The Cartoon Effect: Rethinking Comic Violence in the Animated Children's

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The Cartoon Effect: Rethinking Comic Violence in the Animated Children’s Cartoon

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Julia L. Staben

August 2018

ABSTRACT

STABEN, JULIA L, M.A., August 2018, Film Studies

The Carton Effect: Rethinking Comic Violence in the Animated Children’s Cartoon

Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz

“The Cartoon Effect” examines comedically violent performances of the animated cartoon placed specifically on cartoon children. The thesis looks at cartoon violence in the post-government regulation era of cable network television (1990-) in order to interrogate the cartoon’s relationship to children, violence, and control through the lens of biopower and affect. In my argument, I assert that the cartoon is an affect understood and read through violence, not comedy. In the late-capitalist 21st century, the modulations of power manifest as violences of resistance and control.

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to the Professors of the Ohio Film Division and the members of

the Society for Animation Studies.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the Professors and students of the Ohio Film Division and Media School including Ofer Eliaz, Louis Georges-Schwartz, Katherine Raney, Erin

Schlumpf, Dr. David Thomas and Steve Ross. I would also like to acknowledge the members of the Society for Animation Studies for pushing the boundaries of animation scholarship.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ...... 2 Dedication ...... 3 Acknowledgments...... 4 List of Figures ...... 6 INTRODUCTION ...... 7 Corpus and Literature Review ...... 12 Chapter Summary ...... 21 SO THEY RUINED YOUR CHILDHOOD...... 24 The Children’s Television Act ...... 24 The Dark Ages ...... 30 The Cartoon Boom! ...... 37 Conclusion ...... 45 KIDS JUST BEING KIDS...... 47 Introduction ...... 47 Fairy World: A Magical Agency ...... 50 Adults Ruin Everything ...... 55 Un-Fundamentals ...... 61 Conclusion ...... 65 BATTLE STATIONS!...... 68 Saving Recess ...... 71 The Spinach Inquisition ...... 74 Turning 13: The Adult Problem ...... 78 Conclusion ...... 82 CONCLUSION ...... 84 References ...... 94

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. Limited Animation ...... 35 Figure 2. The Transformers toy/screenshot ...... 37 Figure 3. Operation S.P.A.N.K.E.N.S.T.I.N.E...... 70

INTRODUCTION

The cartoon child does not feel pain. The cartoon child is not a subject. They do not re-enact a scene of assault in front of a camera. They do not step outside of the camera’s frame to process the implications of this performance. There is no material separation between the world of the cartoon child and the cartoon child itself. They are controlled in their very existence, controlled in what they are allowed to express and what they are not.

The cartoon child is not real, and unlike the photographed child or the cinematic child, they do not project an illusion of realness. They can be beaten and rejected, scorned, and condemned, and no one has to be held accountable. The cartoon child’s body is not a real body, nor does it represent a real body. Rather, it is a performance of a body, one that suffers abuse without consequence to entertain those with real bodies that can feel real pain. Thus, the cartoon child is caught between their position as innocent and their malleable form. There is a confusion surrounding the children’s cartoon, an intersection of paranoia adjoining the child’s body and the cartoon’s almost necessary violence. This paranoia reveals an unavoidable relation between children and violence, both the violence acted upon bodies overlooked or justified by the necessity of control, and the violence of resistance. While “cartoon” and “child” feel natural together, the cartoon child expresses a point of intersection for the panic surrounding the child as symbol, a symbol for futurity or purity, and the violence of social control.

Nancy Signorielli and her research team claim in their 1995 study “Violence on

Television: The Cultural Indicators Project” that in the United States: “Violence appear(s) in two-thirds to three-quarters of all television plays at a rate of between six and ten incidents per hour in primetime, and at rates three or four times as much in children’s 8 programing (mostly cartoons).”1 Steven J. Kirsh writes in his study “Cartoon Violence and

Aggression in Youth” that the acts of violence in cartoons are “minor” and “sanitize the outcomes.”2 It is absurd that the television programs that contain the most violent acts per minute in the United States are those marketed for children. It is more absurd that amongst these programs are instances of violence enacted on child characters by adults. With studies upon studies about the effects of media violence on impressionable minds, the consensus tends to center around the fact that exposure to violence in media desensitizes people, most notably children, to violence. Whether or not this leads to violent action is contestable and there is no evidence to suggest the relationship between violent media viewing and violent action is correlational.3 Nevertheless, the violent assault on the cartoon child’s body continues despite the protests, studies, and the attempts of US government regulation such as the Children’s Television or Television Violence Acts warning us against the desensitization of violence. Most of the time it goes unrecognized, unnoticed, even dismissed by simply stating: “it’s just a cartoon. It’s not real.” It is absolutely absurd. And yet, if one takes a closer look, not absurd at all.

Cartoon or comic violence has been a point of contention surrounding children’s television as early as the 1950s and because of this much has been written about the

1 Signorielli, Nancy, George Gerbner, and Michael Morgan. "Standpoint: Violence on television: The cultural indicators project." (1995): 278-283.

2 Kirsh, Steven J. "Cartoon violence and aggression in youth." Aggression and Violent Behavior 11, no. 6 (2006): 547-557.

3 There is a study that contradicts the traditional view of cartoon violence as impactful against children’s understanding of violence. It covers the large consensus that violence in the cartoon is accepted as influential in the child’s violent or aggressive behavior.

Blumberg, Fran C., Kristen P. Bierwirth, and Allison J. Schwartz. "Does cartoon violence beget aggressive behavior in real life? An opposing view." Early Childhood Education Journal 36, no. 2 (2008): 101. 9 relationship between children and onscreen media violence, particularly in cartoons.

However, the studies that surround this topic often depend on a notion of violence that must be witnessed onscreen in order to ‘affect’ the younger viewer. While undoubtedly useful, there are limitations to this approach. The first and most glaring, is the framing of violence as something that is always visible, repeatable, and negative. The second is that it does nothing to explain the different kinds of violence experienced in the cartoon. By this,

I do not mean the Hanna-Barbera “comic vs authentic” violence debate, as this still hinges on the principle of effect.4 The study of effect can only read so deeply into the structures of violence as an operation, as it relies on violence that must be calculatable and repeatable in order to be understood. What results is a study of an effect on an effect, a result of a prior result. Despite the seemingly obsessive compulsion to discuss violence in television in children’s media, little work has been done to interrogate the structures of power that result in said violence.

This thesis will investigate the sources of adult on child violence in children’s cartoons that emerged during the rise of the children’s cable television network and the internet. My method is to use models of biopower to explain the transitions of power from the 1980s to the early 2000s, tracing the relations between children and authority figures

(family, corporations, public governance) affected by emerging technologies, expanded telecommunication networks, and an overall paranoia of control. By using Gilles Deleuze’s explorations of control societies, the family, and childhood, I will formulate a speculative

4 Since Bill Hanna made the distinction between cartoon, comic violence as “fantasy violence” as opposed to realistic violence, this has been a central topic surrounding the interest in children’s media violence in these “effects of violence” studies. Here is an example:

Haynes, Richard B. "Children's perceptions of “comic” and “authentic” cartoon violence." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 22, no. 1 (1978): 63-70.

10 foundation for the rise of adult on child violence in the children’s cartoon around this period. I will be centralizing my focus on animations outside of the Disney company, as much of the already existing discourse on animation and children, and frankly animation of the United States in general, surrounds the Disney brand and industry.5 For this project,

I am explicitly pushing away from the Disney image that dominates our understanding of childhood media and narrowing my attention on the two other prolific children and animation producing cable networks: Nickelodeon and Turner’s Cartoon Network. Despite having a significant impact on the relation of children to media, the programs on these channels, with a few exceptions, have not had the same attention as the Disney machine. 6

It is essential to separate these companies and their identities from Disney not only because their marketing goals and content are different, but also because in obsessing over the

Disney market, film studies has ignored important contributions to the construction of postmodern childhood identity made by Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

“The Cartoon Effect” posits that the cartoon is a relationship to form and movement understood primarily through violence, whether that be visible aggression or the invisible violence of dehumanization.7 As a definition, this allows the cartoon to function apart from the concept of humor which is subjective and often reliant on authorial intent. This project localizes the emerging forms of violence, mainly adult on child violence, in cable

5 Despite this, Disney properties may be used as a point of reference on occasion.

6 Media studies coverage of Spongebob Squarepants is quite substantial, as well as a few of the other big- name Nickelodeon television shows. Newer programming such as Steven Universe and Adventure Time has also gotten some critical attention. Still, it pales in comparison to the amount written on Disney. First, because these other companies are significantly younger than Disney, and second because Disney is a mega- corporation that dominates the field of feature film animation, and thus more is written about it. It is important also to reference the limitations of this research as being focused on child-directed cable networks and therefore targeted to children of parents with the income to afford said cable packages.

7 See pages 19-23 for deeper context. 11 network children’s cartoons after the 1990’s Children’s Television Act as reactions to the shifts of social control that occurred around the expansion of television as an industry, increased telecommunication through the internet, and the dissolution of enclosed institutional spaces in a movement toward wider networks of control. This shift results in an increased paranoia surrounding the child as consumer, something I will call a “crisis of parental control.” Through this anxiety, new forms of violence emerge centering around children and their relationships to authority. What plays out is a series of aggressions perpetrated by both child and adult characters exemplified by violences of control and resistance. The cartoon through its affect makes visible the otherwise hidden violence of normalization, the violence of becoming-subject or becoming-adult, while also creating a world where this violence is normalized. This “cartoon affect” in this way exposes the violence of subject formation through the de-linking of experience and control.

Therefore, the cartoons of the post government regulation era expose the violence intrinsic to childhood and the process of adultification through the paranoia of control and childhood’s nature of resistance.

It is not the purpose of this thesis to state what must be done about violence in cartoons, but rather to expose the motives behind this violence that is so often brushed off as “comedy.” It is my intention that this study transforms our limited perspective of violence in cartoons for children, not making distinctions between physical forms and their impact, fantasy or realistic, but by expanding the conversation to include the societal shifts of violence and control. These methods could be continued to expose the differences of violence on children’s bodies along gendered, queer, economic, or racial lines in the cartoon, as these intersections inevitably affect a child’s social relationship. However, 12 while this project cannot hope to cover these nuanced perspectives, it will serve as a starting point for the re-evaluation of the cartoon and its relationship to violence and children. It is important, also, to pinpoint the panic around children as it is only becoming more relevant as the internet continues to interweave into social society. With technology and communication becoming more necessary for daily life, the “crisis of parental control” and the anxiety surrounding it centers around an abstract understanding of violence as repeatable action rather than something engrained into the fabric of social society. My hope is that the work of this thesis will help to clear the fog of this panic and inspire media studies to work alongside these “effects of media violence” studies to gain a clearer picture of violence in children’s media.

Corpus and Literature Review

In this thesis I will be looking at two main texts selected from two major children’s network stations: Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. These networks both produced cartoons under the Children’s Television Act of 1990, running through the early years of the internet or digital-age. The first of these programs in The Fairly OddParents! (2001-) created by Butch Hartman for Nickelodeon.8 The second program is Cartoon Network’s

Codename: Kids Next Door (2002-2008) created by Tom Warburton. These shows feature child protagonists who in one way or another have been placed in compromised positions by their adult authority figures and feature intense scenes of on screen physical assault of children’s bodies. In The Fairly OddParents!, Timmy Turner’s parents are neglectful, resulting in many physically violent encounters with his babysitter and caretakers.

8 Butch Hartman left Nickelodeon on February 8th, 2018. The future of the show’s continuation since then has yet to be determined. 13

Codename: Kids Next Door is an ensemble show whose premise revolves around the resistance to adult control, from something as simple as eating vegetables to being forced into extreme labor conditions and onscreen abuse. Both programs use “cartoonish” violence to discuss the relationship between children and authority. However, the differing network marketing strategies and level of control over production results in a difference in the message and tone of each series, showing that not every program of this period had the same agenda and highlighting the complex relations between children and adults.

Using the Children’s Television Act as the apex of a changing relationship between children, authority, and technology, I isolate the aforementioned “crisis of parental control” as a part of the greater shift from societies of discipline to societies of control. The re- organization of power within the social sphere in the late 20th century coincides with what philosopher Gilles Deleuze called the “societies of control.” According to Deleuze, the societies of control articulated the movement away from what Michel Foucault called the

“societies of discipline,” an operation of punishment that normalized society through surveillance of the individual for the purpose of controlling large populations. For

Foucault, society functioned as a strict code of conduct that was monitored within the confines of what he called enclosures. These enclosures--the home, the school, the factory, hospital, church--were the spaces within which the individual was constantly watched and pressured into normalization through a system of punishment.9 In Discipline and Punish:

The Birth of the Prison, Foucault outlines the significance of this punishment. “In discipline, it is the subjects who have to be seen...It is this fact of being constantly seen, of

9 Normalization is the process through which people are conditioned into society through surveillance and self-regulatory behavior. This monitoring of the individual in order control large populations is the primary way children “learn” the rules of society and to accept social norms as “natural.”

14 being able always to be seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.

And the examination is the technique by which power...holds them in a mechanism of objectification.”10 For Foucault, what was punishment in the disciplinary society was done behind closed doors, not for public shame or torture, although he articulates that this is still a part of the process. However, the importance here is not what the punishment for undisciplined behavior looks like, but rather how it is dependent on creating an object of what is being looked at, an object that self-regulates according to the invisible eye of power, and that this regulation operates within enclosed spaces.

Foucault’s model for disciplinary societies was situated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and even as he wrote he was in agreement that these forms of discipline were already becoming obsolete by the start of the twentieth century. Deleuze re-evaluates the function of surveillance and the institution in the 20th century in his article

“Postscript on the Societies of Control.”11 Taking into account the expansion of globalization, technology, and telecommunication networks, which only grow more vast by the decade, Deleuze proposes a new form of social power has taken over. In the societies of control, the walls of the enclosure that defined the disciplinary model have dissolved, not erased entirely but put into a “crisis.” For Deleuze, there is no localized space of discipline wherein one moves from one enclosure to another. Rather, the mechanisms of power have become modulations, formulating a network of surveillance that are “designed in the flows of everyday existence.”12 Having written his “Postscript” in the year 1992,

10 Sheridan, Alan. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon, 1977. 187.

11 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.

12 The “flows of existence” refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “flows.” A flow is described in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia as “an everyday, unqualified notion...a flow of ideas, a flow of ideas, a flow of shit, a flow of money.” 15

Deleuze’s model directly reflects the anxieties surrounding children’s changing social position, the departure from the family as a unit or “enclosure” where the child is surveyed and normalized through discipline, towards that of the dividual or demographic’s desiring production.13 The political reforms surrounding television programing are a desperate attempt to monitor and control that which is now impossible to keep under surveillance using past methods of discipline. Thus, the entire function of “child” is placed into a crisis, as is what is deemed “children’s media.”

Part of this changing relationship calls for a new articulation for “childhood”, and for that we look to the theory surrounding “child” a state of becoming as opposed to a stage of development. What is called “adultomorphic thought”, the thought process of understanding childhood through distinct stages of development, dominates most understanding of children, be it as symbols in media, as other, or even as resources.14 To understand where the subject-hood of being connects to childhood, we must first identify, to some degree, what childhood is, and subsequently what adulthood is. Stemming from discussions of development, the position of the child, according to postmodern theorist

Jean-Francois Lyotard, is that of the pre-subject. In his article “Epilogue: Becoming Child,

Becoming Other: Childhood as Signifier,” David Kennedy muses on the position of child as an “other”, a being in the process of becoming-subject. In fact, childhood, according to

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans." Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 5 (1983).

13 Desiring production contradicts the Freudian idea of desire by focusing it as an active production rather than a lack. Desire is an operation that produces more desire and flows from within itself. 14 Adultopmorphic thought refers specifically to the idea that children behave, think, and react the way adults do, and that the process of development is that of becoming more of an adult. The word “development” here indicates a “progression” as opposed to a modulation, a necessity of health and functionality. Recent childhood theory contests this notion.

Kennedy, did not always exist. The concept of “child” shifts from a “reserve of production” or “natural resource”, described by Heidegger and Herbert Hoover, to a pre-subject position normalized by the process of “becoming-adult.” “Childhood here signifies a form of ‘abjection’, an ‘inhuman’ in the sense that it is pre-subjective,”15 claims Kennedy in his analysis of Lyotard’s “infantia”.16 He goes on to argue that childhood disrupts the post- enlightenment order by connecting the human back to the animal, or even to the divine, and rejects the “progressive machine-human...if only as a wound.”17 Lyotard’s notion of the child is that of a subjugated position forced into complicity through conditioning but whose natural state is resistance.

The postmodern notion of childhood, as Kennedy states, comes once again from

Deleuze and Guattari, who take the notion further from development to state that childhood is not only a position of pre-subjecthood but the ongoing process of re/deterritorialization of the self in a relation which he calls “becoming-child.” In their book Anti-Oedipus:

Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the concept of childhood is not situated in the developmental stages of pre-pubescence, but is in constant play within all beings, whether considered pre or full subjects.18 The process of becoming can take many forms: becoming- gender, becoming-adult, becoming-other, but the key is that it is a continual process of restructuring the self to form identity. Kennedy claims the postmodern child is “a

15 Kennedy, David. Epilogue–Becoming Child, Becoming Other: Childhood as Signifier. na, 2013. 2.

16 Kennedy, David. Epilogue–Becoming Child, Becoming Other: Childhood as Signifier. na, 2013. 2-3.

17 Kohan, W. O. (2011). Childhood, education and philosophy: Notes on deterritorialisation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 339-357.

18 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans." Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 5 (1983).

17 permanent revolution in subjectivity.”19 However, for theorist Walter Omar Kohan,

Deleuze and Guattari’s childhood is a revolution not simply of subjectivity, but against the very structure of society. “In this space, becoming-child is a war machine against the state and adult institutions,” Kohan says. “As the non-chronological time of becoming, it represents a space of resistance, a source of creativity and of experience of a different world.”20 While the children’s cartoons of the parental crisis of control form the binary that divides children from adults, the postmodern notion of childhood works against that binary stating that both children and adults are in constant states of becoming, and that “becoming- child” is a threat to the construction of “adult.”

With that in mind, while the crisis of childhood is the primary subject matter of these shows due to desires to capitalize on the new emerging markets surrounding children, this is only half of the equation. Although it is the social relations between children and authority that create the systemic conditions for violence, it is the cartoon that defines the way that violence is represented. However, the theoretical definition of “cartoon” has not yet been fully achieved in film studies, the famous works of Scott McCloud notwithstanding.21 Animators often attempt to construct a definition for “cartoon” by placing it on a spectrum of principles in animation. Leslie Bishko in her article “The Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation,” describes cartoon animation as “animated

19 Kennedy, David. “Epilogue–Becoming Child, Becoming Other: Childhood as Signifier.” na, 2013. 6-7.

20 Kohan, W. O. (2011). Childhood, education and philosophy: Notes on deterritorialisation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 339-357.

21 McCloud has argued for the definition of the static cartoon in Understanding Comics as reliant on their simplistic nature and universal ability for viewers to project oneself into the position of the comic. The exaggeration and abstraction of the form are the focal point.

McCloud, Scott. "Understanding comics: The invisible art." Northampton, Mass (1993).

18 movement that adheres to the principles of animation...promote(s) believable character performances,” and is “comedic as opposed to expressionistic.”22 One of the main principles Bishko highlights, well-known amongst generations of animators, is the notion of “squash and stretch.” Squash and stretch refers to the malleability of the cartoon’s form.

The degree of squash and stretch is proportionate to how the animation behaves tonally, quite literally how much the character can squash and stretch their body. The further away the physics of the body are from the limitations of realistic body movement, the more cartoonish it becomes. All this does, however, is attempt to contextualize through words what is naturally felt physically. To say a cartoon is “comedic as opposed to expressionistic” is misleading and assumes that the cartoon is defined by its intention as opposed to its performance. A cartoon can be both comedic and expressionistic. Sometimes it can be both or neither. And moments of “cartoon” can occur in animated or live-action media that are not fully classified as such.23 Cartoon is not a category. It is a relation between movement and form, one that can be as humorous as it is disturbing despite whatever intentions the creator may have.

According to Richard B. Haynes, the Director of the Division of Radio-TV at the

University of Mississippi in 1977, the production of fantasy violence is essential to the understanding of the cartoon. Hanna-Barbera studios believed whole-heartedly in the separation between what was known as “comic” and “authentic” violence, a paradigm they invented that would continue to influence the way cartoon violence is discussed to this day.

22 Bishko, Leslie. "The uses and abuses of cartoon style in animation." Animation 2 (2007): 24-35.

23 Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, The Three Stooges, all exhibit “cartoonish” relations despite not being animated.

“There is nothing wrong with the unreal fantasy-type violence,” explains co-owner Bill

Hanna. “For instance, in ‘Tom and Jerry’ the harder the cat gets hit, the funnier it is, but it is for comedy not violence. It is the spirit in which it is done that makes it nonviolent in action.”24 What is considered violent by most standards is limited to what is shown on the image, and therefore, at least in Hanna’s case, not even violence at all. The concept of cartoons being intrinsically linked to the humor affect negates the existence of violence within the cartoon. The “cartoon” defines itself by its physical distortion, is only revealed in its movement, and is more often than not identified through violent action. Bishko’s implementation of the “squash and stretch” principle implies that animations can become more or less “cartoonish” as they employ the so-called “principles of animation.”

One knows instantly when they are watching a cartoon. It is a physical relationship between the movement of the cartoon body and their environment, one that cannot be noted by form but must be witnessed in motion both suggested (in comics) and animated.

Whether the audience laughs or cringes, the cartoon’s core affective relationship remains the same. Yet this relationship is abstract and clearly difficult to define. The cartoon, therefore, is affect itself. That word “affect” is taken from Brian Massumi as pre-subject.

It is pre-subject in that it “remains unactualised, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective.”25 The physical response to the cartoon is a production of movement, of violence, but not of a violence that can be contextualized through effect. In the mind of Hanna, what is being produced is not violence. What allows

24 Haynes, Richard B. "Children's perceptions of “comic” and “authentic” cartoon violence." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 22, no. 1 (1978): 63-70.

25 Shaviro, Steven. Post cinematic affect. John Hunt Publishing, 2010. 4-5.

20 him to even consider this is the fact that the violence of the cartoon does not operate through an exchange of long-term effect. Fantasy violence is over quickly, too quickly for it to register as a “violence” in the way that it is normally recognized. It is useful to think about cartoons in terms of affect due to affect’s lack of necessity for representation. Cartoons do not represent as much as they perform. Therefore, the violence that defines them also performs rather than represents. While modern affect theory would claim cinema functions much the same way, there is no construction of reality in the cartoon that would assume representation on the part of the viewer. For what bodies are ‘represented’ are exaggerated beyond comparison, turned into performances. In the cartoon, representation is not possible. There is only affect, only construction.

How do we understand this affect, though, if not through comedy? In a short essay,

Walter Benjamin reflects on the early Mickey Mouse cartoons, expressing the relationship between the cartoon’s body and their movement. What Benjamin observed was a dislocation. “We see here for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s own body, stolen,” he claims. “Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being...These films disavow experience more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have experiences.”26 In the cartoon, what is stripped away from the body is the ability to have experience, the ability to experience the suffering that would define a human being. The cartoon affect is one that denies the body the “experience” of life, of pain, of being human.

The cartoon body does not sustain permanent damage, or as Benjamin says it can survive even after its body has been stolen. This disavowal of experience creates a barrier between

26 Benjamin, Walter. "Mickey Mouse." Selected Writings 2, no. Part 2 (1994): 1931-1934. 545. 21 the cartoon and the viewer and acts to distance them. Violence is not an incidental part of the cartoon form, it is the cartoon form.

The “cartoon affect” produces a relation to experience that contradicts experience: the experience of physical trauma, and of long-term suffering. It could be easy to say that cartoons are humorous, but to do so in absolute terms is to deny its history as an art form produced through the process of dehumanizing figures and problematic social relations.

However, the power of the cartoon affect to make visible violences of control and resistance regardless of the form they take speaks to a deeply human experience, that of feeling inhuman. To quote Benjamin again; For the cartoon children of post-CTA cable network, “It is not worthwhile to have experiences.”

Chapter Summary

Chapter one is organized around the emergence of the “crisis of parental control” in cable network television, including the attempts of government intervention and articulating the “crisis of parental control” as an aspect of “societies of control.” This chapter illustrates the source of panic in parent’s inability to control the media consumption of their children, who were becoming a new marketing demographic. Companies, meanwhile, use that paranoia to create child consumers, promising to become the new caretakers. Likewise, this chapter shows how animation techniques and styles changed to reflect these growing anxieties from the 1980s through the 1990s and the Children’s

Television Act/Violence on Television Act. Here I will trace these social developments through what is known as the “dark ages” of animation to the “cartoon boom.” In particular, relationships between children, family, and the corporation that influenced the growing 22

“childhood market.” By this chapter’s conclusion, I will redefine the animated cartoon as an affect understood through violence and use this definition to highlight the essentiality of the cartoon form when discussing my corpus.

Chapter two discusses the Nickelodeon program The Fairly OddParents!, particularly the made for tv-movie School’s Out!: The Musical in where the crisis of parental control becomes the central conflict. Here, I use Sarah Banet-Weiser’s book Kid’s

Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship to discuss how companies use empowerment to market childhood to kids, but only a childhood defined on their terms. 27

I continue on through the various theories of postmodern childhood and family, focusing on Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, to identify childhood’s destructive nature. The desire to commodify childhood is also a result of the

“crisis of parental control” as childhood acts as a state of resistance to normalization.

Therefore, in order to control it, childhood is given a new consumer identity that can be later repackaged and sold as nostalgia. This chapter proposes a type of social control prevalent in fantasy cartoons called “magical agency”, a false agency that allows the child the ability to intervene in their lives in minuscule ways but never gives them the ability to permanently change their oppressive conditions. It mirrors the consumer freedom and the control of childhood identity through rules and regulations on magic. The goal of the cartoon to maintain the status quo negates any sort of progression in Timmy’s family life, the industry of his “magical agency”, Fairy World, reliant on child misery for its survival.

Therefore, the operation of social control is allowed to function at the expense of the child’s

27 Banet-Weiser, Sarah. Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and consumer citizenship. Duke University Press, 2007.

23 freedom. And as the consumer, the child is made to feel at peace with this sacrifice, having grown attached to the Fairies as characters and wanting the story to continue.

Continuing with the tension between resistance and control, the third and final chapter looks at the Cartoon Network show Codename: Kids Next Door. This chapter focuses on the cartoon affect, incorporating the previous theories of childhood and parental control into the cartoon form in a much more explicit way. Defining the cartoon by affect, one can expose the relationship between violence, children, and cartoons through a disconnect between the child’s body and the adult’s lack of recognition of their experience.

This chapter will focus on regulation of the child’s body through consumption, labor, and physical punishment, and the resulting extreme violence of resistance that follows. Told entirely from the perspective of rebellious children, the resistance to normalization is much greater than in The Fairly OddParents!. By this I do not mean that the show is more or less violent, but rather that the desire to compromise into normalization is rare. While the return to the status quo in The Fairly OddParents! is seen as a “return to normalcy” in a positive manor, chaos subsiding and order restored, the endings of KND are a return to the status quo with the status quo being chaotic and oppressive. Often the ending of the episode is violent or simply a repeat of the same conflict that began the episode. Through this violent normalcy, the operations of social society which are traditionally normalized by narrative are interrogated. Despite the resistance, KND also reveals the way conditioning into normalization happens mostly through self-regulation and the creation of binaries.

SO THEY RUINED YOUR CHILDHOOD

The Cartoon Boom and the Crisis of Control

The Children’s Television Act

On October 18th, 1990, U.S. congress made a movement toward reforming production for children’s media. The Children’s Television Act was meant to increase the amount of educational programing, reduce violent content, and limit production of material created explicitly for the marketing of toys and merchandise. In 1991, the task of regulating this content fell into the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, where it remains today. Networks are required to have their content approved by the FCC before broadcast, and the FCC decides what is “educational and informational.” Programing must be at least 30 minutes in length, air between the hours of 7:00am to 10:00pm, scheduled weekly, and “serve the educational and informational needs of children as significant purpose.”28 Likewise, commercial breaks are restricted to 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends. Programs cannot exist for the explicit purpose of selling products to children and must have some other value apart from commercialism.

Like the Television Violence Act also signed in 1990, the CTA aimed to reduce the amount of violence depicted in broadcast media.29 Both of these movements did not prove as

28 Calvert, Sandra L., and Jennifer A. Kotler. "Lessons from children's television: The impact of the Children's Television Act on children's learning." Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 24, no. 3 (2003): 275-335.

29 The Television Violence Act was signed on December 1st, 1990 only a few months after the CTA. Both were not the first attempt to reform television media through censorship (The 1974 Family Viewing Policy was found unconstitutional by 1976) but their emergence around the same period proclaims a similar anxiety surrounding the lack of control over mass media in the 1990s. “Concern over violent programming was beginning to arise [as early as] the 1950s.” For more information on the TVA refer to Schlegel’s “The Television Violence Act of 1990: A New Program for Censorship”:

Schlegel, Julia W. "The Television Violence Act of 1990: A new program for government censorship." Fed. 25 effective as desired, and violence on television is still more common in children’s television than that aimed at adults. Despite the attempts to regulate the content, no significant progress has been made. What the government failed to realize was that the shift of power-relations, the very structure of society, was changing, and that their regulation policies would not make much of a difference in the creation of more “wholesome” entertainment for younger viewers. It is quite possible that these movements were and continue to be utterly useless in moderating the relationship children have to onscreen violence, and that these regulations are symptoms of the actual problem rather than the solution. This chapter will explore such symptoms in order to evaluate the conditions of violence in American children’s cartoons from the 1980s through the late 1990s.

According to Julia W. Schlegel’s research in “The Television Violence Act of 1990:

A program for new government censorship,” the CTA and TVA were considered a compromise for the rising activist groups who wanted to ban violence and toy marketing in media altogether. Fear that violent television would make children more violent, despite it being “impossible to prove” a cause and effect relationship between the viewing of violence and the translation of said violence into action, demanded something be done to regulate the amount of violence in media.30 Schlegel goes on to say that in her view

“parental supervision is probably the most effective way to curb the negative effects of excessive viewing of television violence by children.”31 However, the panic that gave rise

Comm. LJ 46 (1993): 187.

30 Schlegel, Julia W. "The Television Violence Act of 1990: A new program for government censorship." Fed. Comm. LJ 46 (1993): 191.

31 Schlegel, Julia W. "The Television Violence Act of 1990: A new program for government censorship." Fed. Comm. LJ 46 (1993): 191-192.

26 to the CTA and TVA indicate that societal changes surrounding the family were creating less opportunities to monitor the viewing practices of children within the home. Stay at home mothers who were mainly responsible for caring for the children and the home became less and less frequent. And as cable television was introduced, family-viewing started being replaced with individual demographically targeted media. The institution of the family, the institution itself in fact, was undergoing a crisis. With it, the fear of exposing young children to violence rather than educational content designed to aid their development created a panic surrounding the position of the child and, most relevant to this thesis, the child’s body.

The words “panic” and “paranoia” in this context elude to a generalized anxiety surrounding the child that relies on a subject position that sees them as innocent, pure, and a symbol of futurity. While one cannot deny the science of cranial development that confirms a lack of certain cognitive processes before specific developmental stages, the crisis surrounding children and violence at this time assumes a similitude between children regardless of age, class, gender, race, and even personality. According to L. Rowell

Huesmann and Leonard D. Eron in their 1997 book Television and the Aggressive Child:

A cross-national comparison, what has made the causational relationship between children’s aggressive behavior and the amount of media violence they consume so difficult to locate is that different children react different ways to violence.32 The “paranoia” comes from the opposite assumption: that children will all be effected the same way to violence onscreen due to their impressionability, their innocence. Thus, the child’s body being a site

32 Huesmann, L. Rowell, and Leonard D. Eron, eds. Television and the aggressive child: A cross-national comparison. Routledge, 2013.

27 of violence whether as victim or as aggressor suggests a threat to the stability of social structure and security. The fear of corruption, the tainting of the innocent with something perverse whether or not that perversion will lead to action, becomes a compulsion to scrub clean the unsavory realities of social structure.

The ensuing panic surrounding the child’s body signaled a crisis in the relations between children and authority, and even the concept of adultomorphic thought which had been taken for granted.33 The rise of television was the beginning of the expansion of communication that gave way to what I am calling a “crisis of parental control.” Derived from Gilles Deleuze’s model of control societies in his article “Postscript on Societies of

Control”, the crisis of parental control arises in conjunction with the networks and modulations of power that come with the dissolution of the enclosure.34 According to

Deleuze, the enclosures characteristic of Foucault’s disciplinary model have been placed into a crisis, the punishment meant to normalize society moving from the private space to the public. In this case, what is in crisis is the institution of the family and the family’s ability to control the child’s consumption. With so many images available, parents no longer have the same power over what and how much their children watch. What follows is a fear that without the ability to control their child’s media consumption, one can lose control over the child’s behavior. In the case of children’s television, the panic surrounding the responsibility for the child in the network age spawned a demand for media networks to monitor their programing keeping in line with the FCC’s regulations. This paranoia of

33 See Introduction page on 17.

34 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.

For more on Societies of Control, see Introduction page 6. 28 what will happen to children who can no longer be ‘disciplined’ in the Foucauldian sense, is the “crisis of parental control.” Using Deleuze’s theory as a model, the crisis of parental control deals directly with the anxiety surrounding the future of society, marking children as that “future.” It is marked by an inability to monitor child’s consumption in a direct way, forcing the discipline of the private sphere to become public. There is also a distrust of the child to self-regulate and therefore the corporations must regulate for them. In this way, media is both the saving grace and the devil’s playground in this new crisis of control.

I am skeptical of the abundance of studies that focus primarily on the effect violence has on children in contrast to the research done on the roots of the violence represented in these programs. While the desire to regulate violent media and study its effects on children comes from an admirable place, its lack of correlational findings makes it difficult to get a full picture of what the relationship between children and violence. This is why the cartoon and the concept of “comic” violence provides such an important point of complication within this relationship. Children’s cartoons are arguably one of the most violent forms of media, yet not all violence is equal. By this, I do not mean to say that Bill Hanna’s statement that comic violence is not actually violence has any credence. Nor do I want to propose that the impact of violence itself comes in many levels.35 These questions are not the focus of this study and have been examined quite thoroughly in other writings. Violence, media violence or otherwise, is a state of conditions that cause physical or emotional harm, not always repeatable and never unmotivated by outside forces. The primary hole the studies of violent effects on children find themselves in regarding media violence and children is the focus on repeatable “acts” of violence, calculating their impact on the impressionable

35 See Introduction, page 3. 29 viewer who is likely to repeat said act. However, violence as a condition cannot be analyzed in this way because often it is unseen and cannot be repeated. Scenes where children are neglected, imprisoned, or punished in non-overtly physically violent ways are therefore left out of this conversation more often than they should be.

The statement that not all violence is equal does not have to do with the level impact at all, but rather different violences leave different impacts and change as the conditions of society changes. For example, in a classic Tom and Jerry (1946-1954) cartoon, the violence is predicated on a predator-prey relationship, emphasizing how wit and planning can overpower evolutionary advantage and physical strength. The predator-prey relationship is the source of the tension, the situation that creates the condition for violence. This is not the same as the violence in a Mickey Mouse cartoon, as Mickey is positioned within a different set of social relations. In Steamboat Willie (1928) Mickey’s relationship to violence is with his job or position as worker, and his working conditions (the ship, his boss, etc.). While both cartoons use what Hanna called “comic” or “fantasy” violence, it is the power relationship that informs what the violence is and how it is related to the viewer.

When what is violent is regulated to what is impressionable or repeatable, it is easy to think that the solution to the problem is to regulate the violence “shown” in media. It creates a false sense of security amongst parents that their children are protected from violence when in reality violence is the very nature of functioning society. This contradiction leads to a stagnation in the field of research, one that this project will attempt to revitalize. It is also this contradiction that allows for adult-child violence to go unscrutinized as an event in children’s cartoons, due to the fact that impressionable acts are often treated as the same comic-gag regardless of context. 30

In this, we must also open up the conversation to the potential of showing comic violence to children as not an inherently damaging thing. As Deleuze says in his

“Postscript”, the weapons of the control society exist within its very structures.36 The intervention of this violence comes not in what those impressionable acts that children repeat are, but why they are in fact being repeated, and society’s desire to regulate media violence may be as much a reaction to the anxiety surrounding those acts and what they say about our systems of power as they are a fear of desensitization. In the remainder of this chapter, I will trace children’s cartoons back through the 1980s to the 1990s, where the crisis of parental control finally prompted the regulation of television media, positioning the function of the children’s cartoon as the media object for kids. I will be looking at how the forms of animation changed to accommodate for the CTA and TVA and how what we define as the “animated cartoon” can be revealed through this regulation.

In doing so, I will evaluate the relationships between children, their parents, and the media networks that redefined childhood.

The Dark Ages

There is no doubt that current media is obsessed with 1980s nostalgia. Between the popularity of Stranger Things (2016-) the reboot of Stephen King’s It (2017), and the recently released Ready Player One (2018), the over-saturation of throw-back media peppers not only film and television, but video game markets as well. But while nostalgia as an industry has been thriving for decades and growing exponentially, it is, again, also a symptom of the crisis of control. Why is there so much nostalgia for the 1980s? Is it simply

36 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7. 31 that the creators of today grew up during that time, treasuring past media as though it were childhood itself and critical to the formation of their identity? Yes. That is precisely what is happening. However, the implications of this are more insidious than one may expect.

The idea of childhood nostalgia exists to the extent that it does in popular culture today due to a variety of factors that coincide with the production of childhood as a branded product.

It is not a surprise that while the paranoia surrounding television and the crisis of parental control existed before the 1980s, it was this decade that prompted enough action to warrant government involvement in regulation. The development of what I call the “childhood market” comes into full-capacity around the transition between primetime Saturday morning cartoon blocks to full networks, as children’s media is separated from family entertainment and gains a new platform.

The childhood market is not a nostalgia market, although its existence produces subsequent nostalgia markets. The childhood market, rather, is a commodification of childhood identity, one that reinforces the child-adult binary. Instead of viewing the past as a relation of images that construct history and identity, the childhood market isolates childhood as a commodity that can be sold to the child at present. Through toys, media, food, etc., the child is encouraged by companies to embrace childhood through overt consumerism. In her book Children and the Politics of Culture, Sharon Stephens describes a crisis of childhood emerging in the ‘70s and ‘80s surrounding the destruction of universal and pure concepts of childhood.37 Sarah Horton summarizes in her article “Consuming

Childhood: Lost and Ideal Childhoods as Motivation for Migration” that “childhood imagined as a universally idyllic and sheltered stage of development had fallen victim to

37 Stephens, Sharon. Children and the Politics of Culture. Princeton University Press, 1995.

32 the merciless quest for profit.”38 Beryl Langer’s analysis of this phenomena comes from

Herbert Blumer’s discussion of the self in relation to objects in light of the work of George

Herbert Mead. “...the toys and games offered to children by global capital are not ‘stimuli’ that ‘act on’ children, but objects of interpretation about which children make ‘indications’ to themselves, conferring meaning in relation to ongoing plans of action.”39 The purpose of the childhood market is to construct an identity intrinsically linked to consumer products. The explicit targeting of children creates demographics, ones directly approaching children rather than families or their parents.

This market gained more traction as the development of technologies made it more difficult for parents to control their children’s level of consumption. However, the social conditions that allowed for the childhood market to gain such momentum were the same that eventually pushed parents towards media regulation. With the crisis of the enclosure came the parental crisis of control, and as mentioned earlier, inciting a panic amongst adults. There was a backlash against the structures of the institution, rock and roll groups using schools and children in their music videos to illustrate the oppressiveness of the disciplinary model. While schools and families still existed, there was increased anxiety around what would happen to children when the school and the family no longer functioned as absolute spaces of enclosure. Corporations, therefore, had the perfect opening to intercede in the panic. When parents cried out “who will take care of our kids!” the media

38 Horton, Sarah. "Consuming childhood:" Lost" and" ideal" childhoods as a motivation for migration." Anthropological Quarterly 81, no. 4 (2008): 925-926.

39 Langer, Beryl. "Research Note: Consuming anomie: children and global commercial culture." Childhood 12, no. 2 (2005): 262.

Langer, Beryl. "Commodified enchantment: Children and consumer capitalism." Thesis Eleven 69, no. 1 (2002): 67-81.

33 networks said “we will.” And as Pink Floyd famously cried out “We don’t need no education...teacher leave them kids alone!” the corporations of the childhood market were nodding their heads to the beat.

Through the rise of network television, the exchange of media images signaled a new relationship between children and media. For Deleuze, television is the medium by which the societies of control become “immediate and direct.” 40 In their book Media After

Deleuze, Tauel Harper and David Savat write that television as a mechanism of control for

Deleuze and partner theorist Felix Guattari, was part of the greater production of mass culture that aimed to “produce and distribute” cultural goods. It is a culture that is

“produced, reproduced, and modified,” says Guattari.41 The development of a media for children, and the subsequent anxiety that forms around it, comes from the need to absorb a variety of “subjective territories” into a universal “subjectivity,” what I will call the

“consumer subject.” The consumer subject is aided by the development of “new subjective territories: individuals, families, social groups, minorities and so on.”42 In other words, children become identified based on age, and that age is a number that can be codified, appropriated into other demographics, and marketed to. Identity becomes a brand and sold as a cultural product. While children were pre-subject and othered by society, these markets provided them a sense of social identity.43 During the rise of network television, social structure of society shifted its method of surveillance from the enclosed space to the

40 Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. Media after Deleuze. Bloomsbury, 2016.

41 Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. Media after Deleuze. Bloomsbury, 2016. 69.

42 Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. Media after Deleuze. Bloomsbury, 2016.

43 “Pre-subject” is a notion of childhood considered by François Lyotard and indicates an otherness produced by a proto-subject formation. For a direct example of this, see chapter 2 page 59-60. 34 networks of control that had been taking over, and with it came the emergence of a new target audience. Children could be a part of the collective subjectivity, but only at the cost of their childhood.

With the expanding system of television and parents struggling to control the massive number of images their children were ingesting children’s media networks were able to cut out the middle man and address children directly. Kids were both marketed to as ‘individuals’ with their own desires and interests, as well as demographics divided by gender, age, class, and others. The 1980s saw a spike in children-directed commercials, television programing for the purposes of selling toys, and at the center of this was animation. Cheaply produced animation had been the marketing practices of companies such as Hanna-Barbera since the 1960s, signaling what animators called the “dark ages” of animated content. Limited animation replaced cells that would cost money to animate each time with pre-existing movements from other scenes, making the animation choppy and repetitive (See Figure 1). Deadlines and increasing media outlets made it difficult to keep up with the pace of production. Children’s cartoons were cheap and pandering, the combination of which gave way to the assumption that anything animated was automatically for kids and anything for kids was cheap.

Figure 1: Visual representation of limited animation. Note: In defense of Bill Hanna, Fred Seibert wrote “As a cartoon blues man might say, if it wasn’t for limited animation, we wouldn’t have animation at all.” 44

While before the ‘childishness’ of American cartoons was always a part of their affect, it was this era of childhood market industry that solidified animation as “for kids.”

Yet because of the lack of regulation, media networks were able to create what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a desiring-production.45 Here, desire is taken out of its Freudian context of lack and located as a desiring machine, one that works within and is not separate from the structures of society. In short, the relationship of supply and demand for the children’s media market did not “exist” until the companies made it, just as the constructions of “childhood” and “adolescence” did not exist until structures of society and production isolated them. As such, the childhood market demanded more animation, because animation was cheap, but also because it created the desire for more animation, more fantasy, more toys. (See figure 2.)

44 "Limited Animation." TV Tropes. Accessed May 23, 2018 http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LimitedAnimation

45 Harper, Tauel, and David Savat. Media after Deleuze. Bloomsbury, 2016. 36

The same can be said for the production of violence in media, fantasy or otherwise.

Children exposed to exciting adventures in fantastical settings, their desire to be in those worlds, a desire to become a consumer-subject, all stem from a desiring-production constructed by the childhood market. Toy companies could replicate the designs from animated programs more accurately than with live action, leading to the potential for expansive mutli-media merchandising. Animation became the primary tool of the children’s media market. This is also why when the backlash against the overtly violent and commodified media finally reached government, the demand to regulate violence did not end up changing the amount of violence produced, but the style. Companies could justify the continued market for excitement and fantasy that comes from animation by first stating that there was a market for such content already, and finally hiding behind the authentic vs comic violence distinction proposed by Hanna. The shows that were meant to capture the imagination of children, giving them what they “wanted”, were also more violent and set in places outside of the influence of parents. The rise of more cartoonish cartoons in the 1990s known as the “cartoon boom” was a direct effect of both the association of animation with the production of childhood as an industry and a response to the Children’s Television Act and the crisis of parental control. 37

Figure 2: The Transformers (1984-1987) Optimus Prime model for toy (left) and the television show (right.)46 Note: Animations with characters easily transferrable to toys made parents anxious about the overt commercialism of the new children’s network programming.

The Cartoon Boom!

The 1990s saw a change in approach to the animated children’s program for two major reasons. The first was a protest from animators themselves who grew up during the

“golden age” of cartoon animation, disheartened by what television had done to their craft and wanting to take it back to its roots. The second was the children’s television reforms that were finally coming into fruition after years of paranoia amongst parents, educators,

46 "Google Image Result for Https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51mh-5Nfx7L.jpg." Redirect Notice. Accessed May 23, 2018. https://goo.gl/images/nuYdxF.

Google Image Result for Https://i.pinimg.com/236x/5f/36/74/5f3674abb1e295d5ac9c8445927225ba-- transformers-generation--transformers-comics.jpg." Redirect Notice. Accessed May 23, 2018. https://goo.gl/images/WthXq3.

38 and scholars. This created a problem for companies who had rooted themselves in the childhood market. On the one hand, they had to cater to parents who did not want their kids

“corrupted” by overt corporate consumerism and violence, and on the other they had to continue the alliance with children’s desiring-production that they themselves had a hand in creating. As such, producers like Steven Spielberg would add their talents to children’s programing, and technology was improving to where faster and better animation could be produced, the “art” of cartoon animation was being revitalized. However, the CTA and

TVA also provided a demand for more cartoons that adhered closely to the comic violence model as parents were less likely to criticize something fantastical over something realistic.

The crisis of parental control was in greater effect, with parents now needing to contend with the internet and even more expansive media outlets. Now, even parental blocks on television were becoming obsolete and the turnover to the public sphere of surveillance to insure self-regulation and normalization on the part of the child was in progress. It is not a surprise that it was this period of regulation that incited a shift in not only the style of violence shown in children’s television, but the source of it. Capitalizing on the paranoia of the institutions and disciplinary structures of control, children’s media networks found new ways to “get the parents out of the picture” while keeping their wallets in it.

More often than not, the removal of the parental figure appears as a natural progression in light of the shifting focus from the child as a part of the familial unit to the children as a demographic. While this was certainly not the first time the parents were removed from a story to gain the perspective of childhood magic and wonder, the power modulations that allowed for this “removal” within the emerging childhood market encouraged the development of new desiring-productions based around childhood as 39 concept and childhood as identity. Unlike previous individual stories, children’s network television created lists of programming filled with untrustworthy authority figures, empowering children to set themselves apart from their parents thus creating more avenues for revenue. The more children in a household, the more their individual needs tapped into individual markets. Beginning in the 1980s, this often resulted in the creation of demographics along gendered lines, targeting media and products in conjunction with the construction of identity. However, while the 1980s proved successful in this, the CTA of the 1990s limited the amount of commercial time allowed on television and practically eliminated the toy-based marketing strategy for their programs. The old models for The

Transformers (1984-1987), and My Little Pony (1984-1987) had to be changed to accommodate for this new form of government intervention. To save on commercial time, markets created more content that would appeal to both young boys and girls. Instead of parents and other authority being absent from the screen due to the fantasy setting or simply having them gone, their roles are significantly diminished as they are rendered useless, incompetent, or even abusive. The ages of the main characters are made younger, elementary to middle school children. Schools start to become the primary spaces of interaction, and spaces outside of the school were glorified as places of freedom, with teachers and principals serving as major villains or antagonists. The rise of this lack of parental awareness in adult cartoon characters coincides with both the change in societal practices surrounding the child, opening up punishment to the public sphere as opposed to the private, as well as the change in marketing made necessary by the CTA.

The childhood identity of the 1990s was one of a marketable inclusivity, which included the multiculturalism in the response to increased globalization and gendered 40 marketing predicated on the concepts of empowerment, particularly for females, as opposed to divisions along gendered lines. However, with this also came the aforementioned stark binaries between the child and the adult, as children gaining empowerment often came as a consequence to undermining abstract representations of authority without going so far as to question the whole system. While television aimed at younger viewers still relied on positive adult role models, often shown in the mornings, or in primetime television stations like PBS Kids, there was a decline in the role of the parent in the children’s cable network programs of Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Disney

Channel. Disney’s Recess (1997-2001), for example, featured a group of kids who rebelled against the constricting authorities of their school. Dexter’s Laboratory (1996-2003) on

Cartoon Network, meanwhile, starred a child genius whose parents were laughably incompetent by comparison. This trend continued into the mid-2000s as networks settled into their new successful pro-kids marketing strategies.

Because of this, Bill Hanna’s “fantasy violence” made a significant comeback, this time with questionable results. This era saw the rise of the neglectful parent archetype, but also the school bully and babysitter who were often older than the elementary school protagonist enough to where they are considered “adults” by the show’s standards, nor at the very least “not-child.” Although parents of the protagonists were hardly ever depicted as outright abusive, their neglect resulted in the child hero’s run-ins with physical threats.

Because of the form of the cartoon, these archetypes while visible in earlier stages of the crisis of control and childhood market-oriented media, were released from the restraints of realistic violence standards. Hanna’s “fantasy” or “comic violence” proposal allowed for the networks to create obscenely violent scenes of abuse without suffering scrutiny from 41 the government. The cartoon boom, then, did two things for the representation of parent/child relationships. First, it created a strong line between the child protagonist and the adult antagonist, allowing children to feel empowered but also to be skeptical of authority just enough to where the abstract concepts of “fun” and “childhood” could be marketed. Second, it exposed the already very real violences of control and resistance that in other forms of realistic media could not have been expressed. Violences of neglect, social control, rebellion, resistance, all operate within the same sphere in the control society. The cartoon allows for a space for these violences to become visible and calls for a re-evaluation of the relationships between children and adults.

Along with this, the return of the “cartoonish” cartoon in conjunction with the emergence of adult on child violence in the ‘90s also calls for a re-evaluation of the cartoon and its own relationship to violence. Mainly, what a cartoon is and how it differs from other animated forms. It is difficult to find an exact definition of a cartoon. First, the concept of the animated cartoon is vastly different from a political or satirical cartoon that one may find in the Sunday paper. When I say “cartoon” I am referring to the animated form that incorporates the principles of squash and stretch. Leslie Bishko writes in her article “The

Uses and Abuses of Cartoon Style in Animation,” that the cartoon is placed on a spectrum based on form and movement.47 “Squash and stretch” refers to the malleability of the form or body of focus. And yet this doesn’t help to answer what a cartoon actually is but is rather interested in defining it by what it does. It squashes and it stretches. It is also essential to place the cartoon within its social history and political context. Nicholas D. Sammond claims in his book Birth of an Industry: Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation

47 Bishko, Leslie. "The uses and abuses of cartoon style in animation." Animation 2 (2007): 24-35.

42 that the cartoon was a blackface minstrel and that its existence is unable to be separated from that history:

Animation studies, often protective of the ‘toon itself, have until recently tended to

avoid this knotty question-- bracketing animation’s less honorable history of

representational, performative and industrial practices of racism, misogyny, and

homophobia-- perhaps fearing that animation’s subordinate status when compared

to live cinema, its perpetual dismissal as childish, will be once more confirmed.48

Sammond’s view, while relevant for historical context, becomes less of an overt factor in late 20th and 21st century productions. However, in both of these cases it is apparent that the connecting link, the drive behind the force of the cartoon, is violence. Whether that is a social violence or a very real physical violence, it is clear that there is a correlation between aggression and the cartoon from, which brings in a problematic when discussing the cartoon violence as “comedic.”

The clowning elements of the cartoon: exaggeration, hyperextension, the lack of lasting impact, could be categorized under Sianne Ngai’s definition of the “zany” which she associates with “production...an aesthetic about performance as not just artful play but affective labor.”49 In the case of the cartoon, this affective labor performance is the manipulation and exaggeration of the body. Therefore, moments of “cartoon” can exist outside of what is marketed as “a cartoon.” What is cartoon cannot be localized into one body or performance, the logic of their world allowing for the ultimate flexibility of play.

48 Sammond, Nicholas. Birth of an industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Duke University Press, 2015.

49 Ngai, Sianne. Our aesthetic categories: Zany, cute, interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. 1-4.

This aligns with Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.” 50 The cartoon’s body flexibly moves from one state to the other and the audience moves with it accepting that the cartoon’s body is pure performance, an affective labor relationship. That relationship is articulated through the violence shown as the cartoon’s performance, the violence of both the lack of long-term effect and the dehumanization that comes with the denial of that experience.

What it feels like to experience the cartoon can be best surmised using Walter

Benjamin’s analysis of the character Mickey Mouse, where he describes a scene of non- experience, leading us deeper into what we can start to recognize as a “cartoon affect.” In

Benjamin’s mind, Mickey Mouse represented this disavowal of experience, explaining it accordingly:

We see here for the first time that it is possible to have one’s own arm, even one’s

own body, stolen. Mickey Mouse proves that a creature can survive even when it

has thrown off all resemblance to a human being...These films disavow experience

more radically than ever before. In such a world, it is not worthwhile to have

experiences.51

The disavowal of experience and a distortion of the body, are a part of this affect. The cartoon is experiencing the lack of experience, the dehumanization of a body whose ability

50 Shouse, Eric. "Feeling, emotion, affect." M/c journal 8, no. 6 (2005): 26.

51 Benjamin, Walter. "Mickey Mouse." Selected Writings 2, no. Part 2 (1994): 1931-1934. 545.

44 to experience relies on external forces of control and whose world is dominated by violences of both control and resistance.

But what does that mean? The malleability of the cartoon body, its physical relationship to its own ability to be “squashed and stretched”, would ordinarily be considered a physical trauma. However, because the body is a form of a body that can be bent at will, this trauma is what is denied them.52 Benjamin discussed this in terms of

Mickey Mouse, how the fact that his arm could be removed from his body with no consequence showed that Mickey Mouse was not human, did not have experience, and could survive despite extreme violences being placed on his body. While not all cartoons are physically violent, they are identified by their moments of violence. The cartoon is punctuated by a disconnect between experience and movement, and it is because of this that the experience of violence in the cartoon often passes through the mind without notice.

It is not that cartoons are violent, it is that cartoons are violence. This is something we have accepted subconsciously, but often do not admit. The cartoon affect creates a condition where violence is normalized into its very processes and therefore is given no special circumstance to exist. The cartoon boom of the 1990s brought the “cartoon” back to cartoons, but the shifts in the understanding of childhood, family, and industry meant the structures of violence represented would no longer resemble the golden-age cartoons creators wanted to pay homage to. It is here where the children’s cartoon makes visible the

52 In his article, “Sublime Comedy: On The Inhuman Rights of Clowns,” Joshua Delpech-Ramey writes these words: “...what the clowns would like most is to be able to die. But death is precisely what is denied them.” The cartoon is the most exaggerated form of clown, and similarly is denied humanity through its inability to experience long-term pain or suffering.

Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. "Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns." SubStance 39, no. 2 (2010): 131-141.

45 violence of normalization by showing the forces of control and resistance that occupy the condition of childhood.

Conclusion

This era of control and subsequent theories surrounding the societal shifts imparted by globalization, mechanization, and technology, is personified in many ways by a deterritorialization. As we will explore in later chapters, the deterritorialization occurs within Deleuze’s control societies, through the diminishing of the institutional barriers.

Similarly, the definition of childhood in the postmodern sense, the concept of childhood identity that businesses aim to commodify and control, also operates under this process of deterritorialization. In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explain this deterritorialization though a new concept of social power they call “empire.” “It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command.”53 It is possible, then, to connect the deterritorialization of the global identity to the changes in social identity surrounding the child during this time. Hardt and Negri’s “empire” operates on two fronts: that of modulation, the network of control similar to that featured in this chapter, and that of structures of “world order”, new forms of what they call “monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, etc.” It is important to understand this in the context of child/adult relations as, in many cases, the structural forms of the family and school still find

53 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001. 46 themselves in the physical buildings and organizations of disciplinary models of power and control.

The desire to commodify childhood is perhaps not as simple as a desire for modulated markets or increased demographics for sales, but something that aligns much closer to the panic surrounding the child and its social position that began those market transformations. With these shifts in power, what exactly childhood is and how companies fight to control it is the center of much of the child-centric violence found in children’s cartoons. And similarly, the cartoon itself has undergone a deterritorialization of sorts, one that displaces it from form or market and places it in the process of becoming. If the cartoon is a relationship between movement and form, articulated more often through violence than any other interaction, then what is “cartoon” is in a constant state of modulation, not a consistent form, but continually shifting in and out of its own affect. With this in mind, this thesis will continue on to explore the various manifestations of deterritorialization both within the cartoon form and in child/adult relationships as represented through media. The violences of control and resistance made visible by the cartoon represent these reterritorializations and deterritorializations of postmodern childhood identity, shifts of power within the institution, and the expanding childhood and nostalgia markets.

KIDS JUST BEING KIDS

The Real Parents of The Fairly OddParents!

Introduction

“Timmy is an average kid, who no one understands,” opens almost every episode of The Fairly OddParents! (2001-), Butch Hartman’s juggernaut cartoon that runs on

Nickelodeon to this day.54 The show centers on Timmy Turner, a ten-year-old boy whose parents often seem more interested in having a good time than parenting him. Their neglect causes Timmy suffering, mostly due to the abusive babysitter they hire, Vicky. He is, by the show’s standards, one of the most miserable children in the entire world, and therefore is eligible for what are known as “Fairy God Parents”, making him not so average indeed.

The show centers on his magical exploits as he attempts to avoid his horrible, miserable life though the power of escapism, fantasy, and an infinite number of wishes. However, due to the show’s cartoonish and episodic nature, the magic Timmy gains access to cannot actually change his circumstances, sometimes because he doesn’t want to and at other times because the rules of magic prohibit him from doing so. In this way “Fairy World”, the magical corporation that allows miserable children access to Fairies, becomes a mirror to the contemporary control society, one where self-regulation, individual consumerism, and surveillance dominate social behaviors.

About a decade after the Children’s Television Act of 1990 Nickelodeon had managed to reinvent the childhood market in a way that pleased the FCC and produced a corporate empire of merchandise and media that would propel them into the mid-2000s.

The network’s “kids rule” marketing strategy places children at the forefront of narrative,

54 As of yet the continuation of the show has not been decided after Hartman left Nickelodeon in 2018. 48 featuring child protagonists with child interests. In Kids Rule!: Nickelodeon and Consumer

Citizenship Sarah Banet-Weiser explains how marketing child activism and rebellion became Nickelodeon’s platform for catering to its new audience. She notes in her introduction that Nickelodeon began to “sell the idea of ‘empowerment’ the same way [it] sells programming and merchandise.” According to Banet-Weiser, this creates a contradiction between the desire to create “agents for change” and the “brainwashing” of children into corporate consumers.55 The branding of empowerment to children comes with a significant handicap when adding it to the discussion of power. Kids are encouraged to take action, but only within the means assigned by their social position. Whether this is considered a manipulative ploy or a necessary evil, the self-governance of the individual child discourages radical social change. Weiser’s claim not only articulates the struggle between corporate interests to market childhood as a branded identity and children who were given a sort of voice through these programs, but also alludes to the still-evolving power relations between children and the world that Deleuze first identified in the societies of control. 56

The Fairly OddParents! is not the only cartoon of post-government regulation to frame physical and mental violence through the cartoon’s affective performance. The trend of absent parenting coincides with the development of the childhood market and the dissolution of the family as enclosure. As I stated in chapter one, the cartoon’s form and motion provides a space where the cartoon’s experience is detached from its body and is therefore forced to perform affectively. The cartoon “gag” that assumes a status quo which

55 Banet-Weiser, Sarah. "Kids rule." Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007).

56 See chapter 1 pages 29-30. 49 denies long-term consequence paired with the changing social relationship between children, parents, and the corporation creates certain conditions of violence in the children’s cartoon whose representation in live-action would seem abhorrent or at the very least inappropriate. Therefore, in the discussion of adult and child relations, the cartoon normalizes violences of control while also making visible the often censored violences at play in these relationships.

In this chapter, I extend Banet-Weiser’s argument to argue that the tension between the two extremes of empowerment and consumerism is more than just a double-edged sword. Rather, the obsession with commodifying childhood comes from the fear of what childhood represents, a departure from social structure and a truly destructive nature to the process of normalization. While I will not be attempting a full theory of childhood, I will be using the figure of the postmodern child to explain Nickelodeon’s need for the child/adult binary in order to contain childhood identity as a weapon against social control.

By examining one of Nickelodeon’s most famous cartoons, The Fairly OddParents!, I will expose the way that cartoons developed during the post-internet crisis of parental control to both normalize and expose the violence placed on children that forces them into becoming consumer-subjects. I argue that The Fairly OddParents! perpetuates repetitive cycles of violence in its world through its rules of magic and lack of long-term continuity and that this violence is facilitated through corporate consumerism and the commodification of fun and childhood.

Fairy World: A Magical Agency

The Fairly OddParents! is premised on the concept that miserable children are given magical “Godparents” who are there to grant them an unlimited number of wishes.

These immortal beings stay with the child until they reach adulthood before they are assigned to new children and the cycle continues. The show’s 26-minute runtime and lack of long-running story mean that any wish that alters the narrative or world in a significant way will inevitably be undone by the end of each episode. While this is a strategy to allow flexibility in scheduling and more situational comedy, the implications of this status quo create conditions that condition the protagonist to a life that places him in violent circumstances. This conditioning power is seen throughout The Fairly OddParents! through the existence of “Da Rules”, a wishing rule book that dictates what children with

Fairies can and can’t wish for. It mirrors the freedoms promised by the dissolution of the enclosure, and its illusory existence, in order to create what I call “magical agency.”

Magical agency is a power given to a character that can be used to better their day-to-day lives but cannot change their condition or social position permanently. It is often limited not by the physical existence, but by a set of rules and regulations that are enacted by a power structure or by self-limitation. Timmy Turner’s magical agency does not change his current condition. “Da Rules” state, first, that Timmy cannot tell anyone about his Fairies, else they be taken from him and his memories will disappear. If anyone finds out about his

Fairies, he will be held responsible and the same punishment will be enacted. Second,

Timmy’s Fairies were given to him on the condition that he remain structurally powerless, a child, and miserable. This already creates conditions to his power. He grows attached to his Fairies as people, the family his parents never were, and thus will do just about anything 51 to keep them in his life. Even when Timmy’s parents eventually realize that his babysitter is abusing him, he wishes away their memories on the grounds that if he wasn’t so horrible, he wouldn’t have Fairies at all. He denies himself the possibility of freeing himself from abuse because of the attachment he has grown to his new family. Even love, perhaps love most of all, is a condition which keeps Timmy under the governance of control.

Fairy World, meanwhile, is a global organization where Fairies are assigned to children based on how “miserable” they are. The Fairies run on wage-mediated labor, taking residence with their godchild and using magic to provide for themselves. The operation itself is run on the assumption that children in the world will remain miserable.

Therefore, in order for them to stay “in business,” children cannot have any sort of power beyond their magical agency. In fact, the most dangerous characters in the show are either those who use magic without regulation, or those who place too much regulation on it.57

When children gain power, Fairy World is run into chaos as the Fairies’ purpose in life is to make children happy. Straight away, the future of Fairy World as an organization is dependent on the child’s consumerist desires. Therefore, the social not only allows violence to continue, but deems it necessary for its very survival. This situates the child character as powerless without the intervention of the corporation that satisfies their need for consumer items and uses it as a replacement for affection. Timmy retreats into the world of fantasy and consumer objects to cope with the neglect from his parents and school and the abuse he suffers from his “caretaker.” Fairy World corporation is happy to oblige his wishes so long as it does not effect the flow of magical currency needed to run their business.

57 Norm the Genie, The Pixies, and the magic rule-free wish muffin from Abra-Catastrophie are all examples of this. 52

In the made for TV-movie School’s Out: The Musical!, Timmy wishes kids could rule the world. In doing so, he effectively puts everyone in Fairy World out of business and forces them to sell to a larger corporate system, The Pixies, the boring businessmen of the magical world. Under “Da Rules”, should Fairies be forced to retire, the Pixies are to be given full control and the ability to “grant wishes” to “make the world what [they] desire.”

Thus, the Fairies are pulled back to Fairy World, having nothing to do but chores now that kids have the power. It is not that adults will gain Fairies should they change position with children, as one might expect, but the expulsion of all Fairies from Earth, leaving a power vacuum for Pixies to take over. Regardless of the arbitrary nature of this rule, it asserts that the entire balance of magic itself is dependent on miserable children. In order to stop the

Pixies, Timmy must give up the power he has gained and submit once again to the system of control, returning to a life of abuse and neglect for the “good of the world.”

Similarly, the punishment for the Fairies does not end at their resignation. The Head

Fairy, Jorgan Von Strangle, pulls back the Fairies joyously as he sings about torturing them once they return. “Now we’re pulling back the Fairies...” he sings in his polka-like musical number. “So I can bring them pain!” The audience is forced to reconcile the cruel beatings of the innocent Fairies with the now much more peaceful Earth, where children are no longer subject to the abuse that led to the Fairies arriving there in the first place. The Fairies are incarcerated, purposeless, and subject to pain while kids are left to feel guilty for their power which displaces the power of magical agency. The system of Fairy World is a corporation whose laws are “work” or “be tortured”, and thus the corporation itself is seen not as a production, but a necessity. In another episode, “The Same Game”, it is revealed 53 that fairies who do not grant wishes get what is called “magical build up” and explode.

Wish granting, consumption, is necessary for the very survival of the species.

This aligns closely with the “Kids Rule” marketing model of Nickelodeon in Banet-

Weiser’s book. With the Children’s Television Act, consumerism and violence are coded heavily within the narrative. The program accepts, and even encourages the allowance of companies and corporations to take over the education of the child. Not dissimilar from the

Children’s Television Act, Fairy World exists as a potential solution to the problem “who will raise our kids in the society of control?” With the market opening up to children, allowing for the desiring-production created by the construction of a consumerist childhood identity, The Fairly OddParents! makes clear the fact that the role of the “parent”, and subsequently the institution of the family itself, is in crisis. “Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or ‘soul’ of the corporation,” explains

Deleuze in his “Postscript on Societies of Control.” “We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters.” 58 Not only does Fairy World rely on child misery for its exchange of magic, it is Fairy World represents the ideal corporation for the society of control, that which uses arbitrary rules to justify its existence, and markets its necessity to the impressionable demographic, abused and miserable children, who without it have no sense of power. The viewer is meant to disparage the Pixie corporation in favor of the fun Fairy one, even though on paper the two differ very little. By introducing the loophole, Fairy World, like the corporations of late-

58 Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.

54 capitalism, creates the ultimate failsafe should it ever come under scrutiny; It’s better than the alternative.

Adults Ruin Everything

One of the biggest fears of any child protagonist of the early 2000s was the fear of growing up, or of losing the fun in life. In The Fairly OddParents!, the worst thing that could possibly happen is the taking over of Fairy World by un-fun companies like the

Pixies. The production of fun as commodity is in conjunction with the concept of childhood as commodity, returning to the childhood market from chapter one. Childhood can be best sold when it is isolated to a specific age demographic. By branding childhood age restrictions companies are able to re-brand their childhood media products through nostalgia. However, in spite of the market’s promise to stall aging and encourage kids to

“just be kids” another form of “adultification” is happening. The adultification of the child, the becoming-subject or consumer subject, happens not through the rejection of childhood, but by rebranding childhood in the name of commodities.59 As mentioned in chapter one, the toy, food, game and media markets thrive on selling childhood as something that can be identified and accessed through nostalgia even as one gets older. The creation of concepts such as magical agency, which position the child as consumer-subject before they are even considered subject by most societal and psychological standards, are a symptom not of a desire, but a need to commodify childhood. The “adultification” process is

59 Roy, Kevin, Lauren Messina, Jocelyn Smith, and Damian Waters. "Growing up as “man of the house”: Adultification and transition into adulthood for young men in economically disadvantaged families." New directions for child and adolescent development 2014, no. 143 (2014): 55-72. 55 necessary for society to continue. Therefore, childhood must be commodified in order to be controlled.

In psychology, the word “adultification” is often used as a form of abuse placed on children by adults, placing what are called “adult roles” onto the child who is ill-prepared to handle the responsibility. However, it is a strange categorization of the word, one that raises many questions about what precisely a child is and what an “adult role” looks like.

Typically, this is appointed to tasks such as care taking and possibly raising money, but the naming of adultification itself is evidence of an organization of thought that centers on

“development” as an evolution. A child is an adult once a certain age is passed, or once certain societal standards and responsibilities have been placed on them. This organization of thought is the understanding of child from the subject position of one who is not a child, what we call “adult.” What is called “adultomorphic thought” dominates most understanding of children, be it as symbols in media, as other, or even as resources.

However, postmodern theory has pushed against adultomorphic thought as a way of understanding childhood, even going so far as to remove what is called the molar child, or the developmental position of child, from the concept of childhood itself.60 But while

“adultomorphic” tends to define the arrangement of ideas surrounding the child and their development as a “phase of growing up”, either psychologically or structurally, the term

“adultification” reveals the much more sinister methods of control that surround that thought, applying an action to the thought as opposed simply acknowledging the form of thought itself. By this, I mean to say that if one looks at the figure of the child and its process of “becoming-adult”, the context for adultification, very much a kind of

60 Garber, Judy. "Classification of childhood psychopathology: A developmental perspective." Child Development (1984): 30-48. 56 normalization, appears more appropriate. Therefore, I will use this word adultification as a means of describing the violent process of “becoming-subject” in these cartoons.

Deleuze and Guattari discuss their theory of “becoming” in their book Anti-

Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, as relating to a territorialization of the self. The postmodern experience is often identified or articulated through his re-deterritorializaton, as mentioned earlier in the discussion of Negri and Hardt’s Empire (2000).61 In this case, we look at childhood as not a stage of development, but rather a process of becoming. What that becoming is, according to theorist Walter Omar Kohan, is a “revolution of subjectivity.”62 The postmodern experience is that of becoming, either through social construction or through resistance. In the control society, in Empire, these subjective territories are turned into binaries by markets and demographics. And while it is not this thesis’ purpose to find a highly-functioning definition of postmodern childhood, this modulation within childhood identity is essential to understanding the cartoon, which is also always in a state of becoming. Kohan’s “subjectivity revolution” comes with another edge, a very real revolution. Not of identity, not of subjectivity, but of real political and social change. According to Allison James and Alan Prout’s book Constructing and

Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Study of Childhood, there is a general departure from the biological formations of childhood or “childhoods” in the field of sociology as well as critical theory.63 Childhood is no longer one childhood, one isolated

61 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001.

62 Kohan, W. O. (2011). Childhood, education and philosophy: Notes on deterritorialisation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 339-357.

63 James, Allison, and Alan Prout, eds. Constructing and reconstructing childhood: Contemporary issues in the sociological study of childhood. Routledge, 2015. 57 point in time but rather many points of intersection personified by de/reterritorializations within the self. What cartoons like The Fairly OddParents! show us is that childhood in its postmodern formation is in constant flux between its consumerist identity and its perpetual revolution. Thus, the violences of control and revolt are in constant play between the members of the family and even within the territories of the families themselves.

Without developing a complete theory of childhood, we can see from these examples that what identifies childhood in relation to becoming-subject is in fact its resistance to the becoming of that subject. This resistance must be met with retaliation from the institutions it sets out to destroy if social order is to be retained. This struggle is exemplified in the children’s television cartoons of the early to mid-2000s, coming from an anxiety around the loss of the enclosure and an expansion of information networks such as the internet and other mass media, the “crisis of parental control.” In School’s Out: The

Musical!, the central conflict revolves around the parents’ lack of control over their kids, causing them to panic and look for any means necessary to do so, even if it means ultimately harming them. The children ultimately rebel, which causes more chaos, until they are eventually put away into a summer day camp. Childhood, or what the show calls

“kids just being kids,” is personified by the destruction of property, an inability to follow rules, and a lack of discipline. All this is done in the name of “fun” and is a reaction to the release of the kids for summer vacation, an isolated time of fun designed to recharge the kids before school starts again in the fall. The teacher even calls out “It’s not my problem till September 3rd!” as if to relinquish himself from the responsibility. However, without the school there to contain them, the children run rampant on the streets, literally destroying the city in their wake. Children here are destructive, unruly, and pose a threat to the social 58 order. “We can do the things that our parents forbid! Summer’s not a bummer with us kids just being kids!”

To combat the violent kids, the parents respond by force, gearing up in militarized police uniforms and moving through the city, as though prepared to stop a violent protest

(with more violence). Unable to control the kids, they complain to the Mayor, who also runs away from responsibility and declares the town mascot, the goat Chompy, the new

Mayor. This doesn’t seem to faze the citizens of Dimmesdale as the position of power still exists as a way of pushing the blame off of themselves, even though Chompy the goat does not have the power to execute orders. “How can you sit there baahing when our children are out there hurting themselves!” Timmy’s Dad exclaims. “And more importantly, our stuff!” The parent’s solution to their children’s acting out is to act with violence, as they do toward anyone who does not have a solution to the problem at hand. Using the pretense of child safety, the parents justify violence towards their own children in order to protect their material wealth and, moreover, their subject position within social systems. This turn to authority, any authority despite its usefulness, as a way of controlling the children, is evidence of the anxiety of the crisis of parental control. The parents go to the mayor, who without the ability to do anything, pushes responsibility onto the goat, and so on until someone finally steps forward to take care of the issue. Unsurprisingly, it is the corporation who has the ability and the desire to step in and take over.

It is through the pretense of safety which allows Flappy Bob, the clown turned lawyer/businessman, to take advantage of the parents’ fears and sell them his new daycare center: Flappy Bob’s Camp Learnatorium, where the children will spend the rest of the summer institutionalized for their own safety. “Security is a differential management of 59 normalities and risks that are regarded as neither good nor bad, but as natural and spontaneous phenomena.” Maurizio Lazzarato writes in his article “Biopolitics and

Bioeconomics”, “It designs a cartography of this distribution and the normalizing operation consists of playing one differential of normality against another.”64 Lazzarato claims that the normalization favors a familiar form of control and violence over something spontaneous that is not controlled. Similarly, Flappy uses guilt and the criminal justice system, i.e. prison, to sell his daycare at a high price of admission. “It might be a tad expensive, but let me ask of you,” he says. “Won’t it cost more down the line when the cops are blaming you for the injuries and turmoil as your children wreck the town? You can learn to love your cellmate or just learn to love this clown!” The same tactic which is used to keep the parents in line, the fear of punishment, is the very same they use to justify the force they use on their children. They exchange something they can control, their bank account, in order to be protected from something they can’t control, being blamed for their kids’ behavior. Because “someone’s gotta be there, when you know you can’t be there...or don’t want to be.” Thus, the children revolt, causing a greater rift between child and adult, ultimately losing to the physical force of their parents’ authority. Violence begets more violence, rendering the excuse of child safety pointless. Children are framed as necessary to control: pre-subject, other, threat.

In School’s Out!, the villains, the boring business-like Pixies, attempt to create a stark divide between children and their parents, mirroring the marketing strategies of the

“kids rule” campaign. In his article “Concepts of Life and Living in the Societies of

64 Lazzarato, Maurizio. "Biopolitics/bioeconomics: A politics of multiplicity." Trans. Arianna Bove and Erik Empson. Multitudes22 (2005).

Control,” Lazzarato explains that “this differentiation...the unfolding of multiplicity is a creation of dualisms.”65 Power is exerted through the creation of binaries, noted in The

Fairly OddParents! by the child/adult differentiation. Adults do not understand why their children are acting out, and the children feel they have “earned” their fun because of the days they spent in school. Both sides of the line reinforce the dualism by blaming the other.

In “Adults Ruin Everything!”, Timmy espouses the philosophy “trust no one over ten!”, placing an age limit on childhood and firmly drawing the line between children and adults before making a wish that kids would rule the world instead of adults. As empowered children rally in the streets, demanding their rights, Timmy continues to shout. “Who gets to set the curfew [Kids!] Who gets to make the laws? [Kids!] There’s one adult left we all trust and his name’s Santa Claus!”

Wait...Santa Claus? Yes, Santa Claus, the system of surveillance that has been selling the concept of good behavior to children for centuries, is exempt from Timmy’s hatred of adults. It is here where Timmy’s philosophy begins to unravel, as his decision to simply replace all of the adults with children does not supplant the systems of power they had in place. While the power changes hands, the way it functions remains relatively the same, indicating a lack of progressive change within the new regime. Childhood and fun lose the destructive power they once had because even though “now it’s kids who rule”, structures like Santa Claus still exist. If what childhood is is a weapon against the institution, of social order itself by threatening adultomorphic thought as Deleuze and

Guattari claim, then the move to capitalize childhood through the production of toys, rewards, and magic are the demands made to quell that revolution. Here, it is the constant

65 Lazzarato, Maurizio. "The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control." Deleuze and the Social (2006): 171-190. 61 tension between normalization and resistance that creates adult on child violence, whether through the parent’s panic over the lack of control, or the corporation’s commodification of childhood.

Un-Fundamentals

The logic of The Fairly OddParents! is directly linked to Nickelodeon’s business model and reflects many of the anxieties surrounding the crisis of parental control and the role of the corporation in filling the position of normalization that was once occupied by the enclosure. The normalization process involves the direct correlation between the concepts of freedom, empowerment and fun, as Banet-Weiser mentions. Flappy Bob’s platform of “safe and boring fun” exists as a contrast to the prior chaotic fun that the kids have at the beginning of the story. Brainwashed to think “boring and dull is fun” by his guardians, the Pixies, Flappy Bob must be convinced by Timmy of fun’s true nature and power. Fun is shown as something that both adults and children can use to find a common ground, and much of the second half of the film is dedicated to this process. But what is

“fun?” According to the narrative, “fun” is not a subjective experience, as there are some things that are deemed as fun and others that aren’t. This flows directly in line with the

“kids rule” ideology, where kids have control over what is cool, and that ability to decide for the next generation what fun will look like. Given this desire, kids are content with having their needs met and are willing to put up with their otherwise violent conditions for the promise of more “fun”. As the story progresses, fun loses its destructive quality in favor of a digestible fun that’s “good for the whole family.” This new fun is a compromise between Flappy’s “safe fun” and Timmy’s “fun revolution.” It is a fun that is incorporated 62 into capitalist production, operating similarly to magical agency and decreasing the possibility of rebellion against the systemic powers.

The musical number “Where is the Fun?” shows Timmy and the Pixies both presenting their cases to Flappy in hopes of bringing them to their side. “How could you say this is fun?” the ten-year-old asks, as Flappy Bob falls into a fantasy sequence, landing in the middle of his Learnatorium, which is padded like solitary confinement and surrounded by barbwire and cement prison walls as the large pencil walls of his real

Learnatorium surround him. Timmy begins by explaining how the Pixies have controlled the clown’s life since he was born, represented by a photo of him as a baby, literally pulled by puppet strings as the Pixies smile wickedly down at him. “From the style of your car, down to the food that you ate,” Timmy says. With each change, Floppy is presented with the fun “kid” option, only for it to turn into the boring “adult” alternative, his face becoming more horrified with each transformation. His clown car turns into a boxy grey four-door sedan, his junk food into tofu. Here, the adultification of Flappy is depicted as simply a matter of taste, making him boring rather than fun. As the sequence progresses, Flappy becomes more uncertain of what he sees as fun, ultimately unable to get past his preconceptions and siding with the Pixies. “This nose, pants, hair and shoes, are all my past and now I choose to wish for a world, a world that fits all my views. A world where I am safe,” sings Flappy as he lands back in his prison with a smile on his face, padded head to toe.

In this sequence, the imagery of control, the prison and the puppeteering, is associated with business and work while the imagery of freedom is exemplified through the idea of fun. Flappy’s desire to remain in the prison he has built for himself is equated 63 with his desire for protection and security in his own sense of identity. He wishes for a world which reflects his own world view, where fun is something which conforms to his wishes and the “freedom” is subtracted from it. His desire for safe fun for himself is projected on the kids, whose parents he exploits. However, the character is far from the malicious, cold-hearted corporate lawyer that his guardians want him to be. Deep down, he’s still a clown, and this is represented by his multiple clowning outbursts and pink eyes that contrast with his grey suit and black hair. He truly believes in his Learnatorium and its his ideals that get in the way of the kid’s destructive fun. Just as the parents use the guise of “protection” when justifying force with their kids, Flappy uses similar tactics to avoid being ideologically challenged.

Fairy World, without magical control, has also turned into a corporation ruled by

“un-fundamentals”, with the Fairies wearing suits and being forced into menial labor jobs such as washing dishes. Meanwhile on Earth safe and boring fun has replaced all aspects of life. The parents continue to justify their actions by stating it’s the only way to keep their children in line. The movie also takes a jab at the ACT or Action for Children’s Television, which demanded more educational television of younger viewers from parents. In addition to making the world “safe and fun”, the new goals of education are placed to the forefront of Flappy’s new world order. Even the word “un-fundamentals” implies a re-structuring of thought through education, learning the principles of “un-fun” via the same enclosures, like the school, which promise to keep children normalized within society. However, by setting up these institutions, the bones of the enclosure, the Fairies and the children are less likely to complain about their current situations. In neoliberal fashion, “fun” becomes a marketable tool which sells its ideas not only through the differentiation of child and adult, 64 but also through work/play. Although the physical space, the city of Dimmesdale and the

Learnatorium, are re-introduced to the idea of fun, the parents are now a part of it. The ending image of the children playing inside the Learnatorium illustrates the goal of the society of control, to make the individual’s desires a part of the process of normalization.

Here, the desire for fun satiates that need.

In the end, Flappy Bob (adult) and Timmy (kid) use fun to stop the greater evil,

“un-fun.” The movie concludes with Flappy Bob regaining his freedom by embracing his clown heritage and finding a compromise between the child and adult ideologies. The idea that adults can regain their childhood through “fun” hinges on the postmodern childhood identity and the creation of the “consumer-subject.” By promoting fun as a subversion of authority, parents and children are able to find peace through it. They no longer rely on the institution to control their children, knowing that allowing them to have a certain amount of freedom will in effect keep them in control. “We can control parentally!” they realize in the final scene as they join their kids on stage. This compromise is made only after the children relinquish their power back to the adults, which ultimately means a return to war, enterprise, and school. However, with the blame placed on the nebulous Pixies, the dualism of the child and adult function as one, at peace with the world as it is. Adultification, the becoming of consumer-subject, is allowed to progress. “Someone else was pulling strings as far as we could tell. But you and me will set us free. Everything ends well.” Well, until the next episode of course.

Conclusion

While discussing the effect of social control on the violence of the child’s body, the question may arise what the connection is between these systemic forms of violence and the cartoon animated world. What makes the cartoon child unique is its placement between the two extremes of form and social position. On the one hand, it does not appear necessary at first glance that the analysis of these bodies be animated, let alone be animated in a particular form or style. However, the things which I have presented, concepts such as magical agency, destructive fun, and continued violence on the cartoon child’s body, directly relate to the form of cartoon animation. The absurdity of the cartoon’s world, one that can change form at any given moment, obscures its violent nature through over- exaggeration, and thus the permanence of physical violence is not felt. Instead of using these forms to think about what the child viewer may do, I want to instead discuss how the lack of adherence to reality makes the cartoon a production of pure “fun” and “fantasy”, giving even more power to the ideologies behind magical agency and marketable fun. The status quo of the cartoon world is easily forgivable, or even ignorable, creating a dependency like the children in its narrative to the magic the cartoon provides. And like

Fairy World, this magic hides the systemic causes of its existence: the fact that its story is dependent on child violence. In the name of fun, these things are brushed aside.

The goal of these projects should not be, as Flappy Bob suggests, to protect our children to the extent of oppression. We should not put a pad on every knee and make the trampolines bouncy-free. Yet it must be noted that the normalizing narrative which positions fun as both an easily accessible marketing tool, like the “kids rule” campaign, and a progressive means of expression and liberation is indeed a challenging notion to get 66 behind. The relationship between this production of fun and the assault on the child cartoon character’s body is inherent, and they connect via the marketing strategies of the networks they run on. The very word “network” implies a connection to a greater social power, one that runs on the ideology of the late-capitalist corporation. I also do not think we should use this fact to not monitor what our children intake, although this is becoming more and more difficult with access to the internet. At any rate, it is not the intention of this project to search for solutions, but rather to draw attention to the problem and push away from the ideas of violence which only account for repeatable, impressionable acts.

The Fairly OddParents! demonstrates the ways in which children’s media, particularly during the early 2000s, was able to cater to children’s desire for control in a world where they have none, while simultaneously de-possessing them of real political intervention. The placation of fun from the destructive, rebellious fun of the beginning of the story into something that the adults and children can use to make themselves comfortable within the system reflects the ideal control society, one where the children want to behave in exchange for the promise of a conditional freedom which is easily palatable by corporations and marketable to consumers. Adults are given leniency based on their willingness to give into a “demand” for more fun, and children are conditioned into assuming that this fun is something they earn as a consequence of their good behavior.

There is a reason children still believe in Santa Claus.

However, none of these things alone – status quo, magical agency, the concept of empowerment and fun, universally create the same experience when implemented. Just as cycles of normalization can be used to show the complacency of violent control conditions it can also reveal movement of resistance. The nature of childhood demands structural 67 antagonism and as is true in the control society one does not need to break the cycle entirely in order to be antagonistic towards it. The moments of revolution in School’s Out! may be short-lived, but they are allowed through the same form and affect that allows the violences of control. I will conclude this thesis by looking at a show that uses the cartoon affect to create cyclical conditions of violence that continually interrogate structures of authoritative power, using the inability to break the cycle as its means of interjection.

BATTLE STATIONS!

Adult Tyranny and Childhood Rebellion in Codename: Kids Next Door

During its 6-year run from 2002-2008, Turner Cartoon Network’s Codename: Kids

Next Door only had one episode pulled after its completion for content purposes. The full half-hour episode was meant to be a Thanksgiving special, featuring a Noir-like mystery and tone combined with classic zombie horror akin to Night of the Living Dead (1968).

According to the show’s creator, Tom Warburton, the episode was completely finished before the network pulled it, complete with animation and voice acting. The network feared that the episode was “too scary” for children and did not want to risk complaints from parents and the FCC. Indeed, while zombie turkeys would be enough to scare little children, the decision surprised Warburton as it wasn’t too out of touch with material that the show, and shows in the past, had been producing. The episode was reworked into the 15-minute runtime, which was typical for an episode, altering the plot and tone to be more network friendly-- no zombie turkeys, no Thanksgiving theme. The episode ran with no complaints from the network and the half-hour special was lost to time.66

In the aired episode, the following scene occurs: A young boy no older than eleven is sitting at the table at a dinner party. Diagonal from him is his elderly Grandmother. The

Grandmother drones on and on, making everyone desperate to leave the table. When the host steps in and asks if someone would go to the store to pick up chocolate sauce, everyone

66 “Hoagie's Got a Hankering For Cranberry Sauce...” KidsNextBlog, Livejournal, kidsnextblog.livejournal.com/27004.html

This was confirmed on Warburton’s Official Blog “WarburtonLabs.”

“WarburtonLabs.” WarburtonLabs, Blogspot. warburtonlabs.blogspot.com/

69 volunteers except the boy, who sinks slowly down into his seat, and his Grandmother who is too old to go anywhere and is in the middle of her story. When the boy is the one picked, despite his reluctance, he states that he has a bit of an addiction to chocolate sauce and would rather not. The Grandmother picks up her metal cane and proceeds to beat the boy repeatedly on the head until he complies to the request. (See Figure 3.)

Issues of censorship arise often in the instance of children’s cartoons, and media in general. In chapter one, we examined the origins of certain kinds of censorship and regulatory practices surrounding the cartoons of the 1990s, and how these practices were both evidence of a severe crisis of parental control and a shift toward thinking of the child as an individual consumer as opposed to a part of a family institution. We saw in chapter two how these regulations and shifts in society pertaining to the family and corporate world altered the type of violence that was being represented in the cartoon. I call these violences of control and violences of resistance, and they are at play in Codename: Kids Next Door graphically and unapologetically. When taken out of context, the idea of pulling an episode due to its scary content seems reasonable, necessary even. However, it will become apparent throughout this chapter that this choice is evidence of the way the cartoon, and cartoon violence, is understood. On its own, zombie turkeys are very frightening. But, are they more frightening than slavery? Abuse? Mind-control?

(Figure 3): Operation: S.P.A.N.K.E.N.S.T.I.N.E. Boy beaten by grandmother in “comedic” display of violence. Girl cowers in fear.

It is clear that the show uses cartoon logic in regards to the physics of the world.

The boy is able to survive the beating with no lasting impact and proceeds to go to the store reluctantly, even responding with annoyance and indifference to the graphic display of violence. The disavowal of experience denies the cartoon the trauma of existence, in this case triggered by pain. However, violence, while its physical representation is abstract, is still the anchor in this scene. This is an example of a violence of control, using fear and pain to control the child’s behavior. However, there is more than the simple visible violence here. Around the table, there are many people who witness the event, yet proceed to do nothing -- in children’s cartoons it is often the lack of action that denotes more violence than what we recognize as violent action. We experience the mental engagement of violence stimulated by the physical representation, but because of the lack of “experience” 71 means that the violence does not register. Violence is normalized within the cartoon, and yet if we look for it, it is also one of the most obvious ways to see how society itself normalizes violence. In Codename: Kids Next Door, what is often at stake is the child’s control over their physical body. The cartoon affect produces a window where the violences of control and resistance can be placed in direct conflict with one another as kids fight for their right to their bodies.

This chapter will explore Codename: Kids Next Door (2002-2008) in the light of its cartoon affect as it relates to children’s relationship to labor, consumption, normalization and abuse. As in previous chapters, I am pushing away from the idea that violence is something that is always physically representable, and that the structure of that physical representation has anything to do with the nature of the violence itself. Instead, this study of “cartoon affect” will return focus to the cartoon in its material, physical existence without presuming that all violences are visible and repeatable. Often, what is known as cartoon violence is visible, but not repeatable due to the construction of the form.

What makes something like zombie turkeys unacceptable, but poisoning, brainwashing, kidnapping children acceptable simply because of cartoon “comic” violence is the question that this chapter aims to interrogate. And that these violences are actually damaging to the child regardless of context is something that this chapter and thesis as a whole is happy to contend with.

Saving Recess

It is important to understand that KND is not concerned with the realism of its conflicts, nor is it absolute in an “anti-adult” rhetoric that may turn parents off. It is, instead, 72 an exaggeration of the values and conflicts of childhood, and through these exaggerations it stumbles upon greater issues than it expects to deal with. The show centers around a group of five fourth-graders who are members of a global organization called the “Kids

Next Door”, an activist group created to preserve the rights of children. The show is particularly unapologetic in its depiction of adults as either evil, ignorant, or on the rare occasion revolutionaries, and places much of the blame for children’s suffering on adult society. However, while on the surface the child/adult binary appears to be strong, the conditions that create these antagonisms are centered around the structural conflicts that produce the “becoming-adult” as opposed to adults themselves.67 In fact, child/adult binaries cause more problems often than they solve, and the more the show stumbles into this conflict, the less it is able to justify its stagnation and lack of revolution.

For example, the typical plot of a KND episode functions in an episodic mode similar to that of other cartoons of its time, as seen in The Fairly OddParents! The “status quo” continuity states that the conflict of each episode will be resolved by the next, and the world will be in one way or another reset to “normalcy” by its conclusion. However, while

The Fairly OddParents! celebrates this return with relief, having learned a “valuable lesson” of some kind and appreciating the status quo despite its potential harm toward the main character, KND does not. Although some episodes follow this formula, many reverse it to establish a “normal” status quo that is unpleasant and often times violent. A typical children’s cartoon may present the following formula -- peace, conflict, peace. Superhero shows use this formula, allowing its viewers to rest in the comfort that “the day is saved.”

However, these episodes of KND follow a formula that resembles an awareness of the

67 See Gilles Deleuze theory of becoming in chapter 2 page 8. 73 violence in normalcy. Instead of peace, conflict, peace, we have something like control, resistance, control. Again, this is not every episode and is not isolated to this program, but the difference between the cyclical nature of FOP! and KND lies in its intention. The

“status quo” is a normalcy that often includes violences, but these violences are acceptable because they maintain normalcy, and this normalcy is seen as better than the resistant alternative. In KND this is hardly ever the case. While some conflicts remain resolved, the cyclical nature of the episode more often concludes the episode with more conflict, and most interestingly, the same conflict that began the episode.

In the episode “Operation R.E.C.E.S.S.”, the students of an elementary school have their recess taken away after they “strike oil” beneath the playground...salad oil, that is.68

To reap the benefits of this, the principals of the school transform the playground into an oil rig and force the students to use their recess to work. The imagery is bleak, teeter-totters being used to pump large masses of oil into barrels, which are placed beneath the jungle gym like a containment chamber. The salad oil is then bottled and sold, free tax-paid labor allowing them to make a huge profit. 69 The episode ends with the kids, mostly by accident, saving the day and sabotaging the school’s plans. As the sun returns to the sky, children return to recess only to find after a few minutes of play that one of the students has “struck prune juice” beneath the school, and the cycle beings again. Although the personal conflict of the episode does end up resolved, the structural conflict is simply repackaged, despite the effort and resistance shown in the battle. Like FOP!, the status quo is one of violence and suffering on the part of its characters, but unlike FOP! there is very little causal

68 R.E.C.E.S.S. (Recreation Ended Cuz Enemies Savor Salad)

69 It is ironic that the introduction of this episode begins with a teacher reading to the students about taxes. 74 acceptance of this suffering. The violences of resistance are given play not through escapism, but through activism.

This formula can be seen in other episodes: “Operation: S.P.R.O.U.T.” concerns a brussels sprout that must be removed after accidental consumption, “Operation:

C.L.U.E.S.” begins and ends with moments of extreme familial physical abuse, and the list goes on. The cartoon affect allows these types of violences to continue, yet the show itself is in a constant state of rebellion, highlighting rebellion and resistance as the primary qualities of childhood alongside imagination and freedom. KND showcases violence through the cartoon form, utilizing squash and stretch and other animation principles to create cartoon affect. And like the cartoon affect which is predicated on a relationship between bodies and movement, the majority of KND’s conflicts are issues of consumption and labor -- what children do with their time and their bodies and how the adults control those bodies for their own means.

The Spinach Inquisition

Codename: Kids Next Door was created as an exaggeration of the conditions of childhood, no doubt for the purposes of humor, and yet this exaggeration like the cartoon affect makes visible the real violences of normalization imposed by social society. Most importantly, the conflict of the child’s physical body, their labor, their time, and what they consume are the primary concerns of the show. Consumption is one of the primary methods of control used in KND, a hyperbolic representation of children not wanting to eat their vegetables, but also a startling reality as to what ulterior motives may be lurking behind that control. With so much talk of children being the symbol of “futurity” and “purity”, the 75 controlling of the child’s consumption is taken to a different place than the celebratory childhood market. While, yes, the show favors candy over vegetables, and uses fun to compete against “un-fun”, what is at stake is not fun itself. Rather, it is the freedom of choice and the resistance of control. While compromise had been depicted as an attractive and satisfying conclusion in other programs, KND twists the crisis of parental control as something harmful to the child’s physical body not just their pleasure. The kids in the show do not refuse to go to the dentist because they do not want clean teeth. They refuse to go to the dentist because they are afraid of being tracked through their teeth. They do not want to eat vegetables because no one gave them a choice whether they could and what vegetables they may or may not like. And though this could be ‘all in good fun’, and even in many ways subordinate to the childhood market values, the resulting conflict signals the crisis of parental control, the destructive nature of childhood, and an embracing of productive conflict over controlled peace.

What is perhaps most telling of the show’s intention is the purpose that adults give for making children eat their vegetables. It is so that the adults don’t have to. As seen in

FOP! the parental crisis of control results in a dismissal of responsibility on the part of the parent or school, offering that up to the larger corporation or government. In “Operation:

S.P.I.N.A.C.H.” the entire country of Spinachia forces other people, mostly children, to eat spinach so that they don’t have to eat it themselves. One child, who actually likes spinach, joins them thinking he is simply supporting something he loves. However, when he finds out children are being forced via torture to eat it, he fights back. It is not vegetables themselves that are under attack, but rather the flimsy motivation for why adults control consumption in the first place. The consumption of food motivates both the adults and the 76 children, as the freedom of what children do and what they put into their bodies. It saves the day as often as it throws it into conflict. Not only what is eaten, but how much is eaten is also positioned as a violence of control. Granmma Stuffum is a villain archetype of a grandmother who simply will not let a child stop eating, and thus forces food down children’s throats until they turn into giant balloons. Robbin Food steals lunches from children to give to the elderly, because he doesn’t want to make it himself. The enforcement of consumption is inextricably linked to the adult’s either lack of responsibility or avoidance of labor.

By contrast, candy and sugar are seen as rewards and treasures, earned not by good behavior but by perseverance and appreciation. The best rewards, the best candy, are given to those who have a knowledge and passion for it, imagination and creativity rewarded over normalized “good” behavior. Those who covet sugar for selfish purposes are punished, regardless of age. “A good candy taken in greed, always turns sour.”70 What is happening here is the same as Benjamin’s observation of Mickey Mouse.71 What is at risk in KND is not that children will be forced to eat vegetables when they do not want to, but that their bodies will be taken from them through normalization, and later through adultification.72 The process of becoming-adult is exposed as a violence on the child’s physical body, not simply one of consumerism, but one of complete conformity.

Conformity, while “boring” and “un-fun” poses a threat to the child’s very being for the purposes of maintaining business as usual.

70 Operation: J.E.W.E.L.S. (Juvenile Escapes With Extremely Luscious Sweet)

71 See chapter 1 page 46.

72 See introduction page 8. 77

Through episodes such as “R.E.C.E.S.S.” it is made clear that this threat is constant.

It is not simply that children’s own consumption is being controlled, but that their bodies are used as a means of consumption for the adults. In this way, it is their labor that literally feeds the adult’s capitalist enterprise. In the made-for-tv movie Operation: Z.E.R.O., the

7th generation of the Kids Next Door is founded at a time when children were forced to work in tapioca factories, in horrible conditions and little talk of pay. The wage-labor relation is more or less absent in the case of child labor, and there are no labor laws that protect children from being stolen from their families, brainwashed, and enslaved. In this world, children are often seen as simply “instruments of labor,” whether that be affective, immaterial, or hard physical labor, the consumption of the child’s body and the child’s labor time are all placed into value based in capitalist enterprises, whether it be showcasing naughty children in a zoo of people, using mind-control to make campers believe they are doing crafts when they are actually performing unpaid manual labor, or selling their time and bodies to a school that uses them for material gain. And as children grow older and gain a salary for their work, their minds and bodies are subsumed completely by the adults.

The process of violent normalization runs so deep in fact that the consumption of children’s bodies often becomes quite literal, resulting in not only adults wanting to consume children, but children who are not participant in resistance consuming other children -- sometimes with them knowing it, other times without. In the episode

“Operation: C.A.K.E.D. F.O.U.R.” a rich father, the main antagonist of the series appropriately named Father offers up his children’s delicious birthday cake as the first prize for an inner-tube race. When his children are knocked out of the race, he uses his abilities to re-route the rest of the participants into a giant batch of cake batter where he plans to 78 bake the children into the cake, feeding it to his own. The cake is, however, such a coveted item that when telling the only remaining member in the race that he only won because everyone else was about to be baked into a cake, he asks if he can have a slice. In another episode, a school nurse reveals she has been using pinkeye curst for the toppings of her famous apple crumbles, stating “I’ve made millions at bake sales, and I don’t intend to stop there.”73 Not only are children’s bodies being controlled in what they consume, they are literally being consumed by the society they live in, their physical bodies nothing more than a labor “reserve” or as Herbert Hoover once said, “the world’s most precious natural resource.”74

Turning 13: The Adult Problem

Out of the myriad of ways children and adults have been separated through narratives in children’s media, perhaps the most devastating example comes from KND which casts children as activists in a fight against the oppressive forces of adult expectation only to be forced into assimilation once they have passed the age of admission. What began as a means of making childhood a nostalgic paradise in juxtaposition to the limiting reality of a hyper-capitalist, labor-oriented society, transformed during the show’s progression into an unanswerable problem. After all, only Kids can be in the Kids Next Door.

Decommissioning, the removal of an operative’s memories of the Kids Next Door entirely upon their 13th birthday, fails as a metaphor for the loss of childhood, which in reality transpires as more of an ideological shift than physical aging. However, it succeeds in

73 Operation: P.I.N.K.E.Y.E. (Private Investigator’s New Kase - Extra Yucky Epidemic)

74 Kennedy, David. Epilogue–Becoming Child, Becoming Other: Childhood as Signifier. 2. 79 showing how systems themselves enforce the division of child and adult through marketing under the guise of developmental difference. The becoming-adult process in KND is a literal one, for its operatives, and an instantaneous one. Despite their rebellious nature, the children still believe that becoming-adult is a necessary evil to preserve childhood. They self-regulate into conformity via the very institution they use to rebel, even though conforming to the adult way of life is seen as the worst fate imaginable in the eyes of the show.

This contradiction, the decommissioning problem, encircles the Deleuzian model of control while attempting to justify a child/adult binary against the theory of “becoming.”

In other words, the show wrote itself into a corner. By isolating childhood to a biological existence, and through the desire to preserve childhood as an institution or market, childhood itself dies. Although some operatives continue on to become spies of the teenagers and adults, most end up losing their childhoods entirely to this process. Again, the institution which is made to provide agency and freedom for kids is the very thing controlling their oppression. And unlike FOP! where there is an industry providing the

“magical agency” for the child, this self-regulation is performed by the oppressed themselves. The childhood market and the cartoon form that rely on the status quo are partially responsible for this. The idea that childhood ends after 13 implements ideas that sell childhood to kids and the cartoon affect does not allow for extreme impact that could lead to revolution. To sell, some amount of “normalcy” must be in place. However, it is idea that childhood must end, that there is a separation between the rebellious postmodern 80 territory “becoming-child” and “becoming-adult,” that denies children their bodies -- children of any physical age.75

What “losing your body” equates to in KND is losing your labor. In other words, what indicates being an adult subject is the necessity to sell one’s labor. Far different from

Timmy Turner’s joyful delegating of roles discussed in the previous chapter, the worst fate imaginable for a child in the KND universe is getting a job. In “Operation. P.O.O.L.” a negative world is shown to exist, one that is the exact opposite in every way.76 Here, children work and adults sit around and play video games, enjoying their leisure time.

“Children are garbage collectors, TV repair men, and even lawyers.” The dream that is traditionally instilled in the child, the age-old question “what do you want to be when you grow up?” is invalidated. It is not that being an adult is “uncool” or even “un-fun”, it is that being an adult means conformity and giving away the body to the corporation. In this strange scenario, the viewer is discomforted by things that are otherwise normal whereas child labor seemed okay and even beneficial when these same roles were reversed in FOP!

This ideology is not limited to this single episode, as most of what defines the adult is their relationship to their jobs, paid and unpaid. Children, meanwhile, are seen as either reserves of labor or destructive forces that need to be controlled. Even in cases where the adults seemingly have the child’s best interest, most of the time it concludes when things begin to change too drastically. “I am all for [child] safety, but not if it inconveniences adults!” claims one notorious government worker in the episode “Operation: S.A.F.E.T.Y.”, his

75 For theory of becoming see chapter 2 page 57-60.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, trans." Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 5 (1983).

76 P.O.O.L. (Prevent Opposite Operative’s Larceny) 81 new safety robots having taken away his golf clubs in the name of protecting children. Yet while it appears that adults have it the best in this universe, it is clear that they are just as if not more oppressed than the kids.77

The designs of the characters mostly follow similar models, and for the families the models are almost identical. The main characters look almost identical to their parents, with a few exceptions, and their siblings almost identical to them. There is a certain interchangeability to the designs that when coupled with the cartoon affect dilute the uniqueness of each character’s physical attributes. To stand out, a character must wear something specific, have a particular hair style or outfit. This is to save time on character design, but it also aligns with the show’s position of children as a “reserve” in the eyes of the world around them. Large masses of kids, both inside and outside the organization, are placed into peril -- girls being sent off to Pluto so their parents can stay at work longer, masses of children being abducted into school on a snow day. While in most cases this is simply a consequence of clever character modeling to avoid unnecessary animation costs, the show uses the similarity of the models to illustrate the cyclical nature of abuse and violence within their world. It is taken for granted that these children will grow up to be just like their parents, some exhibiting physically violent traits that mirror their parents, and their parents having repressed traits of their kids in order to conform to normality. This dangerous cycle is known to be destructive, yet the show can’t seem to find an answer for it.

The villain Father’s lack of love from his own father leads him on the path to spending his life trying to impress him, only to be rejected once again. A child’s abuse

77 S.A.F.E.T.Y. (Senator Attacks Foes Endangering Today’s Youth) 82 from his grandmother leads him to believe violence is the way to respond to anger at his own brother. The adult on child violence does not necessarily mean a physical violence from a molar adult on a molar child. It is the violence on the becoming-child, the violence that fears childhood and aims to control it through consumption and commodification, through regulation and punishment. The hope of the Kids Next Door is to break the cycle, but they cannot hope to achieve this goal. The show manages to encourage the individuality of subjectivity while at the same time not ignoring the collective consciousness. The cartoon form that dilutes individualism in design creates a political statement, whether that was the show’s intention or not. It is not one child, it is not circumstance or personality that creates the violence in cartoons against children. It is a systemic cycle of normalization in a world that was already violent to begin with. In this world, zombie turkeys are the least of anyone’s fears.

Conclusion

The point here is not to praise one cartoon over the other, nor is it to suggest that showing violence to children will in some way benefit them. The benefits and consequences of violence in media are things that scholars have already been debating for years. The point is instead to take into account the colossal impact of the Children’s

Television Act (1990) and the rising crisis of parental control mentioned in previous chapters, the development of childhood identity outside of biological or developmental science, adultomorphic thought, and the cartoon affect that makes violence its main language, in creating what are essentially cartoons about systemic violence for children. If it seems like this chapter was riddled with examples, it is to drive home the point that the 83 very foundation of adult on child violence is not and should not be individualized. It is not a concern of the privatized institution, because the institution is dissolving. The neglect of one adult leads to the neglect of another and other, which leads to violence of another, and soon it is status quo. If we are to take what Kohan says to heart, the revolution of subjectivity that childhood provides is one that pushes against notions of structure that continue to normalize us into this world. In Codename: Kids Next Door, childhood is that revolution.78

The cartoon affect produces a condition that no other form can. It is the complete acknowledgement of the clown and its purpose, to laugh at, belittle, condemn, and to take away from the body what makes it human -- its experience. And yet through the cartoon the violence that would otherwise be ignored is given a voice. In the case of children, it is often more that we are not paying attention because violence looks and acts a certain way to us. If we are not responsible for those actions, how could we be responsible for the violence our children witness and perform? The cartoon is the place where the paranoia of children and their subject position meets the reality of childhood as war machine. In the postmodern, the violence can become invisible, distant, unstoppable. In the cartoon, this is the reality. It cannot be censored because it just is. It is the exaggeration of the very forms of violence that make our world, violences of resistance and control. In this way, the cartoon communicates to its viewers one thing.

Battle Stations.

78 Kohan, W. O. (2011). Childhood, education and philosophy: Notes on deterritorialisation. Journal of Philosophy of Education, 45(2), 339-357.

Read introduction page 10. 84

CONCLUSION In recent years, the access to the internet has only increased while its user base has expanded to include younger and younger children. The becoming of the consumer-subject is therefore taking place much earlier through avenues such as YouTube. The crisis of parental control is more prominent than ever before, with parents making technology such as tablets and smartphones a more integral part of their children’s education and development. With this new technology comes new controversy. For example, YouTube

Kids, a special offshoot of YouTube for child-friendly content, contains material from many animation companies that gain revenue by uploading cheap and disconcerting videos using variations on pre-existing templates targeted towards preschool children. The popularity of these templates, the “family finger song” for instance, has given the disturbing videos airplay due to YouTube’s algorithmic method for selecting and displaying content.79 And while the intention of these videos is to perturb and troll in order to get more views, their unsettling undertones have parents and other child caretakers deeply concerned about what this could potentially mean for the children who consume them. What does it mean to place an algorithm in charge of selecting content for children?

What happens when algorithms designed to manage an immeasurable amount of content fail to pick up on system oversights? Who is held responsible? The company? The trolls?

The parents?

79 Burroughs, Benjamin. "YouTube kids: The app economy and mobile parenting." Social Media+ Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 2056305117707189.

See also: Bridel, James. “Something Is Wrong on the Internet.” Medium , 6 Nov. 2017, medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2.

In the crisis of parental control, the paranoia of the child’s body and their subject position in relation to authority remains in flux. Children are spending more time in constant communication and this is, for better or worse, altering the way parenting, social connection, and development operates into the 2010s and will continue to do so in the future. This is not news to anyone. The neoliberal ideology places conflict into its market, integrates political discourse into its consumerist vision, and dilutes extreme radical change through this process. In a sense, history has begun to repeat itself with the demand of

YouTube regulation to prevent scandals like the YouTube Kids algorithm, and the encouragement of separate streaming platforms on sites like Netflix to prevent unwanted material from being digested by younger viewers.80 While Deleuze’s model for control societies, the society of modulations, has more or less gone through a modulation itself, the anxiety surrounding children in the United States exemplified by this crisis of parental control, which I have outlined in this thesis, remains present. It is only a matter of time before the “effects of media violence” studies shift their focus to the behavioral impact of these YouTube Kids videos just as they have with violent video games.

Throughout these chapters, I have outlined a variety of essential landmarks of change in the emerging ‘digital age’, and now that we are coming into a better understanding of what this means it is essential to underline the importance of these landmarks in congruency with today’s media. First, the childhood market that found its

80 Burroughs, Benjamin. "YouTube kids: The app economy and mobile parenting." Social Media+ Society 3, no. 2 (2017): 2056305117707189.

See also: Matrix, Sidneyeve. "The Netflix effect: Teens, binge watching, and on-demand digital media trends." Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 6, no. 1 (2014): 119-138.

86 roots in primetime television and was solidified in the 1980s has entered a new phase. As mentioned in chapter one, the social significance of the childhood market is that it has created an isolated childhood identity dependent on the consumption of media and branded product labeled “for kids.” Child empowerment as marketing such as Nickelodeon’s “Kids

Rule” have died down significantly but in their place arises the nostalgia market, or I should say many subsequent nostalgia markets. Postmodern nostalgia, as Jameson writes, is the consumption of the past though what he calls “glossy images.”81 Anne Friedberg calls this the nostalgia for the “commodity-experience.”82 It should be common knowledge for those who study cinema that this epidemic of nostalgia films and markets allows for the desiring- production to flow. Childhood isolated no longer creates antagonism, but rather longing for the past. And markets, rather than selling the concepts of childhood to children, are using it as a means of selling childhood to adults. This idea is so permeated in the public consciousness that the specific definition of the childhood market as I have written needed to be torn from the talons of nostalgic consciousness.

It is no coincidence that the childhood market gave birth to nostalgia markets, nor that the nostalgia market is so prolific at this moment. While this thesis has not focused on the question of nostalgia, which is surprisingly difficult with children’s media, the concern of the cartoon in the 2010s depends heavily on this market relationship. The influence of anime has given new boundaries for animation in the West, and as streaming sites such as

Crunchyroll and distributers like Funimation gain more influence, the global anime trend

81 Cited form: Friedberg, Anne. Window shopping: Cinema and the postmodern. Univ of California Press, 1993. 188.

82 Friedberg, Anne. Window shopping: Cinema and the postmodern. Univ of California Press, 1993. 188-189. 87 is changing the cartoon. This means more mature content, nuanced animation techniques, and more realistic violence. Anime markets skew older, leaving a staunch divide in demographic between child and pre-teen or adolescent viewers, and with the popularity of

Disney’s MCU films, Marvel and DC animations have become part of a less niche market.

This does not mean that the cartoon is dead, but the reluctance to call these new shows

“cartoons” for fear of undermining their mature themes demonstrates a very telling association we have made with the cartoon. Childish, immature, not to be taken seriously, comedy. It could be that the cartoon is going through a metamorphosis. After all, the cartoon affect is still very present in many anime and in contemporary US animated programs. However, while I praise the new wave of interest in animation that is mature and can use the medium in innovative ways outside of squash and stretch, I am weary of the loss of the cartoon. More so, I am weary of the loss of the cartoon’s purpose, even if that loss is only temporary.

There is a growing assumption that the nuance of storytelling, its subtleties and its realism, is the indicator of quality. It is not my desire nor intention to make this argument about quality. I only say this to point out that while nostalgia protects old cartoons, new cartoons that perform extreme amounts of “cartoon affect” and perform the lack of experience that comes with them are not as well-appreciated. If a cartoon is to “cartoon” it must also have a nuance that allows it to pass as something else, something deeper or more mature. This is a consequence of the anime market as well as years of animation being dismissed as “kid’s stuff.” There is a strange tension between the acceptance of the cartoon and one’s nostalgia and the rejection of bombast and exaggeration. This is not always the case, however more so than ever before the cartoon has standards to uphold if it is to justify 88 its affect. Most see this as progress, I see it as modulation. As cycles continue, fluctuations in style and affect will change with demographics. But even if it is temporary, the loss of the cartoon affect and what it capably communicates, is something to be cautious of.

Cartoons are violence. They speak in violence, they act through violence, so it makes sense to eliminate them and in doing so, eliminate the normalization of violence, yes? No. While the cartoon started out as a creation whose purpose was mockery, the clown that could not die, that very denial of experience produced by cartoon affect animates a violence in the system of control that is not explicitly visible in its everyday operations.

The violence of the cartoon is not a violence of good versus evil. It is not justified by logic.

It is squash and stretch: control and resistance. The cartoon is radical. It shows explicitly the very possibility of violence, that it is not always noticed and is not always treated as violence. The exaggerated space and body of the cartoon forces the aggression of normalization to be seen, and that that cannot be seen to be held under scrutiny. The experience of childhood, that deterritorialization of self that becomes one thing then another, is a battle of control and resistance. Nuance, the realistic, while good and productive in their own right, allow for violences to be defined by their visibility. Because the cartoon is violence, there is an assumption that violence is always there. You can see violence in the cartoon, but it is denied a traumatic experience. It is denied the right to be special or circumstantial. However, in our current view of the cartoon this potential is ignored, not because the cartoon itself is saying different, but because our view of violence is anchored in that which is a reactionary physical act. It is the dangerous idea that only things that are realistic have impact. And that which has no impact, cannot make an impact. 89

We would much rather keep children away from even the idea of violence than have a meaningful conversation about it. And this silence is costing us.

To marry these two points, one needs look no further than the 2013 reboot of the

2003 television series Teen Titans (2003-2006), called Teen Titans Go! (2013-) a series that goes out of its way to be the exact opposite of its previous incarnation. Rehiring the full original cast, the show makes a mockery of the original series, a teen drama superhero program, and creates a farce. Despite venomous hate from old fans, the show remains one of the most popular currently airing programs on Cartoon Network, with a theatrical release film premiering in 2018. The show alienates old fans, yet consistently speaks about how much better the original was. In a panel at WonderCon in 2018, the producer Michael

Jelenic claimed he could “almost guarantee” the return of the original Teen Titans, picking up where it left off in 2006. Cartoon Network later tweeted to confirm this possibility.83 It appears as almost too perfect of a promotional stunt, racking the nostalgia market by first destroying something they had instilled as part of childhood, only to bring it back with overwhelming popularity.84 The more “comic-like” original would appeal to the older nostalgia audience while the newer show has popularity with younger children and produces more of a cartoon affect. Is the new show just bad? Will kids simply watch anything? Obviously, something else is happening here.

Teen Titans Go! provides the perfect intersection between the nostalgia market and changing opinions of the cartoon. On the one hand, its lack of popularity amongst older

83Charlieridgely. "'Teen Titans Go!' Producer Says Original 'Teen Titans' Cartoon Might Come Back." Comicbook.com. April 01, 2018. Accessed June 11, 2018. http://comicbook.com/dc/2018/03/30/teen-titans-series-return-wondercon/

84 At this time, this is not yet confirmed. It is merely a speculation to prove a point. 90 fans cannot be attributed to its cartoon affect alone. On the other, it is the combination of this affect and the betrayal fans feel having loved and attached to the original that creates this response. TTG! itself does not even truly acknowledge itself as a “cartoon.” In the episode “Squash and Stretch” the Titans attempt to use cartoon violence to retrieve a bowl of nuts stolen from them by a squirrel. In doing so, they turn into “cartoons,” despite already performing large amounts of cartoon affect. “I thought society was okay with violence as long as it was funny,” the character Cyborg suggests. He proceeds to show his friends a cartoon that makes them laugh. When asked if violence in real life is funny, he punches his friend Robin in the face and sends him flying into the couch. With ruddied face, Robin is scanned. The result? Not funny. Despite being a cartoon, the cartoon affect wasn’t in place in that singular moment, and therefore the characters could justify not being called cartoons. To them, the “cartoon” resembles the classic model of violence that holds a predator vs prey power relation. While the episode is in direct dialogue with the displeased Teen Titans fanbase, what can be taken from this for our purposes are that the following assumptions about the cartoon are still alive and well. First, that the cartoon is equivalent to humor regardless of its context. Second, that violence is not violence if it is fantasy. Third, that the origins for violence in the cartoon are rooted in innocent and stupid shenanigans and not real social conditions.

I am not trying to suggest that cartoons are not made to be “silly” or “humorous”, clearly that is their intention most of the time. I instead want to point out again that the cartoon is not humor. It can create humor as much as it can create discomfort. Jay-Z’s “The

Story of OJ” is not humorous yet is undeniably a cartoon. Bodies are exaggerated. Bodies are stolen and turned into fetishized objects, enslaved, hung, black. What was once 91 humorous to a people of privilege would today make those same people turn their heads in shame. It is not humor that creates the cartoon, it is violence. It is a history of social violence that Sammond writes of. It is the continued violence on the body of children in media, children of all genders, orientations, and races. And above all, it is the lack of experience and trauma that comes with the denial of experience by a greater social power.

When the body is beaten but returns with no bruise. When the child is crying, but the ones who are meant to care for it turn their back. When violence is a part of our daily life, it is appealing to think violence is more aligned with conflict than with peace. We want nuance as adults, but perhaps as children we connect more viscerally to the experience of being unheard, controlled, and manipulated. Perhaps the “becoming-child” at war with adultification relates to the emotional understanding of violence as opposed to its physical and realistic manifestation, the thing that studies on the effects of media violence on children are missing.

I am weary of current children’s media that does not meet them where they are in order to please adult fans with adult ideas of nuance. I do not think it is bad, nor do I think one is superior to the other generally. However, with the influx of the internet and new creators listening to online critics, there is a sense that what is good is what is balanced.

Character development, plot, even philosophical meanderings are what please adult animation viewers. There is nothing wrong with that, and indeed the concept of “good” plagues our understanding of media due to our need to buy and consume it in capitalist terms. These value judgements created for the purposes of selling products based on supposed “quality” are the backbone of our current affective economies. Yet there is something about the cartoon that is childish in that it relates to the world the way a child 92 would. And to say something is “childish” is to automatically reduce its value because what is “for children” could not possibly be worthy of recognition unless it is through the paranoia of control or pleasure of nostalgia. In the study of childhood, however, the connection between a childlike understanding of the world, deterritorialization, the process of normalization and adultification along with the cartoon affect suggests that what children themselves care about as worthwhile has little to do with adult standards of quality.

The adultomorphic thought that assumes constant forward development plagues the media as much as any other aspect of life.

I will conclude with this. Society is not okay with violence “so long as it is funny.”

Society is okay with violence. And with that, the cartoon is a double-edged sword. It both normalizes violence and makes visible to violence of normalization. Tragedy and comedy are, after all, only one step away from one another. TTG! shows the impact the childhood market had on creating programs and platforms selling childhood and solidifies in public consciousness what Bill Hanna first said about the cartoon in television. Individual character development and crises of identity are beginning to replace the structural antagonisms between children and adults. “Be yourself” becomes more important than “be a kid”, but it is still all a negotiation of control and resistance. “There is no need to ask which is the toughest or most tolerable regime,” claims Deleuze in his “Postscript.” “For it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another.”85 The crisis of parental control facilitated by the invention of television forges on through the age of the internet. Panic surrounding what the child should consume, what is “good” and

“wholesome” entertainment, still exists. And just as with the CTA of 1990, because the

85Deleuze, Gilles. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7. 93 violence changes in form does not mean it disappears. To dismiss one “type,” comic or authentic, for another is to miss the forest for the trees. Yet the influence of the cartoon on children, its history, its childishness, is undeniable. Adult on child violence in media will end when adult on child violence in the world ends. Even if all representations of it are censored, it’s still there.

Just invisible.

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