I touched on this briefly in Steven Universe when Steven said “And now I’m gonna die”, but let’s talk about kids’ shows that do and don’t respect their audiences.
When I was growing up in the nineties and early aughts, kids’ cartoons were...well, they tried really really hard not to let on anything darker than someone getting hit with a squeaky toy mallet. Well, okay, that’s an exaggeration, but even at ten years old I knew I was being talked down to--stakes were low, real guns were a no-no, enemy mooks were all fake people and robots, they never even said the word “die”. The people making these shows had forgotten what it was like to be a child, had forgotten how rough our own play-pretend could be, and so they viciously sanitized everything that they made for us in the hopes it wouldn’t hurt our wee widdle feewings. 4kids got mocked relentlessly for this, but it predated them by a long ways.
You wanna know what kids actually act like? Go watch The Goonies. Never have I seen a more accurate depiction of kids than that movie. We swore, we tussled, we cracked jokes at each others’ expense that were more often than not as ribald as our fumbling understanding allowed. Any adult making a kids’ show that forgets that kids can handle quite a lot simply forgets to respect those children. It’s really neat to see horror in a kids’ show, here, because when I was growing up, we weren’t allowed horror.
A wise fellow once said that children don’t need fairy tales to tell them dragons exist; children know dragons exist. They need fairy tales to tell them dragons can be killed. It’s something to remember when you’re making media for kids, I think, because something that respects the audience it’s aimed at has much more bite than something that doesn’t.
