I wear a lot of hats at work, among them one I kind of adopted as a means of dealing with my own stress. I’m a bit of goofball (hoping desperately that her family and friends don’t out her as a major goofbal). I’ll do completely pointless, silly things to cheer myself up. I’ll even do it to cheer someone else up when things get rough.

There are many ways of accomplishing this. I put my hands up to my head and say, “Moose!” I’ll crack a lame joke. Depending on my mood and the situation, I occasionally even branch out into bizarre voices. Last night was one of those night. We all felt like it had already been a long week, and we were all a bit slaphappy, and when something happened with my students at one point I just kind of broke into the monster voice. I wish I could remember what I’d said, both because it was funny and because it would have made this so much easier. Instead, I had to settle for the first that came to mind when I mentally asked myself, “What could you possibly say to a student in this voice?”

Monster

I’ve been told I seem like the kind of person who has many voices waiting to get out. (I hope this works. I haven’t had the best luck embedding files into posts, and it doesn’t appear to be embedding the little player.)

Really, this is more thinking on ratings in general, because it’s interesting to watch the evolution.

In digging around, I discovered Darkwing Duck (which started in 1991) had the Y7 rating, making it the earliest cartoon I’m aware of where the Y7 rating was used. Around the same time, Batman series were being released with a PG rating while still being included in the after-school line-up (and if those Batman series were PG, why wasn’t X-Men, which came out around the same time as Batman: The Animated Series?).

Even more interesting, Thundercats, which I watched every day after school as a child, also has the PG rating (which really makes you wonder how X-Men avoided a higher rating a few years later).

Although I really thought I saw it in high school, many sources agree that the FV (Fantasy Violence) rating was added in 1997 to indicate “intense violence”. Examples of “intense violence” cited included the Power Rangers series and Digimon. having seen Digimon, I have to start wondering again where that line is. I didn’t find it particularly violent, and I don’t consider myself desensitized.

A British report, Safer Children in a Digital World, out in 2008 lays out standards for children’s media. It sets levels for what’s appropriate in terms of violence and language for various age groups, and then raises the question of why no one seems to be using a uniform ratings methodology across all children’s media (movies, television shows, and video games).

It really is one of those things that we think we’re dealing with, or at least making attempts to deal with. At the same time, though, it’s hard to know where the right lines can be drawn. Add to that the fact that children are often deciding what they watch or play, and it becomes more a of a “best intentions” measure.

It’s just interesting to think about, both when planning and viewing children’s media.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and last weekend had a number of things intersect that really got me going on it again. I was listening to the Writing Excuses podcast where Jessica Day George discusses having to remove a poker game that was relevant to the plot of her novel because The Powers That Be felt that is inappropriate for children. After the podcast, I picked up Redwall and soon found myself at a banquet where five different kinds of alcohol were listed in the same sentence and the fights were gruesome by my squeamish standards. Granted, Redwall was written nearly twenty-five years ago, but still it seemed a little odd that in this time when children are exposed to grown-up situations earlier and earlier, there is this struggle between exposing them in understood fantasy settings and sheltering them in the hopes their world will turn out differently than ours has.

What really got me started thinking this months ago was cartoons. I grew up with M.A.S.K. and G.I. Joe, both of which had fights between the bad guys where guns were fired and missiles were launched. Occasionally, someone would get hurt, but no one ever died. I even had M.A.S.K. and G.I. Joe toys, and my cousins and I would play with them and shoot at each other with them and realize we were all playing a game. I then grew into watching X-Men, and if you’ve ever seen the original cartoon then I’m pretty sure my point is made. In college, I watched Gargoyles, which featured all sorts of violence and social drinking.

In fact, shortly after Gargoyles started, the cartoons I tended to prefer all started sporting the FV (fantasy violence) label under their Y7 rating. That rating is supposed to be given to shows with intense violence, kind of a warning that if you’re going to let your seven-year-old watch, then your seven-year-old needs to have a certain level of maturity. It’s kind of like the breakdown between PG and PG-13, only it’s aimed at cartoons that target elementary-aged viewers.

I still watch cartoons, albeit a very small collection of cartoons. Mostly, I watch adapted cartoons from other countries. I’d love to sit here and pretend that our cartoons are really the worst for violence or mature behavior, but I do enjoy anime, many of which were never intended for children but somehow or other got into a situation where they were/are being adapted for children here. My personal favorite is a gun edited out of an early Yu-Gi-Oh episode because 4Kids was trying to keep the show safe and appropriate for its younger audience. Any seven-year-old can look at the edit and tell what was taken out, but then he’ll complain that any of half a dozen cartoons he’s watched on Cartoon Network has guns. It’s an imperfect situation.

But it, like the poker game in the podcast, brings a question to light: Where is the line? Where do we say that what we’re showing, even in what is understood to be a fantasy situation, is potentially harmful to the children who might view it? How do we expose children to the dangers of the world we live in and help them see that what we’re showing them is make-believe?

When did we lose the ability to trust children to understand the line between reality and fantasy?

There’s more on my mind. This is really the tip of the iceberg, but I think it’s something that those who create (or want to, in my case) children’s media have to think about.

I’ve often read that what makes a classic cartoon character is the character’s ability to fit into any time and space. Bugs Bunny could walk the streets of France, sing an opera, and run away from a (rather inept) hunter. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can face the Shredder in modern-day New York, New York of the future, and cyberspace. Mickey Mouse can drive a steamboat, enchant brooms, and still find time to court Minnie Mouse.

It works that way in books, too. Look at the Nancy Drew books. Nancy solves cases all over the world, and has for decades. Children’s picture books like the Arthur series feature similar timeless characters who can move naturally between very different situations.

These characters are strong in their own personality. They’re defined more by what they do and how they do it rather than by where they do it, and that gives them a flexibility that allows them to draw viewers or readers in and drag them along on their adventures. That, in turn, gives them a timelessness that allows them to reach out to different generations, making them truly classic.

Last week, I focused on the messages media can inadvertently send girls. And that’s where a lot of people stop: “Oh, no! Look at what media is doing to our girls!”

Yeah, well, girls aren’t the only ones affected. Look at action/adventure cartoons with a mostly-female cast, and then look at the token guy. Yep, I said it: token guy. It’s like someone decided that the only way you can create a girl-centered action is by inverting the boy-centered action cartoon structure. A bunch of strong girls and a wimpy or subservient guy.

Really, what happened is that they wrote the base of the cartoon with the characters in their “traditional” gender roles, and then just swapped the genders of all the characters. (I want to say I’m kidding, but I have actually seen this technique recommended. I can only hope no one has ever taken it seriously.)

Assuming that there’s even a hair of truth to it, though, male characters don’t have to be weakened to make the female characters around them look strong. In fact, to do that creates a whole new problem. It starts sending the lesson to both girls and boys that it’s okay to turn the tables rather than find equal footing, a mindset that has failed repeatedly throughout history.

Why can’t we promote characters who are strong and capable, regardless of their gender? Why does one side have to be put down so the other can be promoted?

The Challenge: Do something that is typically seen as inappropriate for someone of your age.

My mother tells this story (I actually remember this) about taking me to see Star Wars when it first came out. I sat in the backseat of our Buick and played with my action figures and bubblegum cards while we watched, matching the scenes on the cards with what was happening on the screen.

A couple of years ago, someone brought me a pile of toys he’d rescued from being thrown out. Most of them were Pokemon figurines, but a couple of them were action figures. He didn’t recognize either of them, but I did! One was Will from W.I.T.C.H., which I enjoyed while it was on a station I could see. That other was the Dark Magician from Yu-Gi-Oh, which I happen to be watching right now.

Watching cartoons (outside of anime and shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy) is generally enough to make any kid look at you like you’ve lost your mind to begin with, but I decided to really have fun today. I pulled out Dark Magician (who usually lives right beside my Yu-Gi-Oh manga). He’s sitting on my bed watching this morning’s episodes (which happen to have been my first exposure to Yu-Gi-Oh several years ago because I didn’t turn the television off quickly enough after Jackie Chan Adventures one afternoon, and also happen to be among my favorite episodes). I was watching with him up until I decided I should probably upload pictures and write this post.

Sadly, I can’t seem to get a good picture of Dark Magician and the episode for documentation, but hopefully this will work for now!

Dark Magician Watches Face-Off

For those curious, I ended up watching because Kaiba fascinated me. He’s still my favorite thing about this show and the manga.

If I’ve learned one thing from being an animation fan my entire life, it’s that a cartoon doesn’t have to be educational to teach you something. I think it’s important to remember that when debating the “usefulness” of watching cartoons.

This isn’t meant to belittle the educational cartoons, either. I’ve spent many an afternoon watching Arthur and Cyberchase. To this day, the animation/live action-hybrid Blue’s Clues is still a favorite show. They’re all three well-done shows where a learning outcome is clearly displayed, regardless of whether it’s a lesson about friendship, math and science, or exploring the world around you.

The E/I rating (as near as I can tell) helps identify cartoons that aren’t necessarily educational in nature, but fit a certain criteria to be considered “educational enough”. More recent examples of this include Magi-Nation, which offered interesting and relevant moments of math and science instruction interspersed throughout the storyline, and Winx Club, which encourages girls to develop strong, positive characters.

Then you have the cartoons that are either built around a trendy toy or game (card or video). Because they’re really trying to sell something, they get written off. The cartoons are often shorter than cartoons in the educational or E/I categories, and the writing can get downright insipid at times. That said, though, the writers on these cartoons take advantage of the nature of the world they’re writing in to slip in mini-lessons from science and social studies. I can even think of a couple of cartoons that promote literacy simply by having the characters read frequently. My favorite cartoons tend to fall into this last group, and I can’t tell you how many things I learned from those cartoons in the 80′s are still with me now as an adult.

Just because something isn’t “educational” doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from it.

When  Dinosaur King first showed up a couple of years ago, I almost turned it off because it sounded like another Pokemon. Once I got past the voice actors, though, I found that the cartoon actually reminded me of my favorite childhood cartoon, M.A.S.K.

In Dinosaur King, a paleontologist’s son and his friends travel all over the world looking for modern-day dinosaurs. They’ll be tracking down a dinosaur, and then find that a team of adults is also trying to catch the same dinosaur. It becomes a race where each group’s dinosaurs often have to battle (and the good guys don’t always win).

In M.A.S.K., a philanthropist and his son would be somewhere in the world where the philanthropist was usually conducting business. Then, whatever they were supposed to be visiting would go missing or they would see the bad guys trying to mess with what they were supposed to be visiting, and the philanthropist called in his team and fireworks would ensue.

What caused me to draw the connection between Dinosaur King and M.A.S.K. was the globe-hopping. While the characters in either cartoon are on their mission or in the build-up to the mission, they’re exploring the location. When I was a child, I loved those parts of M.A.S.K. because it was a chance to learn about somewhere far away from where I lived, somewhere I probably wouldn’t get to go on my own. I see the same thing in Dinosaur King, a chance to expose a child to small facts about life around the world in an engaging setting. Even if all they’re doing is following the dinosaurs, they’re bound to pick up something.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to watch an episode of each together. It was the best hour I’d spent watching television in a while.

While attending voiceover workshops last summer, one of the things I learned is that the voiceover industry tends to be male-dominated. Despite the fact I noticed both workshops had more women attending, I really didn’t think much about it until I was watching TV last night. I had just finished watching one of the America’s Next Top Model cycles, had just finished watching a young woman win a Cover Girl contract (based in part on a commercial she shot during the competition)…and listened to a man announce a Cover Girl commercial.

Somehow, that just seems wrong to me. It’s a product for women. Women are featured in the ads. Why isn’t a woman narrating those commercials?

I started digging around, and while I didn’t find much I did find that studies have discovered that we tend to find women believable and men authoritative when we listen to voiceovers. I also discovered how much I don’t pay attention to movie trailers. I think in the back of my mind I’ve always recognized that movie trailers are narrated by men, but with Don LaFontaine’s passing last year there has been a slow, subtle movement to hire women to do these trailers. It hasn’t always been successful because of the movies involved, but there has still at last been an effort.

It’s something I want to start paying more attention to. Does it matter whether the material needs to be believable or come from an authority figure? Is the right gender advertising the product? Are women really not well-represented in the voiceover industry?

Last week, a coworker loaned me the first second Death Note movie after she found out I’m a fan of both the manga and the anime. It was subtitled, which I don’t enjoy, so it took me most of Sunday to get through it. What I found really interesting was how they took elements from all along the manga and compressed them into this movie. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Wow, this is a very creative adaptation.”

On Saturday night, a friend patiently sat through my tirade on a Wired article about Warner Brothers revitalizing the Tomb Raider franchise roughly a year and a half after completely giving up woman-led action movies. In my ranting, I ended up professing my love for the first movie because I felt it was a strong adaptation of the games and condemning the second for being little more than trendy. I’ve known other Tomb Raider fans who’ve felt the same way.

Books and video games have been adapted to television shows, cartoons, and movies for decades now, and fans are quick to scream when the adaptation doesn’t reflect their own impression of the book or game in question. A well-done adaptation can be shredded by the fans because a beloved character was left out, or a setting doesn’t look the way the fan artists have drawn it. We’re quite vicious about it sometimes.

Sitting there Sunday night, adoring the actor who brilliantly played the rather inhuman character L, I realized I’ve heard very few complaints about this movie. But it is an adaptation, and I’d fill up a page of notebook paper trying to list everything that was changed. But no one really seems to care.

I wonder…is our search for a close adaptation a cultural thing?

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