TV for Kids

It is common for older people to see things in the present as worse than they were in their youth  (especially perhaps among men who imagine  their declining vigor paralleled by a decline in the world).  Conservatives seem to do it all the time, and one usually needs to take their gloomy opinions and harsh judgements about  young people, the culture, and the moral state of the nation critically.  However, the old guys sometimes know what they are talking about.   As someone said, if in about 1645  a couple of old Englishmen had griped over their tankards of ale that people just don’t write plays anymore the way they did when they were young , they would have been right.

I read an article a couple of days ago on a conservative site claiming that the popular culture has gotten worse in the last couple of decades. It focused on the Star Wars and Marvel comics movies and put much of the blame on the Disney company.  I know next to nothing about Marvel comics and so can’t say about that, but I would agree that there has been some mediocre and even lousy Star Wars  stuff.

The article led me to think back to the TV programs for kids in my youth, and there I had  to go along with the conservatives.  We had the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Sky King, Fury, the George Reeves Superman, and others that were far better than the stuff my grandkids and their friends had available to them on TV.  The stories were exciting and usually made sense.  They were explicit about right and wrong,  the importance of honesty, courage,  and fair play, and the idea that life could be exciting and interesting. They pointed a viewer in generally right directions. Some episodes  were not very good, but they all completely lacked the icky blend of dopey fake sophistication, disjointedness,  moralistic (usually PC moralistic) showing off, and self-conscious attempts at cuteness so common these days. 

One can feel sorry for kids stuck with the Disney Channel and its lookalikes. Parents and grandparents  of young kids  can remember that a lot of the old stuff is available for purchase.

A Good Comic Book Gone Bad

NCIS Los Angeles is not really a drama or a dramatic adventure program. It is more a televised  version of what these days is grandiosely called a graphic novel, i.e. a long comic book.  With its outlandish  plots,  slam bang action, and colorful characters  with interesting origins or backgrounds, it has often been a very good comic book.  It has been one of only two or three network TV shows  that I have enjoyed watching. However I think I’ve had just about enough since comic books are better taken straight and unadulterated by political correctness. 

It was bad enough when a suspect’s high moral character was attested to based on her support for the Occupy Wall Street gang, but that was a while back and only a single incident.  Then a week or two ago an obnoxious under cover persona assumed by one of the characters was criticized as an example of white privilege. I  did not care for the gratuitous insult from that term and the claims and attitudes behind it to me, my wife, daughter, and grandchildren, most of the rest of my family and friends, and over two hundred million other Americans who do not deserve to be spit on. 

Last night on the show in a plot worthy of Lex Luthor or the Joker, a group of villains took over a group of ICBM silos and planed to launch the missiles and start a world war.   However these evil doers were all clean cut, ROTC trained, Air Force officers whose right wing politics had led them to decide to win the war on terror by nuking Mecca and most of the large Muslim-populated cities around the world.  There was even an evil professor – not quite a mad scientist, but close -  who had recruited  these malefactors based on their scoring as right wingers on some sort of survey of political attitudes.

We libertarians generally don’t buy the left/right political spectrum nonsense.  (We prefer a model ranking governments and political systems based on the degree to which they favor or oppose the liberal notions of liberty and individual rights, one  that places Nazis and Communists, and fascists and socialists together as opponents of liberty rather than as opposites who coincidentally behave in the same ways as each other.) However in the present political context in this country, “right wing” means conservative, and by making their genocidal maniacs right wingers, the show was smearing conservatives – pointedly, needlessly, and self-righteously.  

The conservatives have their faults, but  they don’t deserve that. It’s just dirty.  Besides, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are conservatives. So I think I may give the show a pass for a while.   

Baseball on TV October 2016

Various people have observed that baseball is not as popular in this country as it once was with the game no longer being the undisputed national pastime, fewer young people following it at all,  and even the world series not  creating the interest it once did. I think they are probably right. 

People have suggested several reasons for a decline. They have said  games are longer and slower than they used to be.  The season is too long, and the interminable playoffs are far too long. Players are less likely to stay with one team.  The years of steroid-juiced arena baseball  caused some fans to lose interest and not come back.

I think there is another one at least for those who see games entirely or mainly on TV – the announcers. Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee  Reese  added flair, color, fun, and excitement to the games they covered.  Joe Morgan enhanced  the games he covered by giving viewers  an expert’s insights.  Contrast that with what we have seen during the playoffs and the start of the world series this year.  Listening to announcers  drone on continually and seemingly nearly exclusively  about pitch counts, placement of sliders, and how many seams the pitcher is gripping seems to me to be  a near surefire way to make a game come across as duller and less entertaining. Baseball is a great and fascinating game with things going on all the time all over,  but a person  wouldn’t know it from the way the post season is being covered on TV. 

  

There is only one Joe Morgan, and it surely would be impossible to duplicate Dizzy Dean, but it would be nice if the announcing were better and at least did not detract from the games. 

Amos 'n Andy

I received a collection of DVDs of the old Amos ‘n Andy TV show as a Christmas present this year. I remember watching the show in reruns when I was an adolescent, but I had not seen any of the programs since then. I have watched a few episodes and am now puzzled by the controversy over and suppression of the show over the years.

In what I have seen, there is nothing about the program demeaning to black people. The lead characters are of course comedic to the point of being goofy. It is a comedy show. However other black people who appear in the shows are depicted as normal, average, competent  Americans  - lawyers, actresses, department store executives, bank officers, FBI agents, secretaries, store clerks, and so on – with a complete lack of stereotyping or condescension. The main characters are a typical set of stock comedic types. There are the conniving schemer (Kingfish), the henpecked husband (Kingfish again), the straight man (Amos), the schemer’s frequent dupe (Andy), the cowardly, blustering loudmouth (Algonquin J. Calhoun, attorney at law), the shrewish wife (Sapphire), the harridan mother in law (Sapphire’s mother), the troublesome idiot brother-in-law (Leroy), the preening, ridiculous lady’s man (Andy again), and the witless sidekick or servant (Lightning).  One finds versions of all of them in comedies going back a long way indeed and having nothing to do with black people.

The episodes I’ve seen vary in quality. Some are funny. Some fall flat. One was touching. None depicts black people in as bad a light as do many more politically correct movies and TV shows (particularly the awful stuff from the 1970’s), and none provides any good reason for throwing the Amos ‘n Andy show into a memory hole. One could  half wonder if the real reason for suppressing the show is less the humor than the background of presenting black people  other than the main characters as ordinary Americans, something which goes against too many cherished political notions. I doubt it, but the entire situation is odd. As Kingfish might say, something funny going on here.