Much Love Monday

For today's Much Love Monday, my thoughts are connected to Aspen's MLM post from last week, about Disneyland. The same day as her post, I'd read Ray Bradbury's defense of Disneyland for the disenchanted intellectual. His point was that rather than being the manufacture of ersatz, Disneyland "causes you to care all over again. You feel it is that first day in the spring of that special year when you discovered you were really alive. You return to those morns in childhood when you woke and lay in bed and thought, eyes shut, 'Yes, sir, the guys will be here any sec. A pebble will tap the window, a dirt clod will horse-thump the roof, a yell will shake the treehouse slats.'"
A few years ago, one of my colleagues whispered to me that she enjoyed watching Disney Channel's Suite Life On Deck, and that the breezy ignorance of one of the characters was a source of constant amusement for her. My colleague is a very serious person -  and suddenly, she was mimicking a carefree child millionaire, batting her eyes, asking: watchya doin'? When I finally watched the show, I laughed, too.
How old is too old for fun that is not overwhelming? There was a time I was becoming a stuck up college student, until one of my friends showed me how to watch comedy: one is to note the facial expressions, the timing and the catch phrases that one can employ oneself, to release a tense moment.
There is a light type of comedy that allows one to relax knowing that the ending is going to be happy and that any difficulties lead to lessons, not existential quagmires. Humour softens that which goes awry: a mother-daughter argument over a stolen purse leads to a funny street performance of their angry take on a hackneyed a song, which later gives the mother the big idea to take their squabbles to Broadway. That's kind of funny!
I wonder if there is a stigma attached to writing children's programmes: possibly discounted for being more simplistic than adult ones. But it must be noted that abstract themes (love, character building, etc) are spelled out in very concrete terms in shows for young people, themes which shows for more mature audiences never have to come to terms with. More mature audiences do not necessarily live up to the themes of courage, sacrifice and patience that shows for younger viewers address, humorously.
If you work with people, then you know how hard it is to both get the job done and be fun about it. So, people who write good shows for a younger audience must be very smart, indeed.
Goofiness warns that not everything is to be taken seriously, and that one can have fun even when trouble strikes. I think more respect is due to the genre that such Disney shows are a part of. "Disneyland ...has proven again that the first function of architecture is to make men wish to go on living, feed them fresh oxygen, grow them tall, delight their eyes, make them kind," writes Bradbury.

Elements: brushes: Animus.