(This post is a little more than a week old)
I babysat for my neighbors’ sick child recently. They’re nice people, they pay well, and their children are as close to angels as a babysitter could ever hope for. Their younger son, Matt, was sick with...well, something. The cold or the flu, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t deathly sick, though. All my job consisted of was making sure he was comfortable, got plenty of fluids and rested up. When I wasn’t tending to him, we spent our down time in the living room watching television. It was during this down time that I watched the Disney Channel for the first time since before high school. I mean, REALLY watched, for a solid two, maybe three hours.
I was horrified. I was disgusted. I was terribly confused. I was saddened. Disney, what in the world ever happened to you?
The grainy cartoons I loved, the Mickey Mouse Club, the occasional Friday animated movie...gone. Out the window, without a trace. In their place: “The Suite Life”, “Two Kings”, “Zeke and Luther”, and other faux-sitcom nightmares. I nearly wept to see what had become of (what was) my favorite TV channel when I was growing up.
For those lucky enough not to have their eyeballs scoured with such filth, I’ll try to describe Disney’s new formula without being too graphic. Cartoons are by-and-large removed from the programming schedule. Instead, the vast majority of the daytime schedule has been gobbled up by IRL comedy shows. I say “comedy” because that’s technically the genre under which they are categorized, although the truth of what these shows are is much more aptly described as “gross-out horror”. They drip with slime (à la 1990s Nickelodeon), bodily secretions (sweat and nasal mucus, nothing sexual--surely you don’t think Disney could sink as low as that?), physical humor that is more creepy and unsettling than slapstick funny, and a brand of dialogical and monological humor that can be defined as cartoonish.
Cartoons are inherently funny (although not all cartoon creators choose to be funny). Writers and animators can portray good old slapstick humor in ways that defies the laws of normal physics or scientific knowledge. Watching Daffy Duck get shot in the face by Elmer Fudd and end up with his beak sticking straight out the top of his head is funny. Very funny. It’s impossible to do that in real life, which makes it hilarious, especially since poor, long-suffering Daffy suffers no lasting ill effects from a shotgun blast to the face.
Cartoonish behavior in real life is not funny. It’s damn disturbing, akin to watching a hospital patient on morphine try to function like that on a day-to-day basis. You’d know pretty quickly that something was not right. Many of the real-life, on-set on-camera actors portraying these characters regularly speak in high, screechy voices, make grotesque, highly distorted faces that are disproportionate to the emotional timbre of the moment, move their bodies (walking, gesturing, name a common movement) in unnatural, stunted ways, and say things that no normal, right-in-the-head person would ever say. When I watch these characters act and interact, I don’t think “oh, that’s funny!” I think “oh, they must have some sort of mental problem...how sad.” Then the logical half of my brain reminds me that this is a television show, that this is scripted, and that these are actors deliberately acting like this in an attempt to get lols from the audience.
Now, I’m not against cartoonish antics in an entertainment program. “The Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise (one of Disney’s rare good ideas), revolves around one Jack Sparrow, portrayed by Johnny Depp. Sparrow is DEFINITELY a caricature, a too-fluorescent-for-real-life cartoon character in flesh and bone. The difference here is that he’s funny, a lovable scoundrel who we (the audience) continuously second guess, only for him to come through in the end as a hero. So, why is he funny and Disney’s daytime television characters are not? Because he’s a pirate! Pirates were larger than life, outrageously colorful and flamboyant, and in no way fit within the currently acceptable social mold. To further defend good old Jack, the “Pirates” universe is crackling with elements of the supernatural, the divine, and the stereotypical magical we grew up with in books, movies and games. The point is, Jack is not meant to be taken seriously. He and his world are fabrications of a vivid imagination, and not likely to ever be encountered in real life.
The programs on daytime Disney channels are a different story altogether. Many of these characters are supposed to be relateable. Zeke and Luther are two skateboarding, rollerblading, extreme sports-loving teenagers, just like many young boys who can be found in Anytown, USA. However, they--along with many other characters found within the show--say and do things which are so hyperbolic that they come across as cartoons come to life. If they were real-life characters, they would be ridiculed and bullied out of school out of sheer social awkwardness. And yet this is what the impressionable youth of America is supposed to aspire to? These are their role models? I think there’s a disconnect here.
There needs to be a return to reality. Disney is pandering, but they need not do so. They are targeting an audience of pre-adolescent and newly-adolescent boys and girls, all of whom are experiencing amazing, frightening and humorous changes in their own lives. What’s so wrong about an episode of a real-life comedy that deals with something as expected as the deepening of one’s voice, or the outbreak of pimples, or the first feelings of attraction towards the opposite sex? These are perfectly normal changes which tweens and teens can sympathize with and even poke fun at. It’s a universal issue, so why not tap it for its inherent humor? It’s an awkward time in our lives which we all must come to grips with without exception, and universal strife breeds universal understanding. I, for one, would like to see a return to regular, scheduled programming.
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