Enough with the dark, adult revisionings of bygone fantasy series. Wishes for superpowers and supernatural solutions to problems are juvenile fantasies. Once upon a time, the TV shows and comic books that catered to such whims, accordingly, were aimed at kids. Now all those kids have grown up and, perhaps embarrassed to admit to the childishness of their first loves, they expect their fantasies to be tarted up with moral ambiguities, horror imagery, and explicit sexual themes.

I love "Watchmen," "The Dark Knight Returns," "Buffy," and "Angel." But I also mourn the fact that kids today have no "Six Million Dollar Man" or "Bionic Woman," no "Lost in Space" or "Land of the Giants" or "The Adventures of Superman," no dumb, cheesy, wholesome prime-time fun. We've taken away all their action figures so we can pose them in kama sutra positions. The meretricious "maturity" of today's prime-time fantasies and graphic novels isn't bold anymore--it's a pretentious cliche.

Television is about fantasy. No one sane actually thinks they'll wake up one day and have supernatural powers, just like no one thinks they'll wake up one day in Manhattan with a quirky gay roommate and an alcoholic secretary, throwing quips at each other at unnatural speed. I do admit that the latter is at least possible, but the purpose of entertainment television IS escapism. It has been since soap operas and Star Trek debuted. With each new generation, television morphs into what its audience demands. As jazz morphed into rock, so the old Bionic Woman morphs into the new. It's not that we're embarrassed, it's that we've grown up, and instead of abandoning our past, we've asked it to grow with us. What's pretentious about that?

As for kids and their programming, we live in a time of rapidly changing technology. Video games and the internet fight against television and books for our kids' attention. Even if there are no primetime series out there both suitable and engaging for kids (a notion I am not sure I agree with, but as I don't have children - and thus don't know what is suitable - I can't argue), there are still a myriad of ways kids can lose themselves in a good, clean, interesting fantasy world, no television required.

It takes a particularly narrow view of popular entertainment and literature to suggest that:

A) Fantasy has traditionally been aimed primarily at children--it hasn't. Fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery & suspense, fairy tales and other speculative genres (including super-hero stories) have always examined adult themes and issues; generally moreso in their beginnings than they do today. This isn't a "revisioning," it's a return to their roots. Examine a few old issues of "Dick Tracy," "Batman," "Captain America," "The X-men," not to mention those popular horror and science fiction comics of the Golden Age to see what I mean. "Juvenile fantasy," maybe--but no more so than those produced by Poe, Lovecraft, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other "adult" writers. "Moral ambiguity, horror, and sexual themes" are at the root of all fantasy genres, not just the modern ones.

B) That children's entertainment is inevitably "dumb, cheesy, wholesome" fun. Read Grimm's Fairy Tales or any one of the classic children's books from the nineteenth century: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Hans Christian Anderson, Mother Goose. There's nothing "dumb" or "cheesy" about those stories, and very little that's "wholesome." The same goes for superheroes (see above) and television shows. "Lost in Space"? A family alone in outer space facing danger and mystery at every turn--that can give a child nightmares just as easily as the murderous villain Sylar on "Heroes."

It sounds like this complaint is really about making adult themes more explicit in our popular entertainment (admittedly with debatable results), or, more likely, with some kind of yearning for the sentimentalized "wholesomeness" of the 1950s. For many Americans today, that era of cultural squeamishness, denial, and repression of all that is ugly in the world has somehow become equated to "the way things used to/should be." They seem to forget that there was a long history of literature, film, and fantasy before "Lost in Space." But it seems to me that it's that longing for the unrealistic "wholesomeness" of our least reflective era that should be perceived as "childish" and "juvenile"--not the more mature vision of these modern writers and film-makers, which is arguably the more "traditional" mode storytelling.

And oh, by the way, I feel quite certain that children have always posed their action figures/dolls/stuffed animals in "kama sutra positions" when their parents weren't looking!

jack:

A) Examine a few old issues of "Dick Tracy," "Batman," "Captain America," "The X-men," not to mention those popular horror and science fiction comics of the Golden Age to see what I mean. "

Yup. The X-Men have often looked at the idea of racism and xenophobia, but hid it beneath masks and spandex. The classic age of scifi - ok, thats easy - theres an H.G. Wells short that predicts the comming of armored warfare. He had the details wrong, but he was, as the best scifi authors frequently are, ahead of his times.

B) That children's entertainment is inevitably "dumb, cheesy, wholesome" fun. Read Grimm's Fairy Tales or any one of the classic children's books from the nineteenth century: Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Hans Christian Anderson, Mother Goose. There's nothing "dumb" or "cheesy" about those stories, and very little that's "wholesome."

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Yup. Theres a line in Peter Pan where he's asleep and some faeries walk past him, comming back from an orgy. Read the description of Pan boarding a warship packed with grown men, armed to the teeth, whose profession is robbery and death. How this child goes through them like Death.

I should also mention the Hall of Fame kids cartoons - 'Whats Opera, Doc?' which is a parody of Wagner's Ring Cycle, and Rocky and Bullwinkle. Remember that show?

"Ok, I got hottsy-totsy worked-on-Trotsky plan!" Yeah, thats Boris Badenov making a reference to Trotsky's murder.

"Do-Right, do you realize what this means? A thing like this could lead to woman's sufferage!" Subtle feminist humor? Yeah! In a 60's kids show!

The great mistake in believing the wholesomness of old school kids programs is that it sells both children short and the adults who make those programs.