Adrian Schober - Children, Youth, and American Television

When episodes of the adventures of Davy Crockett first aired on ABCs Disneyland (19541958) between December 1954 and February 1955, its effect on children was immediate and extraordinary. After being watched by an estimated 90 million television viewers, which notably increased on the rerun, the episodes created an insatiable appetite for all things Crockett: coonskin caps, blue jeans, toy rifles, bows and arrows, as well as bubblegum, lunch boxes, and other merchandise. Almost overnight, children became their favorite American folk hero by acting out what they had seen on the small screen. The Crockett craze, as it was called, was the subject of an industry worth $300 million,1 or more than 2 billion dollars today, adjusted for inflation. And woe to children who were not part of the craze, as Steven Spielberg found out as an out-of-touch third-grader: [B]ecause I didnt have my coonskin cap and my powder horn, or Old Betsy, my rifle, and the chaps, I was deemed the Mexican leader, Santa Anna. And everybody came after me with the butt ends of their flintlock rifles. And they chased me home from school until I got my parents to buy me a coonskin cap.2 The impact of these hour-long programs even caught its creator Walt Disney unawares, who didnt think of drawing out the heros small-screen adventures: It became one of the biggest overnight hits in TV history, and there we were with just three films and a dead hero.3 But as cultural critic Margaret J. King points out, the craze died as quickly and unexpectedly as it had begun,4 just as Disney was about to launch another series, The Mickey Mouse Club (19551996). Although kiddy Westerns like The Lone Ranger (19491957), Hopalong Cassidy (19491952), and The Roy Rogers Show (19511957) were already popular among children, King sees the Crockett craze as richly instructive, offering an insight into a particular moment in American culture.

First, King argues that the phenomenon demonstrated the power of the nascent medium of television and its capacity to influence and shape behavior, dramatically illustrated in the case of children or subteens but encompassing adults as well.5 Second, it signaled the emergence of a new consumer category the child to the delight of TV programmers and advertisers. Never before had a single generation found itself with so much leverage as consumers [] The craze generation, spanning the ages of two to twelve, had power of the purse, and the Crockett craze was its first proving ground and coming of age.6 Or as media scholar Gary J. Edgerton has put the Crockett phenomenon into socio-historical context:

Before TV, children received presents on their birthdays and special holidays, but now, after a decade of postwar prosperity, baby boomers and their teenage counterparts from the silent generation were expressing their collective identities on a regular basis through the merchandise they were buying and the products their parents were purchasing for them. The whole notion of a youth culture is in large part a media and marketing creation [] For its part, the Davy Crockett craze confirmed that Americas new emerging postwar culture was increasingly both youth oriented and media centric.7

The craze, then, would mark the beginnings of the commodification and Disneyfication of childhood.8

Postwar prosperity led not only to an upsurge in birth rates in the US but also to an upsurge in sales of TV sets. Indeed, parents often bought TV sets at the insistence of their children, and much of the early advertising from manufacturers and retailers was designed to exploit parental guilt if they did not buy one for the sake of their children.9 In 1950, almost 4 million American households owned TV sets, which accounted for about nine percent of homes; by 1963, just over 50 million sets were sold, accounting for about 91.3 percent of homes.10 From its inception as a mass medium, television was welcomed as a natural babysitter.11 But at the same time, parents, critics, and researchers worried about its effects on impressionable young minds. Would TV make children passive and listless, unable to sleep, eat, and focus on their homework? Would it lead to a generation of bug-eyed children? Or worse, would the violent content of Westerns and cartoons make them act out what they saw on screen?12 Periodic hearings and probes into the effects of TV on childrens values and behavior, including juvenile delinquency, widely seen to have reached epidemic proportions in the 1950s and 1960s, helped categorize television as a dangerous medium, in need of regulation.