe you should always go along with the group. What about thinking for yourself? What about developing your own personality and viewpoint? What about doing things because you decide they're the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?
We weren't allowed to teach any of that. We had to teach kids to join gangs. And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.
What a stupid thing to teach children.
Now, I won't make the leap to charge that gang activity, of the Crips and Bloods variety, increased on account of these programs. That influential, I don't believe a cartoon show could ever be. I just think that "pro-social" message was bogus and ill-conceived. End of confession.