It's Time to Be a Hero
In which I overanalyze my compulsion to laugh at post-9/11 children's infomercials
At the top of a rocky platform, situated in a nebulous landscape of slate and cobalt, a faceless figure uses all its might to pull itself up. After swinging its legs around the ledge in a fluid motion, it firmly plants its feet on the ground and triumphantly lifts its arms to the sky. The heavens explode in a burst of light, and a yellow-gold that holds promises a bright new day shimmers through the terrain. An omnipotent male voice (confident, but not intimidating) informs us, an invisible audience, that “it’s time to be a hero”.
After bypassing some footage of a pep rally, a classroom full of anime schoolchildren overlayed on an American flag, cartoon characters begin serving out unsolicited insight on what exactly heroism means.
Harry, the star of a short-lived sci-fi series called Alienators, commands viewers to create patriotic ribbons, wear them, and hand them out to schoolmates. A tanned man with bulging muscles labeled “Crag” points at me and demands I learn a patriotic song as well as the history behind our flag.
What fever dream have you stumbled into, Meghan? Today, it’s a long-lost post 9/11 advertisement from Fox Kids, a children’s programming block aired on local Fox affiliate stations throughout the United States.
My initial reaction upon finding this snippet of forgotten media? I laughed. There’s a level of undeniable absurdity in the protagonists of a Digimon spinoff series imploring viewers to write letters to fire and police departments.
But once my giggles subsided, I was left with some sobering thoughts.
As the target audience of this particular advert, chances are high that this message reached me as an eight-year-old. What else was I fed? I grew up just over 100 miles from the Twin Towers. While I doubt I grasped the gravity of the situation, I clearly remember the general panic and sorrow and anger all the adults in my life expressed.
Shouldn’t I be a little more reverent or respectful of these generally harmless (albeit weird and half-baked) attempts at making children feel empowered?
Am I lacking in empathy when I can’t restrain a laugh forcing its way through my sinus or teeth?
Has two decades worth of Septembers filled with burning buildings and civilians plummetting to messy deaths left me jaded?
Targeting kids with patriotic rituals and propaganda is not a concept unique to the United States. Historians have studied the ins and outs of the Hitler Youth. Italy and the Netherlands had similar youth programs, designed to indoctrinate a new generation into Nazism. As early as the Meiji era, Japanese nationalist military songs (known as gunka) taught youngsters not to fear death should death further their emperor’s goals.
Nor is this brand of propaganda a 21st-century phenomenon. There’s always been plenty of child-friendly content fetishizing America. You can find it anywhere from early Disney cartoons to classrooms filled with allegiance-pledging. Kids tended victory gardens in hopes that whatever fruits or vegetables they managed to grow would help mitigate food shortages during World War II. Cultivating a blind love for country early on is not anything new.
Even so, there’s something distinctive to the flag-waving puff PSAs of early 00’s children’s programming that’s uniquely bizarre and slightly unsettling.
Notably, there was no need to warn about the danger that the rest of the world held in store. Thanks to a 24-hour cable news cycle and the emergence of the internet, the danger was something everyone (kids included) saw every detail of, ad nauseam.
Instead, the strange shorts littered between cartoons and sitcoms were filled with heavy reds and blues begging for attention. Pretty euphemisms allude to tragedy without explicitly naming the tragedy in question. Variations of the word “unite” repeat so often that it starts to lose all meaning. Here’s a gem that aired on the Disney Channel that encapsulates these qualities well:
There’s nothing tangible for sale here. At risk of sounding cynical, this somehow feels more sinister than, say, Budweiser anthropomorphizing clydesdales “kneeling” at the New York City skyline to sell a few cans of beer. At least it’s transparent that that sort of thing is ultimately aiming to stock your fridge with a six-pack.
In this case, Disney does the thing it’s best at – sledgehammering idealized fantasy.
Hillary Duff of Lizzy McGuire fame gets animated about 25 seconds into this video as she describes seeing a fire truck, stars and stripes in tow, driving by a cheering and clapping crowd. While Duff very well may have experienced the scene described above, it sounds surreal. Like something out of a state-sponsored after school special more so than an event that would actually ever occur in the streets of Anywhere, USA.
Later on, a dramatic two second shot features the teenage Lawrence brothers holding up an oversized American flag while standing in front of an even larger American flag. Yet again, I must battle the urge to cackle every time I rewatch it, even as I question whether there's something deeply wrong in this reaction.
Over the last couple of weeks, there’s been a significant influx in never-before-seen content stemming from the September 11th terrorist attacks. This goes further (and much darker) than National Geographic’s 9/11: One Day in America or Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters: 9/11 → 2021 1⁄2. If you know where to look on Reddit, there’s grisly pictures of disembodied hands and feet in blood-soaked rubble. Youtube preserves phone calls of doomed white-collar workers slowly succumbing to smoke inhalation. Whatever it is that’s most likely to keep you awake at night, it’s out there.
As an adult, the true scope of the tragedy becomes clear. Shocking and devastating as the initial 3,000 fiery deaths broadcast in real time nationwide were, the aftermath has further drawn out the pain. Fruitless wars sprung by hasty decisions have ruined countless lives. Widespread Islamophobia endures today and makes everyday life in the US difficult for millions of innocent people. 9/11 survivors, after eluding the danger of smoldering skyscraper ruins, are now falling victim to medical debt and the high volume of carcinogenic particulates that fluttered through the air like snow. The ghosts of victims haunt us virtually, fated to go viral at the end of each summer.
I really don’t need to list all this out. I’m not the first to say any of this, and I know that you already know as well as I do. Quite possibly, even more so.
Ultimately, it boils down to this: there’s irony in these smiling calls to unite being the harbingers of divisive years to come, an ominous but forthright signal to adolescents their lives would not be returning to “normal”. The implication that the magic cure to treating trauma is to bury it under red white and blue is ludicrous, no matter how it's sliced.
Two weeks after the towers collapsed, The Onion released a front-page story titled Not Knowing What Else To Do, Woman Bakes American Flag Cake. It’s self-aware of the futility in baking a strawberry-covered sheet cake, in terms of actually solving issues larger than any one person. Simultaneously, there’s beauty to the fictional vignette and the woman’s attempt to channel grief into something she and her friends could find pleasure in.
I’m not sure if these lingering low-res archives of advertisement are attempts at baking a cake or somewhat nefarious efforts to manipulate impressionable minds. Maybe it’s some of both. Who am I to say?
But what I can say is this. If you too cannot help but laugh at Digimon Tamers instructing you on how to be a better citizen, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with you. Finding comedy in something ultimately does not negate empathy and disappointment and concern. Learning to chuckle can’t cure complicated, intertwined emotions, but they can help a person cope. Even when painful reminders seem evergreen.
So, why am I laughing?
How could I not?