I was bored so I started watching Sweet Tooth on Netflix. I read a good review so why not? It is based on a set of DC graphic novels that ran from 2009-21. Looking at the graphics, I wish they had made this an animated rather than live action series. It's a little bit too cute but fun to watch just the same.
The most popular shows on television these days all seem to be dystopian visions of the future, where viruses have killed off most of the population and the few healthy ones that are left have to literally fight off zombies or other demented beings to survive. Not exactly bedtime stories for children, but this is the way Sweet Tooth is presented.
A relative handful of hybrid children hold the answer to the plague that has covered the earth. The only problem is that many consider them the source of the plague so there is a bounty on their heads. The lead child, Sweet Tooth, boasts a rack of 6-point antlers. You would think the Big Man would cut them off so the child wouldn't look so obvious, but then I guess his deer-like ears would give him away. Other children take on more fully realized animal forms like Elephant boy, but their basic anatomy remains human. Kind of like the experiments conducted by Dr. Moreau.
The other massively popular television serial is The Last of Us, which also has a child as one of its central characters. It's basically a more stylish Walking Dead, as here the protagonists are battling zombies. I haven't gotten around to watching it but my daughter says it is very good.
Using children is a great hook because the studios are able to latch onto the preteens who love scary stories. Even The Walking Dead had a young boy, Carl Grimes, as one of its main characters, who grew up over the course of the ten seasons to become a young man. Unfortunately, he is ultimately killed but his famous hat is passed along to Judith, the youngest sprite in the Grimes family.
I suppose on one level it is important to prepare children for such dark possibilities. God knows how many children there are living through these nightmares around the world. Yet, the natural instinct is to shield our children.
This is what Sweet Tooth's father tries to do when he first sees the plague taking over his part of the country. He takes the baby boy to the woods of Yellowstone, finding an abandoned cabin where he raises him for seven years before poachers and the virus finally infiltrate the forest, leaving the antler boy orphaned. Sweet Tooth is able to find the lock box his father buried and learn he has a mum somewhere in Colorado and so his journey begins. All this happens in the first episode so I haven't given away too much.
The Big Man was interesting to me. I spent the first five years of my life in Angola. My father was a geologist and engineer working for a Portuguese mining company back in the 1960s before civil war ripped apart the country. We lived pretty well in a big house in Nova Lisboa, which became Huambo after the revolution. My dad didn't accept these post-revolutionary names. He still called it Nova Lisboa, as he did Rhodesia and Nyasaland, in the stories he would tell me of his mining experiences. I was essentially raised by a black manservant named Nicolau who towered over me like a giant. I remember him being so kind to me, to the point my mother would admonish him for not letting me do things on my own. I still have dreams of him. I figure he got caught up in the war as he was a young man at the time. We never heard from him again.
I guess that's the appeal of these shows to me as I find myself recalling childhood experiences. I was never much into zombies or post-apocalyptic stories. They weren't so popular then. I remember stories of demonic possession, the Bermuda Triangle and Sasquatch, which were enough to give me nightmares. I don't know what kids today go through with all these post-apocalyptic horror stories. I would think some would end up with PTSD watching too many of these serials.
But, Sweet Tooth keeps it on the light side, at least from what I've seen so far. You don't get the sense its main characters are going to be killed off like they are in The Walking Dead. Pubba (or Daddy) dies but you saw that coming. The antler boy eventually had to go out on his own or we wouldn't have a story, the narrator tells us. We will see where it leads?
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