Television and Me

Tonight was a viewing night. We finished watching some cool Olympic events, Sasha went to bed and I launched Netflix. Three hours later, I'm posting a blog about it. Kind of odd to be making that kind of transition, when I should be sleeping, but I'll get there shortly. It's important to start with the last show I watched, an older anime called Fruits Basket. An imaginative show that in 20 minutes introduces the main character (a high school girl) and all the hardships she had endured to this point and how she meets a family that turns into zodiac animals when hugged. Yeah, it's strange, but I had read the manga and wanted to see how it was animated. And Fruits Basket is like nothing ever seen on American television. And I thought, "These are stories told in an awesome fashion that cannot be matched by what we produce here!" Especially since, prior to Fruits Basket, I watched the intro to an episode of Last Exile, another anime series that is a little older. But instead of high school girls, it's huge flying ships that battle and the couriers that fly messages and all sorts of crazy things. Amazing story that I had seen before, but I enjoyed the intro enough to watch it and get the taste. Again, nothing to match it in our part of the world. "If only we had stories like that!" I thought. Then I remembered what I had watched right after turning on Netflix. Not an animated show. Nothing that wasn't filmed here in the good 'ol North American continent. (I think they flim in Canada.) The SyFy show Warehouse 13. Season three just became available on Netflix, so I finally could view it. And it took a supreme act of willpower to have only watched two episodes. Warehouse 13 is a light modern science fiction show about items that gained supernatural powers due to the cultural significance of their owners. The first episode I watched started with Jimi Hendrix's guitar shooting out lightning and it went from there. I could have watched until the sun rose. This is not a kind of story I have seen in Japanese anime or manga. Very American and very cool. So as my mind went over this, the next question was how can I share this love of stories with the kids? I want them to get that same kind of thrill from a new story concept. To be able to appreciate all stories and enjoy telling them as well some day. Everything I watched tonight was too old for the kids. But all of those stories I saw and appreciated required knowledge of previous stories to make sense. And thus my plan is to keep going forward with what I do now. Read to them a lot. Bedtime involves books and that is something that Sasha and I will never change. Once those stories take root, be it the basic fairy tales, or the creatively silly Olivia books, Alya and Marcus will have the foundation to build an appreciation of latter books/shows/manga/graphic novels. And that will be cool to share with them. Be seeing you.