For the past couple of months, my five-year-old has been asking to watch “Fire Burning” on the computer. It took his older sisters to explain what the heck this means, and it turns out it refers to a YouTube video they’ve seen at a friends’ house.
Someone has taken the popular(?) song by Sean Kingston(?) and crudely overlaid it to clips from SpongeBob SquarePants’ episodes in this video. I say crudely because the characters’ mouths hardly seem sync’d to the song’s lyrics, but it seems harmless enough.
I was a bit bummed that they had first seen this video at a friends’ home before I could see it, but when I learned of it, I put it on and watched it. Most of it. After watching SpongeBob, Patrick and the gang’s goofy faces for a few minutes, I got up and wandered away, keeping the music on to hear the rest of the lyrics.
MISTAKE.
This weekend, with my son square in my lap, I was stuck with my eyes on the screen for the entire four-plus minutes of the song. And at 4:03, this is what I saw, appear on the screen
It was all I could do not to blurt out, “WHAT THE F*CK!” in front of my son. Instead, I quickly closed the screen and then started quizzing the kids:
“have you seen that word before?”
“why do you think it’s there?”
“have any of your other friends mentioned it when they’ve seen the video?”
I told them why the word upset me so much. Why it had no business being there, and that the creator of the video obviously added it for shock value. Maybe he knew how many kids would stumble upon this video and watch it.
But, why put “rape” over a kids’ video? What is the purpose?
I’d like to say that after this episode, my kids will never ever watch another video before I can screen it, ALL of it. But, the reality is they go to drop-off playdates now, and, even with parental controls on our computers, I’m not standing over them all the time. And there will be times they see things that I don’t want them to see.
And the things they could see could be so, so, so much worse than a word, I know that. And maybe that is what bothers me most of all.
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edited to add:
As my sis, Mrs Q, noted, the video now has a flag on it. Anyone who wants to watch the video has to plug in their birthdate which will deter some kids from seeing it. I have to give props to YouTube for putting up this up so quickly.
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