Rusty Saber: Children don't question their heroes

As a grandfather, I often shake my head in wonderment at the movies and TV programs today's youngsters watch: cartoon characters with superhuman powers involved in impossible-to-believe exploits, and other shows that are in no way believable. In case you have had the opportunity to watch children's movies or TV, you may have uttered this ominous phrase: "Why, in my day, kids didn't watch silly junk like this." Really? What did kids watch in your day? It's not like cartoons are realistic when they are about a mouse, rabbit, duck, coyote, roadrunner, and the like, speaking and behaving like humans. Are they?

Anyone old enough to remember possibly the greatest kid bargain the world has ever known Saturday afternoon movie double features knows all about hard-to-swallow plots.

Since the early days of movies, Tarzan has entertained children. The original Tarzan book by Edgar Rice Burroughs wasn't a kids' book, but he has thrilled millions of them. The latest Tarzan epic is a Disney animated movie.

The Tarzan I grew up with on Saturday afternoons starred Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismueller in a seemingly endless series of Tarzan movies. Like today's kids, we never questioned the plots.

There was Tarzan and Jane, two attractive white people smack dab in the middle of Africa, living in a tree house. Although the book explains how they happened to be there, the movies never did, nor did they suggest why Tarzan and Jane hadn't gone back to their homes in England.

In that day and age, we never gave a second thought to their unmarried status. To us, Tarzan and Jane were like Ozzie and Harriet, an all-American couple, who wore skimpy costumes and lived in a tree house.

To sustain the family flavor of the series, a young boy was added to the cast. Tarzan named him Boy.

To my knowledge, none of my cohorts ever gave a second thought about where Boy came from. It certainly didn't occur to us that perhaps Tarzan and Jane had lived in that tree house long enough for Boy to have, well, you know, resulted.

Kids were content to watch Tarzan control wild animals, outwit and outfight villains and be a suitable tree-house mate to Jane and Boy. I wonder if today's kids accepted Disney's Tarzan story line with no questions?

The irrefutable staple of the kiddie double feature was the cowboy movie. The studios cranked them out the way Hershey cranks out candy bars. So similar were the plots that five minutes into any western, every kid in the theater knew exactly how the movie would end. This week's movie was just like last week's, only with a different hero. The villains were probably the same actors who were the villains last week's film. No one cared.

Actually, kids then had to be as gullible, maybe more so, than today's kids are. The heroes and there were a lot of actors playing cowboy heroes never seemed to have jobs, yet they rode better looking horses and wore better clothes than the bad guys, who were gainfully employed as outlaws.

How the heroes supported themselves is a question that never crossed our minds. For some unexplainable reason, handsome young cowboy heroes rode the range fighting crime alongside older, comical, half-witted characters; they were sidekicks. We just assumed that cowboys had to have sidekicks.

Since their introduction as super heroes, no kid that I know of asked why Lois Lane never recognized Clark Kent without glasses as Superman, nor that no one recognized the Lone Ranger, whose mask didn't hide much more of his face than glasses. Alas Superman, Clark Kent sans glasses, would fly to the rescue of Lois in every episode; she never recognized his face or voice. We recognized him, but we didn't care.

No questions asked; Superman could fly. The townspeople never stopped asking, "Who was that masked man?" Kids knew who he was, but we never told.

If today's kids don't question their heroes, maybe they inherited the trait from us.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)