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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133317
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 10:06am | IP Logged | 1
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Having just spent the weekend with my nephews (ages 7, 5 & 5, and not allowed to watch WHO), I bet they would think she meant two buttholes. Or possible two noses if there wasn't an adult in the room to offend. •• Did someone say they were offended?
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John Byrne
Grumpy Old Guy
Joined: 11 May 2005
Posts: 133317
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 10:08am | IP Logged | 2
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The original Battlestar Galactica had a prostitute as a major cast member before remembering there were kids in the audience and made her a nurse. •• The version of BATTLESTAR GALACTIC which was released theatrically differed in many ways from the TV series of the same name -- and none of those differences had anything to do with anybody "remembering" anything. (Did Baltar recover from having his head chopped off because someone "remembered" he was supposed to be a recurring villain?) If you're going to play this game, at least stay on the same field as everybody else. ++ Doctor Who has the odd bit of kissing and the occasional naughty joke designed to go sailing over the heads of the wee ones. The later bit being a bit of British tradition. •• Ah, yes, how well I remember such things in the likes of SUPERCAR, FIREBALL XL5, THUNDERBIRDS, CAPTAIN SCARLET. . . All those shows aimed at the same principle audience who were the original target of DOCTOR WHO.
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David Miller
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Posts: 3093
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 11:54am | IP Logged | 3
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Did someone say they were offended?
+++
Nope. Just speaking to what would motivate my nephews. They get more scatological if they think they can get a rise out of an adult. At least I hope that's what happens.
Edited by David Miller on 15 January 2013 at 12:00pm
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Clifford Boudreaux
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2012
Posts: 443
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | 4
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Very different times. How do you think your Superman run would fare if we judged it by Golden Age morality? Would the Comic Code of the 60s allowed everything you did in your Marvel work?
Mary Tyler Moore once shocked audiences with a joke about The Pill. A few decades later two unmarried women are fighting for the last condom shocked no one. The adults who were shocked by The Pill would yave a very different idea of what is appropriate for children than the adults who watched Friends.
It's ridiculous to try to judge a modern show by the standards of a much more prudish time.
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David Miller
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 1:33pm | IP Logged | 5
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Whatever the writing around him, I think Matt Smith's Doctor is great in the sense of the character as host of a kid's show. I'd love to see him in an educational adventure in the style of the series' first few years.
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Stephen Robinson
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: United States
Posts: 5835
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | 6
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CLIFFORD: Mary Tyler Moore once shocked audiences with a joke about The Pill. A few decades later two unmarried women are fighting for the last condom shocked no one. The adults who were shocked by The Pill would yave a very different idea of what is appropriate for children than the adults who watched Friends.
SER: I think your example speaks less to changing mores (and I'm not necessarily disputing that they have shifted) but more to the fracturing of the TV audience. In the 1970s, families watched TV together. TV was still a "democratized theatre." By the 1980s, the "family hour" was deemed 8 p.m. and the programming reflected that (The Cosby Show as the last major example). The 9 p.m. hour was the more "adult" hour (some of the kids had gone to bed) and so you'd see a Cheers -- though even it was written as though children might still be present.
FOX was the first to break these unofficial rules but I think its goal was not to convince families that they should sit down together and watch Married... with Children. They were targeting young adults and unmarried couples. And that's when we started seeing "demo" ratings (much to Brandon Tartikoff's chagrin).
By the time of "Friends," the "family hour" was essentially no more -- both literally and figuratively defeated during the "Friends" face-off with "Murder, She Wrote."
Now parents get to stick pins in their eyes while watching something on DISNEY with their kids. I think that's a shame.
So, this brings us back to comics. Although Cary Bates, for example, objected to Marvel initially because it "appealed to college kids," I've argued that part of its success was "perfecting the formula." Spider-Man and the FF was as appropriate and as entertaining for kids as Superman and Batman was, but the layers written into the former made it appealing to those college kids, as well.
Later creators forgot the formula.
And the assertion that NuWho is similar to the classic series is, as I've said, like Quesada's claim that comics have always been "edgy" and that kids never read them. How far would a 12 yr old have gotten into the first episode of NuWho, which is almost entirely through the POV of the female companion? The episodes are also twice as long (let's consider attention spans), and the emphasis on romance is far greater than it was in the original series -- where romance was rarely explored in depth and often used as a means of writing someone out of the series (Susan, Jo Grant, and Leela).
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Clifford Boudreaux
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 19 July 2012
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| Posted: 15 January 2013 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | 7
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In regards to the changing mores of the public. Between the debut of Doctor Who in 1963 and today is the Sexual Revolution, which changed how everyone in Western Society views sexuality. It's been slowly inching forward, with my childhood being filled with "Jiggle TV" such as Three's Company and Charlie's Angels. By the 80s, teen sex was becoming more normalized with Michael J. Fox losing his virginity to a random older lady on the family sit-com, Family Ties... while his sister chooses to wait with her long-time boyfriend. Different rules for boys and girls, go figure.
Today, we have senior citizens boring their grand-children with tales of decadent excess at Studio 54. Every generation since the late 60s has featured a youth culture which very loudly experimented with sex and drugs and today we have shows like 30 Rock doing visual gags of auto-erotic asphyxiation. It's not even an edgy show, it just goes there.
And the assertion that NuWho is similar to the classic series is, as I've said, like Quesada's claim that comics have always been "edgy" and that kids never read them. How far would a 12 yr old have gotten into the first episode of NuWho, which is almost entirely through the POV of the female companion? The episodes are also twice as long (let's consider attention spans), and the emphasis on romance is far greater than it was in the original series -- where romance was rarely explored in depth and often used as a means of writing someone out of the series (Susan, Jo Grant, and Leela).
Romance is a very new thing to Doctor Who, but they're not exactly going there in any major way. I still maintain it's pretty tame by today's standards. No naked people in bed together, no body swaps with people checking out each other's junk, no asking robots if they're fully functional. Just random comments from people who tend to have healthy attitudes toward sex.
Doctor Who has always had a pretty adult streak through it, mostly in regards to violence. I was shocked at how dark the first few years got. Not in "dark for the 60s", I mean dark for a family show in any decade. The moment where the Doctor raises a rock above his head to kill an inured man for purely selfish reasons is the darkest the character has ever been in the history of the show... and it's in the first story.
"The Keys To Marinus" featured a man menacing Barbara in what can only be described as a rapey way. They're fairly subtle about it, but it's a pretty disturbing scene for a children's show. "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" attempts to deal realistically with Collaborators, showing how people would turn on their neighbors just for the chance to survive another day. "The Dalek Masterplan" features the death of two companions. The first sacrifices her life by ejecting herself out of an air-lock. The second (who is introduced when she murders her brother in cold blood) is aged to dust on camera. Susan succumbs to hysteria in "Reign of Terror" over her impending date with Madame Guillotine.
The show takes a decidedly comic turn with the introduction of Patrick Troughton, but there are several episodes who only surviving moments are the scenes excised from foreign broadcasts for being too disturbing. The hanging scene (featuring only men's feet) is the kind of scene that would have given me nightmares as a child.
In terms of darkness and violence, NuWho has nothing on the show's first three years. While it's often a light-hearted adventure, there's a very dark streak which runs through it, which is disturbing because it's based on reality and not fantasy monsters. As those excised clips prove, the show has always been pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable for children's television.
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Leigh DJ Hunt
Byrne Robotics Member
Joined: 20 February 2008
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 1570
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| Posted: 16 January 2013 at 11:42am | IP Logged | 8
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Clifford, there's also Susan menacing Barbara with a pair of scissors in Edge of Destruction (or whatever story 3 is called these days).
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