Like many seven-year-olds, Benjamin Colson of Washington has a favorite movie.
"I would say I've seen Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius 1,000 times," he says. "It's really, really, really, really, really, really complicated. I can't tell you all the details, but I understand the whole thing."
He likes the movie so much that he's memorized it. He likes it so much that he discovered the freeze mechanism on the VCR to watch it frame by frame. ("I did not know we had that feature," says his mother, Karen Paul.) He likes it so much that lines from the movie have entered the family's vernacular.
ILLUSTRATION: YU SHA
If you have a child, chances are you know about this desire to watch the same video endlessly. You think maybe you should worry about the effects of four-score viewings of Shrek or Toy Story or The Little Mermaid. (If you looked into your kid's brain, would Ariel and her decolletage be taking up the space where math is supposed to be?)
From picture books to nursery rhymes, kids have always loved repetition. Today, toddlers take it for granted that they can pop in their favorite tape -- or now DVD -- and watch a movie over and over. They can even make their own version of the movie -- repeating a funny scene, then skipping a scary one. But this capability required a new technology, the VCR, which became widely used in American homes in the 1980s. When VCRs first came out, it was thought that videos were strictly a rental item -- who except a fanatic film buff or someone in the industry would want to own these things? Then parents, seeing they were depleting their children's college funds to rent Beauty and the Beast for the 50th time, began buying videos.
"We started to discover right away that the family video business was not a niche business," said Ann Daly, who oversees feature animation and video at DreamWorks and previously ran Disney's video division. "It was not the tail wagging the dog. It was the dog."
Or the lion. The biggest-selling video of all time is the Disney movie The Lion King, with more than 30 million bought, according to Video Business magazine. Current best sellers include The Jungle Book 2 and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. When today's animated hit, Finding Nemo, makes it to videotape and DVD, it will surely enter the pantheon of the endlessly watched. After all, a movie doesn't sell US$277 million in tickets in five weeks without children enlisting any available adult to take them to the theater again and again.
There has been little hard research into the effect on children of viewing videos to wretched excess. Parents have been told to limit the time their kids face a screen. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends zero television viewing for children younger than 2, and no more than an hour or two a day for children older than that, to avoid insidious messages about violence, sex and gender roles and because the doctors think that there are better things to do.
But other experts on children's development, and those who have done the few empirical studies, say the repeat syndrome appears mostly benign. As long as a child isn't exhibiting any warning signs -- nightmares, anti-social behavior, obsessive thoughts -- watching a favorite movie ad infinitum can actually be good, researchers say. A favorite video can bring the same comfort and deeper understanding that comes from having a beloved book read over and over.
"I think it's a great device for kids and parents alike," said Marie-Louise Mares, who studied the phenomenon while an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's department of communication. "If it's a safe, cozy film, no matter how boring, I suspect the kid is getting something out of it."
Mares helped design a national survey done by the university's Annenberg Public Policy Center that looked into how widespread repeat viewing was. It found that 70 percent of parents of two to four-year-olds said their child watched a video more than once. As the children got older, the numbers fell off: 61 percent of parents of five to seven-year-olds; 49 percent of parents of eight to 10-year-olds; and 34 percent of parents of 11 to 14-year-olds concurred. Wanting to find the reason behind the numbers, Mares interviewed 300 children about their viewing habits.
She found the need for repetition came partly from the children's realization that they just didn't get it. She said one three-year-old could anticipate scenes in Mary Poppins but had little idea of the story being told, let alone the themes being expressed.
Repeatedly watching a video also allows young children a rare sense of knowing exactly what's going to happen and the thrill of announcing it.
"They love ritual and feel comforted by it," said Dr. Kyle Pruett, a professor of child psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center. "They have no control over their own lives -- when Mommy or Daddy is coming home. With a favorite video, they know there will be a funny part, it will be confusing but get better, and they will understand the end. It's an emotional, visual, cognitive journey."
And an economic one. Disney representatives declined to comment, but that doesn't mean that the studio is uninterested in the subject. The Australian division of Buena Vista Home Entertainment International is financing studies by Dr. Helen Skouteris of La Trobe University in Victoria to examine the developmental effects on children of its animated videos. She has found that children are not passive, zombielike recipients of entertainment but want to engage with what they see. "It is almost like children `crave' to see the video over and over" to grasp more fully the qualities of their favorite characters and understand what happens to them in the movie, she said in an e-mail interview.
Rebecca Zhang, 10, from Cabin John, Maryland, would agree: "I saw The Sound of Music 26 times from ages 5 to 7. When the oldest girl, Liesl, was talking to Maria and saying their prayers in pajamas, it made me feel tired, which was good. I felt like I was Liesl. I always acted it out at sleepovers. My friends would watch me act it out while we were watching it."
Cyma Zarghami, executive vice president and general manager of Nickelodeon, the children's cable network, believes that humor is one of the most important elements drawing kids back for repeated viewings: "Dramas are less rewatchable than comedies, even as adults." She said that that was why people go to work and tell the jokes from the previous night's Seinfeld. "Kids enjoy anticipating where to laugh, even at a young age," she said. "It's empowering. They want to appear to get it."
Laughing so hard that your snack shoots out your nose is fine, but sometimes you crave heart palpitations and a good scream. Pruett of Yale thinks that part of children's attraction to movies like Jurassic Park is that they touch a deep, evolutionary chord: the desire to avoid large teeth sinking into your flank. He says watching "primal scenes that take you to the edge of terror" can be a refreshing change from the grinding modern anxieties that children face, like test scores and joint custody.
Even if a movie isn't advertised as scary, it is crucial, the experts say, that parents watch it with their children first or for the first few times. Even seemingly benign films can have deeply disturbing elements. For example, dead parents are a leitmotif at Disney: think of the plots of Bambi, Lilo and Stitch, Finding Nemo and The Lion King. Adults need to explain, soothe and, if need be, fast-forward, said Dr. Joanne Cantor, author of Mommy, I'm Scared: How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them.
Anna Wickenden, 9, of Washington wanted to be able to watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone with her friends, but, she said, she was "freaked out" by the scary parts. So she enlisted her parents to help her.
"I watched it a lot of times, and my dad would fast-forward the parts for me," she said. "I would always want my mom and dad to stay. I was sort of proud of myself for getting used to the movie."
There are other physiological and psychological reasons children watch movies repetitively. If a child enjoyed a movie the first time, repeating the experience can be like slipping into a warm bath.
Jack Mintz, 13, of Manhattan, recalled that when he was three and four years old, "I watched Peter Pan every day without fail.
"I liked it so much that I felt I needed to experience it over and over again," he added. "When he says, `I don't want to grow up,' I related to that. I was starting school, and school seemed so grown up."
Repetitive viewing reaches its height among elementary school children, but after falling off, it can rise again in the teenage years. Then the repetition comes out of a desire for group experience.
So letting your kids watch their favorite movie in an endless loop is better for them than eating their vegetables, right? Not quite. Even the experts say that they have to pay attention to how many times their children are rewatching the same movie. Pruett's four-year-old daughter has seen The Little Mermaid about 20 times.
"The technology is incredibly seductive," he said. But sometimes he finds himself saying to his daughter: "You're over-Arieled. Let's do some drawing."
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