I recently picked up Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for the first time. Finding the plot rather amusing, I began relaying it to my father over the weekend. Because he had never read the book, I was rather surprised when he began asking informed questions about the story. In no time at all, he was the one schooling me on plot elements I had not yet reached.
“Wait a minute,” I asked. “Are you sure you’ve never read this book?”
“No, never have,” he replied, “but I saw a cartoon
version of the story when I was younger and everything I know comes
from that.”
His revelation was intriguing, and to be honest,
not the first of its kind. Like many in the Boomer generation, my father
grew up watching classic cartoons, numbers of which were produced by
the likes of Warner Bros.
But those cartoons did more than mind-numbingly
entertain a generation of children. They also introduced millions of
young people to key facets of cultural literacy, particularly in the
realm of literature and music.
Beyond the aforementioned case of Mark Twain’s
novel, these cartoons introduced children to stories such as Robert
Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde through the medium of Bugs Bunny. Key quotations and scenes from William Shakespeare’s works were the main theme in a Goofy Gophers cartoon known as A Ham in a Role. And Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha was placed front and center in a Walt Disney short called Little Hiawatha.
Perhaps even more famous than the literature
references are the many ways in which cartoons introduced children to
the world of classical music, including both instrumental and operatic
selections, one of which is the famous Rabbit of Saville. American film critic Leonard Maltin describes the situation well:
“An enormous amount of my musical education came at the hands of [Warner Bros. composer] Carl Stalling, only I didn’t realize it, I wasn’t aware, it just seeped into my brain all those years I was watching Warner’s cartoons day after day after day. I learned Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody because of the Warner Bros. cartoons, they used it so often, famously when Friz Freleng had a skyscraper built to it in Rhapsody and Rivets.”
But Maltin wasn’t the only one learning from these classical music forays. In fact, as the famous pianist Lang Lang testifies, it was Tom and Jerry’s rendition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in The Cat Concerto which first inspired him to start piano at age two.
These
examples just brush the surface of the cultural literacy lessons which
the old cartoons taught our parents and grandparents. Even if they never
learned these elements in school, they at least had some frame of
reference upon which they could build their understanding of the books
and music and even ideas which have impacted culture and the world we
live in today.
But can the same be said of the current
generation? Admittedly, I’m not very well-versed in current cartoon
offerings, but a quick search of popular titles seems to suggest that
the answer is no. A majority of the time they seem to offer fluff,
fantasy, and a focus on the here and now.
In short, neither schools,
nor Saturday morning cartoons seem to be passing on the torch of
cultural knowledge and literacy. Could such a scenario be one reason why
we see an increased apathy and lack of substance in the current generation?
How Classic Cartoons Created a Culturally Literate Generation | Intellectual Takeout
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