Sunday, October 19, 2003

By L. Wayne Moss and Eve Shavatt

He said ...

I was flipping through the channels the other day, searching for something my 2-year-old daughter could watch. There was "Blue's Clues," "Sesame Street," "Care Bears" and some emotionally challenged octopus going around trying to help everyone. All these shows were charming and thoughtful, and as sweet as saccharin. They were also about as entertaining as joint compound. They were boring AND presumptuous.

	Men and women through the ages, have had opposing points of view. HE said this...SHE said that, Which one works for YOU? He Said-She Said, a male-vs.-female point of view, appears weekly in Washington Sunday.

What passes for cartoons these days is nothing but a thinly disguised plot to brainwash children with "values education." These shows teach honesty and integrity and warn of the dangers of greed and laziness. There is no slapstick. Nobody gets blown up, squashed, run over, shot or sliced in two. In every episode, something gets learned. How stupid.

Are those people in charge of children's programming so naive as to believe that a single little cartoon, or even a series of episodes, will change a child's rotten behavior? Did they forget that their job is not to mold small minds but simply to entertain? Apparently, they want to be parents. Excuse me, but that's MY job. And my daughter doesn't want to learn a lesson in civics from some television executive -- my daughter wants to see somebody get run over by a train. It makes her laugh and keeps her occupied, entertained and out of my way.

I remember a few years ago reading an article in Psychology Today that correlated aggressive behavior with watching violence-filled television. Something like 12 percent of the boys in a day-care were more inclined to steal the girls' toys after watching the Roadrunner than after watching Mister Rogers. Now, stealing girls' toys -- that's funny.

I couldn't take the article seriously anyway, because the study was conducted entirely by women doctors. God knows those little boys didn't stand a chance. Every woman I've ever known since I was a little boy has hated all little boys except her own. It's just their natural instinct. They think we are dirty, loud, abusive and deceitful. Snakes and snails and puppy dog tails.

OK, so they're right. Little boys are hard-wired with an insatiable thirst for the extreme. We like action, danger, sparks and things that collide. We want to hear screaming and explosions and watch someone get afflicted with massive pain. It makes us laugh.

And I don't need a white lab coat or a Ph.D. in child psychology to know that little girls are pretty much the same. Girls crave fictional humorous violence every bit as much as boys do. They just have to hide the desire, the way they hide so many other desires -- squelch it and conform to the standard image of gentility.

I would really like to know, for my own informal survey, how many adult women who read this column actually preferred the original and politically incorrect Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner to the modern and anesthetized cartoon characters we have now. Drop me a line.

And Eve, you'll be happy to know that I finally found something my daughter enjoys watching: Steelers football. She laughs at every collision.

All is right with the world.

L. Wayne Moss can be reached at wmoss@mail.com.

She said ...

It's funny the things you remember from when you were a kid. On Saturdays, my sister Donna and I would wake up early and plop down on the floor in front of the couch to watch cartoons on TV. I looked at them as mindless entertainment. I didn't care if there was a moral to the story. I didn't care if Pepe LePew stalked a cat. I didn't care if Wile E. Coyote couldn't brake in time to avoid going over that cliff. I only cared that we had a box of sugary cereal and some milk.

Yet classic cartoon characters left a lasting impression on me. Even today, I still can hear Natasha say to Boris Badenov, "Hello, Dollink!" Or Bullwinkle exclaim "Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" Still, what I remember most vividly is the day 7-year-old Donna looked at me and said, "That Yogi thinks he's smarter than the average bear, but he's simply a dreadful role model for little Boo Boo. He just stole another pic-a-nic basket."

That got lodged in my brain and stayed there.

Because while I was whiling away the hours, Donna was looking behind the scenes, analyzing what made the cartoon characters tick. I remember giving her a strange look as she sat there in her footed PJs, her curly blond hair a tousled mess, and proclaimed, "Fred Flintstone's nothing but a bully, and he eats too much. Look how many pterodactyl eggs Wilma has to make for him. And last week, he bought so many ribs it tipped the car over. That's just sickening."

Time marched on, and I got used to her running philosophical commentary. "Everybody thinks Bugs Bunny is such a cute little wascally wabbit, but he's really just a wisecracking bunny getting drunk on carrot juice. I hope Elmer Fudd is vewy, vewy quiet and catches him."

Then one day Daffy Duck jumped into a cage with the Tasmanian Devil, motivated by a $10 bill he spotted inside. Coming out of the cage, wounded but clutching the money in his bill, Daffy triumphantly shouted, "I may be a little duck, but I'm a greedy little duck!" Donna spat out, "How true that is. The despicable psychopathic little miser."

That's the day I really started to pay attention to my sister, 'cause by now she scared me a little. And she made me realize life is all about perspective. Those cartoon characters were alive to her. When she watched Foghorn Leghorn, she didn't see a funny, overbearing, Southern loudmouth know-it-all rooster. She saw a chicken-bashing control freak.

Even the honest, hard-working Huckleberry Hound didn't make the grade. After he job-hopped from mailman to lion tamer, she refused to watch him anymore. "He's disgraceful," she said. "He's just a drifter and he'll never amount to anything." By the time "Here-I-Come-To-Save-The-Day" Mighty Mouse caught her attention, Donna had progressed to saying, "He has a narcissistic personality disorder."

Her analyzing talents have come in handy over the years, especially with men. She's got a way of cutting through the facade to expose the neuroses buried beneath. Sufferin' succotash, she's even got L. Wayne and his penchant for SpongeBob SquarePants figured out. But that's a whole 'nother column.

E-mail this story   Print this story