And Kids Will Never Learn Where Omelettes Come From

The BBC valiantly tried to protect its young listeners from the hard cold facts regarding Death and Eggs by changing the ending of "Humpty Dumpty" into a happy one.

Naturally, now the BBC has egg on its face. (See how I did that one there?)

The revised line has all the king's horses and men "making Humpty happy again." Assuming Humpty was ever happy in the first place.

Kids are definitely more sheltered these days, and many classic fairy tales have always been, well, kinda creepy and violent and weird. After all, we're familiar with tales from the Grimm brothers, not stories from the Happyoptimist Sisters.

Jackson has some book about the chicken who thinks the sky is falling, and she convinces a number of barnyard friends of this emergency, and they follow a fox to their doom. In the version Jackson has, Chicken-Licken escapes, while her friends become lunch. And I'm never very comfortable reading this story, though Jackson never seems very uncomfortable about the circumstances; he does request it, after all.

Today, while Sasha napped, Jackson and Jenn and I watched The Wizard of Oz for (Jackson's) first time. He appeared to enjoy the film, though I thought he might have been a bit too young. (Then again, he had no trouble with Where the Wild Things Are, which has been the subject of a "How old should my kid be to see this film?" debate.)

That being said, I was made uneasy by parts of the film I'd taken for granted. I mean, a house lands on top of someone (a witch, granted, but still) and all we see are the legs sticking out and little people and a "good" witch speaking in a voice that people stopped using after the 1940s cheering Dorothy because the (bad) witch is dead. Dead! Hooray! They even sing a song about it — maybe you've heard it.

Later, when the other (bad) witch is (again, accidentally) killed, her own servants are like, "You've killed her. Thank you! Thank you for killing this person."

Which is why, even though I let the kids watch (some of) the old Bugs Bunny cartoons I still enjoy, and even though I agree with the Member of Parliament who complains that the nursery rhyme shouldn't have been altered, I'm a little wary of what he said next:

"Thirty- and 40-year-olds need to stop telling three-year-olds what to think. Let them see gory and violent cartoons and let them be children."

Because nothing says "let 3-year-olds be children" like letting them watch "gory and violent" cartoons.

Next up for the kids: Heavy Metal. Read more...