Movie Reviews from
By John Ruch
© 1996 CM Media, Inc.
Of Cartoons, Kraft and “Family-Oriented”
Films (column, 1996)
Well, you gotta give the cineplex credit for trying this time.
General Cinema, literally the most generic name in movies, and the cable TV Cartoon Network have teamed up to create something called “MaTOONays.” Held one Saturday morning each month, the event consists of a “feature-length family-oriented film” preceded by 20 minutes of Cartoon Network ’toons. A press release says this throwback to multi-movie and cartoon matinees of yore kicks off locally Jan. 11 at GC Northland with a showing of “Babe.”
Sounds pretty good, eh? That “family-oriented” bit, though—that’s always a warning sign. Largely because of Disney, it’s become acceptable entertainment-marketing practice to idolize “the family” while cynically exploiting the kids who define that hallowed group. If you don’t take the kids to see unimaginative junk like “101 Dalmatians,” you’re almost a bad parent, somehow breaking a consumer-era custom as important as Christmas.
If you think about it, it’s a natural commercial outgrowth of the long-standing legal abuse of “the family”: Protecting the children was the excuse for yesterday’s anti-miscegenation laws and today’s drug-war fascism and TV/music/radio/movie/library censorship. Who wouldn’t do anything, beat down anybody, buy anything, to protect their kids and make them happy?
So it’s no surprise that the “MaTOONays” schedule declines rapidly from its auspicious debut into recycled crapola like “Richie Rich” and “All Dogs Go to Heaven 2.” Or that the Cartoon Network PR guy defines it all in that creepy car-commercial cant: “an affordable family movie option.” (Brief economics lesson: The most affordable option is not going at all.) But the kids are guaranteed to like it: It’s been test-marketed.
Now enter Kraft Foods. “Kraft will have the opportunity to screen :30 (that means 30-second) promotional spots prior to the MaTOONays film.” Kraft, we’re told, has a specific Kraft Kids branch that annually sells $3.5 billion worth of nutritional standards like Kool-Aid, Jell-O, Oscar Meyer hot dogs, Tang and Fruity Pebbles. And to think people are losing sleep over Joe Camel.
Well,
showing cartoons is at least a little better than other plex kids’ series,
which just show the recycled crapola. Hopefully, Kraft didn’t insist that they
show only “the cheesiest.” As for me, I’ll be content to dazzle my grandkids
with the fact that the first thing anybody tried to sell me was a gorilla mask
in the back of a comic book—at the ripe old age of 6.