YouTube Kids is massively popular and also the actual worst content the world has to offer. The most successful content, racking up hundreds of millions of views, is extremely vapid and just consists of sounds and colours punctuated by disguised adverts for expensive toys. No narrative, no speech, nothing educational. Kids are so malleable and early development is so important, yet a sizeable chunk are watching people in knock-off Spider-Man costumes unwrap toys and chase around knock-off Elsas all day. I won’t even get into the unsettling uncanny valley side of things and the creepy procedurally generated animation on there.
I’m genuinely concerned about kids being brought up on what is essentially mental junk food through their most formative years. I’m not saying they all need to be listening to violin concertos all day, but I feel that when I was a kid straight up garbage like this didn’t even exist and every kids show had at least something you could learn from it, like Sesame Street, or was decently produced entertainment, like Pokemon. This has a quarter of a billion views and it’s just... nothing.
Barney was the hottest kid show when I was super young. It's a dude in a mascot costume doing a bunch of nonsense on a single set. It was drek. Those cheap Disney Channel shows of the mid to late 2000s were super popular and absolute trash pablum. Pokemon was a commercial for the games, cards, toys and other merch through and through. Each episode is Ash meeting some new Pokemon that is available to buy in some way or another. Digimon was good slop however.
Going further back to the era of Hannah Barbara and FUNimation and the quality was lower. Kids have always had dump trucks of swill tossed on em.
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