This piece on the Guardian website was a head-scratcher. It purports to be about how to 'turn adult science fiction into kids TV' and the problems therein. But from the off the tone is strange:
Children are not allowed on the bridge!" said Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode. Nowadays, that attitude has softened, with Trek about to get its own animated series as an antidote to the smörgåsbord of F-bombs, Klingon boobs and decapitated Romulans that populate its live-action incarnations. Alongside Netflix's Camp Cretaceous – which turns the Jurassic World franchise into a family-friendly cartoon – it's part of a trend for creating versions of sci-fi shows for children that haven't lost their power to shock – but won't give kids nightmares.
Star Trek giving kids nightmares? Not in The Next Generation. Or any of the iterations before then. Or in Voyager, or Enterprise. Okay maybe one or two episodes here and there, but I've always viewed Star Trek as a franchise as one that straddles children and adults. For better and worse.
Now granted there's a new tranche of ST shows, of varying quality from the actually quite good Picard (well, Season 2 is good, so far - Season 1 was woeful) to the not great ST: Discovery. Others are on their way. And as for F-bombs and so on. Not many in ST:D IIRC, and a few, but not many, in Picard. All kind of strange complaints to be honest.
But what about that line about Trek about to get its own animated series. I know I'm not the only person on this site who has sung the praises of Star Trek: Lower Decks. Now I know a year is a long time in show business, but it was released in August 2020. Hardly years ago. So why isn't it mentioned?
As for Star Trek: Prodigy which the article references. That dropped in October 2021.
The broader point isn't uninteresting but then again, let's not overstate it. Babylon 5 was arguably one of the more sophisticated science fiction television serials, whatever about the ropey sets, but there was little or nothing there most children couldn't watch. The Expanse, Foundation, For All Mankind? Well, I guess it depends on where you set the age boundaries for children. The last might on an emotional level be a bit much - the former might for the intermittent use of naked(ish) actors be a problem. Who knows? But then I think science fiction is science fiction and horror is horror and it's the latter area where real violence enters the picture. The creature is fascinated to see Alien, but Alien's might be a better bet being more in the former area than the latter (though I think Alien is a fantastic film in its own right). And perhaps it is that equation SF is SF and horror is horror that has meant that the former is pitched towards a more ambiguous and broader area.
But it's odd. The piece looks at Jurassic Park as an example of 'adult' SF that has to be softened for a younger audience in television iteration.
When the creators of Camp Cretaceous were developing a kid-friendly version of the Jurassic World movies, they decided to do it by asking existential questions. "We asked ourselves, what is the DNA of the Jurassic franchise? Why do people watch these films?" says Zack Stentz, creator of Camp Cretaceous. "We decided you need those scary action beats, but you also need Spielbergian moments of awe and wonder." Getting those scary moments right is a tricky balancing act when it comes to writing for kids. It can't be too scary, but you also can't go too far the other way – particularly if you're being given input by the creator of Jurassic Park. "Everything to do with the Jurassic franchise goes to Steven Spielberg," he says. "He's shot down attempts to do animated shows in the past, and he only agreed this time on one condition: 'Make it scary!'"
But Jurassic Park always struck me as a franchise that was pitched towards that broader range of viewers age-wise anyhow. Or take Jaws, speaking of Spielberg. That was a horror film of sorts, but it was sufficiently broad based that I recall being brought on a friends birthday to see the second one in 1978 when I was all of twelve. It was kind of scary. But not impossibly so. So what were the expectations back then as to how that film would be received by a gang of eleven and twelve year olds at the Savoy?
But then different imagery or narratives hits at different times. People might laugh at the idea of people hiding behind the sofa during Doctor Who. And yet, and yet, I recall watching The Time Warrior series of Doctor Who in 1973 - I'd have been eight, and watching in, well, horror as the Sontaran removes his helmet at the end of an episode. What was under that helmet? Nothing good was clearly the answer. I kept watching. The reality of what was there was, naturally, much less worse than anything one could imagine, even then, and little did I know that by 2011 this eldritch horror would wind up on a more recent iteration of Doctor Who represented by an amiable battlefield nurse amongst its number. Truly we live in a different age.
Then again, and I'm a bit of a fan of Jon Pertwee Doctor Who, The Three Doctors from late 1972, more or less blew my mind with whole buildings being torn from this dimension into another - those visual effects might be rudimentary but they were effective, if you were eleven.
But all this raises questions. What scared people when they were young and when is scary too scary?
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