Rather than say some of the things that I am sure will be said in abundance about Henry Kissinger’s death and about Elon Musk’s frankly hilarious variant conception of Stalinist-capitalism where failing to advertise on X is treason, I’m going to go to a less travelled road, and that’s to talk about the death of Marty Krofft—a subject that ties to actual expertise I have, since I’m the co-author of a book about Saturday morning children’s television.
Oh, it’s not as if there haven’t been a lot of other memorial commentaries since the news of Krofft’s death spread at the beginning of this week. The television shows created by Krofft and his brother Sid (who is still alive, 94 years old) are not only firmly etched into the memories of Gen-Xers, but have become a kind of layered pop-culture joke in the years since they first aired.
Most commonly, there’s been a common assumption that the mood of the shows and the designs of sets and characters were either the product of consuming psychedelics or a knowing reference to psychedelic-infused counterculture. Here I can only say that my co-author and I had the same experience in speaking with the Kroffts that journalists have had over the years: the Krofft brothers not only denied that this was the case but were actively offended by the suggestion.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that reaction better, because I’ve gotten a clearer picture of the cultural moment that opened the door to the Kroffts’ work on television—The Bugaloos, H.R. Pufnstuf, Lidsville, Land of the Lost, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, Far-Out Space Nuts, The Lost Saucer, Electra-Woman and Dynagirl, as well as some later efforts to slip away from giant costumes and even from kidvid entirely. (There’s also the show they did in 1973 at the Hollywood Bowl, which Variety generously summarizes as “haphazardly produced”.)
The early history of American television is hard to interpret without a knowledge of the theatrical and radio-broadcast history of the first half of the 20th Century (not cinema, which isn’t nearly as important as an influence on television until later). In particular, the strong links to vaudeville and associated performances was crucial.
Similarly, you can’t really understand children’s television from the 1960s onward without grasping the entire political economy of broadcast television as the last Boomers were born and the earliest Boomers were teenagers at the edge of being college-age. Television that children watched in the 1950s was fundamentally different from children’s television from the early 1960s to the early 1990s.
That’s where my shift in perspective comes in. I ended up co-writing a kind of history and commentary on Saturday morning kidvid as an accident. I helped my brother write a kind of humorously fake-pompous scholarly analysis of some Saturday morning cartoons while he was working for a magazine called Film Threat. He got an invitation to spin that up into a full book and invited me to be part of it. It was an uneven work—I guess I would cop to we brothers having a sibling spirit with the Kroffts in the sense of creating something that was “haphazardly produced”—but it ended up being more important to my own understanding of cultural history and cultural critique as a whole than I expected going in.
The last chapter of the book spoke to more of my voice and sensibility, where I found myself really trying to think about what children’s television in the era of my own childhood was all about while also repudiating its many critics. A colleague of mine at the time said with some surprise that the project seemed to be pushing me into a sort of cultural libertarianism, and that comment struck me as being well-observed. Something of that push has survived in me over the years even as I’ve drifted from the strongest adherence to that perspective.
That libertarian turn, if that’s the best label for it, was not about free-speech maximalism, or a dogmatic opposition to “political correctness”. I developed an antipathy in writing the chapter to four forces acting on the development of kidvid: network bureaucracies (particularly Standards & Practices), parental advocacy groups, federal broadcasting officials, and scholars who worked on the effects of media on children.
I ended up developing my own version of an observation that I associated with the scholar Lauren Berlant, who had noted that whenever American society talked about the need to censor, control or constrain culture, the tendency in public culture was to envision the potential victim of culture as an imaginary 12-year old girl—always in a kind of hypothetical, abstracted way. Because what subjectivity is least likely to be an actual speaking subject in public culture than that one?
What I saw was that this quartet of institutional actors—the network middle-managers, the parental advocates, government officials and the media-effects scholars—were working from a similar construct. Children were an audience you could speak about without fear of them speaking back (in a pre-social media age). You could envision the child as a subject needing extensive protection from culture (and thus extensive controls over it) and use children as a way to launder your own fears and antipathies towards television or popular culture or a changing society in a safe way that didn’t trace back to you. You could imagine a regime of prior constraint on cultural production without being called out for censoriousness—because think of the children. You could be a snob who believed that media for people less educated than you would always be a bad thing unless it was sanitized, prosocial, and grossly simplified and not have to actually be snobbish in saying it because you were talking about the children rather than the working-class or Blacks or all the other groups that it turned out that quartet were actually thinking about. Children were a great proxy for projects of control and hierarchy then, and unfortunately remain so now.
Where that was most visible to me was in the collaborative making of a durable discourse about the effects of representing “violence” in televised media on child audiences. The more I read of that discourse as it came together between those groups, the more dismayed I was by it. Parental groups had an arbitrary understanding of “violence” that was as easily perturbed as the sleeping princess could be by a pea twenty mattresses down. Network managers could use “violence” as a way to send infinite production notes to the makers of children’s television demanding arbitrary changes on the grounds of eliminating violence or creating a more prosocial content. (As I noted back then, it got to the point that the only acceptable prosocial message was ‘always cooperate’.) Government officials could use the agitation of the parental groups to push for more constraints on kidvid and to align themselves with other nodes of regulatory concern about the coarsening effects of television and popular culture. (Even into the Reagan Administration, where the concerns shifted somewhat towards content perceived as sexualized.)
My real irritation ended up centering on scholars, however, perhaps because I could see how thin the research was underlying their arguments about media effects. One scholar argued (favoring a claim made by some parents’ groups and by Fred Rogers) that college unrest in the 1960s and 1970s was a result of “violence on television aimed at children” when that made no sense—the protesters grew up watching the putatively less violent television of the 1950s and early 1960s. Others didn’t seem to recognize that their claims meant they were making a prediction that violent crime should be rising steadily from the 1980s onward because the content of culture available to children was becoming more violent, a prediction that was already failing by the late 1980s. When I called one scholar in the field to talk about this point, they immediately modified the claim to say that those effects would only impact children in lower-income, lower-education households. When I suggested that this made the emphasis on media effects puzzling, because it really meant they were expressing a concern about structural poverty and inequality, the scholar replied that there was a chance of affecting the content of media and no chance of challenging inequality, so you stick with what you can change.
The skepticism that this research produced in me is what I’ve stuck with, or what has stuck in me. What’s changed—and here I’ll get back around to Marty Krofft, at last—is the argument that my brother Kevin and I ended up making about Saturday morning television itself. While I ended up being sure that the quartet of groups trying to control kidvid were operating from bad premises and questionable intentions, I found myself needing to think about my own view of children as an audience. What I settled on was that children had a kind of critical intelligence rooted in their own experiences, that they were a knowing audience capable of engaging in coherent and creative interpretations on their own.
I still think that as strongly as I ever did, but the corollary was, “Worrying about the quality of Saturday morning television was a shibboleth; even bad TV is good for kids”. Part of that was based on our interviews with contemporaries, both online and offline, where we saw plenty of evidence for the creative, imaginative reinterpretation of what people had watched as kids. (That’s where the “The Kroffts must have eaten magic mushrooms” trope came from.) Culture has a kind of thermodynamic law to it: meaning is never destroyed or destroying, always preserved and reworked. Bad culture can be remade, will be remade. Allowing that Saturday morning TV was an aesthetic problem just let the quartet of control-freak institutions back in the driver’s seat, armed with a different kind of discursive formation.
That prospect would be especially noxious considering that if there was a problem with quality, the quartet was partially responsible for it. The nadir of Saturday morning in quality terms was the early 1980s, when all four of those groups were at the height of their powers over children’s television. If quality was a problem, they were assuredly not the solution.
The solution was letting really talented people in the door to make good culture that was open to children but not necessarily limited to them. That started to happen in the late 1980s and 1990s at last. The Little Mermaid (1989), among other works, opened the door to the culture industry understanding that children and parents could enjoy culture together, that kidvid didn’t have to be off in an exclusionary zone. That’s where the political economy of TV in the 1960s and 1970s played a baneful role. The after-school afternoons and Saturday mornings had been dead times with no advertising revenue coming in before then. But kids could watch—and be advertised to—in those hours. That implied a whole sociology of the family and household—kids who were kept kidlike and away from adults, kids who could beg for commodities purchased for them—so it’s not as easy as TV just making an audience. But TV execs had no reason to make children’s television any good, no reason to spend money on it, until kids and adults might be watching together, and then later, might spend money on the cultural product itself, on videotapes or cable TV channels. Maybe Saturday morning is what made the next generation of adults open to a continuing relationship to ‘children’s culture’; maybe this was part of the end of “free-range” or “latchkey” childhoods.
The change that came in from the 1990s onward, the sudden efflorescence of really good culture for children, meant that our argument that “bad culture could be good for kids” was exposed for what it was, a desperately compensatory attempt to make the best out of a bad situation. So here’s the revision: sorry to speak ill of the dead, but the Kroffts’ work on television was bad. Yes, sure, we all found ways to make our memories of it seem warm and funny and Gen-X ironic, but in no universe should that all have been on TV. The Kroffts and the other producers of content for Saturday morning at its height (Hanna-Barbera, Filmation) were the beneficiaries of a social formation that separated kids and parents, a vision of audiences that deemed children to be simultaneously undemanding and mute and therefore a pliable dumping ground for any old garbage, for an economic logic of mass culture that needed to maximize advertising revenue while minimizing expense on the production of content.
The Kroffts stepped into that space because they were prepared to provide within those constraints, and what they provided was just fucking terrible. Also, as Variety notes, they did not step into that space because they were “fifth-generation puppeteers” whose skills at entertaining children were an ancestral legacy—the “fifth-generation” claim was just made up, a correction which still doesn’t seem to have seeped into wider knowledge. Even their 1950s puppet work wasn’t for kids. Saturday morning was a bargain-basement opportunity and it was taken up by bargain-basement culture-makers. Among them the Kroffts. You can admire the hustle but not the outcome.
Sometimes someone talented snuck in the side and got work on a Krofft show to produce something slightly better—that famously was the source of some of the interesting elements of Land of the Lost developed by well-known SF writers who wrote scripts, though buried underneath the Grade-Z acting and the kind of special effects that made a Dr. Who alien wrapped in aluminum foil seem like a miracle by comparison. Sometimes later folks drew inspiration from the aesthetic vibe of the Kroffts—Pee-Wee’s Playhouse definitely was riffing off the Kroffts as well as a lot of UHF-local kid’s shows. Sometimes what the Kroffts did aesthetically was at least interesting enough to be potentially ripped off by an advertiser, leading to a significant legal case.
It’s not really the Kroffts’ fault per se that kidvid was as woeful as it was in the golden age of Saturday morning, and the aesthetic quality of it didn’t do any harm. It was just a lost opportunity, in the end. Later kids have had the same imagination and native creativity as cultural consumers that we did, but they got to work with much better material. First Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Batman: The Animated Series and then the floodgate of the early 2000s, where so many new styles and modes of programming open to but not exclusive to children poured out.
That’s what I really think about as I think about Marty Krofft. The 1990s were an era where a lot of things that were taken as immutable facts about the world changed suddenly, to the surprise of everyone. Nelson Mandela came out of jail and South Africa transitioned to majority rule. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. And the proposition that children’s television either had to be controlled by a group of censorious adults who had contempt for children or had to be a bargain-basement load of crap made on the cheap fell into a thousand tiny pieces.
It makes me wonder a bit what geopolitical or cultural-aesthetic propositions that we take to be immutable are just one good year away from breaking into a thousand pieces. It’s not worth being bitter about Saturday morning television, but neither is it a good idea to nostalgically gloss over its real, rather than imagined, weaknesses.
An extraordinary commentary. Thanks, Tim.
Great analysis.