![]() Noodle, a group of ragtag vaudeville adults who do everything wrong. Elmo’s World is populated by kids who have acquired specific skills such as putting on their raincoats or tying their shoes, but also by nincompoop adults in the form of Mr. Elmo is 3.5 years old and has amassed many of the skills toddlers aspire to, making him a role model and something of a big brother character. He was born in a time when "Sesame Street’s" executives recognized that the show’s audience was skewing much younger than originally intended, 1-2-year-olds instead of 5- and 6-year-olds. “Elmo is love,” he writes in his memoir "My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Elmo Has Taught Me About Life, Love, and Laughing Out Loud."īut I had a different idea. Kevin Clash, the embattled puppeteer behind Elmo, has written and spoken much about why he thinks kids love his furry red puppet so much. But if he was so happy, why did I feel like such a grouch? Within months of first meeting Elmo, Sesame Street’s most popular character had become the single most complete source of happiness for my toddler. In the beginning, it wasn't just seeing the furry little red monster on the screen that elicited these laments. I could see it rippling through his body like a wave of joy, his voice saying this one word over and over again, striking me like the shower blow from "Psycho." Soon, the favorite word of his emerging vocabulary lost all connection to its meaning and became nothing more than sound, pitch and texture. In between, he became a plaintive, pint-size Patti Smith shouting out “Elmo” about 1,476 times a day. “Elmo” was the first word out of his mouth when he woke, and the last word he said before going to bed. Over the next few months, when Dash was thinking about Elmo, he became a full-body exclamation point of glee. Elmo? Good God, no. I hated him for his giggly laugh, for the sheer joy he took in being Elmo in Elmo's World.īut my son did not agree. Within a few years, I was a teenager growing up in an Age of Elmo, in which sane adults wrestled each other in malls for Tickle Me Elmo dolls. By the time Elmo was on the scene, he was baby stuff as far as I could tell - as annoying as Barney and more ubiquitous. He didn’t come into being until 1984, when puppeteer Kevin Clash gave him his tinny toddler voice and his silly laugh. I grew up watching "Sesame Street," but I’m too old to have had a childhood relationship with Elmo. “That, my dear boy, is Elmo,” I said, and took a sip. He settled into my lap and soon we were snuggling and watching TV – at 8:43 a.m.! Within seconds, his eyes glazed over and he was transfixed. Apart from the oddly mesmerizing screensavers my husband had shown our colicky baby, he didn’t even know what a TV was.īut then Elmo came on the screen. We had watched only a few videos together from the Baby Signing Time videos, whose only developmental drawback, as far as I can tell, is how much skinnier and oranger the host becomes as the series progresses. I had banished most branded products from the house. Up until this point, I’d done a fairly good job of maintaining my commitment to no screen time. I flipped on the television to the most innocuous programming I could find and leaned back with the warm comfort of having given myself one of those occasional mommy breaks you hear about. But I just wasn’t ready to parent that day, so after breakfast, we retreated to the living room, he with his bright eyes and ducky waddle and I gripping my coffee mug like a lifeline. I changed his diaper and set the coffee to percolate. I opened my eyes to the sound of my 15-month-old crying on one of those dreary Oregon winter days when you never truly wake up. It started, as these things do, with one morning of parental laxness. They shall be people and not brands, I vowed. I knew that when I had kids, I would raise them with wooden faceless dolls. Television wasn’t scripted televised theater – it was just one long commercial. Basing my talk on books such as Juliet Schor’s "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture," I spoke passionately to those students, who weren’t far removed from childhood themselves: Characters were carefully crafted marketing tools meant to lure our kids into amassing tons of branded junk. ![]() In grad school, I gave lectures to 250 undergraduates on the horrors of marketing to children.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |