Here Comes Science Response - They Might Be Poison

My political opinions don't occupy the left-right political spectrum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the worldwide proliferation of internet resources, such a narrowly-scoped view of modern politics has become increasingly obsolete and irrelevant. What was once a deeply important question in civics has now evolved to a centralist vs. decentralist issue. My personal beliefs can generally be summated to decentralist, more specifically, anarchism. So, you can imagine my alarm when I subjected myself to witness the music video album from They Might Be Giants' and their bleeding leftist agenda to indoctrinate children. While their videos are educational and visually engaging that nominally inspire children to be creative, it ultimately stifles or limits creativity through imitation and paternalistic liberalism.

The series had a strong start: "Science Is Real" places its viewer in an objective reality where what can be immediately sensed is real and unchangeable. It explains the fundamentals of science, while implicitly explaining the complex dichotomy in life in which we can choose personal pathways, but must adapt to unchangeable circumstances. Elementally, this is an important neutral zone between discussions in civics explained simply enough for toddlers to understand. "My Brother the Ape," and "Meet the Elements" are incredibly inventive songs, fully of irony, and simply explain important scientific truths (notable because it indelibly ignores creationist notions) but unfortunately, songwriter John Flansburgh digresses as time goes along. "Electric Car" is the most egregious of all offenses. Not only is it repetitive, and leads the discussion nowhere, it promotes expensive consumerism. One might argue that it condemns useless gas emissions and destruction of the environment; however, children are hardly divested of the resources to make a lasting difference for environment - I would argue that they never will, regardless of how old they are. It also fails to explain in enough detail the benefits of berating parents into buying one. Reserve to two isolated lines, "On verdant green/no diesel, no steam, no gasoline," "Electric Car" serves no practical use than to subliminally insert leftist capitalistic ventures into children's skulls.

Such repetition stifles creativity in children. Though songs like "Put It to the Test" inspire inquisitiveness, and positively encourages children to treat life like a scientific method, it restrains the breadth of their experimentation with songs like "Here Comes Science," whose order in the tracklist baffles me. It seems to have been a fitting place for the first or last track, but its penultimate placement in painfully self-promoting, as if to assert dominance of a child's learning time. When I heard, I heard nothing but They Might Be Giants implanting their role as babysitter and educator in the household, an educator that insists upon bludgeoning children with dull melodies and disputatious democratism.

Naturally, this is the type of low-budget material Disney has been aching to sell in the shelves in lieu of children's music. Between T-Squad and Kidz Bop Volume 370, Hollywood Records really struggled to connect with contemporary households, eventually settling on the quinoa-inhaling pseudo-hippies to turn over some bills for their uncreative children. Spare me the agony of another "educational" song from They Might be Giants, who hasn't done a good thing since it wrote music for Homestar Runner. With self-promoting narcissism and over political poison, Here Comes Science has not only angered me, but successfully warned me against buying records from from Walt Disney Records post-2000.

Pinocchio Response - A Morbid Tale of Paternalism

A secular viewpoint as well as a moral viewpoint is always important when examining the merits of children's media. Media itself demands a mediator, and this mediator must accept the duty to examine the merits of a certain story with intense skepticism. A positive message about an underdog rising to fame and glory can potential be a harmful message to ill-equipped dreamers with systemically social, physical, and financial disadvantages, as it is harmful to those who merely believe and act to others as disadvantaged as the character they connect with in a movie. I turn my attention especially to movies for children, because children are impressionable, and often don't recognize subliminal messaging when they see it. The story of Pinocchio as one told for children is replete with paternalistic ideologies regarding the creating myth, agency and accountability, censorship, and subservience.

Pinocchio tells a dreary tale about a boy, carved physically as a wooden puppet by a lonely clockmaker, and spiritually embodied by a magical fairy traveling on icy stellar bodies falling through Earth's atmosphere. The duality of his nature lead him into troubling circumstances, being lead by a perfect stranger vagabond who solemnly imposes himself as a "conscience," an employer looking to exploit and eventually yoke to bondage, a totalitarian radical who hypnotizes boys with the promises of pleasure, and a monstrous metaphor for parental guilt. More than a story for kids to warn them of stranger danger and disobedience, it plays out as a cautionary tale for parents: know their secrets, pull their strings, or you will lose them forever. In fact, the most compelling focus point of the story is not so much how Pinocchio became a real boy, but how Jiminy earned the right to control Pinocchio's thoughts and actions. 

The film very slickly passes to the audience that Jiminy the Cricket is a legitimate conscience, despite the much more intuitive notion that Pinocchio as a body of wood with intelligent human characteristics (talking, walking, judgments of character) was born with a conscience, and the ability to make decisions for himself. For the most part the legend of Pinocchio condemns the imposition of evil strangers on youth, yet fails to acknowledge the fact that Jiminy cricket is a stranger. Or perhaps it is the exuberant lifestyle of the rich or the reckless that appalls Walt Disney Animation Studios. The most apparent criticism in Pinocchio as Keith Booker asserts in his book "Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children's Films," the pleasures of the working class, of vaudeville, or of pool halls and amusement parks, led to a life as a beast of burden," and to convey the "middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance, naturalized as the experience of the most average American." 

For some reason, we have been conditioned to believe that Disney has the best interest of youth in mind and that animated allegory is suited for children, almost as intrusive as the insect that snuck through the crack under your door and is sleeping in your little boy's bedroom. If there is anything apparent in Pinocchio, it is the message of graduating from one set of ideals to the next continually. It is important to question your guiding system of influence, whether it be your whimsically-minded father, your greedy boss, your jackass best friend, your own selfish pleasures, or a gargantuan media enterprise.

Son of Rambow Reponse - What Am a Childrens?

As we approach the realm of children's media, off we must madly go again into the circling realm of semantical discussion. "What is a child?" they ask. Present in this question are a fistful of compelling concepts: maturity, corruptability, and accountability. Examples abound on both sides of the spectrum, in which children percieved to be plagued by mature, violent content, act out in violence against others, yet a preponderance of youth can go outwardly unaffected by graphic imagery or heavy thematic material. Most importantly, lack of parental guidance in selection of media,  a child's ability to comprehend the intensity, horror, or morals the media presents, and psychological development can affect the potency of such imagery. In the light-hearted mood of Garth Jennings's indie sleeper hit Son of Rambow, we get to look at this question through the eyes of a fictionalized youth remaking - or swede'ing - the bloody 80s blockbuster, Rambo: First Blood.

After an arrangement with the Lee Carter, the school bully, Will Proudfoot, a sheltered boy from a fundamentalist Christian family, agrees to act as a stunt man in a movie to enter an amateur film festival. The movie in question is First Blood, a movie which hardly is for children's eyes, let alone his precious virgin eyes. His parents and his community reject media depictions entirely as heathen, and all attempts to view it stem from the devil's temptations. So, for Will, his watching of First Blood - likely over and over - was about as horrifying as it was magical. He ascends in scale from 0-100 with a great deal of difficulty along the way, as he must pursue his short-term goal in secret from friends, authorities, and his own family.

As Will and Lee continue in a loose friendship/acquaintance they run into trouble with popular school kids and staff, usually resorting to violence, a language which Lee and Will they have gained a great deal of credence from abusive paternal relationships, and media choices, respectively. The continued level of abuse apparent in the Carter family can be deduced not to come from media depictions of violence, but from parental neglect. Realizing the sad state of affairs of their own parental neglect, Will's family leaves the strict Christian sect, so that she can mitigate his participation with media.

I would suggest that childhood is an objective state that may appear consciously in adults as a recollection period. Children are greatly susceptible to graphic depictions of language, sex, and violence, particularly if it the depictions do not lay out consequences. In most cases, I would suggest that PG-13 violence does greater harm to 13 year olds than R-rated violence, because PG-13 conveniently leaves out the gory details of firing machine guns into large crowds. R-rated content is wasted on the old because it depicts ideas they yet understood, when it could be greatly effectual to children who would wish to avoid such perils.