Dream Tropes Wiki/What Do You Mean, It's for Kids

Template:Trope
Often times, productions that are marketed to children make us wonder if they were created for them (namely for potentially explicit content and/or serious and mature plots. While the latter is existent, the former is more common.) Namely, if these shows have an awful lot of Parental Bonus, Parent Service, and the like. Unfortunately, this can also bring Moral Guardians out of the woodwork if it seems to be blatant enough. This can also happen when something is given a G rating but has an awful lot of potentially explicit content.

This phenomenon can also occur due to Values Dissonance. For example, Once Acceptable Targets are, by definition, no longer acceptable, and Real Life tragedies can make things Harsher in Hindsight, and different countries' Moral Guardians have different standards. There's also the fact that, in the past, the line between "child" and "adult" wasn't always drawn at the same age as it is now.

Another reason for this trope is that a good number of children are quite fond of scary or violent things, and are often too young to understand the reasons many of these stories are considered dark. Often confused with What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?, where a work is commonly mistaken as being for kids even when it is not.

## Anime & Manga

* Hiroshi Takajima's example with *The Drillimation Series* was to bring western audiences, and especially young people, to Japanese culture and the world of anime. *Space Ninja Team Star Trigon*, *Magical Girl Team Lucky Star*, and *Mr. Driller* all ended up becoming the most-viewed Saturday morning programs in North America. Drillimation had a worldwide audience of over 70 million people, with half of those being adults. Despite this being an anime that kids typically watch on a regular basis, the Drillimation world is dark! Characters die throughout the arcs, and the Japanese version is more gratuitous. Like with many Japanese imports, the violence was subject to censorship. Animators had to reduce the amount of blood used, being limited only to cuts.
* In 1999, Studio Bogey and Template:W made a little anime entitled *Cyborg Kuro-chan*. In 2002, Template:W dubbed it into French and gave the rights for broadcast in Template:W to the *educational* public broadcaster Template:W, who aired it alongside *actual educational kids' shows*. The show was meant for kids, however the titular character's arm can *turn into a Gatling gun* and it's chock-full of violence. It's run there made the Islamic Arabic dub's very existence look like a joke. This may have been due to the dub starring talent from Template:W's Belgian French dubs, or the fact it had a cute art style. Surely some executives at Template:W thought "It's a fast-paced anime with a super-hero feline who saves the world and his eldery owners from doom every episode! It must be teaching lessons about respect for your true family and *must* be for little kids!".
* *Tokyo Mew Mew* (in it's *Mew Mew Power* edit for the first season and then a memetic dub recorded in Gothenburg, Sweden for the second) aired on the European feed of PBS for a spell in the 2000's. Given that 4Kids was known for dumbing down anime and adding morals, it airing there Europe-wide can be half-explained, however it is baffling in that the show didn't even air on the original U.S. PBS channel *and* was barely E/I to begin with.

## Comics

* The SANIC ON BOARD comic, Kantasy outside of it's world, to Mobuis, has a lot of blood and swears, but still for kids.

## Western Animation

* Many Kantasy shows have fantasy violence, minor profanity, references to alcohol and mild sexual references, yet some get aired on pre-school channels worldwide. Many have to get censored in certain countries because of this.
* Basically the Maddox Show Online, a few D-words, politics, religion, references to the Matrix... but due to the Maddox Show branding, it's still "for kids".