By Justin Avery Smith
Between the Lions was arguably the zenith of children’s programming. For those who don’t know or need a refresher, it was a puppet show that aired on PBS Kids, much like Sesame Street, but focused on a family of anthropomorphic lions who lived in and worked at a library. There was family patriarch Theo Lion, who ran the library with his wife Cleo Lion, while raising their 7-year-old son Lionel and their 4-year-old daughter Leona. They all work alongside Click the Mouse, a female computer mouse shaped like a rodent who can drag and drop characters or objects in and out of a story, but must remain connected to the computer at all times in order to function. Remember those days? It ran from 2000 to 2010.
Each episode typically centered around the Lions and Click reading a story that served as the central theme of the episode, whether it was a popular picture book, a folktale, a fable, or a myth. All done with a whimsical sense of humor that kept children and adults alike engaged. One example that immediately jumps to mind for me is the episode where Theo and Cleo introduce their kids to the Greek myth of Pandora’s Box. Not yet knowing how the story ends, Lionel and Leona come across the titular box with the help of Click. When they open it, they release a spirit that gives everyone in the library the hiccups.
The segments in between this story focused on spelling and grammar. Many of those segments have also stuck with me to this day. Those “Silent E” songs still live in my head rent-free more than twenty years later. I still remember the way he turned that “tub” into a “tube”, that “cub” into a “cube”, and how he would escape jail by turning that “cap” into a “cape” to fly out of his cell. Who needs police procedurals when you have publicly funded catchy songs about phonics?
I still vividly remember my parents printing copies of the books featured in an episode, like the aforementioned myth of Pandora’s Box, for me to enjoy on my own time. And I remember that old man from that one episode, in a story by recurring fictional author Babs Caplan (played by Alison Fraser), scaring the living daylights out of me and making me hide under my blanket.
It is thanks in part to quality children’s media such as Between the Lions that a common refrain amongst my generational cohort is that we Millennials experienced the best time to be a kid and the worst time to be an adult. Our childhoods were defined by this golden age of educational shows full of imagination that the modern media landscape sorely lacks. While our late 2010s and early 2020s adulthoods have been defined by political division, stagnant wages that have failed to catch up with the cost of living, and a global pandemic. Many might say, “So what? Grow up and move on.” I’d agree if the children of today had video programming of an equal caliber to learn from, but that sadly is not the case. Many of these cornerstones of childhood literacy education have faded into obscurity, and in their place arose YouTube’s Elsagate phenomenon, highlighting the importance of publicly funded children’s programming, and the dangers of family-friendly content being posted on a website that is not given the same regulations as a public service.
Elsagate, put very basically for the uninitiated, began in 2017 when multiple YouTube channels with subscriber and viewer counts in the millions, started to upload videos that, while seemingly family friendly at first glance because they include characters like the aforementioned Elsa from Frozen, as well as Spider-Man and Peppa Pig among others, quickly devolve into depicting these characters performing lewd and dangerous acts such as body mutilation, urination, injection, and even criminal behavior such as assault and arson. And, of course, all this content was easily accessible to child audiences due to the featuring of traditionally family-friendly characters, as well as the videos’ descriptions using keywords like “education” and “nursery rhyme”. Between the Lions, this most certainly is not.
Only once this content began to be widely covered by major news outlets did YouTube finally start deleting and demonetizing several of these videos and their respective channels. While the monitoring of Elsagate content helped minimize some of the damage, as it is told in the story of Hydra, you cut one head off and two more grow in its place. Unlike TV stations, which carefully monitor what they allow on the airwaves at any given time, YouTube has an endless amount of easily accessible content uploaded daily. So much so that it’s hard to regulate because of the sheer volume of it, making it nearly impossible to keep up, never mind get ahead of it. There will always be another Minecraft scat video. According to multiple sources, more than five hundred hours of content are uploaded every minute. And even twenty years later, YouTube’s regulatory standards leave a lot to be desired.
I thank my lucky stars for allowing me to enter early adulthood by the time Elsagate content swarmed YouTube and way before AI-generated content even existed. Thanks to the introduction and normalization of generative AI, it means a huge fresh wave of Elsagate content now floods YouTube and threatens to hijack the feeds of child audiences. As has been reiterated time and time again, generative AI by nature is unimaginative, since it uses the pre-existing work of others to create any given piece of content it generates. And the modern echo chambers of social media, the manosphere, and influencer culture have only helped to limit the imagination of developing minds that much more. If that wasn’t bad enough, studies have shown that using AI lowers critical thinking skills. Meaning that if you want someone to break free of those dangerous online circles, it will take a lot more than telling someone to “use their brain” if they’re also using AI. Most disastrously of all, AI has also been shown to offer advice to teens considering suicide.
This is to say nothing of AI’s environmental implications. It has been widely reported by now how much energy and resources AI takes up to produce anything it generates, be it an essay, an image, a song, or some other. Even if it wasn’t using the work of other people to generate this stuff, the product itself is always inferior. Even if puppets and kids’ shows aren’t for everyone, at least it’s clear the people involved put time and effort into making them instead of just typing a prompt into a computer, which sets a dangerous precedent for the next generation if AI is to be accepted as just part of our lives this easily.
I still remember not being able to watch certain TV channels due to childblocks, but even then, my parents could sleep soundly knowing nothing graphic would reach my eyes on the channels I could access, except for that Old Man from Between the Lions, of course. And the irony is not lost on me that I was able to re-watch much of that show as research because people had, in fact, been gracious enough to upload whole episodes onto YouTube.
The US government’s handling of education and literacy has done little to help matters, as well. Another show cut from a similar cloth as Between the Lion, namely Reading Rainbow, hosted by Millennial childhood icon LeVar Burton, is likely only something Gen Z has heard of in passing at most because it was canceled in 2006 after a strong run that spanned back to 1983. I even told LeVar, during a meet-and-greet at a Star Trek convention last year, that he has done more for childhood literacy than the No Child Left Behind Act could ever hope to, which is when he pointed out that Reading Rainbow was actually cancelled because of No Child Left Behind. And even though that act was largely stripped away in 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act that replaced it in 2015 still kept the latter’s provisions about standardized testing that helped lead to Reading Rainbow’s cancellation.
In a time when the Trump administration has stripped federal funding from PBS and is partnering with right-wing video publisher PragerU to pump out AI-generated videos of the founding fathers barking conservative catchphrases, it is now more important than ever to remember all the good this type of high-quality, thoughtful, original children’s programming has done. Doing the research for this piece allowed me to revisit several other PBS Kids’ shows whose influence on me I had, until recently, taken for granted. For example, Cyberchase, a cartoon following the adventures of three kids learning math and science to solve problems plaguing the digital universe, AKA Cyberspace. It’s thanks to that show I knew what symmetry was before my first-grade teacher even got around to it in class! And who can forget that bop of a theme song? C-Y-B-E-R CHASE!
Liberty’s Kids, a historical fiction cartoon about three kids who live through the American Revolutionary War, is another. It even had a stacked voice cast for several historical figures like Walter Cronkite voicing Ben Franklin, Dustin Hoffman as Benedict Arnold, and Billy Crystal as John Adams, just to name a few! That line in the show’s theme song about how “the truth will rise and fall” definitely hits differently nowadays, as well. But The Magic School Bus was my favorite. Miss Frizzle is proof that kids can have abnormal experiences and still be better off for it. No Spider-Man assault or Elsa toilet humor, just an octopus in the neighborhood and a river of lava with the comedic charms of Lily Tomlin to guide it.
This isn’t to say that those around my age were completely immune to consuming mature content until we were adults. The difference there was that the non-child-friendly media we watched never pretended to be child-friendly, and so we knew the whole time that we were watching something directed at an older demographic. Examples from myself and acquaintances include visiting adult film sites where we’d just click the tab saying we were over 18, using the internet to indulge our curiosity on R-rated movies, and (a perennial favorite), going over to a friend or relative’s house to play the new Grand Theft Auto game our parents wouldn’t buy for us. But thanks to both the ratings, content, and theming, it was hard to mistake these for child-friendly pieces of media. So the choice was entirely ours, and we weren’t being deceived by those trying to work around an algorithm. Adding on to the pile of AI-generated content is handcrafted media that deliberately blurs the lines between children and adults, such as video games like Five Nights at Freddy’s, Poppy Playtime, and Fortnite.
The only real comparable media in the age of Between the Lions was the video game Conker’s Bad Fur Day for the Nintendo 64, which had an M rating on the box to let you know that, despite the art style, this wasn’t just another cutesy 3D platformer like Super Mario or Banjo-Kazooie. And on the TV side of things, there was also South Park which aired on Comedy Central and made it very clear upfront that, despite its colorful and simplistic art style and child protagonists, was not geared towards kids thanks to things like Cartman getting an anal probe, Kenny’s many gruesome deaths, and Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo. But the internet is not restricted by time slots, network censors, or dependent on kids who have to ask their parents’ permission to watch and/or buy the media in question. Considering what each respective generation was raised on, it is no wonder that Millennials and Gen Z turned out so differently.
Between the Lions even has the perfect example of how to properly integrate something more mature into children’s entertainment in the form of its segments with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, or as she’s named in her segments, Dr. Ruth Wordheimer. Imagine my surprise when I grew up and learned that not only was “Wordheimer” not her real name, but that the word doctor who helped puppets with word troubles, such as reading long words or helping pairs of letters get along better, was actually a sex therapist!
While rewatching her segments on the show as research for this piece, I was pleasantly surprised at how tasteful and seamless her inclusion was. Unlike many of the innuendos of today, it actually is very subtle. A prime example being when she tells the letters U and N, sitting on a couch in front of her, that they need another consonant to help themselves “feel complete, and bring a little excitement into [their life]”, which just so happens to be the letter F. While benign enough for innocent eyes and ears, adults who realize she could’ve chosen letters like B, P, or R, can appreciate the tasteful way she brings her work into this children’s program. The same can be said for when she has to help those who can’t handle words that are “too long”, and need to take it “one part at a time”. But with Elsagate content giving us the inverse, that’s where it all goes wrong. Arthur became fodder for many memes, but Elsagate is not only just the memes; but tasteless ones at that.
This isn’t to say that, without Between the Lions, kids today are completely at the mercy of Elsagate content and doomed to a life of brain rot. Shows like Bluey are great for teaching kids issues like infertility, shame, and even mortality, on a level that pre-schoolers can understand, while also, in a first for a preschool show, portraying the parents as actual people who have to struggle with the stress that is raising small children. And its official YouTube channel, which has almost 11 million subscribers, features a playlist of several tie-in books read aloud by not just the likes of Elmo and Cookie Monster, but also recognized talents like Elijah Wood, Jenna Fischer, and Tom Daley, to name a few. And that playlist has amassed a total of 3.5 million views across 23 videos. But given the prevalence of Elsagate content that exists alongside it, it’s not necessarily a sure thing that kids will come across the former instead of the latter.
Even with all those names, the most famous example of someone using the power of YouTube to teach kids language development is Ms. Rachel, whose channel took off after the COVID-19 pandemic and now has over 15 million subscribers. While her channel might not receive government funding, her pre-YouTube career saw her teaching music at a public preschool in New York City after getting her master’s in music education from NYU. Like Between the Lions before her, Ms. Rachel has used her platform for more than just phonics lessons. Just last year, she recognized Pride Month on her TikTok account and has used her various other social media accounts to continually raise both awareness and funding for the children of Gaza. All this, in spite of backlash from conservatives and similar online movements. That didn’t stop her from collaborating with Elmo to teach kids the colors of the rainbow.
Things could definitely be better, considering Sesame Street had to not only deal with Elmo’s social media accounts being hacked to post about very unchild-friendly things like the Epstein files, but the show itself had to be bought by Netflix to be saved. Personally, I’m not very keen on thanking them for that, given that just a few days prior, they chose not to renew Star Trek: Prodigy, a more child-centric Star Trek show I really could’ve used 20 years ago when all I had was Enterprise on UPN. While Prodigy is CGI and not a puppet show, it’s still children’s programming that doesn’t regurgitate content into obscene depictions. In fact, it is a perfectly grade school-friendly way to get kids invested in the sciences, space exploration, and striving for Star Trek’s envisioning of a future where there is no hunger, no greed, and all the children know how to read.
That last part boils down to why we have this issue today. Greedy individuals who want to make money off of YouTube, but don’t care about kids or using their imagination, so they easily succumb to the temptation of just typing some shocking prompt into an AI generator and posting it to where impressionable developing minds with short attention spans can find it. There is reason for hope, however. During the writing of this piece, YouTube announced that it would end monetization for AI videos, which while not solving the problem completely, does at least give less incentive to those who are hoping to maximize earnings with minimal effort.
If we’re being honest with ourselves, nobody clearly knows exactly what the state of the internet and PBS will be in the future. One thing that is clear and self-evident, however, is that once this administration leaves office, one of the first priorities of the new administration, and us as citizens in the interim, is to ensure stronger funding for public broadcasting and stronger regulations for those who will take advantage of impressionable minds for profit.
Justin Avery Smith is a writer, humorist, and performer based in Massachusetts. His work has been featured in McSweeney’s, The Onion, and TheGamer. He is also the author of the Newsletter Comedianerd: The Only Neurodivergent Comedian Alive.
Between the Lions photo by PBS. Elsa/Alien image by Fazz160. Collage by Matt Wolfbridge.
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