Oh The Generation Gaps

A post to prove how old I am in terms of my thoughts. As I've written various times in the past, I hate most of the things on American television. We're a country that says we can watch whatever we want and say whatever we want on television, yet we cut anime and the uber violence in some movies. But thats not the point of this post. The reason why I hate some of the programs now a days is because they lack originality and morals. I can flip on cartoon network and enter a world of fart jokes and immaturity at it's highest (honestly the people who write some of this stuff are either mental patients (no offense to one of my readers) or immature adults). My brother and I grew up near end of the 80s, so we were introduced to cartoons like G.I. Joe and Transformers in the form of VHS tapes rented from Warehouse video (if you know what this place is you're old!). At it's time most cartoons were roughly the same format as what we watched. You have one bad villian in charge of a bunch of henchmen and a hero or a group of heroes who would ulitmately foil plans of the forces of evil.

This past year my brother and I got back into Transformers (I mean the original transformers, Peter Cullen as Optimus, Frank Welker as Megatron and Chris Latta as Starscream) and I tell you cartoons were different. I look back and see how inspiring some of the transformers were. Optimus was always my favorite as a child and he holds a special place in my heart now. You'll never see a leader unlike Optimus. He cares for both his fellow autobots and human friends. He puts others before himself, one example is in the episode "Cosmic Rust" (type that into a video site and watch it) Perceptor is infected with a rust that infected Megatron and is slowly destroying him, but at the same time there's a bomb attached to him. Optimus is given the choice to either save his fellow autobot or watch him blown up. Saving Perceptor will infect Optimus with the rust, but doing nothing will lead to his death. In the end Optimus saves Perceptor and is infected with the rust. Now I've seen this sometimes in some cartoons, but never did it have the same impact as when Optimus did it.

Now looking at todays cartoons. We're treating it too much as yes they are meant to be unrealistic and entertaining. I mean yes they entertain me in a sense it tickles the stupid bone in my body. But my little brother watches the stuff and I'll tell you it really shows what he's watching. In a recent episode of Spongebob, I saw Patrick put garbage on Spongebob's thumb which had a splinter in it and I saw to my disgust get infected. For a country that cuts out blood and violence in anime we can show a wound get infected. Also it seems unforgiveable that Canada is the only country that gets to air the second season of Black Lagoon since we here in America say that the first season of Black Lagoon was so full of violence and bad words nobody wanted to pick up the second season.

We say that children are the future. Yet we as a country expose them to random acts of idocy and immaturity. The shows of the 80s and early 90s were by far the peak of shows that could inspire children to become better people. But now we're telling them to be that stupid loud kid in class or the attention getter. What can we do about it now, I can think of two (the first being more bias) one: make them watch uncut anime, no pokemon. You'd be surprised how originality of some shows can defeat American shows now a days. Naruto uncut is pretty inspiring, it shows kids to never give up in yourself or others and to pursue thier dreams. Two: make them come up with thier own ideas for shows. My pitch ideas help me admire and strive to become like the characters I've created (Ryo is me!!). So maybe there is no solution to this problem, but in the end what we watch can truly shape who we are.