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   Sweet Deals February 9, 2025 at

   Arthur ran for 25 seasons. I stopped paying attention after 10. Around that time, the show had become too boring to captivate my interest. The animation style changed from traditionally hand-drawn to digitally computer-animated and the writing quality had dropped dramatically. Because of this, ugly rumors I’d heard second-hand about the show jumping the shark or including inappropriate elements were not my concern. I’d prefer to remember the show as it was, and not how it became in the end.

   If you go back to very beginning, in the year 1996, the show had a lot of excellent stories worth remembering. While the kids were all relatively ordinary and none of them were super-geniuses or possessed super powers, they were all reasonably capable and independent. Back then, children were encouraged to use their imaginations, explore possibilities, think for themselves and find their own solutions. You didn’t have to be perfect and you didn’t have to get it right away, but you still had to put in the effort and try. High expectations were set, and while they weren’t always easy, they were usually attainable, and the kids often rose to the challenge. Whenever a kid was denied responsibility or given something that seemed too easy or too babyish, they would get bored and frustrated. And there was always the possibility that something might go wrong and a kid might mess up, fail or get in serious trouble. This was usually followed by an opportunity to come clean about the problem and develop another solution which might not have been the one they expected. Back then, kids wanted to dream big, grow up and prove themselves worthy, and the character interactions were both sincere and honest as kids and parents learned how to get along with each other.

   Today, when I stand in the same room while a new PBS show is running, I don’t see any of those qualities. In addition to cheap and ugly computer animation, in a modern cartoon, children who are supposed to be talented and extraordinary seem to require a great deal of hand-holding just to execute the simplest of tasks. They don’t seem to know how to think for themselves. If they don’t understand how to do something, they don’t know how to find out the answer without someone telling them what to do, or using a solution that sounds like it they were reading it off a government-approved curriculum sheet. There’s also not much tolerance for taking risks or failure; if things don’t go well, instead of accepting the responsibility to fix it or coming up with a new idea to make it better, they usually end up settling for not-so-great and celebrating at-least-we-tried. I consider this a huge insult to the intelligence and capabilities of children of all ages.

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