By Jeanette Williams

Guest Columnist

 

There I am, 7-years-old and sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of our old wood-paneled television. It’s 1990 and my blonde hair is crimped to unnatural volume, pulled back and to the side with a bulky Scrunchie.

My Barbie dolls sit next to me, stuffed haphazardly into a hot pink New Kids on the Block backpack. My younger brothers sit to the other side of me, alternating between munching lazily on Schwan’s dixie cups and smashing their green Ninja Turtles action figures into each other, all while keeping one eye on the television.

From our compact positions we absorb our favorite cartoons and shows as they stream across the screen, one after the other, throughout the day. We watch “Fraggle Rock,”

“TaleSpin,” “The Smurfs,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja

Turtles.”

Eventually our mom comes home from work to relieve Nana (who, coincidentally, has been watching soap operas all day) and we’re forced to turn off the boob tube to help with dinner.

This was our rainy-day summer routine, so it’s really not surprising that I have some very strong memories and emotions tied to these shows. I even own some of them on DVD and I can still sing most of the theme songs.

Maybe it’s nostalgia that causes me to cling white-knuckled to the idea that my shows are, without a doubt, the best, and that no other children’s shows can possibly compare to the ones I grew up with — especially not the crap on TV for kids now. Up until very recently I would defend my shows tooth-and-nail if they were ever criticized.

Now I realize that those shows were mostly useless. Except for a select few programs, the shows didn’t teach us much.

Really, what have we learned from these shows? Let’s examine a few.

“The Smurfs.” The lack of females in the Smurf population provides strong evidence that Smurfs can, indeed, reproduce asexually. Or Smurfette was really busy off-camera.

“Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” We should all drink radioactive goo, mutate and fight crime while bearing the name of a renowned dead Italian artist.

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” If you follow that nice middle-aged man in the cardigan he’ll take you to the Neighborhood of Make Believe.

Then there’s my favorite — “Fraggle Rock.” I believe Jim Henson, rest his soul, wants us to go spelunking through the wall in search of tiny communities of brightly colored rats. I tried this once as a child. My parents were not amused.

Some of the shows we watched were violent. The opening of “TaleSpin” shows Baloo being shot at three times.

Let’s not forget “Looney Tunes,” either. Tweety Bird was constantly putting the smack down on poor Sylvester, and it’s possible that no cartoon character was as sorely abused as Wile E. Coyote was by the Road Runner.

Yeah, I used to think those shows were the absolute best and that no new show could ever compare.

Now I know better.

I thank my 2-year-old, Ethan, for inadvertently enlightening me.

The enlightenment began a few years ago as a massively pregnant version of myself balanced the remote on my gigantic belly. I had stopped channel surfing on Nick Jr., mostly because I was curious what kind of shows my kid would be watching in the next few years.

“Dora the Explorer” was coming on next.

As I watched the show for the first time I wondered: “What kind of a name is Dora? Why is she asking me questions? Why the heck is her head so big? Wait, is she speaking Spanish?”

A few minutes of “Dora” and I found myself speaking out loud, trying to correctly pronounce a Spanish word I’d never heard before. I couldn’t believe it, our shows never taught us anything like this!

Indeed, today’s shows like “Dora the Explorer,” “The Backyardigans,” “Blues Clues,” and “The Wiggles,” are very different from what we grew up with. They’re mostly computer animated, totally politically correct and often quite educational. These shows are informative and interactive, frequently pausing to seek the child’s participation and feedback.

Baloo never asked me to count with him. Papa Smurf definitely never implored me to yell “Azul!” at my TV.

Aside from a handful of exceptional educational shows (think PBS), our shows didn’t offer up anything more than visual and auditory stimulation occasionally attached to a watered-down moral lesson. They were entertaining, yes, but that was usually all they had to offer us.