@elvesdoitbetter - Seriously?  Was there a reason? Captain Planet is one of the least offensive television cartoons I can think of. 

Not that you’re missing anything really. It’s also really really bad.  If that’s the reason you were denied then cudos to your parents and/or guardians for safeguarding your good taste. Though it does have a good message at least for a propaganda cartoon.

This clip is just the initial intro that explains the plot of the show. Really if you watch this, you know just about all you need to know about the show. All you need then is the theme song and you’ll get every reference.  The song is the one that goes:

“EARTH!”

“FIRE!”

“WIND!”

“WATER!”

“HEART!”

“Go Planet!”

“By your powers combined, I am
Captain Planet!”

“Captain Planet, he’s our hero. “
“Gonna take pollution down to zero.”

“He’s our powers magnified”
“And he’s fighting on the planet’s side”

“Captain Planet, he’s our hero”
“Gonna take pollution down to zero”

“Gonna help him put asunder”
“Bad guys who like to loot and plunder”

“You’ll pay for this Captain
Planet!”

“We’re the Planeteers”
“You can be one too”
“‘Cause saving our planet is the thing to do!”

“Looting and polluting is not
the way”
“Hear what Captain Planet has to say!”

“The Power is Yours!”

I think you can get the idea…

@elvesdoitbetter - so the restrictions on what you could watch came after it was determined you were super imaginative? I’ve heard that people who aren’t inundated with a lot of sensory inputs like we are these days tend to turn out a lot more imaginative. But I haven’t heard of people so imaginative there was a risk that more input might make them too imaginative.

My parents were the opposite really. They didn’t really shield me from stuff but then I also wasn’t very interested in most of the things they might have wanted to shield me from. Generally I don’t remember butting heads with them on anything. But I know I could watch whatever I wanted on TV up until bed time but there weren’t even any strict bed times either. Back in the day though (the 80′s and early 90′s) I don’t recall a lot of crazy stuff on TV. Certainly not nearly as much sexual stuff as you see these days even late at night. And we had cable too. I do remember seeing several R rated movies though when I was a kid. Even those seemed pretty tame by today’s standards.

Yeah you definitely weren’t missing much with Captain Planet. I honestly didn’t watch a whole lot of it. Watch one episode and you know the whole series. It’s just the annoying theme song that invariably gets stuck in your head that in retrospect was probably the best part. 

Now if you couldn’t watch Gargoyles…. that was TRULY a shame.

@elvesdoitbetter - Yeah I remembered you grew up in a pretty Christian household and I remember some of your posts about coming out and such. I think I remember one of the earliest entries of yours I remember reading was about a scandal relating to one of the major religious figures in a church. I don’t really remember who or much of the details because back then I really wasn’t as interested in the politics of the religious right as I am now. But I remember you had, as always, made very interesting points that made me think about it differently than I would have had I just heard the news story. Still, I wasn’t sure if the restriction on your TV watching/book reading was more a religious thing or more uniquely having to do with your childhood disposition and hence related to concern for your general well being. I didn’t want to make an assumption.

Back when I was in middle school, I had this friend (well sort of a friend, more an acquaintance, or maybe a candidate friend, didn’t really know him that well). He was an asian guy who used to play Dungeons & Dragons with us. Once I lent him a bunch of D&D books. A few days later my Mom got this phone call from a very irate woman screaming at her about something along the lines of “how dare your son give my son these Devil books!!” I didn’t hear the phone call but Mom whenever she tells the story remembers her going on about devil worship and devil books and danger to our souls and things like that. It was one of the oddest experiences.  I didn’t really get it back then. It was my first exposure to the idea that there were people who saw the things I loved as fundamentally “evil” or “dangerous”.  Before that I never really understood that people could really feel passionate about something like that and really really mean it.  And the first time I realized that there were actually A LOT of people like that around. Hence maybe when a lot of kids, even those who weren’t particularly snobbish in school looked with aversion upon fantasy or D&D, it wasn’t necessarily just because it was considered “uncool” it also could because they knew their parents and family wouldn’t approve.

Of course I never got those books back. And he and I didn’t really interact very much after that. But in retrospect I admire his courage for trying to rebel. I just wish he’d told me cuz I would have told him not to be so stupid as to borrow the books! But like I said, I didn’t know him that well.

Ever since then, I’ve been really curious about how much different people restrict access to experiences and why. Personally I’ve always felt a kind of thirst for more varied experience of culture and I’ve constantly felt like I haven’t had enough. It always seems like that lack of experience creates barriers of communication or misunderstandings. More than that, I just personally find it really annoying when I don’t get a reference someone makes. I hate it when someone makes a joke relating to something or other and feeling like an idiot because I don’t know what they are talking about and hence not knowing how to respond.

Moreover, it generally seems to me that parents underestimate how capable children are of absorbing and coping with new information. I’d imagine it’s the same with cultural experiences. My beliefs on that might be a consequence of my own always growing up feeling perpetually bored and feeling like I was capable of a lot more than I was being given an opportunity to do.

The reason I replied though was that idea of restricting experience, or at least restrict the flow of experience, in order to safeguard someone from their mind being overactive I find really intriguing. It isn’t really something I’d ever given much thought about. I know a lot of parents protect kids from hearing things like curse words or sexual innuendo even when the kids are so young they have about a zero percent chance of understanding it. Stuff like that I dismissed as silly all along. I think it’s much more about protecting the parents from uncomfortable conversations than it is about protecting the kids.

But I probably was unfairly generalizing that in my mind to the idea that the rate of experience exposure in children should be sped up altogether. I hadn’t taken into account the idea that someone, could as you put it “end up mentally disturbed” by their own imagination. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it certainly seems a viable concept.

Thinking back to my own childhood, I know certain experiences certainly had a profound effect on me. Like seeing the movie “Gremlins” (or maybe it was Gremlins 2) apparently contributed to some of the paranoid myths I developed about my place in the world. And I was always very frightened of the dark when I was young because I would imagine indescribable unspeakable things in it. This was especially true if there was just a tiny little bit of light which would distort the objects around me enough that my imagination could take over.  I didn’t really talk about these kinds of things with anyone while growing up though. I wonder if I had, would my parents have decided they needed to shelter me more from experiences for fear it might twist me. And I wonder if they had, would I have ended up a really different and perhaps more well adjusted person?

I still tend to guess society is generally more too far along the overly-restrictive side of the equation than to the overflow side. But then I’m an optimist about the amount of data that the human brain is capable of absorbing.

Anyway just musing out loud here.

Yeah I pretty much hate TV too now even though I’m a veteran of insane hours watching all kinds of junk on it when I was younger. Now, I almost never turn on the television at home, and the only reason I still have cable is because I stupidly signed up for a 2 year contract for satellite coverage that is as expensive to get out of as it is to just finish. When I watch television shows I do so almost exclusively online nowadays. Though there have in the past been quite a few shows I did watch that way that I enjoyed a lot. Can’t think of any though that are super addictive right now aside from Lost (and that ends this year).

Gargoyles is mostly awesome because it has lots of random Shakespeare references littered throughout it. I consider it probably the best thing Disney has ever produced. Certainly their best television work.  No. I don’t count Pixar in with Disney in case you’re wondering.  But is it worth it to go back and watch now? Eh, probably not.  A large part of why I loved it is that I was a kid at the time. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to watch it now, but there are better experiences out there.

@elvesdoitbetter - yup. That was definitely the entry. I honestly never read anyone approach the idea of a famous figure in a church revealed to be Gay as an opportunity for the Gay community to show compassion toward them. Most people just jump on what they see as hypocrisy and are not able to mentally put themselves in that person’s shoes and most people don’t spare a second thought for that person’s family.

Although I don’t know any people on the extreme right, I do know plenty of very religious people including many members of my family. And like your family they’re mostly just normal people. Indeed neither the religious nor the a-religious seem to have monopoly or morality or lack there of. I’ve certainly met some pretty emotionally abusive people who aren’t religious at all. I would never assume that just because your family was far to the right that they were crazy and abusive. That would sort of be the opposite problem of the Haggard thing. In the Haggard situation people made it personal, made it about one person, who became a symbol of their anger, vengeance, and hate. When in reality it was the institutions that mattered. Not the person. Yet when one judges families based on generalizing from institutional beliefs to cast aspersions upon the individuals they are focusing on the institutions in cases where it’s the individual people that matter.

I agree with you about the importance of early years except that I’m not sure I understand the exact mechanisms through which ethical foundation is developed when you’re under six years old or what even counts as an ethical foundation. Seems like we develop a lot of our ethics later on. I mean most ethical questions are too complex for a toddler to understand.

Your idea for an entry on religions perception of art forms and the hypocrisy related to it sounds intriguing. I don’t really know much about how major religions perceive most popular magic-related art forms outside of Narnia=good and His Dark Materials=bad.  But what do religions think of like Hercules or Twilight or Heroes or X-Men or Lost or Buffy or Wheel of Time or Earthsea or Dune or Avatar, etc. etc? I haven’t a clue. I mean how would anyone ever keep track?

Anyway let me  know when and where you post it. I look forward to reading it.