Just holy shit. Holy shit. Conservative conspiracy theorists always go on and on about secret societies planting subliminal pedophilic imagery in kids’ shows and it’s ridiculous because in reality you don’t need a secret society and it barely needs to be subliminal. Just wrap your abuse up as a “joke” and get people to laugh with you. The concept of sneaking adult themes into kids’ shows has never been more insidious.
Honestly, I think if you’re good natured and maybe not a parent who is attuned to the need to be vigilant for creeps it’s actually pretty easy to view some of the stuff and to just pass it off as being from an era where the cinematography was much less polished so that kid looking vaguely uncomfortable is just an accident and the placement of the male actor’s hands is just poor choreography, and that it wasn’t intended to sound like a man moaning but it was just the fact that the foley artist was doing their best impression of a cow mooing without a digital sound library at their fingertips, and that there’s no possible way that they could have intended to make that a thinly-veiled reference to a facial…
And then you learn about Shirley Temple’s story and you realise that they knew exactly what they were doing and what kind of audience they were appealing to because they were producing this stuff for people who are just like them.
For whatever it’s worth, I take my own self with a pinch of salt - there’s an old episode of Ren & Stimpy titled Nurse Stimpy which I watched as an adult and blazed out of my mind on edibles when it struck me that the episode was one long metaphor for a BDSM sorta kink relationship and tbh I’m not convinced that I was right about that interpretation and I haven’t revisited that episode with fresh, unaddled eyes to check my own notes - but if you look critically there’s just way too many pings on the radar with Shirley Temple’s stuff for it all to be just a string of unfortunate mishaps and oversights. Not when you know the context.
By this point, after the Epstein case and how it has been “handled” along with old shit like R Kelly getting away with stuff that his manager and handlers and entourage must have known about as well as Diddy and the stuff that has recently come to light (though the stuff about Usher living with him at the age of 13 is old news) or fucken dozens upon dozens of other examples that I can point to just in showbusiness, bourgeois culture has such a dirty reputation that I’d be open to someone making a solid case that the British Royal Family is suspected of engaging in the sacrifice of infants in blood rituals.
I mean I don’t actually believe that this true and I’ve never been presented with an argument for it but my disbelief is completely dead and buried by this stage. I’m so jaded that I don’t think I am capable of being shocked anymore.