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When it comes to kids and 23-metric ton apatosauruses, we’ve learned you just can’t be TOO careful. But at the time Syd Hoff’s Danny rrdteatzey
and the Dinosaur was published back in 1958, nobody even considered the terrible example it was setting for our most vulnerable populations — sauropods and impressionable children — by making it seem ACCEPTABLE (or, worse, FUN!) to lift telephone wires when galavanting about town:
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Thank goodness when the book was re-released in the ’80s, Danny is shown encountering only non-electrified clotheslines, so he no longer models dangerous dinosaur-riding/telephone-line-lifting behavior. Who knows how many copycat catastrophes and lawsuits have been averted! But you’ve gotta admit: that was a close one.
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And thanks to reader Sara Heard for sending this in! – L
32 Comments
The original story was kind of ridiculous. Both the kid and the dinosaur would probably be dead if they had tried something like that. I like to think that this makes the story more realistic rather than it making the story more lawyer friendly.
Where is the boy’s mother?!! For that matter, where is the dinosaur’s mother?!!
They’re unsupervised!!!
So many of the things we read and watched were scary, dangerous and ridiculous. It’s a wonder we didn’t all speed down the hills in wooden handmade cars or eat soap and burp bubbles like the Little Rascals. And let’s not even get into the head bashing Three Stooges.
My thoughts stray more to what Doug said. Not that a book about a kid with a pet dinosaur need conform to reality. But for the sake of the adult reading to the kid, it would be nice if the adult doesn’t take one look and have flash backs to the gory lesson from their electrical engineering professor, about what happens when you touch both the electrical wires up on the pole. (Hint: they aren’t insulated)
Actually, I don’t think this is that big a deal. The story isn’t ruined (or even really compromised that much) by changing “power line” to “clothes line,” and touching live power lines really is dangerous. The engaging tale of a young boy roaming freely with his dinosaur friend, and NO adults, is still intact, albeit with one minor edit.
In my experience telephone wires are closely insulated, and wouldn’t present a threat. After the 1998 Ice Storm here in eastern Ontario, however, a couple of free-range kids did have the opportunity to poke at a live snapping powerline broken from the streetlamp in front of our house – but being free-range they were cautious and weren’t hurt. This remained unrepaired, and one of them, more than a decade later, charmed a repair crew into not repairing it, and we’re still spared the bedroom light pollution it used to provide.
Actually, this is probably a good move, and it doesn’t really affect the storyline. I knew a boy in high school who was killed when he climbed into a tree to free his little brother’s kite and grabbed a power line. You’d think he’d know better (otherwise bright kid), but it’s probably better not to give kids the idea that grabbing any wires on a utility pole is safe.
Lenore, I know it’s tough to find material to post every day, but this sort of thing just doesn’t carry much weight and detracts from your core message.
The irony is that many neighborhood “associations” and even town ordinances prohibit clotheslines and drying clothes in the Great Outdoors. (That’s a whole other outrage that is my personal ax to grind….. I LOVE drying my clothes outside and it’s better for the fabrics…. and my electric bill….. but that’s for another blog…..)
Many kids being read this book haven’t even seen clothes drying on a clothesline.
“nobody even considered the terrible example it was setting for our most vulnerable populations — sauropods and impressionable children — by making it seem ACCEPTABLE (or, worse, FUN!) to lift telephone wires when galavanting about town:”
Telephone lines aren’t dangerous. Power lines, on the other hand are Not To Be Trifled With.
Ehm, but telephone lines aren’t the same as powerlines, I think?
“many neighborhood “associations” and even town ordinances prohibit clotheslines and drying clothes in the Great Outdoors.”
Whaaaaaat…??? I had heard that rumour about The Land of the Free but couldn’t believe it!
It’s tragic that we’re taking silliness out of children’s lives. Part of the fun of the original story was that kids KNEW it wasn’t real (That people didn’t live with dinosaurs, for example.), but they loved the creative fantasy. That was actually a popular trope in the late 50s, as the wonderful book “The Enormous Egg” was a huge hit. We’re moving much more to the darker Dickens of “Hard Times” when only that which is observable in fact should be put into literature. Sigh.
Papilio, you are correct that telephone lines are not power lines. And the poles depicted are often referred to as “telephone poles”, but the more accurate name is “utility poles”. They run electric lines in addition to telephone lines, cable lines, and fiber optic. A 3 wire arrangement as depicted in the story, considering when it was written, we looking at two power lines (one +, one -) with a telephone line. So yes, deadly.
For the love of all that’s holy, don’t let it slip that I’ve started my 6 year old playing Dungeons & Dragons.
He was very happy he killed the slime creature and the evil wizard.
What disaster might befall him if he tried to do all the things his comic book superheroes do? He was excited that the extra big winter coat covered his hands, because then his hands could be “shooters.”
Lenore, I know it’s tough to find material to post every day, but this sort of thing just doesn’t carry much weight and detracts from your core message.
Lenore’s core message is that kids are smarter and more capable than we give them credit for. Removing an image and changing text in a book to prevent kids from learning the wrong lesson and then acting on it shows very little faith in kids’ ability to figure out that not everything in books should be taken as fact. How many children over the decades who have handled electrical wires to a bad end learned from Danny and the Dinosaur that it was safe to do so?
One of my favorite images is from Go Dog, Go…those treetops so flat that dogs could lounge and play on them. I never confused that image, though, with real trees. Kids’ books contain fanciful images and it is good for kids to daydream about those images and let imagination take them away to other worlds where kids have dinosaurs.
This change in this one book may not be a big deal but it is an indicator of how society sees children as less than smart and capable…and that’s a shame.
“This change in this one book may not be a big deal but it is an indicator of how society sees children as less than smart and capable…and that’s a shame.”
The power company runs ads telling adults to treat all downed power lines as dangerous, too. Although the one we had in my youth (featuring “Kite-Man”) was pretty condescending.
Where is that kid’s dinoseat?
Also, I think kids are smart enough to know the whole thing is fantasy. IF we ever have dinosaurs and the kids ride on them THEN we can explain that clotheslines are the better bet: Dino could get strangled, but not electrocuted. This whole thing is hilarious.
Do today’s children even know what a clothesline is? Some communities have even banned them on the grounds of being unsightly. Clotheslines might expose innocent tots to the sight of a pair of jockey shorts or boxers flapping in the breeze:undergarments traditionally word by men, the leading kidnappers and sexual abusers of children!
Aimee,
Where do you live that hanging clothes out to dry is against the rules or by-laws? Sounds like those idiotic Home Owners Association gone wild again. For the life of me, I have never understood people wanting and belonging to such moronic groups.
This is no different than that twit that rewrote T’was the Night Before Christmas so that she could remove Santa’s pipe so that kids won’t be influenced to smoke.
@gina you fall victim to common fallacy: Of course you remember the “scary, dangerous and ridiculous” things. Because you survived. Like all the people who proudly complain that they didn’t get vaccinated against measles and yet here there are.
Power lines *are* dangerous. They are mostly out of reach of children, yes, but in this case: Why tell children that they *are* harmless, which the story does? And does the new version of the story lack because the changes?
About the stooges: Children seem to be very good at understanding dangers that would apply to other apes of the same intelligence. That predators like dogs can be dangerous, that falling from heights is dangerous, etc. (Humans severely overestimate vertical distances probably for that very reason). Fire BAD is also easy to learn.
But they are very bad at understanding all that stuff that humans invented and where our adaptions are cultural, not biological. Asphyxiation, poisoning by radiation or heavy metals, electricity, and so on.
So yes, even small children will grasp that the Stooges’ behavior is play-acting and they will play-act and not copy it, they will understand that there are not dinosaurs to ride on, but they will not understand that touching a live wire can kill in a heartbeat.
If we were wondrous, why expect kids now, allowed appropriate freedoms, basked in opportunities to learn, would prove any less so?
Are we to shelter our children so that they never learn how to properly assess “scary, dangerous and ridiculous” material until unsupervised adults rendered dangerously naive without invaluable guidance, experience from early ages? Never learning healthy skepticism, resilient self-reliance until late, maybe much too late, if ever?
I benefitted enormously from exposure to much adult media, conversation, activiies, art, etc from an early age. And yet drugs, promiscuity, gun violence hold no allure.
I didn’t have to keep believing in Santa to greatly enjoy Christmas. I did need to trust my parents, myself as much as tenable.
@Mark
“Are we to shelter our children so that they never learn how to properly assess “scary, dangerous and ridiculous” material until unsupervised adults rendered dangerously naive without invaluable guidance, experience from early ages? Never learning healthy skepticism, resilient self-reliance until late, maybe much too late, if ever?”
I think one thing that’s happened if that we’ve come up with so many “safety” laws and rules and regulations that young (and not so young) people just assume that everything has been rendered safe and all unsafe things have been banned.
I used to ice-skate as a kid (up to about 12 years old, when we moved) and then lived for decades in places where ice rinks were not nearby. Some years ago one was built in our area and I tried it again. I noticed kids doing dangerous maneuvers, like skating at top speed toward an open door and then doing a sudden hockey-stop, that no kid ever would have tried when I was that age.
BL,
“I used to ice-skate as a kid (up to about 12 years old, when we moved) and then lived for decades in places where ice rinks were not nearby. Some years ago one was built in our area and I tried it again. I noticed kids doing dangerous maneuvers, like skating at top speed toward an open door and then doing a sudden hockey-stop, that no kid ever would have tried when I was that age.”
Really? No kid ever would? Obviously not Canadian. From the day we first put on skates we all wanted to stop like that. We all did it. Hell even during public skates we would jump over the boards like our heroes in the NHL. During public skates we would have what we called the suicide skate, for those interested. Using the entire rink you would skate backwards, in a huge figure 8. With the intersection of the 8 being at center ice. Last person standing won free admission to their next public skate. It was awesome. We also had organized type of roller derby. Teams of three would compete. All this with no pads and no helmets.
Aren’t dinosaurs dangerous? Shouldn’t kids be shown playing with more gentle creatures like kittens?
When I see original, the “he would be hit by current” thought pop up in my mind. It distracts from mindless fun it was supposed to be. Assuming my reaction is not unique, they might have changed it for that reason.
Growing up, we were told repeatedly that cables are dangerous and we should never touch them. That is only way how kids can learn about dangers of high voltage before they get injured or killed by it. You don’t get repeated experience. Maybe just people back then haven’t that beaten in their heads so often and were distracted by different things.
It would be unfortunate if freerange movement would turn into another “lets chastise people for small non-freerange changes and complain about tiny details” group.
“It would be unfortunate if freerange movement would turn into another “lets chastise people for small non-freerange changes and complain about tiny details” group.”
No we are still the group that gives kids the benefit of the doubt that kids know that what they see in cartoons is not real. Just like I knew my kids would not go around dropping grand pianos or acme anvils on people’s heads, just because Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner were able to do it.
But the way I see it, if a kid can find an actual dinosaur to tame and ride around town on, then go for it, grab all the cables you want.
@Warren I don’t see anyone claiming the kids would climb up and touch electrical cables had the change was not done. Not a single article or comment on the internet so far.
We do not know what the thinking behind the change was or even whether there was elaborate thinking instead of “I thought it looks better with colors” or “original picture seemed to be too empty for modern taste”. Even if it would be “the electricity thing pop up in my head and I think something that does not trigger trivia so easily would work better”, it would still not imply belief that kids will consider it real. It is just a guess of readers associations – something artists do constantly and all the time.
Too many of posts lately amount to assuming bad or exaggeratedly stupid intentions behind something minor and inconsequential.
andy,
Would you like to place a wager on the motive behind the change? I am pretty confident on what the motive is, are you?
@Warren–Slightly off-topic, but I’m Canadian too, and I went to many a public skating session during my youth (although my feet are too high-arched for skates now), and we never had contests like you describe–it was just general skating. I don’t know if those kinds of games were banned, or if we just didn’t have the inclination, but public skating as I remembered it consisted of arriving, skating, maybe practicing some moves you learned in figure skating/power skating/hockey, if it was safe to do so, and possibly playing tag with your siblings or friends. This would usually be followed by a visit to the snack bar, if the adult who brought you was feeling generous, or if you came by yourself and had money. Outdoor skating followed a similar pattern, minus the snack bar. Also, some outdoor rinks had a separate area just for hockey. There’s a park near my childhood home where the “hockey area” was always on the tennis court, which helped keep wayward pucks to a minimum. But, even though I believe what you’re saying, I’ve never participated in, or even witnessed, a giant backwards figure 8 contest, or a “roller derby” type game at a public ice rink. Individual groups of skaters might have informal foot races, without bumping, but that was about it.
Phew… so glad we have the clothesline version!
I’m surprised the modern day version would even condone children having dinosaurs as pets. I mean, isn’t that dangerous for a child?
I don’t understand how the dinosaur managed to get the cord/clothesline wrapped around his neck in the second picture.