"Kid-Friendly"?

Alright, so I'm not big on having young kids around, but my mother and I were talking about children's programing yesterday and some interesting comments came about.

We started talking about what type of things I was allowed to watch when I was younger. I was allowed to watch The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, any of the Muppet movies, Lady and the Tramp, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Robin Hood (the Disney version with the foxes), the majority of the animated Disney movies that came out during the late 80s and early 90s, The Munsters, and some of the older television shows when we could find them or my dad recorded them off the TV. My mom said that I would go through many copies over a year because I knew how to work the VCR. We had cable, but my parents knew how to block certain channels or how to "erase" channels so I wouldn't be able to get at them at certain times of the day when I was home.

Saturday morning cartoons/programming were completely out when I was younger. If I wanted to be with a friend Saturday morning, my mother would ask if that friend could come over to our house; because my mom knew that at the friend's house there would be Saturday morning cartoons and at our house there would be VHS movies. Things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Batman, and others weren't allowed until I was a bit older. I never really got into a lot of the Saturday morning programming. Yes, I knew the shows and I had watched a little bit so I could understand what the kids at school were talking about, but I didn't really watch it as much as those around me did.

That could explain my love of the older Disney movies and the Muppets.

So last Saturday I got up earlier than I expected and I decided to flip through the channels and see what was on. Well, the Saturday morning programming was going and I decided to watch and see what had changed . . . and it had changed. Is this what they are calling "kid-friendly"? I was really taken back by what I saw. There was a lot of cartoon violence, the girls were all "sexualized", and there was humor there that went on many different levels. It made me think that they were trying to entice the parents into the cartoons/programs as well as the kids.

There is a reason that I like the older shows like I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dike Show, and The Munsters. Yes, for today's younger generations it might not catch their eye because it doesn't have any fancy explosions or CGI or cool fights, but it worries me to see where children's programming is heading.

What does that do for the youth of today? I think that it starts the desensitization process at a very early age and their exposure to it just seems to increase that desensitization to the point where they look at the everyday news and events and just kind of shrug their shoulders and say "huh, so . . .". And unfortunately, those youth are the ones who will be making the next generation of "entertainment", so what does that tell you about what will come next?