A successful educational show shifted commercial children’s TV away from violent content

Evidence

Children’s programming consisted mainly of Saturday morning violent cartoons in which “superheroes” beat up “supervillains.” Violent cartoons were replaced by “morally repellent pseudoscientific space fantasies” (Cantor, 1972). However, the success of Sesame Street changed commercial children’s programming. The industry opted for nonviolent content with some educational value for children, much to the relief of writers: “You get sick doing that crap. We had to do it for two years because that is what the network wanted. For a while, from every studio, all programs were the superhero variety. We were glad when this phase ended because it had created a penetrance of violence… . We are now using our brains coming up with ways of doing things that do not rely on smashing, hitting, and banging… . Now we are enjoying our work” (Cantor, 1972). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 825

Categorization

• CANDY: A fun, tweetable counterexample: Sesame Street, of all things, forced violent cartoons off the air.
• XREF: connects to: Educational TV succeeded by deliberately imitating commercial attention-grabbing techniques — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 575