My son and my wife were watching some NCAA tournament play yesterday but he got bored and went upstairs. No sooner had he left the room than three commercials came on: one for the performance enhancing medication that features a 4 hour erection as a side-effect, and one for an obviously family-oriented film called Hellboy (the trailer is playing over at Apple.com’s Quicktime repository).
* do I want to explain an erection, let alone one lasting 4 hours, to a seven year old? Maybe all the other seven year old boys are getting wood, but I’m OK with him remaining ignorant of that for a little longer.
* what does that say about the folks who watch NCAA hoops? Maybe they need to get off the couch a little more often?
* and I guess I’m just an over-protective parent but is cartoon ultraviolence really family fare? Ya know, sometimes kids can’t always tell the difference between fantasy and reality: while that can be a good thing (Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy strike me as benign aspects of that), crass money-making ventures are not.
<update> Actually, this is a good argument for a PVR to skip commercials entirely. If the broadcasters and their toothless masters, the FCC, won’t take a little responsibility, we can hit them where it hurts: in the pocket.