Xref: utzoo alt.flame:989 talk.bizarre:6409 Path: utzoo!hoptoad!ptsfa!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!labrea!husc6!bu-cs!bzs From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) Newsgroups: alt.flame,talk.bizarre Subject: Re: Saturday morning classics. Message-ID: <17601@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 17 Dec 87 02:43:18 GMT References: <125DOW@MAINE> Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci. Lines: 46 In-reply-to: DOW@MAINE.BITNET's message of 5 Dec 87 16:49:44 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bu-cs (berkeley-unix) >I'm really starting to get pissed at the way the saturday morning >cartoon 'editors' (read: Butchers) are hacking TO DEATH my favorite >childhood cartoon, Bugs Bunny. AAAARRRRGFGGGHHHH!!!! THIS IS >NIGH ON TO CENSORSHIP!!!! What about us adults who still like to >watch the last remaining bastions of good cartooning? HUH?! WE >*LIKE* Bugs with violence! > >Michael Dow At Cornell I had a professor who was on the President's Commission on Child's Violence on Television (or something like that, under the Kennedy administration.) He claimed that the commission never recommended that violence be removed or censored from children's television programming, at least not for any reasons they were concerned with (that is, there's no accounting for taste, but they were commissioned to deal with deleterious effects.) According to him (and I hope I am remembering this fairly) the recommendation was only against violence of unrealistic outcome, violence without consequence thus promoting fantastical views of violence and its results. For example, they felt that heros who are obviously fatally shot but heroically manage to defy their murderers or whatever is probably an unrealistic image, another example was your typical barroom brawl where it always seems no one is ever much injured (if you've ever been in a fight of the violence typically shown in a Western, bottles breaking, chairs smashed, you'd know that half those people would require emergency medical attention.) Unfortunately the media people found the prospect of realistic violence for children's programming untenable, from a marketing perspective (see, real violence grosses people out, as it should) so they declared that the president's commission had "outlawed" violence in children's programming. Of course, they were outraged at the interpretation, it was an obvious cheap attempt to discredit the findings of the committee. Anyhow, I found it interesting...they may not have approved of your Bugs Bunny cartoons anyhow, I doubt Bugs pukes and shits and screams and cries for his life as a steam roller does him in. Eh, no sense of humor. -Barry Shein, Boston University