The End Of What We Grew Up With As Kids

[beaker]

MC poster DrTooth and I have long bandied about the notion of how so much of the stuff we grew up with in the 1980's and 1990's has been done away with. When old Sesame Street episodes have to come with a parental advisory warning, certain cereals done away with or all the creative/imaginative children's programming being nixed in favor of Dora/Blues Clues/Barney garbage...it's a sign.

- Jack in the Box announced they will no longer have toys in their kids meals:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43483446/ns/business-consumer_news/

- Certain cities like San Francisco have banned happy meals altogether.

- Toys now pretty much suck. Most action figures now went from 5-7" to super duper frail and dinky
3 3/4" figures but STILL cost the $10-$12 price point as bigger figures did.

- Saturday morning cartoon rituals have long gone away

- So to, the advent of the arcade went the way of the DoDo

- Most children's movies are cgi heavy, obnoxious films that lack any of the fun or magic and imagination of pre modern kids/family films(Smurfs, Yogi Bear, Chipmunks 1/2, Scooby Doo,
Garfield, etc...all garbage movies in both look and substance) As well as the all cgi films, which there's way too many of.

- I DO applaud the advent of exercise video games, but back in my day as much as kids played Nintendo....we were outside. a lot. We didnt need virtual Wii tag football or Wii basketball. We went outside and actually did stuff. Most people now just come home, and veg like a zombie in front of the tv til bed time.

And remember when you could just relax, take your time?

Everything has to be instant gratification, cynical. Texting EVERY second the day. Everyone now has a PC in their pocket...always texting, chatting, twittering, updates. Always plugged in. Everything has been reduced to "like" "unlike". It's this whole "iGeneration", where everything is now-now-now ADHD addled, multitasking...total cultural entropy where everything has been remixed, rebooted, rehashed, mashed up and autotuned with a dubstep beat and lolcats meme image. Defriend, twitter, blah.

I feel bad for kids these days.

 

[CensoredAlso]

- Jack in the Box announced they will no longer have toys in their kids meals:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43483446/ns/business-consumer_news/

- Certain cities like San Francisco have banned happy meals altogether.

Well normally I'd get upset about this too. But I've just become more and more aware lately of just where those toys come from. They're made by under paid children in dangerous sweat shops. I know this is nothing new, but I think we've ignored it for too long.

Most children's movies are cgi heavy, obnoxious films that lack any of the fun or magic and imagination of pre modern kids

It is very frustrating, it's all about underestimating children and pandering to the lowest common denominator.

 

[The Shoe Fairy]

As much as I hate to say it, Stop Motion tv series.
I have a love of them, MacKinnon and Saunders-style with the cotton wool snow and such, but sadly it has become just so much cheaper to do a bodge job and hire the cheapest possible CGI animation now that it is commercially available. In recent years there have been a number of reboots for what would be considered British and/or Australian classics for childrens' television adapted directly from the original small scale stop-mo puppetry to terrible cheap animation. I find this awfully depressing and I think that in many ways, this will only continue to become a niche genre, no longer as style but a niche genre.

 

[beaker]

@heralde: Yeah, sadly most Americans don't think about the Chinese, Vietnamese or Bandledeshi sweat shops where most their clothes, toys, etc is made. Often times, places where young women live and sleep in deplorable living quarters the few hours they have a respite from painstakingly making stuff we buy for very little.

Also the pandering thing...it just seems like when you go back to School House Rocks, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, etc it wasnt about pandering. It was letting a child foster her or his imagination.

@the shoe fairy: Well, there's been a number of cinematic efforts with stop motion. Coraline, The Fantastic Mr Fox, Corpse Bride, Sam and Max, $9.99, A Town Called Panic, etc. A bit of a stop motion renaissance if you will. CGI is just so ubiquitous and noisy...to me it still doesnt do justice to say, early 80's matte painting or animatronics. Because your mind still recognizes its a fake, non organic and un-tangible product.

 

[The Shoe Fairy]

I was going to mention Corpse Bride and Fantastic Mr Fox (a favourite film of mine) but they are somewhat unique as both of them were well funded and backed by entertainment industry deities. Indeed the whole thing of "non-organic" is especially true, it just makes it seem as if there is less work put in. It is the same idea as buying a pair of pants mass marketed and mass made for a chain store vs. going to a tailor and having them made specifically for you. The rationale behind the former is it's cheap and people will buy it, the reason one would prefer the latter is that the handiwork is evident in the finished product, and that product is hard to genericise.

 

[CensoredAlso]

@heralde: Yeah, sadly most Americans don't think about the Chinese, Vietnamese or Bandledeshi sweat shops where most their clothes, toys, etc is made. Often times, places where young women live and sleep in deplorable living quarters the few hours they have a respite from painstakingly making stuff we buy for very little.

Indeed, Wal Mart is not our friend and I think we paid for all this when the poisonious toy scandal broke. We simply can't ask for low prices and then expect high quality. Especially when you're dealing with countries whose governments just don't care about people's health and rights.

Also the pandering thing...it just seems like when you go back to School House Rocks, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, etc it wasnt about pandering. It was letting a child foster her or his imagination.

I don't know if it's just this particular crop of parents in this generation (no offence to parents here! ). But somewhere down the line it became the norm to "protect" children from things "they won't understand." I'm sure there's some kind of socio-logical trend that's responsible for this, but I'd have to do more research, lol.

CGI is just so ubiquitous and noisy...to me it still doesnt do justice to say, early 80's matte painting or animatronics. Because your mind still recognizes its a fake, non organic and un-tangible product.

Yeah I mean, a lot of times I look at CGI and think "yeah...that's a cartoon!" It doesn't look as real as people insist it does. And attempts to make it look more real often end up creepy, lol.

There's this movie from 1985 that I guess was kind of an early attempt at a Jurassic Park type story. Called Baby: The Secret of the Lost Legend, about some scientists discovering a living baby dinosaur. Now, the animatronic effects definitely look silly nowadays. But there are times when the character sort of does feels real in a wierd way, because it's a physical "creature" you could hold and touch and not a CGI cartoon that you know came from a computer.

 

[Drtooth]

For the most part, the Chinese made sweatshop toys are only made by child labor if they're bootlegs. That's why I steer clear of unofficial bootleg merchandise (if I can help it... sometimes you just won't be able to know). Those are dangerous too. They're illegal, so they're covered in the exact same lead paint that Mattel was under fire for putting on Elmos. Only THEY don't have to save face and recall anything! Avoid bootlegs at all cost, even if they're wacky and wild and too funny to resist.

Other than that, there's nothing that I haven't said. The Fast Food toy is going to be extinct if uppity parental groups that don't want to pay taxes and shifty Pediatricians get their way. Thanks media sensationalism of the obesity epidemic. BTW, you know obese REALLY means more than 20 pounds overweight, right? HA! I bet you thought it was people who were 300 pounds or over too! Way to pad the average, huh?

Kid's cartoons are getting it from all ends. Junk Food commercials are apparently evil, and that's MOST of what made the advertising worth while, the rise of terrible live action kid's sitcoms, network deregulation, and the fact no one wants to watch TV anymore, yet complains how there's nothing good on anymore... the only cartoons they make now are for teenagers and adults (Regular Show and Adventure Time are becoming quite successful).

Kids, in short, don't want to be kid's anymore AND their parents and society want them to grow up faster... the same parents start whining about how they're kids are rushing into sex and how kids are so sexualized now. Why? They have no reason to have a childhood anymore. We give them iPhones so they can play Angry Birds (which SUCKS) all day, we force them to do all this homework, all these standardized tests... we make them worry over jobs they're going to have in the future when they're still in the womb...

Here's the saddest thing you'll ever hear. The last generation to care about their childhood are people in their late 20's and 30's. I just give up. Saturday Mornings are for get rich quick scheme infomercials with "authors" who are yet to be indited. Junk food is sold in plain brown wrappers behind the counter with the porno. Kids care more about what cereal gives them the cleanest bowel movement than the most chocolatey marshmellowy goodness... and they're still fat because you grow out of playing and exercising when you're 5 now... unless of course they want to look good for premarital stuff because there's nothing else to do, except play long winded violent X-Box games.

 

[CensoredAlso]

For the most part, the Chinese made sweatshop toys are only made by child labor if they're bootlegs. That's why I steer clear of unofficial bootleg merchandise (if I can help it... sometimes you just won't be able to know). Those are dangerous too. They're illegal, so they're covered in the exact same lead paint that Mattel was under fire for putting on Elmos. Only THEY don't have to save face and recall anything! Avoid bootlegs at all cost, even if they're wacky and wild and too funny to resist.

Even the non child labor Chinese products aren't made in great conditions though. Look at the accidents happening in the Apple product factories lately.

Kids care more about what cereal gives them the cleanest bowel movement than the most chocolatey marshmellowy goodness... and they're still fat because you grow out of playing and exercising when you're 5 now...

That's an interesting point. We want kids to eat healthier and be active, yet at the same time we're letting them spend all their time on phones and the Web, which aren't terribly active exercises!

 

[The Shoe Fairy]

Just on the whole "war on on obesesity" thing - the classification of obese is based on BMI, and so imagine all the incredibly fit and healthy footballers who would be placed in the category of obese due to the amount of muscle on their body, cause muscle weighs more than fat. It's things like this and the spin that the media puts on the issue that blow it out of proportion.

 

[Drtooth]

Even the non child labor Chinese products aren't made in great conditions though. Look at the accidents happening in the Apple product factories lately.

Yeah. I mean, think about it. China doesn't care about it's own people. Why would it care about some other country once they got the money? Small things, UNFORTUNATELY need to be made overseas to make them affordable (toys, lightbulbs, crap like that), but it's the bigger stuff like electronics and home appliances being made over there that kill our economy.

That's an interesting point. We want kids to eat healthier and be active, yet at the same time we're letting them spend all their time on phones and the Web, which aren't terribly active exercises!

Wanna hear the biggest bull on the planet? This will blow your mind, and I might repost it in its own thread. Kid's cereals are staring to be healthier than the healthiest adult cereals. Even oh so healthy, "replace all your meals to lose weight" Special K has High Fructose corn Syrup. I just bought a box of Quisp. Know what gives it that Quazy Energy? brown sugar. Even a neon green bone shaped Pebbles cereal didn't have High Fructose Corn Syrup in it! But I find Bran and various other "healthy" options sweetened with corn. BULL! Bogus! At least with Pebbles and Trix commercials, they don't say eating it will help you lose weight!

Just on the whole "war on on obesesity" thing - the classification of obese is based on BMI, and so imagine all the incredibly fit and healthy footballers who would be placed in the category of obese due to the amount of muscle on their body, cause muscle weighs more than fat.

BMI is outdated and pointless. That's where the "Obesity epidemic" comes from. Bad math. And here's the kicker... again, Obese is poorly defined. We tend to think of very VERY large people, well over 100 pounds overweight. By the BMI, everyone here, unless they're anorexic is obese.