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Green Phoenix - The Pagemaster Review
I think it is not controversial to refer to the 80s and 90s as the Golden Age of Children's television. This was the era where the transition from Saturday morning cartoons to 24 hour children's exclusive stations was in full swing. We had the glorious mornings of watching Transformers, GI Joe, My Little Pony, DuckTales, etc. It was an amazing time for children to enjoy shows that still entertain and enthrall over 30 years later.
Of course, I also think that it is no exaggeration to consider this era as the heyday of educational children's programming. Especially, ironically, the focus on teaching children to read and have an interest in reading. With shows like Reading Rainbow and Between the Lions, it was a great age for reading-oriented television programming, which I also think in hindsight was a shockingly selfless action. Television fundamentally wants you to keep watching so that you can be around for advertisements which make the TV studios and distributions channels money. To have a concerted effort to push kids away from television into the arms of their local library is frankly amazing, and I'm not certain in the current age of "banned" books that it would really fly anymore.
One of the films in this "inspiring literary interest" genre was 1994's The Pagemaster. For reasons I can only really go into in this review, this film has remained in my brain like a bad advertisement jingle. Between the film itself, the corresponding book that was released with the film, and the SNES video game that I played as a child, I was surprisingly saturated with what is generally considered a fairly forgettable 90s Macaulay Culkin vehicle. But returning my attention to the film, does it actually hold something special? Something that would enable it to remain within my mind, despite being only a slightly younger in age than I am.
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