Do you ever have one of those moments where you realize that your childhood has conditioned you in a certain way to believe something that you later discover isn't true?
Take the icecream truck for instance. For as long as I can remember, the sound of those dinging bells or Greensleeves has always meant one thing and one thing only; The Bring Out Your Dead Van. Now, to most children, these sounds unmistakeably signal the possibility of icecream. But for my brothers and I there was only the Bring Out Your Dead Van.
Those avid Monty Python lovers among you would know exactly what I am refering to; the scene in Monty Python's The Holy Grail, where a filthy man pushing an equally filthy cart strolls through the town gonging a bell and shouting "Bring out your dead!" The people in the town present their plague-ridden kin and load them onto the cart to be taken away for burial.
For the first ten years of my life, I was conditioned to believe that that was the gonging sound I heard every now and then on a hot summer's day. Not icecream, but the gonging of the Bring Out Your Dead Van, trundling along my street looking for dead civilians to cart away.
My parents thought this was a bit of a laugh. We weren't the richest of families and to be honest, it was a great way of sidestepping the old "Mum, can I have an icecream? Pleeeeeease?" that most parents had to put up with upon the gonging of the icecream van. In fact, to most parents, I'm sure the icecream van really was something of a Bring Out Your Dead Van, or "Bring out your paycheck" at least...which to some, really is the same thing.
But boy were my parents sneaky. How amusing they must have found it, that all three of their little conditioned minions shouted "bring out your dead!" before promptly running away every time the icecream van showed up. Clever indeed. Until of course we poor guinea pigs discovered the truth.
I was ten and spending the day at my best friend Elle's house, when the icecream van showed up. "Bring out your dead!" I shouted and promptly ran away. My childhood BFF laughed at me and asked what on earth I was doing. How did she not know? Had her parents not explained to her what that van was?
In short...yes they had. But they, unlike my sneaky parents, had explained the truth of that van, and on more than once occasion bought her icecream from it. Imagine my surprise! Instead of plague victims there was dessert? It was a day of miracles. And then, just to rub the salt in (not to mention the sugar) they bought me an icecream.
As you can imagine, my parents never heard the end of it.
But it got me thinking. Just how much of our childhood is conditioned in that way? We are brought up to think so many things are normal, when in fact, they are just the opposite.
Which brings me to rangas. Gingers. Redheads.
I'm turning 21 in less than two weeks, and for my party in my new home, I decided to go retro and celebrate the tv characters that affected my childhood. So, I snooped around the internet, looking for the perfect 90s cartoon character to dress up as, and what did I find?
Rangas. Hundreds of them.
You would think that in a world where redheads represent less than 10 percent of the population (I am totally making this statistic up, but it's got to be close) children's tv would reflect it. Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong! In fact, gingernuts seem to dominate children's tv. Let me give yo ua small list off the top of my head.
Postman Pat
Madeline
Pepper-Ann
Tintin
Wheeler from Captain Planet
Pippy Long Stocking
Wilma Flintstone
The Little Mermaid
Jane Jetson
Daphne from Scooby Doo
Yosemite Sam
Strawberry Shortcake
Chuckie Finster
Eliza Thornberry
Kim Possible
Dexter
The redheaded PowerPuff Girl
Do you see the trend here? The percentage of redheads on children's tv far outweighs the actual percentage of redheads in society. Why? In my opinion, childhood conditioning. You see, if the population of fictional gingers was proportionate to reality, children might just see redheads for what they really are. A minority. A scourge. A plague, even. But because there are so many right there in front of us on the television, we are conditioned to believe that they are normal human beings like the rest of us. It isn't until highschool that we learn the truth and promptly make fun of them, as is our right and responsibility.
So, that being said, I put this to the television writers and producers of the noughties era. Allow regular children to grow and develop untarnished by your subliminal messages. Only then will the gingers at last be defeated and carted off from this earth in a Bring Out Your Dead Van.
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