execrable children's programming pox

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I had a long talk with my daughter yesterday about whether Moana is a princess.

Went to lots of interesting places; we discussed metafiction, cultural appropriation, and power imbalances. Kids these days are woke af.

She’s the daughter of the village chief.

We’ve also had productive conversations about Moana.

“What’s a demigod? Is that half god half human?”

“Yes and now we need to have a long conversation about theology.”

Right, the topic starts with "the daughter of a chief is not a necessarily a princess and different cultures treat these topics differently" etc.

(I have to physically stop myself from my normal Pocahontas digression here. Pocahontas is the daughter of a chief, not a princess ffs. And she did not get romantically busy with John Smith, ffs; she was like 12! They were friends, but she married a totally different dude. Disney is garbage, etc. But we don't need to do that one because I already flogged it to death years ago and anyway we did Virginia history in fourth grade.)

Anyway the movie has the line "you're wearing a dress and you have an animal sidekick, that makes you a princess," so we get to talk about fourth wall, "meta-" etc., and the degree to which contemporary children's movies sometimes subvert tropes while simultaneously reinforcing them.

Unfortunately my son found a series of weird-ass unlicensed fan videos that are premised on Maui/Moana marrying and having kids, which we agree is insane, so we get to address fair use and shipping and fanfiction while also addressing consent, power, age gaps, the obliteration of platonic friendship....

That all makes my brain hurt. Glad my kid just likes to sing the songs and doesn’t ask questions.

Ha, be glad we didn't feel the need to talk about whether Lin-Manuel Miranda counts as an appropriator of Polynesian culture. Or whether Puerto Rican ancestry gives him a "well, that's kind of an islander" get-out-of-jail-free card. Or whether (half-Maori New Zealander) Jemaine Clement is okay, but maybe should not have done a David Bowie impression because wypipo, etc.

All of which are real Internet takes of varying degrees of performative wokeness.

how old is your kid?

Ten.

ugh
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

I am 99.9% sure all the videos we watch are fine but from now on I'm gonna build up a playlist of things I have personally vetted and only watch those. I might have come across ones with hideous blasts of crying (and switched it off immediately).

Most of the crying videos we've seen are actually not that sinister, tbh. I'm surprised the author couldn't figure out what was happening in the video; the outsider figure cries when the heads/faces don't match up, giggles/cheers when they do. It's easily the least sinister form of the type of video he's describing (we've encountered some very unfortunate claymation-esque pooping Elsa/Spiderman videos as well as some super macabre Thomas the Tank Engine videos; there was also a homemade video with Peppa Pig toys that ended with Peppa accidentally hitting George in the head while playing where George ended up lying in a pool of blood and Peppa was yelling "GEORGE, WAKE UP" at him before we turned it off).

The crying videos ARE annoying as sin, though.

hah, I knew this bump would be about that

is that last video completely AI-generated or was that dreamed up by an actual person? feels like a James Ferraro art project but even then it's too weird and haphazardly random. I had no idea this world existed.

the ironic thing is that a bunch of parents afraid of their kids being exposed to this stuff are now gonna have their YouTube recs loaded with it, and I now do

for some reason this stuff really spooks me, I read that article this morning

yeah I think we'll stick with DVDs for the grandkids

ha i just read this today too. i think the writer is definitely overstating how many of those videos constitute "child abuse" but jeez there is much weird content out there. i spent a little time this afternoon clicking around some of the shit he links and ..... i just don't know any more man

i mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm4Algab_qk

what the

That is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying

It's also probably going to show up on my smart tv now because I'm logged into my Gmail account

:-/

yeah I wasn't really sure about the "child abuse" part either. like I get what might be terrifying about Spiderman riding around on a giant syringe or Elsa "giving birth" to eight different superheroes but none of that really seems explicit - it's just deeply, profoundly strange. I mean, lets not forget what sort of horrible things were always right around the corner 15 years ago

or to put it more succinctly

jealous that kids get procedurally generated videodrome and I just had goatse

— Kevin Snow (@bravemule) November 6, 2017

this one's pretty good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9QOGFX2gos&t=737s

Well let's be clear; dude explicitly said in his article that he wasn't going to link the really disturbing videos. The Peppa Pig one I described was definitely not anything I would want my toddlers to watch, even though thanks to being on YouTube it wasn't full-on goaste/Tubgirl.

MARCOS MY CHILDREN HAVE WATCHED THAT ONE

but from now on I'm gonna build up a playlist of things I have personally vetted and only watch those.

I do this, but it seems impossible to avoid YT just playing whatever the fuck it wants when a playlist is over, is my worry. At least on the AppleTV app

lol no way xp

That is def one of the videos where we went "okay we cannot just put Youtube on and let it cycle through random things" because we did not choose that for our kids to watch

my embed didn't work huh. LETS TRY AGAIN WHY NOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9QOGFX2gos&t=737s

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture, with a reasonable level of tie-in to developmentally appropriate things. It's no worse than the very similar and venerable "Where is Thumbkin."

The phenomenon I do NOT get is "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa" which is even more annoying and has no clear genesis, it just keeps happening.

YouTube Kids is, of course, cleaner than normal YouTube but is still plenty weird.

toy freaks was legit alarming imo

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture

yea a lot of this doesn't seem that far off from idk teletubbies

The first time I saw Johnny Johnny Yes Papa, I was certain someone had slipped me acid.

The boy has come home from nursery singing that more than once. Now I’m wondering just how much YT he is getting there

wow, that animals for kids stuff is wild

yeah it's amazing. the version of 'buried alive' Bridle links to had a low hit count but other Animals For Kids uploads of the same video total 20 million+ views

I remember Teletubbies being the moment when TV officially sanctioned going after the 6-24 month old demographic; everyone agreed the content was well-meaning, the issue was whether or not it was morally ok to target viewers that young, but babies were just magnetized by that stuff and so it became a moot point. this feels like a breakthrough moment where the people targeting that demographic are getting competitive and creating edgier and edgier content to attract audiences -- there's still an attempt at a moral center in some of these (the superheroes usually end up winning by the end) but the ride on the way there -- there isn't 10 seconds of this I think unsupervised children should be watching

the NYT's article about this yesterday was a little more button-pushing, but the stuff they linked to was even edgier

With my children the worst stuff is always a passing phase. My daughter went through a brief period of watching deliberately grating things (Annoying Orange, Battle for Dream Island). It was during a gap when she didn't particularly like kid's shows (Dora/My Little Pony) anymore, but she hadn't yet gotten interested in tweenier stuff. And now she mostly just reads books, so it's working out okay.

My son sometimes falls into a rut of something pretty stupid, but he tires of it and moves on to something else.

Sometimes he rediscovers something he used to like, and gets back into it. He recently rediscovered Signing Time, which were the first videos he watched (back when we thought he might be deaf). Indeed, for a while, he signed "Time!" to mean all videos for a while. And then it will be on to something else.

Given the transitory nature of all this, I don't have the energy or time to vet and control his video input. The cost/benefit ratio just isn't there for me. Some day he may see chance to see something inappropriate, but I assume we'll just process that as we would any other unpleasant thing that happens from time to time.

I thought this comment underneath the medium post was interesting:

I just remembered I was discussing this with someone once and we came to the conclusion that they should essentially be called “fetish videos aimed at children.” The slavish devotion to search terms and SEO’d nonsense video titles has given rise to a… well, fetishistic product. You can look at the thumbnails and see it. Superheroes, costumes, taped up/tied up women. Syringes, blood, inappropriate gore. Crying is popular on thumbnails. The videos showing people dressed up as Frozen characters and doing something against their will. The main fetishistic aspect of it is, of course, for each of these videos there are probably a hundred more like it. Add in that all of these channels are weirdly foreign and seem to be imitating more popular channels and I think the fact that the strange knockoffs are on theoretically the same footing as established and legitimate channels adds to the general disturbing atmosphere.

I had no idea wtf Johnny Johnny Yes Papa was when my kid was saying it for a while. It had just come up in auto play after a parade video or something. Theres so much insane garbage on YouTube that we basically disabled it on the iPad and if he watches stuff in it it’s videos we’ve downloaded and put there on purpose. Works out cause we mostly reserve it as the nuclear option on car or plane trips.

Say what you will about Dinosaur Train and Wild Kratts but when he watches those he gets all his dinosaurs and trains and plays with them while watching and tells us facts about dinosaurs or animals for days. With YouTube he basically just goes catatonic and stares.

procedurally generated fetish porn targeted at children. wonderful.

burn the internet to the ground.

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

There's a version of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" where new verses extol charity (giving clothes to homeless children) and prudent savings. There are also versions of "Johnny Johnny..." that regard naughtiness as played out and take a turn toward healthy habits ("eating broccoli?"). A version of "Humpty Dumpty," apparently subcontinental in origin, becomes a safety parable.

finger family is giving me a full on panny

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

― Careful with that Ax, Emanuel (Ye Mad Puffin)

my god, have things truly gotten so awful that edutainment is now considered "charming"?

good call on Teletubbies being the origin of this sort of thing, I hadn't really thought of that.

I try to push my kid (who is almost 3) towards stuff like Sesame Street, but that's mostly for selfish reasons, because I find it entertaining (or at least moreso than anything else he wants to watch). He's mostly drawn to BabyFirst TV, which has some of the shoddiest, most low-budget animation imaginable, some of which is not so dissimilar to the stuff linked in that article. They even have a Teletubby knockoff featuring three very creepy animatronic mice - my wife and I joke that half the channel's budget went into those mouse costumes.

I found some of the BabyFirst stuff fascinating but that creepy devil tractor needs to go immediately.

I'm not quite sure what's going on with that show either. I feel like it's made in the Ukraine or something and just dubbed over in the States. It's not like there's any information online.

My kid definitely goes through some phases with that channel. He LOVES "Mio Mao", this Italian claymation show from the 70's that they just licensed out. It is bizarre but pretty charming. I like it. He was into Harry the Bunny for a while until they made it into "Harry & Larry", after which he lost interest. That was funny to me because that was kinda like him experiencing his first pop culture disappointment. Both my kids love "Tillie Knock Knock" which I find amusing simply because they (apparently) make two people do all the voices. The frustrating thing is that I just have no idea when any of this stuff is on, since they have like 10 different names for "assorted programming" and none of this stuff is ever like, "on" in the listings.

my sons and i were reading the original rev. w. audry thomas the tank engine stories last night and you know what those stories suck and i think they execreble. i couldn't even understand what the fuck is going on in most of these stories, they are incomprehensible gibberish. "poop poop!" said thomas cheekily. "poo poo!" whistled gordon crossly.

so is there a "good children's programming" thread? I'm taking any & all recommendations for the granddaughters, who are almost 3 1/2 and 1 respectively, but there might be a better thread to bump

I loved Mio Mao when I was young! Amazing that's still around and being watched!

We didn't do screens till 2.

A 3.5er can and should gorge on pre-HBO Sesame; there's a lot out there. I rather like the Tina Fey "Pirates of the Care-to-be-Readin'" disc.

yeah we're down with the no-screens-til-2 thing (parents are a bit more liberal/slack but they do pretty good), just wanted to mention that a younger one is coming up and will also watch video at some point, so we wanna pick up a few things now. thanks!

Good children's programming

ty

maybe relevant to this discussion - there seem to be a bunch of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse videos on YouTube that do pretty much everything possible to get around Disney's copyright detection algorithm, including increasing the speed, flipping the screen, and dropping out big chunks of the show. they're completely unwatchable but I assume someone's making a quick buck there.