Childhood, cartoons, and capitalism

As a certified old person, I find it fascinating to contrast my life experiences and attitudes with those of my younger online acquaintances. In particular, I’m struck by how many of them view capitalism as a totalizing force—omnipresent and inescapable. I also wonder how much that might be due to their watching television as children.

The basic idea is that the media we experience as children influence our view of the world—that, for example, because conservative Boomers see the 1950s as reflected in TV shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66) and Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) that they watched in their childhood, they see that decade as one reflecting traditional conservative family values, like heterosexual marriage between a male breadwinner and a female housewife. But the 1950s were also the decade of (for example) the Mattachine Society (1950), Playboy magazine (1953), and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955).

Which brings me back to cartoons: As a child I watched shows like The Flintstones (1960-66), The Jetsons (1962-63), George of the Jungle (1967), and so on. They were clearly commercial productions, but existed as standalone pieces of media for the most part, with few if any commercial tie-ins. I also watched some shows that were positioned as more than mere entertainment, like Captain Kangaroo (1955-84), but they were not clearly delineated from the other shows and ran on the same (commercial) television networks.

But as time went on and restrictions on advertising on US children’s shows were loosened, many if not most children’s shows became simply vehicles by which to sell children’s toys: He-Man (1983-85), G.I. Joe (1983-86), Transformers (1984-87), etc. The most prominent exceptions to this trend were shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001), Sesame Street (1969-), and Reading Rainbow (1983-2006) that were shown on public television and were explicitly promoted as noncommercial and (more or less) educational in nature.

Those who were children in the US in the 1980s and beyond thus lived in two disjoint worlds. The first was a world ruled by corporations, in which the distinction between “entertainment” and “advertising” was abolished, and children’s participation in media culture was implicitly reduced to an endless series of economic transactions—a model of oppressive capitalism. The second was a world shaped by governments and nonprofit organizations, from which commerce was banished and in which children were viewed primarily as the targets of instruction and advocacy for progressive values—a model of benign socialism.

This may just be me as a old person attempting some amateur psychoanalysis on the younger generation, but it seems as if this dichotomy might help explain some of the particular forms the “culture wars” and the controversies over “wokeness” have taken.

Thus, for example, the idea that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” that by watching a TV show or film, or reading a book or comic, one is inextricably entangled with capitalism in all its aspects (arguably true of those watching He-Man and similar series) and (more contentiously) that one is then implicated in all of capitalism’s crimes and ills.

But of course children in their innocence are not aware of all this, simply enjoying these shows and comics as entertainment. When grown to adulthood their remembrance of that enjoyment then exists in tension with their knowledge of the social and economic context in which those works were created and consumed, and the purposes to which they were put. And the implied continuation to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is often “but I’m of a mind to do it anyway.”

Thus, then, the urge to retroactively redeem childhood favorites by importing into them the values of the public television shows they existed in opposition to: Not a new story of a growing love between two young lesbians, but a reboot of a He-Man spinoff in which Adora/She-Ra and Catra go from enemies to lovers. Not a contemporary bildungsroman featuring a biracial teenager thrust into “great responsibility,” but Miles Morales as a successor to the role of Spider-Man. And when the patriarchy is to be fought, Barbie is drafted to do it.¹

And thus, on the flip side, the reaction of people (usually male) who think such changes “ruined my childhood.” After all, these media “properties” are not in their eyes like the Mona Lisa, Seven Samurai, and other traditional works of art. They are instead products that as consumers they have paid for many times over during childhood and beyond, often to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. No wonder they react like regulars at a restaurant when the chef changes the recipes for their favorite dishes, complaining loudly to the manager and then hastening to Yelp to write negative reviews.

I enjoyed The Jetsons when I was in elementary school, but it holds no interest for me today. It was made as disposable entertainment for children, it served that purpose well, and it can now be tossed into the trash bin of history. I have no interest in reading an academic paper on how it propagandizes for “late capitalism,” or an opinion piece on its positive vision for “accelerationism.” And I definitely have no desire to see it rebooted as a “bone-chilling dystopia.”

Give me some new stories, and let the old ones stay in the past to which they belong. If I ever want to revisit them, I know that I’ll be entering a different country, and will be mindful of the flaws and injustices I find there—not forgetting or excusing them, but also not letting them completely obscure the power of a work of art to entertain or enlighten me.