Television of The Living Dead

I have always liked Invader Zim.

            I watched the premiere on Nickelodeon when I was 11, and the show clicked for me. Something about the bizarre humor and their mockery of the school environment spoke to me. The nonsensical jokes, the intricate plots, and the incredible detail of animation all led it to be one of my favorite shows. The show has a cult status that still lives in local Hot Topics, brimming with Gir ephemera. At 19 I re-watched the series with my then roommate’s girlfriend, and we bonded over our mutual love of the show. It was the same. The jokes all worked, but now on a more coherent level. I reveled in the in debasement of our stupid, base-line consumer culture and the postmodern random gibberish. The show’s comedy had molded my own sense of humor, and when I returned to this ancestral home I founded it as pristine as ever.

The majority of the time, however, This Is Not True.

            Somehow all of us of in the 18-25ish range, we the “Generation Y”, have taken our first step to becoming our parents without even seeming to realize it. Don’t believe me? If you ever want to start an engrossing conversation among complete strangers of this age bracket that will last a guaranteed hour, perhaps to give you enough time to bury a decaying corpse stashed in the oven so you can make Christmas dinner, mention a children’s television show from 1992-2002. Don’t bring up anything more recent or an onslaught of pretension will befall you. 1992-2002. That will buy you enough time to come down, check out, or re-up. We have all seen it happen before.

            This is nothing to be too embarrassed about. People connect over their memories of childhood and unite through a common culture. I hold no pretension of television as some lower art form, because there is no lower art. In all art exists both the crap and the sublime. No, the problem lies elsewhere: people hold onto these television shows as sacred artifacts, and then decry what passes for children’s television today.

            Yes, I started this whole rant with my love of Invader Zim. But, at a full 21 years of age, I have re-watched Invader Zim. If you own your favorite childhood television show on a box set and have re-watched it, congratulations that is a classic. However, the vast majority of the shows we praise we have not seen in ten to twenty years.

            Re-watch these shows. They are on Netflix, they are on YouTube, and they are on countless pirating sites where you can see every episode with virus-free contentment (occasionally). Some of them will be great; some of them will be Invader Zim. Shows like this exist from each generation. People still watch The Brady Bunch, I Love Lucy, The Smurfs, and The Flintstones.  This is sublime television, or at least television that speaks across the generational divide. Yet more often than not there is only crap.

            We can’t crystalize our childhood shows into perfection because they can never live up to our memories. Those shows were great when we were eight, but we aren’t eight any more. When we re-watch these shows, few have anything that will satisfy the cynical and disaffected adult

So here is where we turn into our parents: we have already passed our scorn onto the next generation. We already hate them and misunderstand them just like our parents did to us. Go onto the Internet (brave traveler), and go to any forum talking about any piece of pop culture made for people 7-14 in their lifetimes. Do you know what you will find? Black, unmitigated hatred from people 16-25  about Justin Bieber, Twilight, One Direction, and whatever else the kids like. All of that is TOTAL CRAP and STUPID. Well, guess what? There is an equally terrible 90’s equivalent. This rings true for all generations. The 80’s had toy commercials for cartoons. The 70’s had the patently bizarre H. R. Pufnstuff and similar stoner nightmares. Anything before that only registers to me as Leave it to Beaver-esqe baloney. And yes, many of our 90’s shows are terrible.

All this stuff is the same, only separated by a decade. And to be honest, yes, a lot of it is crap. But not to whom it is meant for.

As much as it seems to, our entire society doesn’t revolve around our generation. There are entire markets selling things to five year olds, seven year old, and twelve year olds because they can consume. And if you don’t like what is sold to them, fine. But if you are going to lament on how our culture’s standards have fallen, on what crap this generation likes, and on how this next generation are all idiots, than you have become your parents. You have crossed the divide; you now stand with a teenager yelling at you how you don’t understand. And you don’t. Even if you could coherently explain to the teenager why their cultural artifacts are terrible, that teenager won’t listen to you. Why should they? You stand in a completely different rung in your life now, and you will continue to climb up the ladder on a predicted path until you die.

            Art is art. Crap is crap. Do you research. See the past without the tint. People in the 90’s where just as unhappy as they are now. Yes, there wasn’t a recession but they had other problems. Rampant, unchecked homophobia. Genocide in Darfur and the Bosnian Genocide. There was no Internet. Every period of time has its positives and negatives, even those beloved 50’s. Sure, more people ate around a dinner table, but more women were beaten, abused, and marginalized. More African Americans were lynched. Do you really want to go back there?  Our problems are eternal; hope lies in the future, where it isn’t the present yet.