The Current State of Childrens’ Entertainment
May 2012
My children (including the 16 year old street accredited dude) love…love…LOVE.. ‘Little House On The Prairie’…this is a fiercely protected secret….something about the wholesome stories … the absence of sex, sexual innuendo, profanity and gratuitous violence means we must never tell the general population of our indulgence for fear of ridicule and scorn…
Isn’t it a shame that entertainment aimed at those of tender years
has morphed from the elegant and magically quiet charm of
‘Bagpuss’ or the delightfully imaginative ‘Fingerbob’ or ‘Mr Ben’(..as if by
Magic) to offensively loud lurid productions ill concealing a marked lack of story character and plot. It’s a lot less effort to pump out this candy coated sewage than to produce meaningful satisfying screenplay…much easier for the maniacs in charge today to replace timing, rhythm, and skilful tale telling with startling (sore ear drum inducing) noise and weird animated oddity. Take the latest ‘’Puss in Boots’’ it should have captivated the audience….I tried hard to enjoy the thing for the sake of my son…but couldn’t avoid spending the entirety of the DVD in a state of disengaged stupor ( it seemed days longer than the advertised 89 minutes) and the violent opticals (all the shifts up down sideways diagonal vertical AT 1000mph accompanied by subliminal flashes)….….made me feel bilious. The animation was horribly disjointed dark and characterless…and yet here’s the curious thing: the children were held in a trance … they were slack jawed and unresponsive rather than moved and captivated as they would have been with superior material of bygone days( caused by the banging around , mad disconnected flashes, and psychotropic assaults on their young eyes….) The Sound Of Music cheesy as I suppose it is….or Mary Poppins….at least contained loveable characters…nice dialogue….and exquisitely pleasant melodies…the utterly dreadful ‘Nanny McPhee’ on the other hand apart from being a shameless rip off of sound of music and mary poppins (Nanny McPhee: odd nanny….7 bratish kids….hopeless single father….same era…rubbish step mother….blah blah blah….) was just bad entertainment…the characters were cardboard cut outs, the story was a fraud…and the ‘music’was tuneless and unnecessary and served only to send the index finger flying in search of the volume minus button to quell the relentless boom boom boom …. even Colin Firth trying his best to look sexually attractive couldn’t rescue it…the verdict is ; not nice at all…. exploitative and cynical…..and worst of all very boring…
and don’t start me off on the disgusting little masters and madams of American
tv who look more sexualised than Jordan and for whom we need a new word to describe their pathetic precocity .
Three cheers for ‘Little House on the Prairie’
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