There is something to be said for kid's programming, and that something is usually "Oh for God's sake please turn off the God-Damn purple dinosaur". That having been said many times by now, certainly, the programs my kids watch (I will not tolerate Barney no way no how) seem somehow better than most of the stuff I remember having to endure in the presence of young kids in the past. Now, I realize that I wasn't an adult back when I was a kid....I'll give you a second to process the stupidity of that idea.... so maybe if I could go back with adult eyes and look at the crap that was geared toward young kids when I was a teen, maybe I'd find some appreciation for it. It seems obvious from the standpoint of a wizened (snort) cynical adult that the reason it seems like the stuff I watched when I was little was awesome, sucked when I was a teen, and then got awesome again now that I'm all growed up, is that being a teen makes you think you know everything and a certain amount of that attitude sticks to your memories like adhesive from Rugrat's stickers you left all over your favorite shirt and forgot to remove before you put in the laundry.
BUT. I'm genuinely impressed with some of the stuff I use when I need to get my kids out of my hair for 20 minutes. From an episode of Sesame Street today, granted, a bastion of kids programming, but still better today that it was long ago I think: Elmo: hahah, Dorothy is imagining Elmo is a Jazz musician playing a violin! (Dorothy is Elmo's pet goldfish. For the uninitiated, they do this every episode. There is a theme and we see a though bubble coming from the goldfish bowl with Elmo dressed up or transformed into this particular....thing.) In response, a talking violin who is supposed to sound like Rodney Dangerfield I guess says "we're going to watch a fish think? This'll be exciting." whereas in all other segments of Elmo's world before this, it was simply an accepted fact that Dorothy the fish imagines Elmo as what-have-you every episode and we never really question how or why. Then there was Timmy Time. A lackluster spin off of Shaun the Sheep which is itself a spin-off of Wallace and Grommet. There is no dialog, just animal sounds that fill in for speech and we're left to make assumptions about the conversations they have. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much, but there you have it, whatever its worth. Today Timmy imagined himself a pirate. Again with the animal fantasies, I know, maybe this is the standard of comedy now - in his fantasy he is wearing all the trappings of piratehood; eyepatch, parrot, etc. But he's still a sheep, so what does he say that still fits with the no-dialog format as he looks through his spyglass? "Baaaarrrrrr!"I have to admit. I laughed. Something happens in most of these shows that makes me laugh, but I wonder if the writers/creators have really gotten better at throwing us parent's a bone now and then, or if they've always been doing that and when I was a kid ai was too jaded or stupid to notice.
