Month: April 2006
Again with the cheap anime!
ADV is at it again.  Cheap anime. As much as 75% of on some stuff. Go spend money. You know you want to. You just got that nice big tax return.
ADV should be giving me a cut every time they do this.
Nostalgia
This rant is probably going to make me seem like “one of those people,” but I feel the need to vent, and since this is my blog, where better to do it?
I’ve been experiencing a bit of a wave of nostalgia over the last week or so, which has prompted me to “acquire” an almost-complete run of You Can’t Do That on Television, which I started watching fulling expecting that it wouldn’t be nearly as good as my memories of it, expecting that they’d been tinted through rose colored glasses.  Much to my surprise, I found that even at my age, I still found them quite entertaining and funny- and not even because of the ridiculous 80s hair and clothes. Some of it was actually quite mature, considering the target audience was young children.
That’s got me thinking about a lot of the crap that they’re showing to kids (ESPECIALLY on Nickelodeon) nowadays.   Stuff like Spongebob Squarepants, which rarely raises itself above the level of fart jokes. Or Blues Clues with it’s insipid, patronizing hosts (Steve, and whatsisname who replaced Steve). It really makes me wonder what affect it’s gonna have on children in this country in the long run.
While YCDTOTV and it’s contemporaries (on Nick, at least) may not have been high art, and the actors weren’t exactly Shakesperean quality, it NEVER insulted the intelligence of the kids watching it. It never talked down to them. It treated them like intelligent PEOPLE. Thinking about it, I’d say THAT is the major downfall of Nickelodeon. It stopped treating it’s viewers like people and started treating them like “kids.”   It assumes that they won’t “get” anything beyond the level of Spongebob farting and bubbles popping up behind him.
Granted, not every show they have is completely awful like that. The Fairly Oddparents seems to mostly be semi-decent. Jimmy Neutron too (and considering they’ve had crossovers, my assumption is they’re made by the same production company). Simillarly, even back in the day, Nick had a few condescending shows (Wild and Crazy Kids springs to mind).  But in the balance, I’d say it’s a HECK of a lot worse now than it was then.