Children Can Have Taste

My eleven-year-old son loves Minecraft. He started out by watching other people play on YouTube, then once bought the game without permission on my tablet. He plays. He still watches. He knows a lot of details about game lore and so forth. He will talk your ear off given half a chance. We own two Minecraft cookbooks, which is partially my interest in novelty cookbooks and partially his interest in the game. Sunday, he and his best friend went to see the movie together, and while I have not yet had a real conversation with him about why, he was unimpressed with it and did not think it was good.

A lot of people I know have said that the Minecraft movie was fine if you were a kid. Some of them liked it themselves, and that’s fine; it’s basically the editorial position around here that we don’t shame you for your tastes unless they’re really sketchy. Liking the movie we as a group don’t care for is one thing; being on the side of the Klan in Birth of a Nation is quite another, you know? But the most common defense I’ve seen of it goes something along the lines of “kids don’t know better, so who cares if adults think it’s bad?”

Well, goodness knows my kids frequently do not seem to know better. I haven’t ported it over yet and don’t have time to get it all right now, but I wrote a whole column at the Old Site about the things my kids watched that was sometimes clearly just catharsis on my part. (So many parents have complimented the articles about Peppa Pig and Paw Patrol and so forth.) But every once in a while, it was “here’s a show my kids really like and here’s everything that’s good about it and we will be here for a while.” My daughter in particular has a knack for cutting right to the heart of quality of things.

Kids’ preferences are unrefined. That’s the thing I am most inclined to say. Unrefined is not the same as good or bad; it’s uneven. My kids will quite cheerfully watch high-quality shows and movies a fair amount of the time. I even used to have long conversations with their paternal grandmother about Masha and the Bear lore. I don’t want to go all “I understand this better than you,” but she and I would note the occasional throwaway cultural reference that my son, then two or three, did not, and we appreciated them.

Some shows are literally designed to catch adults that way, so they’re enjoyable to both kids and adults. Sesame Street in particular—I had friends who were deeply annoyed at the Game of Thrones parody, because Game of Thrones is for adults and they didn’t remember “Me Claudius.” They also put in the work to introduce kids to things like production design. Yes, you get silly jokes on their level, but they aren’t lazy.

Kids do not always spot lazy. My son used to love a show that was literally the same script with minor details changed for every episode, and he watched it over and over again. (Probably. It was hard to tell.) He certainly never noticed how much Special Agent Oso stretched things to make it so there were always three special steps to do whatever he was trying to do. But they can learn to, and they can learn to fairly young. And once they learn to spot lazy, they’re never going to be caught by it again.