VALUABLE LESSONS - Nicholls + Vickers

Valuable Lessons 36
It hasn’t caught on. But on the other hand, no one ever said “What the
hell does that mean?” either.
I reserve special contempt for the writers who adopt these phrases –
the trustees among the haftling in the Nazi lager.
PEOPLE WON’T KNOW THAT
As I type these words I’m involved in a series the target audience for which
is children about ten. On this series we’ve been told that kids won’t
understand:
The Mona Lisa (“Can we have an image that is more recognizable to
the audience? Remember, Irma ain’t the smart one.”)
A passing reference in a joke to folic acid. Or a kazoo. Or
Madagascar. Or Rasputin.
A joke reference to the flooding of the Yangtze River. (“No kid will
understand Taranee’s line about sandbagging the Yangtzee River. We want
her to be smart, but we can't have lines that totally go over kids’ heads.
Make it something they know, like the Mississippi.”)
On Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (which should be called Jimmy
Neutron: Boy Inventor) we had occasion to put a short mathematical
formula into a joke. The showrunner asked that the (brief, real) formula be
removed and replaced with “E = mc 2 ,” regardless of the fact that it isn’t a
math formula, it’s a physics formula. Children can’t be exposed to
something that a genius would know, because they might not have heard of
it.
On W.I.T.C.H. we had the smartest girl, Taranee, coaching a friend for
a Science test, explain the xylum and phloem inside a plant stem. The note:
“Please replace this with something kids will know.”
But if every kid knows it and it’s the best our character can do... isn’t
she by definition not so bright? Besides which, we pleaded, we were
explaining to kids what it was, right in the script.
“Please make the substitution.”
A friend, Andy Guerdat, who occasionally writes educational kids’
shows, says that even on those, any time he puts in anything – a quote, a
word, an image – that some children might not already know, he’s told to
remove it. And, note: this is anything that some children might not already
know. That’s a very broad mandate for dumbing-down a piece of writing.