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Sunday 8 November 2009

It's a cartoon....that's all

I am agog, I am aghast....no Marius is not in love at last. But the lunatics HAVE finally taken over the asylum........

Imagine the scene.....it's Sunday morning and I'm sitting with a nice cup of coffee having just consumed some dead pig in bread, reading the papers....it's a scene of tranquility, of peace.

Then I come across the following headline,

"Safety Expert Wants Cartoon Violence Rating"

Cue much spluttering and spraying of aforementioned caffeinated liquids.

Its true. The world has well and truly gone mad. The "expert" in question is Dr. Karen Pfeffer a "senior lecturer at Lincoln University and an international mentor for the World Health Organisation". She will be publishing the full paper later this month entitled "Risk and injury portrayal in boys' and girls' favourite television programmes" so we can all look forward to reading the details in-depth.

In the meantime the report in The Observer this morning, the good Doctor has been watching kids programmes and is troubled by the lack of consequences to violence - particularly in the case of Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-men and Ben10, "The problem is that these characters engage in risky behaviours and experience great violence but the negative consequences of dangerous behaviour are usually not portrayed".

Ok. STOP. Is it me? Please tell me it isn't.......

Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner
Tom and Jerry
Bugs Bunny and Marvin the Martian
Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd

I don't remember seeing the negative consequences of an anvil being dropped on your head, or being blown up by your own home made bomb from the A.C.M.E corporation, or having your gun blocked and it blowing up in your face. In my memory, these guys, got up, dusted themselves down and started again.

But maybe time and wine has addled my memory?

It is bad enough that someone has done this piece of research in the first place (and I hope for every one's sake not a penny of public money was wasted on this nonsense) but I would hope that a sensible newspaper like The Observer would treat this with the disdain it merits....but no. They report, "her findings will reignite the debate about the effect of violent imagery on the young".

No it won't. It will raise the question as to why there are so many academics researching completely pointless topics of no benefit to the public, why we are vilifying the young and trying to sanitize their lives beyond belief and why we have forgotten the meaning of fun.

Its a cartoon......that's all.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

My friend told me that her daughter, who has braces, doesn't take apples for lunch because the friend is too lazy to cut them up the night before and put lemon juice on them and the daughter cannot take a knife to school.

Oh yes, we reminisced. Remember all the bloody knife fights in the cafeteria every day when we were kids? How many of our classmates died of stab wounds? HOW MANY SUFFERED?

And then -- the smoking circle. And the chewing tobacco. Guys would spit tobacco at this tree. All the grass around it was dead. We even wore flip flops to school. And rode bikes without wearing safety helmets. Took peanut butter sandwiches for lunch.

At last, someone is addressing these horrible problems. At last.

HRD said...

@class-factotum - I know, such a dangerous world we once lived in. Its a surprise we made it through! The sadder point for me is that the kids of today will not be able to judge risk in the way that we did. We learnt by taking risks and seeing the consequences ourselves. Not by watching it on TV.