Heard Over and Over Again: Variety is Good

Small ones delight in repetition. Children want to hear the same stories over and over again. 

For my children VCR tapes wore out. For the children in the College and School nursery, streaming cannot wear out, though a parent’s patience can. In my case there were some records, especially stories that I played too often. A favorite was a Disney retelling of the Tin Woodman of Oz. This recording is very odd as it credits a story at least partially written by the Royal Historian of Oz, L. Frank Baum, to his successor Ruth Plumly Thompson and stars the not-so-young “Ronnie” Howard.

Yes: Ron Howard. 

Apparently this vinyl record has the key to human flourishing:  finding your mate would bring happiness and some mellow tunes. In the recording, everyone, and I mean everyone, finds true love at first sight, a thing that does not happen in the book. This was not such a good lesson for a romantically inclined little boy. Better to have gotten some Jane Austen: marriage can be happy, but fundamentally virtue brings happiness. Even straight L. Frank Baum, with a Whedon-like cynicism about romance, might have been better, at least for me.

This makes me wonder if we are careful enough with the childish tendency to repeat a message. Nothing much is perfect, so I am not suggesting censorship. Instead, I am noting that the excesses or defects of a work are made greater if we super saturate in the story. The sugary story of Woot marrying Polychrome is fine, but what happens if you hear it scores of times? What if you simply reread the more cynical story in the book too many times? This is harder, because the effort in reading is greater, even in an Oz book, than replaying the much shorter recording.

I am not sure, but am confident that variety is necessary in both stories and media. Fortunately, my era and our family “wealth” did not really enable too much super-saturation. Most books were from the library and you had to return those. Librarians, those goddess gatekeepers, kept encouraging me to read new books and not just reread Oz. They prodded me to Trumpeter of Krakow or African fairy tales. Bless them everyone.

Thankfully, I also was blessed to be one of the last to grow up hearing and rehearing stories from my elders. One Papaw was a very gifted story teller and if my Dad, in the end, could tell his stories as well as Papaw, I still enjoyed the oral tradition. I would give anything to hear some stories from the plant again. Stories came to me from motion pictures, television, oral tradition, books, radio (thank you NPR). This is, perhaps, different than watching a film jillions of times, because more recent technology makes this possible.  Mom would not have let me hear a record too often, but even if she had not sent me outside to play, the vinyl could not have taken too many replays.

I loved Star Trek: TOS, and I would have binged without a doubt, but afternoon reruns of PBS would not let me overindulge, did not even show every episode, and so the show stayed special. People that did or could over indulge mayhap need the life that Shatner urged us to get. Similarly, those folk I have known that “only read the Bible” or only listen to “Christian media” end up quite weird. I am blessed to have lived before this was even possible. We are creatures of the spirit and the body and we need stories that fit all our needs.

Sometimes seminary seems to me, at best, wise Bible fans guiding younglings into better Bible fandom.

So consider, if you will, that we need many different stories, in many media, and should try not to overindulge, even in the very best, without guidance.