thegurgi, you're right, sorry and thanks for correcting me
It wasn't "Snow White 2," I must have gotten confused with either the cartoon version of "The Snow Queen" (about "Tom"?) or the live-action version of "Snow White 2."
Pfff, about childhood - there's a lot of things I could say - but mostly I want to share something I just read, a review of a book by Neil Postman called
The Disappearance of Childhood His thesis is that ever since the advent of the printing in the fifteenth century childhood has been considered a clear-cut stage of life: "the print culture fostered literacy, learning, sequential thinking, protestantism, secularism, a separation of literate and learned people from illiterate and unlearned people, hence the development of education, schooling, training, childhood." And going along with the concept of childhood was a stage of maturity characterized by "secret knowledge, social privileges, personal responsibilities, and a humane concern for the young."
The radio and the television, though, he argues, set the conditions for a new type of culture - "visually and aurally oriented, nonsequential, filled with images, instantaneous impressions, entertainment, and universally accessible knowledge. Thus the two groups, once demarcated by a gap in knowledge, skills, tastes, etc., collapsed, and kids and grown-ups merged into one, the 'adult-child.' Today, as in the Middle Ages, children see everything grown-ups see, both the refined and the raw; they know intimacy like adults, commit crimes like adults, play the same games, make the same dirty jokes."
Gary Kern, the reviewer, continues: "Postman adduces a series of compelling examples in support of his thesis: the same sports (little league and big league), the same clothes (kids in fine threads, grown-ups in jeans), the same crimes and punishments (murders and executions). And ... the same tastes in television programs and movies: the "ABC Saturday Night Movie," "M*A*S*H," and "Three's Company" scored high among all age groups in the Nielsen ratings for 1980. Increasingly there was no need for separate entertainments."
I think there's a lot of that that is true. From the age of around 8 everybody starts being interested in the same things, listening to the same music, seeing the same movies. This book was written in the early '80s but the internet has made everything even more equal, I think.
When we talk about "children's books" most of the time I'm not even sure what they are, since I skipped most of them (except for the fairy tales) and went straight to "adult" books. I do remember when I was little I assumed that most of the things I read or listened to or watched was geared for children, and being surprised that they weren't: like the TV series "Star Trek," like Peter, Paul, and Mary (come on: "if I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning"?
), like Gilbert and Sullivan, like the opera
Carmen, like old movies from the '40s and musicals like "Kismet" or "The Music Man."
Most of the music and film made before the '70s was great to grow up with; there's little that would be traumatizing, and most of it is good quality. I wonder sometimes about movies made today ... it seems like almost all of them are rated R, or are lax PG-13's ... it's like there's nothing in between, you know? Lots of sex, lots of violence, in almost every movie, except for the Disney ones for kids. Almost all movies for kids now are more or less dumb comedies, or so I'm starting to think.