Widening the View - Children and Entertainment Today

I cast my mind back to 2010 and my then three year old daughter has woken me up. It’s too early and I need my sleep. In desperation to grab a bit more dozing time she is given a mobile phone with various educational games. This will keep her happy for a while. Her eyes dark around the small screen as her fingertips tap and swipe. She performs various tasks that will stimulate her mind and build neural pathways. I was as dubious then as I am now by the benefits of early education, but these games cannot hurt. My daughter is actively engaging in something. She is being proactive whereas I will soon turn on the radio or the television and passively receive whatever information happens to be available. 

I was a child that grew up at the dawn of the fourth terrestrial channel. It was also the era of the video cassette, personal home computer and arcade games. With the romance of hindsight and that intoxicating drug we call self-righteousness, it is very easy for me to say that we had the perfect balance over today’s hedonistic, spoilt, overweight and unhealthy wretched brood. We were the last and most representative of Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and just followed the tail end of Andrew Collins’ “Where did it all go Right” brigade. Our generation were the last to experience good rebellious music as teenagers and the ones responsible for allowing our children to be baptized in Don Tapscott’s digital ocean. We were also the first to embrace large scale toy merchandizing alongside our traditional fairy tales. Many of us cried when a giant robot was killed in a motion picture in order to make way for a Christmas toy line. When we got to our adolescence we were filled with a combination of righteous indignation whilst being simultaneously softened by political correctness, which seemed set to ruin the childhood we remembered, sanitizing it for those not yet into double figures. We were cynics and sceptics, and we were also superficially sentimental. The science fiction and fantasy of our youth now dominates the cinemas, which is barely enough to distract us from the fact that we have been lapped by the Millennial Generation.  

Icon Series: Indelible Marx - Groucho Marx

Image via Wikipedia

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“Here’s to our wives and girlfriends – may they never meet!”

Julius Henry Marx, most famously known as Groucho Marx, is perhaps the wittiest comedy actor I have ever had the pleasure of hearing or watching. His fast-wit skill, along with his other talents, was perfected with his four brothers, Chico, Harpo, Gummo and Zeppo, through the hard graft of the Vaudeville stage and then brought to big screen with the advent of "talkies" and finally ending with a hugely successful game show.

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception”

I first got into the humour, caricature and icon of Groucho Marx when I was 17 years old. That was some four decades after Groucho’s golden age in films. In fact, I was only 13 months old when this wondrous comedy icon passed away. It was winter of 1993 and my father had won a couple of industry awards for his work with animals in films and one of the prizes was a coffee table book on the history of films. I was drawn to this light reading and enjoyed looking up the various icons I had become interested in over the years. When it came to comedy, Groucho Marx was the only one of famous siblings mentioned. The photo showed him wooing his regular straight foil in the movies, the great Margaret Dumont. I read the short bio with interest, particularly noticing the witty quotes that were all attributed to this comic legend. I mentioned him to my business studies tutor just off hand and she immediately confessed to being a fan of the Marx Brothers, telling me more about the rest of the gang. I was about to see them all for myself before the year was out.