Friday 25 February 2011

Writing for your audience.

Since we went digital, the kids have been watching some strange stuff on the children's channel. I caught the tail end of a cartoon this week that just made me laugh. Well, it wasn't supposed to make me laugh, not like, say The Simpsons does. It was just so incongruous I couldn't believe the script writers had managed to get it past whoever over-sees these computer animation things.

The cartoon was called Dinosaur King, or something like that. You may have heard of it. This particular episode was set in 1615 in France and featured the Three Musketeers, Cardinal Richelieu, three good space beings with the ability to create dinosaurs, three confused space beings after the Cosmos Stone and a purple flying bloke also after the Cosmos Stone.

The plot, if you can call it such, involved all the characters looking for this Cosmos Stone and fighting each other with dinosaurs. Enough said? Well, no, I haven't got to the bit I found incongruous yet. Hard to believe, isn't it?

Cardinal Richelieu found a blue glass sphere and, following some techno-dinosaur antics, managed to be the first to pick it up. Whereupon the purple flying bloke said

"That can't be the Cosmos Stone. You couldn't pick it up without lighting up like a Christmas Tree."

I ran the line through my head a few times. Out of the wild list of characters, I couldn't image any of them actually knowing what a Christmas Tree was, let alone that it lit up, given the lack of electrical lighting in 1615.

Is it me?

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