living in a time like now, when it seems like the “intended age range” of any fiction is determined primarily by the age of its protagonists… it’s strange to watch and read older media from times when that wasn’t the case.
Yes, Star Trek TOS was marketed largely at children. Yes so was Tron (1982). Yes, freakin’ Amelia Bedelia was a grown woman with a job.
Kids’ media used to be defined by subject matter, not who it was about. Protagonists used to be allowed to not be obviously similar in any way to the audience expected to enjoy them.
I’m watching Automan now, and from the viewpoint of the present day it feels at once “so fundamentally silly that it can’t possibly have been intended for audiences more mature than 9,” but also “so full of Adult Situations that it can’t possibly be intended for anyone below the upper teens.”
Really was a hell of a different time.
maybe another interpretation of this is how overprotective, puritanical, and kinda fascist-leaning we’ve gotten around children’s media. like they need to be protected from even watching fictional adult situations.
i write, assuming your capitalisation of Adult Situations doesn’t imply that this 80s disney superhero show just becomes full on pornography halfway through or something.
no yeah, it’s just the general assortment of situations you encounter in a cop show from the 80s. some gun violence, various crime, some people having affairs and other not-explicitly-portrayed sex things. Plus a comic-relief character that’s a serial sexual-harasser and this is supposed to be funny.
(which it kinda is, but in a horrible way. mostly funny because the character is a small levitating geometric shape about the size of a tennis ball and there is no sane reason it would want to perv on human women. Also because it is Automan’s knockoff version of the Bit, a similar character in the Tron franchise, who would never.)
but yeah. you’ve got it exactly. all of this used to be within the scope of stuff kids could see. (maybe a little outside kids’ usual expected interests, even at the time… but the silliness of the computer-superhero plotline was enough to bring it pretty much within the range of kid-targeted media.)