Panda peek and a few thoughts on violence
The next big DreamWorks film will be Kung Fu Panda, and this weekend Animated News pointed out that there was a new teaser trailer available over at Animatie. The clip heavily features Jack Black (who voices the title character); perhaps you, like me, feel like as an upstanding adult you really ought to dislike Black on general principle, but you can’t because he’s just really funny. Every time I see him I think, “Gosh, I can’t stand that guy, he’s just—” but then generally I am laughing too hard to finish the sentiment.
Ahem. Anyway.
Watching this trailer got me thinking about the rise of martial-arts-themed entertainment for our kids (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Xiaolin Showdown and Skunk Fu come to mind), and about on-screen violence in general. Last week marked a breakthrough in television research, some say—a longitudinal study out of the University of Montreal found that television violence does not make children become violent. This flies in the face of the oft-accepted wisdom of the last twenty years or so, but I believe that everyone of my generation always knew this to be true.
To wit: I spent countless Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons in my childhood fairly marinating in Bugs Bunny and Tom & Jerry and the like. I am here to tell you that I never once dropped an anvil on someone’s head, placed a rake in an unsuspecting enemy’s path, or whacked an adversary with a mallet twice my size. Not once.
This is not to say that I let my children watch any old thing on TV; I do, of course, like to keep the violence to a minimum. But I also never really believed that a cartoon that showed fighting would inspire kids to emulate what they see except as an exercise in make-believe.
Back when I was a kid, the popular cartoons had ridiculous violence (see: anvil, mallet) that resulted in things like gigantic lumps popping out all over a character’s head. Nowadays, as more and more shows espouse the values of regimented fighting systems—martial arts, sure, but even on Pokemon there are stringent rules of engagement—I wonder if the end result is programming that is, overall, less violent than ever before, even while the fighting remains.
And then when we’ve come around to having a movie about a big fluffy panda who becomes a fighting machine… well… I’m sure that says something about our society as a whole and our views on violence. I’m just not quite sure what.