There are many forms of entertainment in media; this can range from literature, television programs, video games, animation, comics, etc. With these innumerable types of media, each one has a targeted demographic or age group in laymen’s terms. We have these groups mostly due to society’s need to protect the impressionable younger generation from the harsh realities of the real world full of cursing, violence, and everything else the older generation wants to protect the youth from. Society then creates programs with age ratings to divide citizens into groups so one group will be slowly introduced to a different world when they get older instead of a child watching Scarface or the Saw series. Occasionally, there comes a time when the people who work creating the media will try to sneak questionable content into the media or as people tend to call it, “getting crap past the censors.”
To begin this blog, let’s start at shows aimed towards children. In most kid’s shows, censors are the least lenient to questionable content put in by the creators. This is mostly due to the fact that one cannot tell a child about death or refer to it in any way, as well as any other harsh aspect of life. As I have said before, sometimes the creators try to “get crap past the censors”, one animated show which did this the most was Animaniacs, the show itself was very clean, but occasionally snuck something past the censors. To a child seeing the objectionable content, they probably wouldn’t understand the joke; when an adult sees the same content, they would understand the joke and find it humorous. When the kids get older they learn more about the world, and learn some pretty colourful language at the same time. This then leads to the next demographic.
In various media targeted to teens, there is more leeway in what is shown by the creator even though the censor is still somewhat hot on their heels. This kind of media has been undergoing the most flak due to the various groups claiming that the media is making teenagers bad people. It is somewhat understandable due to the amount of former questionable content to children becoming standard in teen media. Another reason for this flak is the association of violent people to violent games, ignorantly dubbing them, “murder simulators”. This is inaccurate because there are numerous types of games in which the game gives the player a choice to what to do while playing ranging from morally good, morally ambiguous, and morally bad choices. From teenagers, they slowly become adults in the very short amount of time they have lived.
As adults, they must focus on tasks which will help them live healthy lives and thus, lose most of their time they have for entertainment. From this, shows targeted to adults appear to give the viewer a good laugh, some decent drama, or anything else the audience desires such as fan service. Even though it may seem out of the woods, the censors still have control over what is broadcast to homes. Most of the time, the censors censor content which may be extremely offensive to some such as jokes about 9/11.
In conclusion, every type of demographic in society has different standards to what is shown in the shows targeted to them. The question is how to clearly define what is alright to show to an audience. People will always scapegoat media for the wrongs of society instead of looking for the actual source of the problem.
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