PENGUINS OF MADAGASCAR: THE LOST TREASURE OF THE GOLDEN SQUIRREL
Friendly Rating: All ages.
Safety Rating: A fair amount of slapstick comedy.
Quality Rating: But it’s soooo funny!
Half-hour special airs tonight at 8 p.m. on Nickelodeon, kicking off a week of new Penguins cartoons.
The Penguins of Madagascar has always been one of those shows, with its slightly irreverent wit and slapstick silliness, that is genuinely family-friendly. Not always family-safe, if you’ve got young ‘uns too young to understand that slapping people hurts.
This adventure, in which the Penguins and crew try to find a cursed treasure before the rats get it, is beyond hysterical, though, and on so many levels. It’s a total Indiana Jones-style pastiche, right down to strange pictograms and Skipper commenting on the action that this is the traditional time for the team to start fighting each other.
However, slapstick humor is one of those gray areas for a lot of parents. It’s not really violence, in that nobody gets hurt. Kids generally get it pretty early on that if they try something they see in a cartoon, it’s going to hurt, even if they haven’t quite separated out the difference between reality and fantasy.
On the other hand, there can be a meanness to slapstick that just isn’t fun. Can you say The Three Stooges? And when you have that, I think you can make the argument that slapstick adds to the problem of violence and cruel world syndrome (which according to one guy I heard a long time ago) is the greater problem with TV violence.
The big difference between Larry, Curly and Moe slapping each other around and King Julien using one of his subjects as a hammer, is that the Stooges were acting out of anger and meanness and trying to top each other. Julien is just so blissfully full of himself, it doesn’t occur to him that what he’s doing could hurt someone. And I gotta warn you, the actual bit is really horrifyingly funny.
There’s an old saying that farce is tragedy with the pain removed – and I think that’s what’s at play here. Sometimes you may need to look at someone doing something awful and laugh at it to relieve your own feelings of wanting to use, say, an annoying sibling as a hammer. But talk to your kids about it. Ask them why they think that sort of thing is funny and why it’s not funny when it happens in real life. And please feel free to share what you come up with.
