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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