Essai Critiques / Review Essays Out of the Garden and Into the Mall

312 ESSAIS CRITIQUES / REVIEW ESSAYS
licensed characters (tied further to the global and multiple cross-marketing
networks through the food, clothing, toy, and fast-food industries), has all but
eliminated from the small screen real children with real-life problems living in
real communities. In Kline’s words: “Live drama has been all but banished from
children’s television. Whereas drama once provided paths to the understanding
of personal experience, fiction now only digs deeper channels to fantasy” (p.
314).
In the concluding chapter, Kline makes several important points particularly
relevant for teacher educators and educational theorists. At the outset, Kline
reminds us that we need to acknowledge that TV serves many different functions
for children’s different social and maturational needs. Children’s TV programs
and their spin-off merchandise have not displaced play or peer-group interaction,
or eliminated children’s imagination and creativity. What TV and the toy industry
have done, however, is to position TV as the entry point for children’s experience,
and that entry point — that window into childhood — “promotes particular
patterns of social understanding, attitudes and self-expression” (p. 317). And the
only representational form in which TV represents the social world to children
is through the dramatic narrative or fantasy fiction. In other words, because
merchandise marketing is the root logic underlying the development of children’s
programs, the dramatic narrative and fantasy formula has been the most successful
conduit in connecting the child audience and consumer market via TV to
the marketplace. Other genres such as the documentary, news, magazine-format
current affairs, educational programs, or even children’s soaps (such as Lassie
or the Lone Ranger) cannot provide the kind of narrative terrain required to
translate story-line into a vast array of consumer goods. As Kline reminds us, we
have few insights into the long-term consequences of TV’s promotion of fiction
and fantasy as a mode of consciousness influencing children’s experiences and
expressions.
In response to decades of criticism of TV violence, the frequency of
aggressive and violent acts has indeed been reduced on children’s TV. In their
place, however, has been an accentuation of narratives based on militaristic and
combative story-lines. Because these scenarios take place primarily in the
fantasylands of hyperspace or mythic swamps and forests, the violence and
aggression which structure the characters and social relations are considered
mythic, fantasy, fictional, and hence not “real-life.” But how children interpret,
internalize, and apply TV’s imaginary worlds to their own social relations is
something that teachers and parents tend to be quite clear about. Children do
replicate the terminology, values, and actions of their TV heroes in their play at
home, in the street, and in the schoolyard. TV-inspired discourses dominate
children’s talk, play, games, and litany of wants and aspirations. In one of
Kline’s studies, for instance, he found that children’s play dialogues and dramatic
imaginings were “thin and repetitious . . . rarely used comic or ironic narrative,