This depresses me..

[Transgirlenstein]

Anyone remember Sesame Street?  That great kids show where they never really talked down to kids and taught us all how learning can be fun?  Well not only is the show becoming a mindless light show for toddlers but the Volumes 1 and 2/old school Sesame Street is rated....for mature audiences!

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18wwln-medium-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2

[Oniya]

You can find lots of the old stuff on Youtube (including 'C is for Cookie', and 'I Love Trash').  There's also the fact that some of us parents make our own decisions about what our kids watch, and to blazes with the rating system.  :P

[Jag]

They forgot to mention the Count's obsessive disorder with numbers.  ::)

[HairyHeretic]

They forgot to mention the Count's obsessive disorder with numbers.  ::)

And not just numbers, as this undercover tape shows

The Count Censored

;D

[Oniya]

Then there's always this gem:

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/163/12/1557

(Please note that this was written by shrinks with a sense of humor - a rare breed)

[Mnemaxa]

I learned to read and write from Sesame Street.  You can bet I'll be buying the old ones and showing them to my children daily.

[Caeli]

I loved the parody they did of Law and Order: SVU. <3

Law and Order Special Letters Unit

[HairyHeretic]

I learned to read and write from Sesame Street.  You can bet I'll be buying the old ones and showing them to my children daily.

I learned a fair bit of history from Asterix books :)

[Transgirlenstein]

Nooo, not the Count!!

[Shiri]

lol The Count was my favorite character

[Transgirlenstein]

Mine too

[Inkidu]

I learned a fair bit of history from Asterix books :)

I learned to read from a bastard mixture of:

Dr. Seuss books.
The Hobbit
Final Fantasy IV (Two at the time) for the SNES.)

[Serephino]

I liked Oscar the grouch.  I don't really remember much because it was so long ago, but in my opinion we need more Seasame Street, Looney Toons, and Tom and Jerry, and less Sponge Bob!  Sponge Bob makes my brain leak out my ears....

[Oniya]

Sponge Bob is not played in my house.  When my little one was pre-K, I would play RPGs and read the text to her.  I've read The Hobbit, and half a dozen Redwall books to her - far from the sanitized milk-toast that is offered as 'proper'.  Last night, I started reading 'Seven Spells to Sunday' to her.

Then end result?  I have a daughter that adores reading.

[Heart]

I absolutely adored Snuffleuffagus! He was such an epic Mammoth.
I loved his bath time song.

[OldSchoolGamer]

I find the "not for children" rating inexplicable.

Are we really that much of a dumbed-down society?

Apparently so.   >:(

[Nimmy]

Ty: do you really have to ask?

I'm with everyone else on this one. WHYYYYY? I watched Sesame Street from when I was like 3 until I was 5 or 6. When they came out with Elmo's World I was like "noooo Elmo!!!!" I don't think it's "not for children" - otherwise, why would my parents have let me watch it?

I guess Sesame Street is just another thing from my childhood that they deem unsuitable (like all those toys that they've since taken off the market for health and safety reasons). I find myself wondering constantly, "how the heck did I manage to survive childhood?"

[Oniya]

I guess Sesame Street is just another thing from my childhood that they deem unsuitable (like all those toys that they've since taken off the market for health and safety reasons). I find myself wondering constantly, "how the heck did I manage to survive childhood?"

You mean like toys with light bulbs mere inches away from the play surface (Easy-Bakes), the ones that involve molten plastic/rubber (Thingmaker) and the ones with a near infinite number of sharp plastic pieces (Lite-Brite)?   :D

[Jag]

You mean like toys with light bulbs mere inches away from the play surface (Easy-Bakes), the ones that involve molten plastic/rubber (Thingmaker) and the ones with a near infinite number of sharp plastic pieces (Lite-Brite)?   :D

I loved Lite-Brite!!!

/hijack

[Nimmy]

And the wheely baby-seat thingies (I think they were called chariots or something) that I fell down the stairs in more times than my parents can count but never actually got hurt smacking into the front door because the tray hit it first and stopped my momentum.

Lite-Brite! I shocked myself on one of those plugging it into the wall once when I was 7. It was kinda cool.

[/hijack too]

[Serephino]

<span style="color: teal;">I loved Lite-Brite!&nbsp; I used to play with that thing for hours.&nbsp; Funny, it never occured to me to swallow the light thingies.

I was wondering the same thing the other day; if all these toys are unsafe now, how did so many of us survive playing with them?
</span>

[Oniya]

I never thought of swallowing them either - but they made wonderful caltrops when combined with Pla-Dough or Silly Putty.

I honestly believe that a lot of kids are frankly over-protected and sheltered.  Our playgrounds had blacktop surfaces - if you fell, you skinned your knee, and the school nurse slapped a band-aid on it, maybe some peroxide if it was particularly bad.  Jungle gyms looked like some half-finished construction project, or mad plumbing.  Heck, at my elementary school, there was also a six to ten foot length of concrete pipe - the kind they use to run water under streets - for us to climb on.

[OneOfAKiind]

unbelievable. this is actually kind of heartbreaking.
kids tv today is ridiculous. I can't even believe some of the shows that they play.  :'(



and to add my 2 cents... i loved litebrite and easybake oven! and my gel doll maker that i used to singe my fingers on. to think i'm alive!

[Jag]

I never thought of swallowing them either - but they made wonderful caltrops when combined with Pla-Dough or Silly Putty.

I honestly believe that a lot of kids are frankly over-protected and sheltered.  Our playgrounds had blacktop surfaces - if you fell, you skinned your knee, and the school nurse slapped a band-aid on it, maybe some peroxide if it was particularly bad.  Jungle gyms looked like some half-finished construction project, or mad plumbing.  Heck, at my elementary school, there was also a six to ten foot length of concrete pipe - the kind they use to run water under streets - for us to climb on.

We had one of those jungle gyms. Ours was a dome shaped one.

We also had real see-saws. The kind where you 'pop' people up on and they slam back down and if they are a guy they get that funny face and fall off it...>.>

OH! And the slider things. The big bar with the sliding rail on it that if you jerked yourself in the middle of it and let go it would go slamming into the other side and possibly hit the other kid's hands...>.>

And swing sets that you could fling your self off of and go sliding into the woodchips after attempting to land on your feet...>.>

And the merry go rounds that if you spun it fast enough it might fall off the axis or possibly fling someone off it...>.>

How did I survive?!

[Butterflykiss]

Very quickly: I used to love the merry-go-round.

I think this may simply be generational gap at work. We can go on about how our toys were apparently dangerous but also fun and exciting. Let us go back and ask our parents what toys they had. Would they give us the whole "we only had sticks and rocks and we'd play in the garbage dump by the old ravine" argument, and tell us how spoiled WE are? I think they might.  ;)

[Oniya]

Well, you really can't argue the fact that 'sticks and rocks by the old ravine' (or whatever they really played with) would be less regulated than what we played with.

[Nimmy]

We had one of those jungle gyms. Ours was a dome shaped one.

We also had real see-saws. The kind where you 'pop' people up on and they slam back down and if they are a guy they get that funny face and fall off it...>.>

OH! And the slider things. The big bar with the sliding rail on it that if you jerked yourself in the middle of it and let go it would go slamming into the other side and possibly hit the other kid's hands...>.>

And swing sets that you could fling your self off of and go sliding into the woodchips after attempting to land on your feet...>.>

And the merry go rounds that if you spun it fast enough it might fall off the axis or possibly fling someone off it...>.>

How did I survive?!

... THE SLIDERS! :D I had one of those!

.... until they chained it up when I was in 4th grade and the bars they slid on served no more purpose. I recently went back to my elementary school playground and discovered that they had replaced the sliders with more monkey bar-type things (like we need more), had gotten rid of the tether balls (someone probably whacked themselves in the face with one - I did it on occasion) and we used to have a set of 3 chains running across the gap between two of our wooden platforms that you could walk across (they had chains wrapped in rubber to use as handholds)... that no longer exists. Nor do the parallel bars that used to exist too.

... They have completely ruined the fun of "Don't touch the ground" tag for the new generation. SERIOUSLY.

[Serephino]

I remember blacktops.  I fell off a slide in 1st grade and landed face first.  I learned the hard way that rules for propper use of playground equipment  existed for a reason, and falling 7ft and landing face first on blacktop really hurts.  Fortunately my nose healed just fine and isn't crooked. 

I remember when we weren't allowed to play dodge ball anymore.  Then we got new playground equipment. 

Each generation probably does get more and more spoiled, but it's getting ridiculous.  My boyfriend said something about Barney being taken off the air because he hugged little kids and therefore is a child molester.  The world has become way too paranoid.   

[Oniya]

Barney is an embarrassment to T. rexes everywhere.  Unless he's lulling those kids into a false sense of security so he can eat them.

[Nimmy]

Barney. *shudders* I think I sped through that phase and went for Thomas the Tank Engine.

Is that still around?