You’re a better man than i sir. I use parental controls to specify time periods. They both get 2 hours a day, hard stop at 7pm and no screen time on Sundays.
Youtube Kids spammers rack up billions of views on disturbing, violent, seemingly algorithmic videos
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This is a gateway cartoon for bad drugs:
Both got recent viewings in my household; the kid seemed underwhelmed by Pee-Wee, but she liked the skeksis.
Meanwhile, Beetlejuice is old hat for us; she lives for the dinner party scene.
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Or a rich imagination!
A local theater showed Dark Crystal in 70mm recently; I’d say about half the audience were families who said they’d never seen it before. The kids clearly loved the Skeksis and it was wonderful hearing them gasp when things like the Emperor crumbling to dust occurred.
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That’s my favorite scene too. Large Marge didn’t scare her either, but we sort of over hyped the scariness.
I loved the Dark Crystal as a kid, but like the torture scene where the machine sucks the life out of the Poglings or what ever they were called, freaked me out.
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I never know what to expect when I show Girlizmatic old movies that I like.
For instance, we watched the Lost Boys a few weeks ago, and she was utterly unimpressed.
When I finally convinced her to give vampire flicks another chance with the Fright Night remake, she loved it. (Not that I blame her; I consider it to be one of the few horror remakes that’s actually better than the original.)
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Fun fact about the Dark Crystal, which is an all time favorite of mine… the original idea was that only the two Gelflings (and Aughra) would speak English. The Skeksis would just screech a lot, and there were no subtitles. Some of the original footage is on the DVD. Test audiences were totally freaked out, understandably so. They dubbed in English to help them be slightly less terrifying and make the movie a tiny bit easier to understand.
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Yeah, I remember your theory was that they were catering to adults with very specific fetishes, which might also be the case.
Maybe some crazy foot-lover once compiled a playlist of clips from TV shows where characters showed their feet, and because that would happen more often on kids’ shows, some content recommendation algorithm tracking those views decided that foot fetishes were inherent to children’s entertainment, then it generated the keyword list that ended up being used by these content farms to come up with “ideas”?
Gasp! For shame!
Though that is my kid’s attitude with Star Wars. Despite this I am still pretty sure she is mine.
The guy who plays Steven on Steven Universe will be at the Comic Con in Feb and she is stoked for this.
I remember freaking out some in the beginning when they took off all the stuff off the loser Skeksis and their voices. Really do need to rewatch it.
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Oh and fun fact - if you haven’t heard - the opening to Crystal Method’s classic Trip Like I Do has samples from The Dark Crystal.
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Sort of? I mean, I get that there’s foot-fetish people and stinky-foot-fetish people, but I can’t imagine that there’s enough people specifically into Marvel/Disney characters having stinky feet to watch hundreds of videos hundreds of thousands of times. It seems more like they’re video spam, putting a half dozen popular characters into videos for clicks/hits/views and then randomly having someone have stinky feet to make kids go EWWW!! or something. It’s a bizarre phenomenon.
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I had a similar epiphany about 10 years ago when I realized that my OK cupid account was, in a way, flirting on my behalf to other targeted accounts. It made me feel like John Henry VS the steam hammer for a little while, being prompted by a machine - to court strangers at a faster, more aggressive pace than was my inclination. And this is for a supposedly recreational goal!
I don’t thing the real problem is with the internet as such, I think mass production has run out of things for us to mass consume, so the system is coming up with weirder and weirder things in search of new markets.
It’s not in their financial best interest to consider that there might be a limit to what people can mass consume
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I was in a mall food court for a half hour or so last week and a small child, no more than 2, screamed continually until it was allowed to have its mother’s phone. Nothing else would mollify it. That’s the future, right there.
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The future is bad parenting
There are alternatives, thankfully. For example, the company I work for has developed an app in direct response to this issue. Its called kiddZtube - everything on the app is hand-picked by teachers, with learning quizzes augmented to each video, so its completely safe, educational, and fun. Take a look at http://www.kiddztube.com
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To be honest, so was the past.
Technology might change but there will still be good parents and bad ones.
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Yeah. I seem to remember sending a lot of time on the original somethingawful.com as a kid and coming out okay.
Your kid is made of steel! Large Marge STILL scares me!
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Well yeah, there have always been bad parents but there haven’t always been shitty youtube videos. That implies that we’d have a greater chance of success fixing the videos than the parents.
