Times Change

Have you ever watched something on television that you watched as a child, and suddenly saw it with new insight? That's how I felt last week watching something I hadn't seen in many, many years.

Last week, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) played a tribute to legendary producer Hal Roach. If the name is unfamiliar to you, I'm guessing his shows will generate some recognition. How about names of the characters? Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Worm, Petey the dog...okay, now are you getting it?  He's the genius behind the "Our Gang" series of short films that once played in movie houses throughout the United States during the Great Depression. As a child growing up in the 1970's, the black and white Our Gang or Little Rascals films were thought fine for young minds and played on television during the prime after school time slot, sometime after 2:30.  Later on, someone - I think it was Bill Cosby - bought the rights to them and took them off of television, deeming them racist and offensive.  Now they are back on video and TCM.

Watching them as an adult, I couldn't believe how silly and crazy they were.  Kids whack adults over the head with pipe wrenches. Children threaten to sock each other in the nose as they squabble over their crushes on Miss Crabtree. Boxes of mothballs (poisonous) tumble into pots of soup.  Kids glue babies by their diapers onto the floor to hold them down.

And you know what?  Watching it, you recognize it for what it is....slapstick nonsense.  We know babies shouldn't be glued to the floor, tempting as that thought may be to anyone with a crawling, creeping, getting-into-trouble infant.  We know you don't hit others with pipe wrenches or pour mothball balls into soup.  We laugh because the silly, crazy antics are fueled entirely by fantasy, and we recognize it for what it is: heirs to Punch and Judy, nonsense with an edge that will all come out right in the end.

I remember a debate raging sometime in the 1980's about cartoon violence.  There was some talk of cartoon violence creating aggressive behavior in children because youngsters cannot distinguish reality from fantasy at a certain age.

For centuries, parents read or told stories to children, including Grimm's Fairy Tales where witches get pushed into the oven and mean stepmothers dance to death in red hot shoes.  Our parents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents perhaps watched those Our Gang shows at the movie theater on a Saturday morning and didn't turn into pipe-wrench wielding maniacs pouring mothballs in soup after gluing their kid brothers to the floor.  What's different today?

Is it the constant bombardment of the sense in today's noisy, image-filled world?  It is the access to more and more dangerous things around the house? We used to warn kids not to play with matches and bleach, but now there's Draino and electricity.  So is there more to worry about?  Or something else going on?  Did we have epidemics of kids getting hurt by watching or reading those stories in the past and now we know better?  Or are we just more cautious now?

I don't know the answer to this, but I thought about it a lot.  It made a change from wondering how I can be so absent-minded I forget to mail my letters but I can still recite dialogue from episodes of Our Gang shows almost 40 years later.  What's with that, anyway?