This Post May Not Be Suitable for Children

While loading up the cartoons from my recently purchased Looney Tunes Golden Collection set into my computer, I noticed text similar to the following on the back of all the cases:

“The Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5 Is Intended for the Adult Collector and May Not Be Suitable for Children.”

What's the deal with that? Not the Capitalising Every Word in the Sentence (although that does make me scratch my head), but that it “may not be suitable for children?”

I grew up watching these cartoons. My parents grew up watching these cartoons. Some of these cartoons came out when my grandparents were in their teens. And it was always considered to be good, wholesome family entertainment. But all of a sudden, it's no longer deemed to be fit for consumption by the next generation.

Is this a sign of how sanitised and paranoid our society is becoming, where people are afraid that seeing a cartoon duck trying to drop cartoon anvils on a cartoon rabbit will turn children into serial killers or something? Or is it simply not educational enough (I beg to differ... Thanks to Looney Tunes, I know not to waste my money buying anything from the Acme Corporation)?

I guess another possibility could be that some of the older cartoons do portray racial stereotypes and prejudices that would not be considered appropriate to show young children nowadays¹. They tend to imitate things they see and hear, so I guess in that regard it might be good to keep them from seeing certain cartoons...


¹Every disc from volume 3 on even starts out with the notice, “The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.”

Weirdest Shopping Trip Ever

I've always found Costco to be an odd store. Primarily, because they charge people to shop there. I find it hard to comprehend that they think requiring a membership to enter the store is good for sales. Wouldn't they get a greater number of people checking them out and potentially making purchases if they didn't have to buy memberships?

But in any case, I received a Costco gift card for Christmas which provided me an opportunity to experience the full Costco shopping experience last week, since using a gift card is one way you can actually get in without a membership or using someone else's. And it definitely was a weird experience.