Boink! Boom! Crack! The sounds of the fight scene rage on. Many have fallen in this particularly bloody battle. The good guys have taken their losses but struggle on to what is seemingly a victory. Their aggression is fierce and helps them. Fires consume the background; men and women lie on the ground in pain. Even if it weren’t for the bombs, missiles, bullets, etc. that are flying around, hand-to-hand combat would have got the better of them. It was a classic battle scene when looking back at it, a true testament of blood, hell, and gore. This may sound like a heroic made-for-TV movie shown only on primetime in the hopes of recruiting a mature audience. But it is not. In fact, it is just another Saturday-morning special of GI Joe, “The Real American Hero,” that I watched with my brother and cousins. We were religious followers of the show, tuning in every week to see how Sergeant Slaughter, Duke and the rest of the gang would handle the likes of King Cobra and his cronies. GI Joe’s early morning time slot encouraged kids, like us, to tune in every weekend. While eating our CheeriosTM and Frosted FlakesTM we got a dose of some real fightin’ action, in excess of fifty violent scenes for the morning: there is more than enough to fill the appetite. The truth is, violence on television is on every single day. It takes its toll on society, especially children. The damage done by violence on television is detrimental and confirmed by statistics, case studies, and personal experiences. Fistfights, shootouts, car crashes, rapes... Take your pick. Violence is everywhere on television, sometimes gory and gruesome, other times clean and remote. It is not just the Saturday morning cartoons; clips from action-adventure series, the nightly news and MTV are interwoven with violence and extremely mature content. Prime-time programs can average eight hostile acts per hour; children's shows four times as much (Bajpai, 199...
