How has today's limitless media horizon affected kids?

by L. L. Green

                                                                        copyright 2001 L. L. Green

 

My 4-year-old has discovered the yellow brick road. Not only has he discovered it, He could probably tell me the number of bricks!

Zach has just finished his 20^th viewing of the movie, The Wizard of Oz. Twenty and counting, that is. It was the same with Mary Poppins and 101 Dalmatians.  The ease with which Zach and his fellow pre-schoolers can repeatedly view some of these classic children’s films is a little disturbing.  

Visiting in the homes of Zachary’s friends is like entering the American Film Institute Archives. Think about it! 60 years ago, Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t have had the film library these kids do. Complete sets of every Disney film ever released for home video. Newer releases, such as Toy Story, stretching "to infinity and beyond."

This stockpiling of films for home viewing instead of sharpening our ability to appreciate such masterpieces seems only to deaden it. Put DisneyWorld in your own backyard and it soon becomes a bore.

Think back to the time when a cinematic experience wasn’t within such easy grasp for kids. Remember when you actually had to go to a theatre to see these films? What an event when one was finally broadcast on network television! As a child, I eagerly anticipated The Wizard of Oz a month before its yearly airing on the CBS Movie of the Week. (I am speaking, of course, of the years B.C. – "Before Cable.")

But if watching Oz then was like savoring the finest imported chocolate, now it’s like picking up a ho-hum Hershey bar on sale five for a dollar as you pass through the grocery checkout line.

This is why, when we received Oz last Christmas, I held it back for many months. Partly out of dread of the all too certain pummeling my own childhood memories would take, partly because I didn’t want this film to be just another ad nauseum viewing experience for Zach.

But I soon relented. How could I trickle down to him what nowadays comes in a great gush? With the immediate gratification of direct satellite, DVD, CD burners, the Internet and MP3 music files—any media, any time, anywhere. It’s a losing battle.

What I keep wondering, though, is how this change in the way we experience our entertainment media is changing us.

If the most poignant and tender, triumphant and majestic moments in film and music history are available at any given moment, and, upon our whim, repeated without end, then doesn’t their magic evaporate?

My annual pilgrimage to Oz left me wistful, longing for next year. There’s a certain amount of bliss involved in waiting for something you hold dear in your memory to return once again, waiting long enough so that your own wonder and excitement are almost experienced anew.

Kids of this new millenium may never experience such a feeling.

And I wonder if Zachary can ever love his trip over the rainbow the way I did.

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