I wasn't allowed to watch much television when I was a child.
To some of you, this will come as a complete shock. "A childhood without television and access to pop culture?," you'll think. "Why, that's not childhood at all!" Others of you will read that and nod approvingly to yourselves, glad to know that I spent most of my time actually having a social life, playing outside with other kids, and reading my weight in books every week.
I really don't have an opinion one way or that other. For me, that's just how it was. My parents, always concerned about the type of stuff I might stumble across, forbade me from watching much of anything, no matter how much I begged and pleaded with them to let me turn on the magic box in the living room. While my friends were playing with Power Rangers action figures, I had very little idea about who the Power Rangers were, let alone why they deserved their own line of toys. Most of my television-watching experience as a kid consisted of a few hours of Saturday morning cartoons (or Pee Wee's Playhouse), with the occasional mid-week viewing of Darkwing Duck and Goof Troop in the afternoon if I was lucky. We didn't even have cable. Not that I hold all this against them, mind you - in fact, looking back, I'm grateful I wasn't left to stare at the boob tube for five hours a day like a lot of my friends. And with all the time I now spend watching films and television, it's an understatement to say everything balanced out in the end.
Since I couldn't look to television to satisfy my lust for entertainment, I frequently had to turn to my parents' small collection of VHS tapes. Mickey and the Beanstalk. The Great Mouse Detective. An American Tail. These and other animated films were viewed dozens of times each, partly because I loved them, and partly because there just wasn't much else to watch. There were a few live-action films my parents kept, all family-friendly fare rated G or PG to prevent me from accidentally popping in something that might traumatize my toddler brain. But at this point in my childhood, I didn't care much about live-action media, aside from a few PBS shows and made-for-television children's films. Why watch a bunch of real people deal with real-life situations when I could watch bright and colorful cartoons perform the impossible?