Lassie come home, please

After having a 9 year old in our home for a week I find myself really longing for the old-style movies for children. Every TV show, every borrowed film, tape and many of the advertisements on TV had cartoon-like characters that were either grotesque, frightening or unattractive portrayals of humans. Although I will admit that I didn't sit down and watch a show all the way through I found it very hard to understand the plot. Sometimes, I wasn't sure which were the bad guys and which were the good guys. They weren't wearing either black or white hats, to identify them.

Even the so-called better shows such as the Disney ones hardly ever had real life characters that a child could identify as being similar to anyone in the family or the neighborhood. I have read that the modern child doesn't like a show without a lot of action. The shows we saw certainly had plenty of action, and were rather loud with background music that took over many scenes.

But I noticed that the one show that Matthew stayed interested in was one that had real human beings and the animals were real dogs and cats. He wanted to see what was going to happen to the little boy on the screen. And he was even more interested in what would happen to the little dog.

It made me think back to some of my favorite movies when I was child. I was a fan of Shirley Temple and can still remember many of her movies. In fact I ordered one of the promotion items on TV of four Shirley Temple movies for our DVD. No one uses DVDs any more, but for many years our own great-grandchildren enjoyed watching those Shirley Temple movies. Some of the plots were rather dated, but the drama of what was happening to the little girl caught their interest, even if they didn't understand some of the social settings or problems.

Of course I also liked all of the Lassie series. I read all the books and always wanted to see each of the movies. I enjoyed them even after I was a teenager. And as an adult I loved the movie about the two dogs and one cat that found their family who had moved away. It was supposedly a true story but watching those actual dogs and cat made the show so real that I was as tense while watching it as I would have been at any Hitchcock thriller.

Some of my favorite adult movies had a dog as one of the characters. Do you remember Asta, the little wire-haired terrier, in "The Thin Man" series? I think the male actor was William Powell but I'm not really sure. But I do remember the dog's name.

I liked the Lassie movies so well that I always wanted a collie dog. We finally got one back in the 1950s and kept her through two moves and blessed several other people with her offspring until we took care of that problem. However other people also seemed to like collies since the puppies were not at all hard to place.

Several of the child actors were in very good movies. Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in "Meet Me in St. Louis" had some wonderful songs as well as an interesting plot. Deanna Durbin with her exceptional singing voice was popular, and even the "Our Gang" youngsters had funny shorts that entertained us before the featured film came on. President Ronald Reagan was a B movie star in some movies about the "Dead End Boys."

I used some of those actresses as role models and I can't remember any whose character in the movies portrayed a trait that was undesirable for a child to see. If they did, the plot of the movie used that trait to teach a lesson about the consequences of acting like that.

Maybe some of today's children receive lessons from these new films. If they do, I am just too old to get the point. On the other hand, since the characters are not human maybe the children feel free to ignore any lessons thrown in because they seem to only apply to those cartoons.

If Lassie can't come home, then I hope at least a wolf could be portrayed as a good guy for once.