It is easy to hypnotize children with sound and fury, signifying nothing. If you watch children watching a show like Skunk Cabbage you will notice a certain glassiness of the eyes, a slackness of the jaw. At such times children are no more sentient than a reptile, and no more emotionally swayed. The violence is meaningless. It is animated wallpaper. If it succeeds in moving them to any degree at all, it is to desensitize them to real violence and its tragic effects. Children rise from such a show unable to tell you much about what happened, other than that things exploded, guns went off, swords were wielded, limbs and heads lopped off. Their play after such an experience has no more depth than the show. After watching cardboard heroes chopping up cardboard enemies for no discernible reason, they become more than a little cardboard themselves. They have been viscerally involved, but their emotions have not been touched. Nothing was ever at stake. No lessons were learned.
This is where Sparky and His Gang succeeds, and that it does is little short of a miracle. Load the early episodes, if you dare. You will find Sparky and his friend, Polly, appealing. Everyone else is a reject from a hundred other similar shows. They do uninteresting things for baffling reasons. The show has no center, and no direction.
The changes in the Sparky show can be traced to the debut of the first interesting member of his gang: Inky Tagger. He is a ridiculous character at first glance. His fingers are a spectrum of magic markers. He has a big aerosol valve growing out of the top of his head. And he is completely covered, head to toe, with constantly shifting graffiti.
Inky is a sinner, you see, like all the new Sparky characters. In the course of his debut episode, Inky was pursued as "The Mad Tagger," whose graffiti came to life and menaced people. Sparky cornered him, talked to him, showed him the harm he was doing. Defiant at first, Inky swore he would never stop his defacements, but being admitted to the Gang, a place where he could finally belong, worked wonders. Sparky and the Gang showed him how he could put his artistic powers to good use. End of story, right?
Wrong. Inky has been known to backslide. He is at his best when close to Sparky, enfolded in the love of the Gang. But when alone, his restless urges are apt to overcome him. He feels terrible about it, but is helpless as any alcoholic. Sparky gets exasperated with Inky, but never stops liking him, and Inky is learning to control his urges.
Think about it. How much money has been spent in "Public Service Announcements" telling kids that graffiti is wrong, that taggers are dopes? I hesitate even to guess. It has had no discernible impact on the problem. The reason, I believe, is a simple one: taggers are not dopes. They are lonely, confused, unsure about their place in a world full of anonymity. All graffiti say the same thing, in the end: I am here! I am a person. Sparky tells taggers it's okay. He understands you, he likes you. And you don't have to be a loser. His gang does more than battle rival gangs. Sparky battles evil, both the external sort, and the bad urges that exist in all of us. It has been a long time since a television show has brought us a message like that.
All Sparky's new gang are a little comical, and a little frightening. An excellent example is Arson E. Blazeworthy. The comical side is his appearance, like a mad scientist whose most recent experiment has blown up. His face is blackened. Sometimes the tip of his nose and the tips of his earlobes burst into flame. His eyes are always comically wide. His charred clothes smolder and smoke. Arson is, of course, the pyromaniac, the compulsive fire-setter. The arsonist was a figure of fear even back on Old Earth. Here in the confines of the Lunar warrens he strikes terror into all our hearts. And it is a common enough condition in the young, one not often talked about. Sparky's Gang faces Arson head-on, reforms him, turns his fire-setting powers toward good. Usually. Like Inky, Arson can find the temptation too great. But he is trying.
All of Sparky's motley crew are trying to do better. Sparky does not demand perfection. He knows no heart is totally pure, not even his own. Sparky himself is sometimes prone to overconfidence, and there is a sprightly, practical-joking side to him.
Each of the children in the Gang personifies some failing, fear, obsession, or stumbling block encountered in the process of growing up. In the last few months they've been given a name, these outsiders brought into the bosom of Sparky's Gang: Kids at Risk. Here, meet a few of them:
Lionel Alibi. As usual, the name says it. Whatever happened, Lionel didn't do it. And if he did do it, it wasn't his fault, because somebody made him do it. And it wasn't him, anyway, it was Annie Rexia.
Acne Rose. The disfiguring skin disease known as acne rosacea is, thankfully, merely a memory now. Except for poor Acne Rose. She has an incurable case, her face a mass of eruptions and cankers. Naturally enough, she hates everyone who looks at her. But, this being a television fantasy, she is armed with the Zits of Death. When she pops a pimple it's like a toxic spill.
"Eeeeuuuuw!" That was the reaction of my class at the first sight of Acne, followed by a cruel gale of giggles. But by the end of the episode they were cheering her on as she helped Sparky corral a vicious gang of polluters. Acne is the ugly duckling most of us feel ourselves to be at some point in our childhoods. She personifies the uncertainty we have about our bodies, about how others see us. She is also very gross.
Sparky's writers are not the first to perceive this great truth: that children like the baser bodily processes (see Zippy the Zombie from Skunk Cabbage). Farts and belches make them laugh. They giggle at things adults think are disgusting, or impolite. Sparky is simply the first to put this engine of risibility into the service of a moral lesson, rather than a mere cheap laugh.
You think you've seen gross? I'll give you gross. Take the Terrible Twins, Windy and Wendy Cheesecutter. Virtually identical in appearance, this brother-and-sister team have been taught, by Sparky and the Gang, how to turn their terminal flatulence into an asset. Apply a lit match to their... er, exhaust, and they're jet-propelled! They can grab the wings of a disabled jumper and lower it gently to the ground, put fallen fledglings back into their nests. Leap higher than a skyscraper! Or if you simply must have something blown up, Windy and Wendy are your best bet.
All the Kids at Risk are misfits, all of them afflicted. Sparky's job in life is to show them the power of their abnormality, and that anyone can be accepted, and loved, if they do the right thing.
In opposition to Sparky is the strongest of the Kids at Risk, a really rotten boy by the name of Armageddon Angry. Week after week Sparky and Army do battle for the hearts, minds, and souls of the Kids. Army is very good. Just when you think Sparky has finally reached a really stubborn miscreant, Army will whisper his poisonous insinuations in the child's ear, and fan the fires of resentment. It's easy enough to do; these kids are severely damaged. And who has done the damage? Why, you and me. Society. The ones of us who look at the ugly duckling and jeer, rather than love. Or even worse, those who view them with their hateful pity, those who want to help. These kids want our acceptance, not our help.
But in Sparky's world, not even Armageddon is all bad. He, too, yearns to be accepted, but his defenses are stronger, his hatred all-consuming. And what is the source of this burning rage?
Ah. It is too early to say for sure. But two things are already clear. Master Angry was created by Sparky himself, in a moment of hubris (this is presented as back story; Sparky and the Gang exist in a timeless world that looks like ours but functions like never-neverland). Nothing could be clearer than that Armageddon Angry is Sparky's dark side. In their face-to-face meetings Army has proven himself an accomplished tempter. He has shown Sparky the joys of an amoral freedom; we could see Sparky waver. It is this sort of edgy, nervous awareness of the possibility of Sparky's overthrow that keeps the kids' attention, that engages their hearts and minds. Nothing is assured in Sparky's world, just as in our own. Your friend of today could stab you in the back tomorrow. And the day after that you might embrace an enemy. These are things children have to deal with, things the cheap adventure shows know nothing about.