Reason 1: The latest monstrosity to be inflicted upon my household by the Disney Channel is some...thing...called Cory in the House.
I know that Disney Channel would get zero airplay annually were it not for Household6, but if I thought That's So Raven was fucking pedestrian, this show makes me think we erode the shit out of our soft power by allowing mind-rotting slop to get televised.
Reason 2: Tonight I read, for the first time, a Disney adaptation of Hercules to the Sledgehammer. I then told her I was going to find my copy of Bulfinch's Mythology and read the legitimate, bona fide version of the tales of Hercules.
Disney bowdlerized Hercules' parentage as not coming from a philandering Zeus, since it would be bad form to endorse extra-curricular sport-fucking that generated half-siblings. Hercules, or more properly, Herakles, was a bad mamma-jamma, if he strangled snakes in his crib that were sent by Zeus' justifiably assed-up, and cuckolded wife.
The other parts that Disney omits are when he kills his wife Megara and his children in a fit of insanity, does his 12 deeds, and commits suicide rather than live in pain after being poisoned. These are the things that happen when your mother-in-law wants you dead, dead, dead.
As you might guess, I didn't read a hell of a lot of children's literature as a kid. I remember very pointedly, that the exact number of children's books I checked out of the library when I was a student at St Christopher's Lower School was a big fat zero. The first book, actually, was a history book about the attack on Pearl Harbor. Other books that got a lot of heavy rotation included ones on the Great Depression (Dorothea Lange was a recognizable name to me after fourth grade, not because of schoolwork), spacecraft and technology, and a lot of World War II naval history. Ironically, I didn't go in much for land power history at that point in my life.
Okay, rant complete. That was cathartic, but probably necessary.
No comments:
Post a Comment