Hm... don't think I agree with a lot the author says, here. Cartoons are compelling because they're a colorful, heavily abstracted and anthropomorphized, impossibly expressive worlds without the hard and fast limitations of our physical existence. If Excitebike and lazy Hanna-Barbera cartoons are your only animated escapes from the real world, classic style Disney cartoons offer arrestingly compelling visuals and sto…
Counter argument: I disagree with most of what you say here. I think what impacts all people, regardless of age, is much less about the medium and much more about message. I disagree with the "medium is the message" idea being applied universally. Zelda Breath of the Wild has the same spirit as the Gameboy games, and the NES games. And before that, the same spirit of the games and fantasy books about knights, and for…
The general subject is remakes of old Disney movies. It's the same story in a new movie, making the message the independent variable.
Beyond that, we'd see vastly more radio programming aimed at kids if that was true. It's several orders of magnitude cheaper to create and distribute. What most people who don't work professionally in the A&E and Visual Arts fields don't realize is how much those visuals affect them. That's why they're so effective. The communicate deeply and viscerally in ways that aren't immediately obvious, but are incredibly powerful. That's why advertisers spend as much money as they do creating commercials with virtually no obvious story arc. We've already got most of the story in our heads and they're just pushing the buttons to activate it in ways that are useful to them.
> I do think there is a message in the medium, though, and that the message is "we think this game/story is important enough to convey properly that we'll invest cutting edge technology to enable the best possible experience". I think each generation actually does in fact experience the same impact when that message is received. They way it is conveyed changes, because the cutting edge changes.
The vast majority of adults don't take that much context into account when consuming media, even if they think they do... let alone children. Grandiosity is obviously a part of the message, but you just can't constrict the effects of visual communication to neatly defined categories like that.
Have you ever been listening to a song or watching video media or playing a game with someone nd they say "oh, this is my favorite part!" ... and you just don't get it? It triggers something in their brain that just doesn't connect with you. The difference between your perception of that media and theirs is the context in which it was processed-- your brain chemistry and all of your lived experiences and mood and pharmaceutical influences and thoughts and dreams and insecurities combined receive that stimuli and generate emotional responses.
> You can tell when media hits that Goldilocks zone > each cultural niche and personality type has a different Goldilocks zone preference.
You're putting things into buckets that aren't representative of the real world. Everybody can tell when media hits the Goldilocks zone because their own tastes define it. It goes far, far beyond personality types and cultural niches. Baby bear and Papa bear were likely perfectly happy with their porridge and Goldilocks liking Mama Bear's porridge didn't mean shit other than mama bear and goldilocks had narrow but overlapping heat tolerances.