Saturday, April 12, 2008

 

Another new blog emerges, and deep thoughts about Pokemon


Hey! Yet another new BLS blogger has been spotted, Nathan Winkler. He's doing well in law school, and is good at statistical analysis, which is... kind of something I will need help with this summer. Huh, I gotta get to know this "Nathan Winkler."

Anyways, I was flipping channels at the gym, and saw part of the cartoon version of Pokemon, which is popular with kids of a certain age. Here's the schtick-- kids make their pets fight until they "faint," which looks a lot like killing them. The pets are poisoned, shocked with electricity, burned, stabbed, frozen, shaken, and hit with plants. Now, how is it that this is terrible for Michael Vick to do, but fine for children's entertainment? Then again, having seen Ultimate Fighting Championships (also available on television), we also think some of it is ok for humans, but not animals.

Of course, it follows in a long line of children's entertainments which involve horrible fates for children and animals. The little match girl freezes to death-- thanks for that terrifying bit of my childhood, Hans Christian Anderson!

Comments:
Yeah . . . I have to say, when I was a kid I always thought the Roadrunner cartoons were incredibly violent. The stuff that happened scared me--getting smushed by anvils and all that stuff. I was always kind of surprised that it was okay to watch those cartoons.

And yet my parents didn't want us watching "Laugh-In" or "The Graduate" . . .
 
For me it was THE SNOW QUEEN...the story they idea for some reason scared the life out of me. Then for about 26 years or so it was the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz. There used to not be VCRs do any of you realize that? Anyway you would have to wait for the annual showing of the movie on TV around Easter time. EVER YEAR my mom would tell me not to watch it , that I would get all weirded out and that I would have nightmares and she was not gonna go through all that again this year.. and I would cunningly convince her that this year I was over it, that the stupid monkeys would not scare me and of course they did, and thus followed the requisite three months of nightmares from the flying monkeys.

I have a Just Turned Four Year Old, and he is only allowed to watch PBS Kids /Sprout. Not much violence on there besides the violence it at time will inspire in the parents of the child after hearing the theme to the show DRAGON TALES running thru their hear for three straight days. Not much bad on that network yet I still fire off emails once in a while RE: horrible show called JAMES THE CAT.

I am not worried about cartoons influencing him but I am terribly worried about things like NINTENDO and X BOX type of stuff These games with the guns and killing make Tom and Jerry and the Roadrunner look silly... he will NEVER have one of these systems...but I KNOW his friends are going to have these things and he is going to be exposed to this crap and it worries me.

As for myself, I never really got over the flying monkeys and I have now additional fears: Horror movies, getting strangled by sea creatures in natural bodies of water, insects, reptiles, snakes, rodents, mold, well water, utility companies, terrorism, parasites, birds, and insurance adjusters. And skunks and ESPECIALLY raccoons... and probably the Snow Queen still.


You know, just the normal stuff.
 
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