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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.'"
From the we-must-censor-the-past department...
What about the guy in 101 Dalmations? He's smoking his pipe in almost every scene. I don't really pay much attention to Disney cartoons, maybe they have released a "special edition" that removes the pipe?
Is why my children were never able to become interested in Sesame Street - while as a 5-year-old in the late-sixties, I loved it.
In subtle ways, it began to condescend and pander. The muppets, in particular, suffered from the loss of Kermit and Henson.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I also maintain that the continued escalation of restrictions on youth behavior is THE major cause of youth violence today. Children and Teens in my Grandparent's time, and my parents time routinely engaged in (nonviolent, but dangerous) behavior and received mostly slaps on the wrist (sometimes literally!). Nowadays, similar behavior results in prolonged probation and additional punishments at best, and Jail Time (in adult facilities!) at worst. And people are astonished with teens today crack and start shooting up their schools! Not to mention record juvenile suicide rates and other (in my opinion clear) indications of severe societal issues.
I'm skeptical that this is a left-right issue.
..?
Parents on the right are just as restrictive as the parents on the left. My friend was raised conservative Christian, and his parents wouldn't let him read or see science fiction or fantasy. I don't see any kids playing in the streets, ever, republican or otherwise.
What are the causes behind this? Is it a sue-happy society? Is it that we're just all just perfectly content to use the Internet? Or, did we somehow just become afraid of other people, and don't know how to act around them? Is it some motion that happened in psychology, that led people to think a certain thing? Is it a media effect, where a problem in one place is broadcast everywhere, and then we go into lockdown everywhere? Is it risk-aversion, no matter how small (erroring "slightly" in favor of too much caution, as repeated policy)
What?
Wikipedia states that they cut about a minute out of the "Big Bird in China" DVD where Big Bird goes around asking if anyone speaks American...
Monstar L
I found a web site with detailed photos of changes done to Richard Scary illustrated children's books. It was fairly minor, but I consider it political correctness run amok in most instances (changes to gender roles, elimination of smoking, etc).
I've made an effort to find used children's books where I can, particularly pre-1970s, as these are unlikely to have been edited and also tend to show a wider range of behaviors and experiences (such as shooting & hunting and other "dangerous" behavior).
One of the few bright spots have been the original Curious George books; we've bought them new and they still show George and/or the Man in The Yellow Hat smoking a pipe. We've bought some of the new ones illustrated in the style of curious George and the only thing that seems to be altered are more non-white characters, which occasionally seem out of place in an apparently 1940s America.
Although in "Curious George at the Baseball Game" there's what I presume is an unintentionally ironic bit of multiculturalism -- George wreaks havoc at a ballgame and gets in trouble with a TV camera woman. She chases him and he hides, and then finds a lost little black boy. The TV camera woman catches them and then realizes the boy is lost and puts their images on the Jumbotron.
The irony is in the caption on the Jumbotron reads "IS THIS YOU BOY OR YOUR MONKEY?", with both George and the boy on the screen. A racist wouldn't have written it better on purpose.
You'd think that.. but then I learned by way of my much younger cousin that sometimes that ends up being the result and not the cause. As a young child his mother and father were both over protective, he always wanted to go outside and play but they were afraid of him being hurt, getting sick, etc. He developed a lot of allergies and had skin conditions due to not developing resistance to every day things. His skin and allergies have cleared up, but his desire to go out into the world has effectively been quashed. He now always wants to stay inside, play video games, watch tv, etc.
One particularly funny exchange between PeeWee and Cowboy Curtis (Laurence Fishburne) when Cowboy Curtis needs new boots.
... (long pause) ... big boots!
PeeWee: Gee, Cowboy Curtis, you sure have big feet.
Curtis: Well, you know what they say, PeeWee. Big feet
"Three great powers rule the world: greed, fear, and stupidity." -- Mark Twain.
I will add that the bad decisions of stupid people have a directly harmful impact on everyone around them (stupid or otherwise). So, I pass judgment on the stupid, and offer then little sympathy.
One last point: simply believing one's self to be intelligent doesn't make one intelligent. Active and ongoing mental exercise, and study, make one intelligent. Unfortunately, these things are not popular in our culture.
So true about the way that kids are raised these days, and it's one of my pet peeves. The sensationalist media (among other things) has made most parents very fearful of all kinds of horrible things that might happen if their kids are allowed out of their padded rooms and tightly-supervised activities. Television news is the worst; if anything nasty happens anywhere, they'll make it seem like it's happening right next door and all around you, every day. People want to think of themselves as good parents and especially want to appear to others like they are, but in order to achieve that label you have to submit to the general hysteria. So, kids are trotted from one adult-organized activity to the next, and seldom get the opportunity for spontaneous, inventive play with their peers.
Reminds me of a report on a local TV news programs a few years ago on Halloween. A reporter was interviewing a cop at a police station where candy was being x-rayed for the usual pins, needles, razor blades, etc. The gist of the report was that you're taking a big chance if you don't bring your kid's candy in for this scanning. So the reporter finally asks how much of this junk they find on a typical Halloween, and the cop had to reply that, in fact, they'd never found a single foreign object in any piece of candy in the 15 or 20 years that they'd performed this service. But, of course there's always a first time and you can't be too careful.
I'm glad I grew up when I did, when kids could be kids.
"Protect the children from everything, then send them to Iraq to die.
I've wondered throughout my military career if society isn't setting some of its young people up for PTSD by smothering them instead of expecting them to learn and cope.
Anyone under 30 with some feedback?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Well, one might even wonder if that is happening in the services now as well... For instance, I was absolutely stunned to see that ladders are now being used to *help* recruits out of the backs of trucks. The recruits line up, hand their weapon to someone already on the ground and step out of the back of the truck and down the ladder. What happened to securing your weapon and hopping out of the back? Learn how to jump Marine!
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Seriously, what this "warning label" is really doing is sending a message to the millions of kids-now-adults who grew up with Sesame Street in the 70s: "we have analyzed what this stuff did to you and it ain't pretty." (even if they didn't do the analysis -- which I doubt they did -- that's still the undertone). Gee, thanks! On that note, I can say that gobbling tobacco pipes is really not as uncomfortable as it looks. This generation's award-winning children's programming is the next's NC-17 controversy.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
PeeWee's Playhouse was the most bizarre and subversive television program ever made by anybody, save perhaps for Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's a pitty Rueben's committed career suicide, because that show as the most brilliant half-hour acid trip in history. I'm not precisely sure how it ever got on the air, particularly on Saturday mornings amongst all the 22 minute advertisements for toys (better known as the Saturday morning cartoon). I was in my late teens when it was on, and I have a suspicion that a healthy chunk of the audience was 16 years or older.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What makes you think that Christianity is a conservative religion? Because it's labeled so? I am not trolling. I am serious. Christianity was an attempt to liberalize the conservative newish, roman, etc. societies which ran on a rule of law. Mercy and forgiveness are not conservative ideals, but they are Christian ideals.
What am I saying? Well, that those "conservative" friends of yours were so in name only. Self-reliance and risk-taking are conservative ideals. But both right and left are constantly trying to spare you the bother (on the left) or the opportunity (on the right) to think take chances and think outside the proverbial box. Both are looking for excuses to increase influence of the tyrannical state. Which of the excuses your prefer is up to you. Or you can choose to be free. I'll let you discover on your own who your favorite candidate should be in this case...
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Yes, any biological organism that reproduces is a parent, your argument is silly because it ignores the realities of parenting.
Parenting a toddler is physically exhausting, but generally involved very few decision if the system wasn't involved.
To suggest that the current President and First lady, or the former President and first lady, with 2 adult children or one high school aged child (when they entered office) are indicative of parents of small children (which is what the article was discussing) is absurd. The same is true of most of Congress, state legislatures, and governor's mansions.
People with power, whether they are parents or not, and most are, are generally 40-50, with their youngest child, often a single child or the younger of two, in their late teens to mid-twenties are NOT indicative of people with small children up to age 5, meaning people from the ages of 18 to 35.
The fact is, the baby boomers have pulled every ladder up behind them as they have gotten older. They have made parenting impossible... modern car seats are total disasters because they have to deal with the dangerous cars we've created... Air bags are nice tools for adults, but a disaster for small children. When I was a child I rode in the front seat next to my mother, because car seats could go in the front seat. If I dropped something, my mom could pick it up. My son can't ride in the front seat, so if he drops something, he screams because my wife can't grab something off the floor and hand it to him because he's in the back seat.
However, the baby boomers, when they had small children, had cars built around their needs. As they got older, not only did the market accommodate their new needs (no small children, teenage drivers), but the government changed regulations that made cars safer for older "parents" at the expense of younger parents. People decry the explosion of SUVs, but when you can't fit more than two car seats in the back, because they are no longer safe in the middle seat, and cars with side impact air bags require children up to age five to be in booster seats, what does a young family do? Once you have two kids, if you drive a sedan, you can't transport a friend's child (common things when I was a kid), so you need a mini-van or an SUV to have sufficient seating. If you have a third kid, you can't transport them without a mini-van. My wife carpools to work with a friend, and they pop the two kids into car seats in the back seats. Now both expecting child two, they either have to stop carpooling, or get mini-vans, because cars can't support three children, let alone four.
If you think that the powers that be with one or two children in private school HAVE ANY UNDERSTANDING what a typical family with 2-4 young children go through is absurd, but to say that they are the same because they are parents suggests that President Bush and I have a lot in common because we are both white males, it's silly.
Everyone is a parent or a biological dead-end, roping them all together as those a family with 3 small children HAS ANYTHING IN COMMON with a family with two teenage children (and 15 more years of raises and wealth accumulation behind them) is absurd. The system is run by people with teenage children terrified that anything will happen to them because they only have one or two kids and can't have more. The system is run on top of people with small children that hope nothing goes wrong but lack the resources to do anything about it.
To illustrate the point, consider the following question: If you could guarantee your children would survive to 30, but they would drop 20 IQ points and be financially dependent on your forever, if you are in your 40s and have two teenage children, you'd agree and say that it's because you'd love your children. If you ask a 25 year old couple struggling with the bills with two children and deciding on a third if they'd make that change to avoid a 5% chance of losing a child by 18, you might get a different answer. I love my son to
I think there's some truth to that, but--
My own daughter, 6, while having a computer in her room and playing video games, still wants to play outside.
I want to let her. Her mom and aunt, however, go into convulsions whenever she's outside. Where does this society of convulsions come from?
When I was 6, just 24 years ago, I could go down to the end of the street and back, without anyone freaking out. When I was 8, I could go for miles.
What happened?
How is it that my daughter's mom and her aunt, both who grew up not in the US, but in Colombia, freak out whenever Sakura goes outside? (Sakura basically doesn't even consider it these days, "she knows the rules.") And it's not just them, but practically everyone?
I thank God her school lets the kids go outdoors, and to the creek. (They even have chickens and a peacock; It's really cool. I'm very fortunate.)
A book some of you might find interesting, with relation to the fear in todays society is "Last child in the woods" by Richard Lou. It is available at most book stores including http://www.amazon.com/Last-Child-Woods-Children-Nature-Deficit/dp/1565123913. Though it talks mostly about and other topic, it speaks a lot about how parents fears are keeping kids away from unstructured play time in the outdoors.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Bingo! About 5 years ago I was dating this girl and met some of her family. Her aunt has a son who at the time was 13-14 years old who came into the room and asked to be driven down the street to his friends house. My first question was why not ride a bike? To my surprise (and I know my face gave it away lol) his mom responds that he has to wear a helmet to ride his bike so he doesn't ride it. WTF? He has to wear a helmet to ride a bike 3 blocks in the suburbs? Tell me this is some cruel joke. I started to say something about how when I was his age riding a bike w/o a helmet was probably the safest thing my friends and I did, but how they raise their son is really none of my business.
I recently had to do a double take concerning the everyone wins mentality. We have thought our 3 year old son that when you lose, you give the other person a grin and say "I'll get you next time.". When we race to the car, or play video games, sometimes he wins, and more importantly sometimes he looses. When he wins, we tell him that we will get him next time. This to me says that I acknowledge you won, and that I definitely want to play again. But, when we do, I will look to give you a much bigger challenge.
We took him to a chess club, so that he could get some practice playing against people other than me, my wife, and Chess Master. When he lost, he told the other kid that he would get him next game, and suddenly there was a room full of disapproving eyes on us.
To me, the "Good Game" line has always been a PC way to be an ass. If you are the looser, telling the winner that they played a good game seems kind of stupid. If you are the winner, it always comes across as condescending.
Hehe. It's interesting you should pick that example. Here's one person's interpretation, which pretty much matches what went through my mind when I reread it as an adult:
Now don't go criticizing this (or me) without reading context, which makes the whole thing a lot more interesting. Here, for comparison, is that same person's precis of the story itself:
Now go take another look at Babar.
That Babar link explains that the children surveyed don't care about whatever deeper significance may or may not be linking in the tales - they simply enjoy the stories. Scholarship has moved a long way from the time when it was believed that the messages people take away from a story are the exact same ones that we put in. It's a pity so many people still think that other people are mindless robots and run around trying to protect children from Alistair Cookie. Instead of protecting them from being checked in and out of the TV as though it were a daycare, and a society that in so many ways encourages this kind of parenting and makes it difficult to do otherwise.
I don't see any kids outside ever -- I'm a European living in the U.S., and this absence of kids on the street is by far the weirdest and creepiest thing about this country, to my eyes. I don't think it's because of computers and DVDs and such; kids in Western Europe have access to those things, too, but they also want to go out, go cycling in the woods, kick a ball in the street, etc. American culture in general is saturated with fear. Compare the reactions to 9/11 and the bombings in London, or just try living on both sides of the Atlantic for a while and you'll simply *feel* the difference.
When I was 5, I walked to kindergarten. By myself. One year later, I started going to school, which was farther away -- one mile each way. I rode my bike, again by myself. And today, more than 30 years later, that's still how things work over there, but here, people freak out at the very idea. But then, hey, why am I surprised, this being a country that finds it necessary to build a monstrous nuclear-armed army, in a world that is almost entirely benevolent or at least neutral towards them, and then pick fights with third world countries left and right? Nobody is more afraid of bullying than the bully himself...
- Thomas
Also funny how quickly this changed. My grandfather was considered an "adult" in most areas when he was about 14. In his time, it was normal that you end school around then and start learning a trade. Many people also had to move out around that age, simply because their work place was too far away from their home. He married when he was 17. His wife, my grandmother, was 15 at that time.
That was already quite early back then, but not unheard of. And they didn't "have to" marry, if anyone ponders that.
Within just two generations, this changed completely. If you were unmarried as a woman back then at age 20, people started whispering behind your back. Today, if you get married before you're 20, the same happens. But hey, equality set in, they now start whispering if you're a guy, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I live in Canada, and see a lot of the same. In my neighbourhood, there is a lot of kids, and a lot of families. I know this because I see them in the elevator, and on the bus. However we have an 18 month old that we take to the park quite a bit, at least every other day, and are surprised how few kids are at the park. Once in a while we'll see one or two other kids at the park, but many days we go there, and there's absolutely no one. I'm not sure what all these kids are doing, whether they are staying inside all day or what, but I feel sorry for the kids, because they must have really boring lives.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Actually, it's been revealed that the original reporting that started the "pins and razor blades in candy" hysteria in the 1982 was in fact a hoax. Further, the report found at Snopes, while not exactly "gospel", does indicate that the majority of these candy tampering stories are untrue EVEN though there are rare documented cases. In my neighborhood in a somewhat modern small-city, I got 0 trick or treaters in 2 years straight. (More candy for me!) On the other hand, one of my co-workers in a rural area 30 miles away went through 17 bags of candy this last year. Most packaged candy (which is the most common kind handed out) is not going to be tampered with easily. (Unless you own a candy wrapping & sealing machine, and have access to the printed wrappers.) And, being someone that stares at an X-ray machine screen for a living, I'm fairly certain detecting foreign objects in candy with the x-ray equipment most courthouses and police stations might use is, pardon the pun, no picnic.