Back in the swing of things...

Now that I'm back in the states, let's get back in the swing of blogging with a random travel note:

On the plane ride back, we were shown a half-hour of old "Tom & Jerry" cartoons.

(Why?  I don't know...don't ask me such things...)

"Tom & Jerry" was required daily viewing from 3 to 3:30 every afternoon in my younger days, and seeing these old cartoons brought back many memories.  All three of the shorts in this set I had seen before--many times, in fact--although this time I was able to look at them from an adult perspective.

My first thought upon watching them:  Wow, these cartoons really are violent!  "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoons from "The Simpsons" are a purposely exaggerated satire on cartoon violence, of course, (and were probably created as a direct take-off of "Tom & Jerry" anyway)  but it wasn't until I saw the originals again did I realize how (like all good satires) the difference between "I&S" and "T&J" isn't as big as you might think.  Just in the three shorts we saw, both Tom and Jerry are constantly hitting each other over the head with blunt instruments, and frequently having large objects dropped on their head smashing them into the ground.  (In one instance, Tom twisted Jerry into a light-bulb fixture and then turned on the light, electocuting him...)  Of course, they bounce back up immediately after and keep running without any visible injury (a cartoon fixture--see old Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons for another example...), but it is striking how violent they are in principle.  One T&J cartoon, set in a bowling alley, has a direct I&S equivalent (one of the tamer Itchy & Scratchy cartoons in actuality), where I would consider the "Tom & Jerry" version to actually be the more violent of the two.

Now, this isn't a comment on how violence in cartoons causes violence in real life because...well, I watched "Tom & Jerry" (and Roadrunner cartoons) everyday when I was little and to this day have yet to drop an anvil on a cat, nor whack a mouse over the head with a baseball bat.  Still, it's interesting to look at some of the violent images I was constantly exposed to when I was younger.

(Not all cartoons are expressly violent:  "G.I.Joe" cartoons--another staple growing up--featured massive gunplay in every episode, yet if you watch carefully, no one actually gets shot.  Even when tanks or planes get blown up, there's always a shot of the people inside jumping out with parachutes ahead of time...  Is the difference then violence involving animals is okay for kids, but violence involving humans is not?)