Marking Time

It’s hard to know exactly when it happened, but sometime between January and June of 2008, my five-year-old (now six) outgrew most of the post-toddler “kid” shows on Playhouse Disney and PBS, and became a crazed fanatic about Cartoon Network.

It would be easy to blame it on my wife, since she does not share my mistrust of the network itself, and started turning it on for him when I had previously been steering him away from it. But it’s my fault, too. For one thing, I’m doing what we said we would not do: using the tv as a babysitter, to keep him occupied and safe while we try to get other things done (like this damned blog! …which magically turns minutes into hours!). Or rather, his body is safe… his mind may be another matter.

I’m trying to nip it in the bud by setting some time limits, but I fear Pandora may already be out of the box, and my kid’s a budding cartoon junkie. He hasn’t asked  to read a book in months. He blurts out random non-sequitr quotes from unknown shows while we’re riding in the car. He doesn’t want to go outside when it means turning the tv off. I don’t want to sound alarmist, but I’m concerned Cartoon Network will make my child into a brilliant idiot.

There are two reasons I don’t like and don’t trust Cartoon Network’s daytime programming:

1. commercials for junkfood, bad toys, and more crap we don’t need but that he will bug us to buy. He’s being groomed as a consumer, and I don’t want the corporate monstrosity that is AOL/Time/Warner reprogramming my child and undoing the good work we’ve done for six years
2. too much ‘toonified violence… watered down, bloodless, but aggressive nonetheless, and pushing values I definitely don’t share. There’s a marked difference between the spirit of conflict between Wile E. Coyote vs. Roadrunner, and the power rays, magic and kung fu of today’s cartoon violence. I can’t always put my finger on it, but something about most of the current “drama” and adventure ‘toons just seems to rub me the wrong way as a parent and a pacificist-leaning Christian. Plus it’s mostly just bad… badly written, badly drawn, badly acted. For example, I won’t willingly let Graham watch Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs until he’s 17… but when he does see it, I want to be the one to show him how good movie and tv-makers can do up violence and double-crossing with great intelligence, humor and style, instead of the cartoonish hollowness and CGI flashiness of The Incredible Hulk.

Just as an experiment, though, let’s switch on Tuesday morning’s Cartoon Network offerings for awhile and see what we get:

7:56am   Ben 10  is just wrapping up. Or is it Ben Ten: Alien Force. I don’t know. There are two current series featuring the same characters, and I think Ben 10 is Graham’s new favorite show. He clearly idolizes Ben, who is ten. (How’d you guess? No wait –on Alien Force, Ben is 15. I’m confused now.) It’s not bad overall. Fairly innocent, with today’s villain being a midget hypnotist who wants all the people at the mall to rob the cash registers and bring him cash. Ben has some wristband thing with a button he can push to transform himself into other entities, like Fireball Guy, or Plant Guy. Silly, but not all that different from the animated adventure/superhero stories that formerly appeared only on Saturday mornings or after school. The downside: I put on Playhouse Disney as Little Einsteins was wrapping up today, and Graham howled, “No! I don’t like this show anymore!” It used to be his favorite. Poor innocent little glasses-wearing Leo, cast aside in favor of one of the “cool kids”, complete with a shape-shifting gizmo and a preteen’s smart-aleck attitude.

7:59am        Wedgies. I had neither seen nor heard about this show until just moments ago. Oh wait, I see – it’s only a little bumper, a time-filler, a 1-2 minute mini-toon called Flapjack. Maybe these pilot-y sorta things are called Wedgies ’cause they’re wedged between two other shows. And unless I miss my guess, that’s Brian Doyle-Murray I hear voicing one of the two featured Flapjack characters. Brian is Bill Murray’s older brother. He’s a fairly decent, funny actor in his own right. But apparently nowadays, in an era where scripted tv comedy is third in the pecking order, behind hourlong dramas and semi-scripted reality tv, A-list character actors like Brian have to take what they can get. That means voicing car commercials (Matt Dillon is the current voice of one of the major car companies), or little wedged-in bumpers, or cartoons, just to keep working steady. (Brian’s done some Sponge Bob, some Disney tv stuff, a wide range… his scratchy voice is good for cartoons.) It used to be that movie actors (I think) did this type of work on the side, for fun, or after their biggest career successes were well in the rear-view mirror. But with increased competition, for fewer on-camera jobs, I’ve noticed more and more recognizable actors slogging away on cartoons. Take the PBS show Cyberchase, for example. It has two: Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future’s Dr. Emmett Brown) and Gilbert Gottfried (better known as a stand-up comedian, and for that aggressively annoying voice). Now maybe these two actors actually like working on a quality show that subtly builds math skills into the plotlines. And I know Mr. Lloyd has done stage work on and off for years as well. But part of me can’t help but wonder if the less expensive, less creative, tenement-style programming that is reality tv is the main reason that cartoons have become the bread-and-butter for a whole class of actors now. Meanwhile, have you looked at most of the crap that passes for live-action network sitcoms aimed at 18 to 32-year-olds these days? Big Bang Theory ? Puh-leeease!

8am      Johnny Test - (Not to be confused with Jonny Quest, for all you old-schoolers out there.) I’ve only popped my head in and watched partial episodes, but when I did watch, Johnny Test had a time machine. This is an old trick: it gives the writers permission to put their own goofy spin on thousands of years of human history. Now Graham will probably think Atilla the Hun was just a scowling ham of an actor with a beard and a clearly un-American look, unlike the dashing, blond and ironic hero, feisty little Johnny T.

8:30am    missed it - TVGuide.com says it was Skunk Fu! - probably typical of the snarky, hugely ironic and self-referential nature of entertainment in the Oughts. Everything’s a lefthanded rip-off of something else…

9am    Tom & Jerry Blast Off to Mars. A feature-length movie, produced by TBS cable network. Actually, Ted Turner and/or AOL/Time/Warner (owners of Cartoon Network) own alot of those old cartoon franchises now. When Cartoon Network first started it was mostly just an outlet for a wide range of those shows I grew up with, like the Hannah-Barbera stuff. (Now , CN shows alot of original and syndicated programming, some of which is imported, much of which is crap that definitely will not stand the test of time.) I blogged about this once, in the context of a discussion on Scooby Doo’s staying power. Meanwhile back here at the ranch, Graham just saw that Tom and Jerry were on, and got very excited. I was gratified that at least two of the more “classic” characters and situations strike his fancy as much as, if not more than, the Pokemons and Ben Tens of the cartoon universe.

Long live Bugs Bunny, Felix the Cat and Fred Flintstone!

Kind of hard to write something snarky and cute when the breaking news this morning is about the attempted bombing of the Danish embassy in Pakistan. Yes, that’s right: Denmark — home to the much hated and threatened cartoonist a few years back, who depicted Muhammad with a bomb on his head in the shape of a turban. Who knew that such a middle-of-the-road country could stay so relevant? I’m part Danish myself, and we had a Danish exchange student live with our family for awhile when I was a teen. All in all, I consider it one of the most “vanilla” cultures in all the earth. Once you get past Hans Christian Andersen, what have you got left? Germans with a dash of Scandinavian humility and a pinch of fun thrown in, that’s what. Nice people, yeah. But interesting? Bomb-worthy?

But… such is the atmosphere in Pakistan nowadays. If this is what goes on in democracies (and I use the term loosely), in places where supposedly they’re friendly to the EU and America, what can we expect in more lawless, out-of-control places like Iraq and Afghanistan? What kind of diplomatic improvement is possible in middlin’ nations like Egypt and Iran?

Oops, now I’ve gone and done it. I brought up Iran, but not in the context of some discussion about a mythical Axis of Evil. (If there was ever a term that belonged in comic books instead of politics, Axis of Evil is it.) In my opinion, Iran could be occupying the position of co-peacemaker with the U.S. in Iraq, a role that Pakistan has been very bad at pursuing with us in Afghanistan thus far.

Is that a word? Co-peacemaker? Let’s say it is, for sake of argument. Iran, if we can be grownups and talk straight for a change, is in some ways the best ally that Europe and America could have in the region. If we’re willing to play fair and set aside the past, that is. Iran is already quite Westernized and developed, by many standards. The country is chock full of what we would normally call intellectuals and middle class families, if we weren’t so busy listening to our leaders, who (in playing out childish revenge fantasies) would rather we see them as blindly loyal terrorist sympathizers. From my semi-informed perspective, the Iranian government is not made up of religious extremists, either. Or at least they’re not imposing Sharia law to the oppressive extent that the Taliban did in Afghanistan. Non-governmental interests in the country are certainly more extreme. But we have that here, too… or was that just a big family picnic/orgy down at the polygamist ranch in Texas?

Sure, the Iranians have their prejudices, like the classically tribal, knee-jerk, ill-informed, anti-Jew attitudes that exist throughout the Muslim world, and pre-date the twentieth century. But the average Iranian is not anti-American. They just want a seat at the table with the grownups, perhaps in the same way Europe and America have been so willing to overlook the sins of our “friends” in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states (note: Iran is overwhelmingly Shi ‘ite, the Saudis are Sunni… are you getting the picture yet?) . And by now, we need to consider whether the Iranians have earned that seat at the table.

You catch more flies with honey than vinegar… ain’t that what the hillbillies ’round here is always sayin’? But it will be hard to offer that honey, as long as the powerful and equally-prejudiced Israel is whispering in many an American politician’s ear.

I’m prepared to be challenged on this, but I maintain that the current impasse is due to the reality that we in the West refuse to acknowledge that our “friend” Israel is not helping one bit. Those anti-Jewish (and by association, anti-Western) flames are fed every time Israel allows Israeli settlers to trump up charges and commit injustices in the Palestinian territories. Muslim suspicions that they’ll be pushed off the worldwide map are confirmed every day that travel restrictions and oppressive, apartheid-like conditions go unchanged throughout Palestine. And when the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier or two leads to the bombing of thousands in Lebanon, twenty years of diplomatic possibilities are erased in one fell swoop, not just in Israel/Palestine, but throughout the Muslim world.

So, rational or not, Islamic jihadists in Pakistan (Sunni), Iran (Shia) and worldwide are not basing their bias on nothing. They see evidence all around them. They know they’re the little brothers, and that their dysfunctional middle brothers and sisters in places like Iraq are getting all the attention, while big brother Israel is Mom and Dad’s favorite. Can you guess who Mom and Dad are?

In the beginning, the landscape of books for children was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of Dickens hovered over the publishing landscape. And publisher E.P. Dutton said, “Let there be Winnie-the-Pooh,” and there was Pooh.

Welcome to Pooh Week at Marking Time! (And thank you, Spencer Foon, for sending me the above Mark Tatulli “Lio” comic strip, which inspired this Pooh-related series.)

We shall start with a bit of background on  author A.A. Milne (1882-1956), his works for children, and literary history in general. Then in the days that follow I will take a more personal and opinionated tone, during which I will alternately hug and slap around various cultural icons and sacred cows. So pull up a comfy arm-chair, fix some tea and a “little smackerel” of something, and settle in for a pleasant ride from London to visit our “friends and relations” out in the Hundred Acre Wood, then across the pond to America, and beyond.

As I’ve said, in the beginning, before there was Harry Potter and his gay headmaster, there was Pooh. Before there were graphic novels, there were the “decorations” of Ernest H. Shephard, who was already a renowned artist before he did the Pooh drawings. And before there was Disney (”Gosh, Daddy, was there ever such a time?”), there were books.

Until fairly recently, books were these hard-bound, venerable, comparatively expensive things that people bought for both education and entertainment, especially because they had so few other options for either endeavor. No movies. No tv. No radio or phonograph or iPod. No Guitar Hero, or Second Life, or even Myst. Think of it — for all those centuries, entertainment (when one even had leisure time for it, which was not often) consisted of just a few classic choices: board and card games, maybe a piano or other instrument (if one could afford it and could read music), a ball, maybe a few gadgets like the kaleidoscope (which I also know a few things about, but that’s a blog for another day), and books.

But people also bought books because they loved books, especially the way that a book lets us (as my man Garrison Keillor once put it), “live more than one life”. A work of fiction – and even some nonfiction– lets one imagine what life looks like through the eyes of another person. Thus, it helps us all to feel a little less lonely and strange. That’s probably the main reason families in England, and later in America and the rest of the world, immediately loved Winnie-the-Pooh (E.P. Dutton, 1926), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Because we all need friends, and the ones we find in books are the most faithful friends of all.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call the two main Pooh books novels, but I personally don’t think so. (I’ve been a high school English teacher, and I have a Masters degree, therefore what I say goes… nyah nyah nyahh!) For in the development of the novel as an art form, I have it on good authority that one of the first prose novels ever, if not the first, was a similarly episodic work featuring a child (and other comic characters), not unlike the two Winnie-the-Pooh books. Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554 Spain, was not meant to be fiction for children. However, it does feature a little street urchin of a boy who regularly gets into trouble and has semi-realistic dialogues with various stereotypical people commonly seen in 1554 Spain. It’s a funny little book, slightly satirical, and if you want to check it out online it would be a quick read. (Before there was Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote –the incorrectly labeled “first novels” in Western culture– there was little Lazarillo.)

Anyway, the episodic novel, featuring characters that have a slightly symbolic purpose, was a tradition well-established by the time Milne stumbled upon the forumula for our beloved Pooh. His ingenious idea was to give his son Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals a life of their own, out in the woods, which parallels the lives of adults and children here in our world. Talking animals had been tried before, of course — as early as Aesop’s fables, or the really weird story of Balaam’s talking donkey in the Bible’s Book of Numbers. But an inanimate object brought to life? This was a more modern invention, to be sure.

I’m actually an A.A. Milne scholar, in case anyone’s interested. Not in the sense of having a PhD in children’s literature. That would be stupid… not to mention an oxymoron. I’m only an expert in the sense of having read the two original Pooh books countless times –mostly before I had a child. I’ve also studied enough other adult and children’s literature – and non-fiction history – to be able to put the Pooh books in their proper contexts as masterpieces, no less important than Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn.

Plus I’ve read the collections of Milne’s children’s poetry When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), both of which also feature decorations by Ernest H. Shepard.  It was in one of those earlier poems that Edward “Winnie-the-Pooh” Bear first appeared, within the pages of the British humor magazine Punch in 1923. That poem, “Teddy Bear”, can be found here. Note that When We Were Very Young, which collected Milne’s previous magazine-published poems, actually preceded the 1926 publication of Winnie-the-Pooh by two years… suggesting that Milne’s publishers definitely changed their original opinion of his writing-for-children as drivel, once they saw there was serious profit to be made on it.

As an amateur Pooh scholar, for example, I already knew that Christopher’s stuffed bear was named after Winnipeg, a Canadian black bear which had been the mascot of A.A. Milne’s WWI  British Army regiment. (Makes one wonder how the bear went from being black to being the utterly impossible and unnatural golden color that Winnie’s taken on nowadays.) I also knew that A.A. Milne was frustrated by the fact that his popular children’s books overshadowed any writing he ever did for adults (including plays, novels, nonfiction works and poetry). In this, he is somewhat comparable to playwright J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan and one of Milne’s idols.

I also know a wide range of odd little trivia about Milne and Pooh, such as a few details about the highly successful one-man-show that Patrick Stewart (a.k.a. Captain Picard) took on tour across the U.K. and U.S., performing interpretations of the original Pooh stories to packed houses of mostly grownups. I know there have been ongoing copyright issues, such as the strange California appellate court case in 2005, in which A.A. Milne’s granddaughter got all in a huff about how long her family’s copyright should remain in force (based upon the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998… go Sonny go! ). Or that A.A. Milne retired after a 1952 stroke to Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, which was where the Rolling Stones‘ lead guitarist Brian Jones would later live and be found drowned in 1969. Or that the 1982 nonfiction bestseller The Tao of Pooh is a load of crap – a thinly-veiled, opportunistic grab for cash that is neither Taoist nor Pooh-ist in spirit, and is not written very well either.

Speaking of people who have barstardized our pal Pooh: as you might expect, I barely tolerate the way DisneyCorp has prostituted those great A.A. Milne characters. While the first couple of feature-length movies were of good quality, even inventive in their own way, by now the new movies and tv show have taken those great characters well beyond the faithful portrayals in the original films. But I’m going to have to wait till tomorrow for this whole Disney debate, because today’s entry is already far too long and rambling…

kind of like one of Pooh’s patented hummy strolls through the woods! Nevertheless, we must move on. Therefore, until tomorrow, as the Disneyfied Tigger is fond of saying:

“TTFN — Ta Ta for Now!”