Saturday Morning Cartoons: 2007
Yesterday Alex said he really wanted a new Transformer, which surprised me a bit as I haven't mentioned them (even though I used to love them when I was a kid). There's obviously some underground network for 5 year olds of new toy news that I don't know about. Either that, or one of his friends had one... Anyways, we went to Toys R Us and got a couple of the small ones - they were mostly sold out, but we got a race-car and a truck.
You want to see a little kid light up? Fold a toy robot into a race car in front of their eyes for the first time. I couldn't have impressed him more if I had pulled it out of thin air.
So, as it's not like I'm going to let Alex go see the new movie, I was thinking "what a shame he hasn't seen the cartoon at all." Happily, a quick search on YouTube brought up the first few episodes of a 20 year old cartoon ready for viewing by the munchkin. Better yet? The Nintendo Wii has the Opera browser with Flash support, so he's sitting on the couch watching the cartoons, old-skool. Saturday morning watching Transformers, but all via 2007 technologies. That's kick-ass. I also found a few websites that have pictures and instructions to make Lego Transformers, so that should be fun for later.
Except for the fact that Megatron is a gun, the cartoons are pretty benign, so I'm pretty happy. (Yes, I'm a Liberal hippie type and Alex isn't allowed to play with guns. At all.) I was worried for a bit as I wasn't sure how bad the cartoon would be. I've watched Tom and Jerry with Alex with complete *shock* at how much unacceptable stuff is in them: smoking, guns, drinking, etc. There is a bunch of shooting and explosions and stuff in Transformers, but it's all unrealistic lasers and stuff, so I'm generally okay with it. There's zero way to keep all that sort of thing out of his life - anything beyond the youngest toddler shows and games have some sort of blasting.
Alex is so excited that Bumblebee is, in his words, a "Herbie car"! I don't know how to break it to him that the new models have changed him into a Chevy Camero. Doh!
:-)
-Russ