Last night, I was rewatching Zenimation again. The kids came into the room and started commenting when they recognized the movies, which once again reminded me that I need to spend their summer vacation catching them up on the Disney catalog. But it still just about killed me when my eight-year-old referred to The Princess and the Frog as an old movie. Yes, all right, it’s about four years older than he is. However, as I pointed out to him, there are movies appearing in clips on that show that are older than his grandmother, and she and I both had our children relatively late. I don’t think he thinks of books that way, because I don’t think he thinks of books as having an age at all. But movies? Movies can be ancient.
It’s a curious disconnect for him. I wonder if it’s because movies have release dates and trailers, and books just appear in the stores. And since we’re if anything more likely to buy books used—he and his sister always get books on thrift store outings, for example—the only way they seem old is when they’re about stuff that he doesn’t connect with. The children in the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books don’t have electronics, but they’re still kids and still understandable. It’s when there’s literally no electricity at all that he realizes how long ago the book is set, I think.
Movies, though, can be very strongly of a specific time. It’s not always true; there’s really very little about The Princess and the Frog that specifically calls out 2009. It’s set in the 1920s using an animation technique that dominated the screen for decades. With his knowledge of animation, he probably can’t tell the difference between its style and that of The Little Mermaid or Cinderella, and I’m not sure he sees the distinct differences between it and Frozen. I, an adult, see the difference between hand-drawn and computer animation. He’s a child, and I haven’t taught him that yet. So I’m not sure he does.
On the other hand, we do watch plenty of live-action stuff that’s older than his grandmother around him. (The kids only have one living grandmother, but of course it’s also worth noting that, coincidentally, my mom and their dad’s mom were literally only a few days apart in age!) I don’t know that he’s the only eight-year-old who can recognize Cary Grant, but he’s certainly seen more Hitchcock than I suspect is true of most of his classmates. Every time I see snobbish memes on Facebook about how Kids Today Don’t Recognize Rotary Dial Phones, I think about how my kids have seen the old candlestick phones’ being used in movies.
Yes, it’s also true that I’m older than most of his friends’ moms, and there are certain aspects of that which the kids are just stuck with. My kids know about burning CDs, for example, even if I’m the one who actually does the work. When he’s old enough to watch My So-Called Life, there won’t be much that he doesn’t get, and not just because a lot of that show isn’t specific to its era. He’ll still understand the VCR in one episode, although ours hasn’t worked since he decided as a toddler that it was hungry and needed a peanut butter sandwich.
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