Still gotta admit PBS’s current kid television is way better than anything on Disney/Nickelodeon. We only have an antenna a we watch a lot of PBS. I really, really dislike the kids shows on Disney/Nickelodeon
PBS is fortunate that Disney/Nickelodeon are so egregiously bad they make anybody else look good. Shit, even the toy-shilling 'saturday morning' cartoons of the 80s weren't as bad.
The exploitative intent was certainly present back then, but they weren't as good at it as they are today. The degenerate science of advertising to children has only grown more advanced.
This is something I've been puzzling about for a while. Marketing is evolving every generation but human perception/brains is not. People get PhDs in this stuff. We don't seem to be building better defenses, either biologically or culturally, against the ever improving marketers. There's no telling what the end result will be, but I'm not looking forward to finding out.
Autotune seems to be antithetical to the basic themes (e.g. it's ok to be yourself and mistakes are ok) of Daniel tiger and Mr Rogers. It really, really bothers me when I hear it.