I tried to whip up some nostalgia and/or angst about the
tradition’s passing, but the best I could come up with was this:
(And to be honest, I’ve said this pretty much about TV since
1997 and about Saturday morning cartoons long before that.)
Yes, I spent a lot of time as a kid watching Saturday
morning cartoons. But because we’ve never had broadcast or cable TV in our
house since we got married (firstly due to economics, secondly due to the lack
of compelling programming) the tradition of sitting in front of the tube for
hours on Saturday morning never got to our kids.
That’s not to say we don’t watch TV. We do. Just not on TV’s
schedule any more – which is part of the reason given for Saturday morning
cartoons’ demise. And somewhere in that pile of DVDs and VHS tapes I’ve got
some Saturday morning cartoons we recorded live from the air.
But we watch way less TV now than we did as kids, and that’s
a good thing. Probably we waste more time on computers than we did back then,
but I still think the time spent in front of a screen has lessened. More
irritating is to listen to people call Saturday morning cartoons “sacred” or to
hear people saying things like this:
It’s sad, though, that an entire generation of kids is
missing out on lazy Saturdays filled with excellent cartoons. Replacing them
with cheaper, educational content was bound to happen, but a little magic has
been lost in the process.
What magic?
Well, okay, this magic. And this magic. This magic came on in the afternoons after school -- but is now derided as racist. As if we didn't recognize that back then. But I recall many, many lazy
Saturday mornings doing other things, including playing outside. Building entire villages out of bricks for
our teddy bears. Building entire cities out of clay. And, yes, setting
well-supervised fires.
Not that I want my kids setting fires. That seems dangerous,
unless well-supervised. And I also don’t want them spending their Saturday
mornings in front of the tube, either.
No comments:
Post a Comment