[SPG, Suspected, pattern=3.60]Cord's email about children liking quality...

[Guy Lapointe]

Good point Cord!

 

Your comments remind me that while in college in the late sixties (Canada), in a psychology class project, we looked the cartoon preference of about 60 3rd graders.  We used an amateur projector and 8mm clips of Huckleberry Hound (HB), Tom & Jerry (HB-MGM), Rocky & Bullwinkle, Captain Crunch (Jay Ward Prods), Road Runner (I think, stylized version, WB) and 2 European cartoons I cannot remember.  We could only get 50 or 100-foot clips of these shows and could not find any Disney loops.  Our college arts department rated the cartoons by the complexity of the drawings, life-like images like background, continuity of action; basically, a good reflection of the cost/work invested in creating the clip.  I believe these clips were abstracts from genuine TV or Theater cartoons.  Working with what was available to us, we tried to match the clips that included a chase or fight (Tom & Jerry’s conflicts come to mind here) – that was the sixties…
Strangely enough, both kids and the department made the same selection, in decreasing order of preference:
Tom & Jerry, Huckleberry Round, Road Runner, European cartoon 1, Rocky, Captain Crunch commercial, European cartoon 2.
These were all cartoons characters that children were familiar with, had been shown one way or another in the previous year on TV (not the same episode but same characters) and that all the children could identify by name.  Our study group was made exclusively of boys (boys and girls were segregated in schools at that time).  We concluded that children (male 3rd graders) could and did notice a quality in the making of a cartoon which correlated directly with their preference of better made cartoons/drawings.  Understand that this was a college student project and not a professionally designed double-bind study.  It does fit in with your comments - thank you.
 

Guy


 
--Forwarded Message Attachment--
From: cord at wiljes.de
CC: notebook at wiljes.de
To: abeenget at online.no; TheGuy at drawson.com; dcml at nafsk.se
Date: Fri, 23 Apr 2010 14:17:09 +0200
Subject: [SPG,Suspected,pattern=3.60]AW: Disney Sales




I remember a study in which Chinese native speakers read Chinese Texts to very young (<1y) children. Later in life the children were able to speak Chinese sounds which were not part of their own language, even though they never learned Chinese. When the same experiment was repeated with records instead of human readers no effect was found. So the human interaction (emotion!) seems to be absolutely essential for motivation and learning even (or especially) at this young age.
 
I have repeatedly heard from adults who had never read comic books in their own childhood that they had serious problems reading comics now because they did not know where to start or how to preceed. They had not learned the "language" of comics at an early age.

I believe comics are very good source of reading material for children because they have pictures which is very important, the feature recognizable characters, and they have the appeal of "not just for kids" which marks most great childrens' books. I have read Donald Duck and Asterix to the children of friends and they liked it very much. And once the children start learning to read you can alternate: The adult reads the first panel and the child the second one.

I also noticed how much children, even at the youngest age, recognize and appreciate quality. Not only do they instinctively prefer Barks' stories over others' but they even know which Barks stories they like best. They are very good critics.

Cord  
 		 	   		  
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