Okay, so I'm a freak of my generation.  I'm at the tail end of the Generation which we call "X", which means very little other than I can remember life before computers at school, and the mass usage of rotary telephones.  I was lucky enough to only have two channels growing up...CBS and PBS.  Since I mostly watched PBS as a kid, I didn't realise that there were other shows out there, like the Smurfs or like He-Man.  I knew what the toys were; my cousins had all of them.  Castle Greyskull; whereever it was those Smurfs lived - a mushroom or something - I never really found out - the Care Bear cloud thing - yeah, I played with all of those toys.  I had no idea at the time, however, that there were actual TV shows about them...half-hour long commercials, to be exact. I never learned that until I was in school.  So I spent the first 8 years of my life living in the forest, enjoying the outdoors, playing with our dogs. My parents encouraged me to read, and I liked to play in puddles and trees. 

I don't think children, in general, really know how to do any of these things anymore.  At least, without some sort of elabourate organisation involved.  I musr admit, as a child I lacked the social skills necessary to hang out with kids my own age.  There was a girl in town who played with me once in a while, but she ended up biting a chunk out of my hand and trying to push me down some stairs, which sort of limited our play time.  I still have a slight scar.  I still have a difficult time relating to people my own age. Most of my friends today are at least 5-10 years older than I am, but I don't really notice that.  

I have absolutely no nostalgia for He-Man and most of the 1980s.  Okay, I collected Garbage Pail Kids. This whole "Remember the 80s!" thing is totally beyond my comprehension and interest.  I do, however, have a nostalgia for the educational programming broadcast on PBS during the 70s and early 80s, which is what I watched instead.  And, sadly, I've felt the decline of children's television.  In my lifetime, the majority of it has always sucked.  I have, as an adult, watched a lot of the crap that was shown on network television to kids my age, and boy, it was TERRIBLE.  But PBS was always available to show something constructive, entertaining, and educational as an alternative.  

That's not happening today.

Children's educational programming has become a Shot of Political Correctness with an Asininity Chaser.  

Let me start with a little programme called "The Letter People."  The Letter People was a puppet show produced in New Orleans.  It was a clever setup: the vowels were the girl puppets, and the consonants were the boy puppets.  There was a little game show segment where they had to stand next to each other to form words; and children learned consonant cluster sounds, how to sound things out in order to make the connection between the written and the oral word, and how to identify letter properties.  I LOVED THIS SHOW. Each letter had their own song and catchphrase, too.  Mister T had "tall teeth," Mister P had "pointy patches," Miss O was something like "obnoxious opera", Mister X was "all mixed up;" and, my favourite...Mister H had "HORRIBLE HAIR!"  Twenty years later, I'm still shouting out "HORRIBLE HAIR" at random.  What I loved about the Letter People was its encouragement for young children to sound out large words...because they were more fun than little words and just as easy to figure out how to pronounce, in general.  Kids love swishing around all those syllables in their mouths, sounding things out, learning how to build their vocabulary.

I was exceedingly disappointed when I learned that the Letter People have been updated to "fit the mindset of modern times."  They've dumbed it down, folks.  

They've decided to make the Letter People "gender equal"....meaning, no more injustice! no more vowel-consonant segregation.  That's too bad, because I remembered the vowels as a kid solely for the fact that they WERE girls.  Not only that, but they've also made the girls Ms.es instead of Misses.  I'm going to tell you something....no fucking 4-year-old is going to get the feminist significance of a goddamn Ms. Whatever Letter. 
They have also changed the catchphrases of the Letter People.  Some nutjob probably thought that Mister X's catchphrase, "all mixed up," alluded too much to some gay-rights notion, so they changed his catchphrase to "Mister X, who's different from the rest of the Letter People."  Ummmm....the POINT, Letter People Morons, is that "all mixed up" CONTAINS THE LETTER X.  Something that kids can identify in a sentence.  Granted, you can't have "xenophobic xylophones" or something as a catchphrase, but that one was pretty good, so WHY DID YOU HAVE TO GO AND FUCK THINGS UP?
Mister D was "delicious doughnuts."  These same politically-correct geniuses decided that maybe diabetic kids might feel excluded, so they removed all food-reference catchphrases.  In fact, I think they changed his gender too.  What the hell is he now?  Does it matter?  Because it's STUPID!!!! Hell, even Kripsy Kreme uses alliteration!

And the worst casualty of them all....Mister H.  My beloved "HORRIBLE HAIR!" puppet, who reminded me slightly of Cookie Monster.....Mister H no longer has "HORRIBLE HAIR!" but, rather, "Happy Hair."  Who the fuck is writing this show now, Ned Flanders?  Jesus Christ!!!!  Happy Hair??  That makes absolutely no sense, a, and b, WHAT THE FUCK?

The Letter People are dead, in my book.  What a tragic downfall.

I also watched a lot of shows produced in Canada.  I recently, after twenty years, found information about them....proof at last that I didn't make them up!  One show I adored was called "Harriet's Magic Hats," produced by TVOntario.  It was about this girl named Susan who had this weird aunt Harriet, whose hobby, it seemed, was to take hats from various workplaces and stick them in her trunk, guarded by her puppet parrot, Ralph, who sounded a little like Tobey Maguire doing an impression of Alastair Cooke. (Incidentally, I GOT the Monsterpiece Theatre/Alastair Cookie joke as a kid, since I watched Masterpiece Theatre, too.)  Anyway, Susan would burrow through Harriet's trunk, stick on a hat, and get magically beamed to whatever workplace the hat suited.  Pretty simple concept....and although low-budget, I liked it as a kid and didn't notice anything.
 

TVOntario actually produced a lot of kids' shows that I happened to get through sheer luck of getting Penn State's PBS channel.  They did another great show called "Readalong," which had these puppets named Boot, Miss Pretty, Mister Bones, and this haunted house.  They also produced a show called "Read All About It," which had a theme song that actually gave me nightmares.  I found a website with all of the theme songs, and even though I hadn't heard the theme song in twenty years, it still made me scared, for no real reason.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

I also watched the classic PBS pentangle of the early 80s: Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, 321 Contact, Reading Rainbow, and the Electric Company.  None of these have survived the politically-correct slaying, although they were the first to really embrace the idea, ironically enough.  Mister Rogers, out of all of them, had the most guts. He didn't hide himself under a politically-correct term for some kid in a wheelchair and suggest that we be nice to them because "he's different from the other kids"....no, he did what should have been done: open discussion. He had the kid talk openly about why he was there, how his wheelchair worked, and how he felt about having this affliction.  Nothing degrading or simpering, just straightforward facts.  That, and the electric car episode, are the two Mister Rogers episodes that stick out in my mind the most.  I remember, as a kid, realising through that programme, that there ARE kids out there just like me who have to use wheelchairs, and how cool it was to know a little more about why they have to use them.  I see nothing like this on TV today, just "different" kids stuck on shows to fulfill some handicapped quota.  Fred Rogers had the ability to talk to children intelligently, straightforwardly, honestly, sincerely, and lovingly.  He could tell us about the good things AND the bad things...divorce, death.
 
 
 

This doesn't exist today on children's TV.  In fact, as far as kids' programming is concerned, we must ERASE the "bad things" and sugarcoat everything so nothing makes any sense anymore, nothing is real, nothing is tangible, nothing is honest.  One of the most amazing speeches I have ever heard came from Fred Rogers, when he visited Penn State last year.  I am very fortunate to have been able to see him before he died.  I did not get to meet the man who has influenced me more than any other TV person (excluding Jim Henson, whom we never actually saw), but I did get to meet Mister McFeely.  I wonder if Fred Rogers was aware of how much he inspired and helped so many children during his 40 years on television...who, as adult men and women, cried bitterly the day of his death - as bitterly as if they had known him themselves.  I think he would have been genuinely shocked.  Children have no friends on television anymore.

The downfall of children's educational television began in the late 1980s, when Elmo arrived on Sesame Street.  Previously, the puppet characters on Sesame Street, such as Big Bird, were all sort of supposed to be in the age range of the kids the show was intended for: the 5-6 year old set. Big Bird was supposed to be about six years old; Snuffy was four; Grover about five.  I was watching that show at 3, 4 years old and learning as I went along.  By the time I went to school with the help of my very-involved parents, I knew how to read, write, count, and do simple math.  You know why?  Constant challenge.  

When Elmo was introduced to Sesame Street, he was supposed to be three and a half years old.  He was cute and loveable (I guess, I never liked that stupid Muppet) and talked baby-talk. This concept carried over to the Teletubbies, which came to the US in the 1990s.  The concept behind THAT programme was something like, "Kids watch TV all the time, even babies, so let's cater to the babies and talk like them!  Then they can understand!"

Um, right.  And HOW are kids supposed to learn from this?  Where is the challenge?  Where is the vocabulary building?  What the fuck is that creepy giggling baby head in the sky supposed to be?

And it's gone even more downhill.  Three books I loved as a child, "Clifford the Big Red Dog," the Arthur series, and "Anne of Green Gables" have all become animated programmes on PBS.  None of them have any real literary redeeming qualities.  In fact, most kids aren't even aware that they were originally BOOKS.  

And then.....there's the Liberty's Kids show.  Nothing in the world can convince me that this show is not DISNEY-FIED DOG SHIT. The characters themselves look like refuse from Beauty and the Beast.  I watched one episode of this rubbish, and saw something like a girl with an English accent, Ben Franklin with some black guy and a couple of Indians, and this random French kid talking about social injustice.  Uh, right, what the hell are you teaching kids with this crap?  American history was nothing like tthat, no matter how integrated, hip, and well-intended it is.  You're raising a generation of kids who don't know what the fuck is real and what is made up. I'd like to see an episode about the Penn brothers giving those Indians some nice cozy smallpox blankets.  Oh!  I'm sorry. That's OFFENSIVE.

Right, let's keep on misinforming our children, shoving Ritalin down their throats, dragging them to dance practices and organised soccer games (until the next Big Thing comes along, like organised Yoga teams), feeding them chemical garbage, ignoring them, and telling them to be geniuses already.  

They're already fucked up, we might as well have some fun out of it.....AND MAKE SOME MONEY.