Did the "Club Dorothée" cartoons "stole our childhood"?

• And suddenly, everything gets carried away… This summer,

  20 Minutes

  returns to the phenomenon of “moral panics”, used by conservative movements to denounce societal developments.

• While the concept was analyzed in the 1960s, there are older moral panics – like the Salem witches, and some very recent ones.

  In this series of articles,

  20 Minutes looks

  back at several examples over time.

• Today, back to the late 1980s when

  Club Dorothée

  and its cartoons were blamed for all evil.

Are you between 35 and 45 years old?

Did you grow up in France?

Did you know that you have been fed a monstrous image tap, capable of traumatizing you or, worse, of turning you into brutes?

At least that's what part of the country thought, at the end of the 1980s, with Ségolène Royal in the lead.

The reason for the anger?

The

.

The children's program launched in 1987 on TF1 monopolized the channel's program schedule as quickly as it was accused of all evils.

That is to say, to stupefy the children with the absurd sketches of

and exposing them to the violence of Japanese animated series – described as “japaniaiseries” by

.

In the line of sight, mainly:

,

and, above all,

who arrived on the air during 1988.

"I don't see children as image eaters"

Quickly, that year, the host, who was not very forthcoming in interviews, was pushed to express herself in the media.

She appears on the front page of

on November 21, surrounded by Candy and Bioman.

She's all smiles as the title proclaims, "Violence on Screen: Dorothy Responds to Parents."

"When I talk to children and ask them if they're scared, they look at me contritely and say, 'But it's just a cartoon. And besides, it's a robot ."

They do things right away.

I do not consider children as image eaters, ”she said.

In

, however, it's not robots getting knocked down.

This anime, aimed at an older audience, has found its place on TV at snack time.

It must be said that at the time, the volume of French productions for children was not sufficient to fill the boxes of the programs and that these Japanese fictions made it possible to fill them without insane investment.

Violent scenes removed

Back to Dorothée in the columns of

: “A dozen [de parents] only wrote to request the removal of

, deemed too violent.

I removed it.

Immediately, I received 50,000 letters.

97% demanded his return.

But as I believe that television should be done in a democracy, I did not neglect the 3% who were against it.

We kept

but Robert Réa, director and artistic adviser, deleted the scenes that were too violent, especially the passages where we see blood flowing.

»

Today, the question of respecting the integrity of the work and the artistic vision of its author would no doubt arise with insistence, but at the time it did not cross the minds of many people.

To top it off, the actors who dubbed

in French imposed that the dialogues be rewritten, by injecting humor, before giving their voice to the fictional and fighting characters, recalls Allociné.

The real butchery was therefore more on the creative side.

"Dorothee must not steal their childhood from toddlers"

For Ségolène Royal, these arrangements were not enough.

In December 1988, the then MP for Deux-Sèvres toured the media to talk about the amendment she wanted to table in order to protect children from violence on television.

She describes this fight in a book,

, which was released at the beginning of 1989. It reads: "Dorothee must not steal their childhood from toddlers and must spread tenderness and poetry.

"We broadcast violent Japanese cartoons, which don't even have scenarios anymore...", she insists in

.

“We have received thousands of letters approving Ségolène Royal”, writes the magazine a few weeks later, giving a right of reply to Dorothée.

“Do not confuse action and violence, pleads the host.

Does a robot that explodes under a laser cannon traumatize a child more than Bambi's mother dying under the hunter's gunshots or than Tom Thumb abandoned by his parents?

»

“A conceptual desert.

A lot of noise for nothing "

At the same time, the book

, response to this wave of moral panic aimed at the small screen.

“Television is declared guilty of all the evils of the earth;

he is blamed for illnesses, stupidity, ignorance, lack of culture, violence, vulgarity.

And of all this not the slightest proof has been advanced.

(…) There is something sick in our media civilization, wrote its author, François Mariet.

The virulence towards television is only equaled by the poverty of the arguments and the works responsible for supporting them.

To see so much unleashed fury, I expected to do battle with powerful theses, indisputable scientific data.

Nothing.

A conceptual desert.

A lot of noise for nothing.

(…) No demonstration exists of the harmfulness of television.

On the contrary,

certainties exist showing the profits that new generations can expect from television.

»

To show its good will, however, AB productions calls on a team of psychologists.

“She watched everything we broadcast.

She asked us for cuts when she found it too violent or traumatic.

We did it without discussing but there were very few, ”said Jean-Luc Azoulay in the documentary

in 2020.

Even if the CSA continued to quarrel with TF1, which ceased broadcasting

in 1990, then

a year later,

's success continued until 1997. thanks to the eyes of critics before the end of the 1990s, when the first generation fed on

,

and

began in journalism”, emphasizes Alexandre Raveleau in the book

.

And if, today, France is nicknamed “the second country of manga”, it is largely to Dorothée that she owes it.

And not to Ségolène Royal.

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• Culture

• Dorothee Club

• Ségolène Royal

• TF1

• Television

• Dorothee

• manga