Whatever happened to the good old days of children’s television? I don’t want to be that guy, because the internet has way too many of those guys, but things used to be different. Maybe at the end of a Saturday morning cartoon you’d get someone preaching a moral, but it would always be shoved in there right at the end. As in, it wouldn’t take over the entire episode. The messages were always pretty reasonable too; stay in school, don’t litter, bullying is bad. All stuff that kids should be learning.
So I’m looking after my niece, who is seven, and she’s watching some glitzy show about cartoon donkeys with wings. I’m pretty sure that makes them more like a pegasus, but whatever, they were donkeys. Really well-animated donkeys, I might add. But they lived in a society like we have, and the main character of the episode was called Tammy the Conveyancer. Yes, you read that right. They live in Bray-Ton, which is think is supposed to be real-world Brighton. Conveyancing, in a kids’ show, for real.
Now, it could be a lot worse than that. Could be explicit or something; THEN I’d definitely turn it off before the parents found out. But things really have changed if children are learning about conveyancing in cartoons aimed at the very young. Confession, though: I learned something. This cartoon donkey, who also happened to be a conveyancing lawyer, taught me more about the conveyancing process than I’ve learned in 26 years of life on this real Earth. And they were just conveyancing stables, because…donkeys. Not sure how much my niece understood- I think she was mostly concerned with the fact that the annual St Kilda conveyancing picnic was almost ruined by goblins, until Tammy used her magic to provide them all with quality housing- but then, what do I remember from the morals of my youth? It counts as ‘educational’, so…I guess it’s fine.
-Trey