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From G.I. Joe to the Ninja Turtles: Pop, Mythic, and Folk Elements in Kid Culture Superheroes
| Article
# : |
19709 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1991 |
5,273 Words |
| Author
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George H. Lewis
George H. Lewis is professor of sociology at the University of
the Pacific. He has a longstanding interest in popular culture
and has written extensively on the topic. |
On the playground of a preschool in Stockton, California, five little boys sit in a circle, gleefully chanting. There's plenty of noise from the other kids, busy with hot wheels and a game of tag that's going on around the shrubs by the fence, but not enough to drown out their words:
Tic tac toe, three in a row,
Momma got shot by G.I. Joe.
This charming chant, which lodges a message of high aggression within a rhyme devoted to how you "win" a traditional children's game, has been popular with preschoolers throughout the last few years. It moves through kid culture, seemingly by osmosis, popping up during breaks and school recess and chanted in groups when adults are busy elsewhere. The rhyme is mostly recited by boys and, though it has been learned by some little girls, my 4 ½-year-old daughter tells me it is "what the boys say, not the girls."
Although it is obvious that four- and five-year-old boys brought up in middle-class American culture do not realize the real-life consequences of being shot, it is equally obvious that they do realize that there is something forbidden about this little ditty--something that binds them together when they chant it and reduces them to helpless giggles when they realize that they have been overheard by an adult. These words, collectively learned and nearly always recited in a group, do serve to develop a sense of belonging among these preschoolers, even as they distance the group from the world of adult authority. Verbal aggression against the dominant mother figure, especially in the disarmingly comic context of this rhyme, is really a very sophisticated tactic of preadolescent rebellion. And, if it is not pushing the interpretation too far, having mamma shot by G.I. Joe--a symbolic representative of the macho American male who, in kid comics, videos, and cartoons, is expected to blow away the enemies of one's community--is a significant and highly innovative use of cultural symbols that these young children have been exposed to, growing up in middle-class America.
The Mythic Nature of the Violent Superhero
The world of kid culture is heavily populated with media images and plastic toy representations of "superheroes" who create their own, often spectacularly violent, solutions to the problems they encounter. In addition to G.I. Joe, we have had Rambo and his Force of Freedom, He-Man, Jayce and the
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